Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Anton’s colleagues coped with Kundasova, but, as though the attentions of Kundasova, Tania, Iavorskaia and Lika were not enough, Anton was seeking for another woman. On 30 December he wrote a jocular letter to Aleksandr with one serious request: to find the address of Anton’s admirer, the children’s writer Lidia Avilova, in Petersburg and to do so ‘in passing, without any talk’. Aleksandr gave Anton Avilova’s address and Anton slowly prepared for a journey to Petersburg. He had a pretext: Suvorin required Anton’s intervention, for, alone among publishers, he had made himself an object of vituperation by refusing to sign a petition to the Tsar for freedom of the press. (The Tsar dismissed the request as ‘senseless dreams’, the secret police noted the signatories, and Chekhov, as an author printed by radical journals, came under surveillance.) Ostracized by the intelligentsia, Suvorin fell into a depression that even his theatre company, the Literary-Artistic Circle, failed to lift. On 9 January 1895 Sazonova’s diary records:

  Suvorin was complaining of his loneliness, that his newspaper and wealth gave him no happiness, that he had known virtually no personal happiness, that life had passed him by. He was so tense, so upset, that I could sense tears in his voice. At times he simply couldn’t speak.6

  Anna Suvorina wrote about the same time:

  Anton, I ask you again to cheer up Aleksei. I’m told you’re in Moscow now. Tempt him into coming if only for a few days, while you are there. He is grumbling a lot that you write him only business letters! … Write him something nice and interesting and cheer him up a little. After all he doesn’t love or value anybody but you. He is very melancholy and, worse, doesn’t sleep at night. He can’t work at all.7

  Anton responded, twice offering Suvorin the bait of a drive round Moscow’s cemeteries. He even offered to introduce him to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, but Suvorin was not to be wooed. Anton went back home for just a week. He inspected the false teeth that Aleksandr had bought Evgenia in Petersburg: she would not use them because they had been made on the 13th of the month. Anton left again on 27 January. He spent four days in Moscow, during which time he visited the sick Grigorovich and saw his childhood love Sasha Selivanova, newly widowed, plump, leaving school-teaching for midwifery.

  On 31 January 1895 he went to Petersburg. Moscow’s Grub Street looked on with envy: Shcheglov’s diary records: ‘Cruel cold, a thin rag of an overcoat, no money and now I have to write a humorous novel! … Really you have to become an egotist like Chekhov to manage to get anything done!!’8 In Petersburg Suvorin gave Anton a copy, printed on fine paper, of the half puritanical, half pornographic novel he had published, At the End of the Century: Love, and inscribed it ‘from the kind and virtuous author’. Suvorin introduced Anton to Sazonova, the lady writer and diarist to whom he entrusted his secrets: Suvorin’s two confidants backed away from each other. Sazonova recorded: ‘We silently shook hands, he advised me not to drink Russian wines and went to his room, gathered a company there and then left to see Leikin.’ Sazonova found Anton’s hostility adamant. Anton had other agendas. He renegotiated his royalties from Suvorin: now Suvorin paid Chekhov 200 roubles monthly. While Anna’s beloved Italian tenors sang, Anton wrote letters, read manuscripts and began a new story in the next room. A prodigious year had begun.

  Visiting Leikin, Anton met his neglected acolytes – the melancholy Kazimir Barantsevich and ever-loyal Gruzinsky. He even met Potapenko. Lika weighed on Chekhov’s mind, and he consulted Suvorin. Again, Suvorin confided in Sazonova, whose diary later records:

  Chekhov had an affair with the Mizinova girl. He wanted to marry her but it couldn’t have been a strong desire because Suvorin talked him out of it [possibly in 1891 D.R.] Then Potapenko seduced the girl and abandoned her.

  Aleksandr and Natalia now lived soberly; Anton willingly went to dine with them. Natalia, domesticated by motherhood and by cooking courses, was overjoyed when Anton divined his nephew Misha’s talented, highly strung nature.

  In 1895 Lidia Avilova, the sister-in-law of the editor of The Petersburg Newspaper, a woman whose address Chekhov had taken such pains to find, became Anton’s most deluded admirer. She asked Chekhov for a critique of her story – which he gave with unusual candour. She then ordered a medallion inscribed with the title of one of Chekhov’s books, a page and a line number. This she sent anonymously to Chekhov, who duly found the reference to his story ‘Neighbours’: ‘If you ever need my life, come and take it.’ Avilova did not know, as Anton left for Moscow on 16 February 1895, that this medallion would be used as a final touch to Chekhov’s new play, the cruellest of modern comedies.

  Notes

  1 See A. Ia. Al tshuller A. P. Chekhov i L. B. Iavorskaia, in Chekhoviana, 1990, 140–51.

  2 See OR, 331 64 34: Lidia Iavorskaia’s letters to Anton Chekhov, 1893–6.

  3 See OR, 331 52 2v: Lika’s letters to Anton, 1895–6; some in Perepiska II, 1984, 16–59.

  4 See OR, 331 48 79a: O. P. Kundasova’s letters to Anton, 1892–1904.

  5 See OR, 331 48 83a: Dr P. I. Kurkin’s letters to Anton, 1892–5.

  6 Quoted in PSSP, 6, 381.

  7 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina’s letters to Anton, 1889–1901.

  8 See LN68, 484.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  A Misogynist’s Spring

  February–May 1895

  THE MEDALLION that Lidia Avilova gave Chekhov in February 1895 was an eloquent love token. Anton responded more guardedly than her ‘memoirs’ imply; he did less for her career than he did for Shavrova’s. Anton did not protest at Burenin’s verdict that Avilova was better unpublished. When Avilova in turn tracked him down, Anton had erected a defence against Persons from Porlock. Leikin knew Avilova: in Moscow on his way to Melikhovo, he noted in his diary 9 March 1895:

  Went to the Strakhov [Avilova’s maiden name] library on the Pliushchikha where L. A. Avilova is staying, and had tea with her. She is grieving, ten days ago she wrote a letter to Chekhov from Moscow inviting him there, but he did not appear or reply, she asked in the offices of Russian Thought if he was now at his estate, and she was told he had left for Taganrog. I informed her that I was told in Russian Thought that he was at his estate, expecting me and I was off to see him tomorrow.1

  Anton also took care, while in Petersburg, to avoid Shavrova, whose manuscripts he had mislaid. She received not the meeting she craved, but a roasting for maligning doctors in a story about syphilis and the family. The story was in any case unprintable – only medical journals could discuss syphilis. Anton told Shavrova to leave disease to professionals, and write about picnics instead.

  In February 1895 Anton sent to a Moscow anthology ‘The Spouse’, yet another piece about a long-suffering doctor whose life is wrecked by a spendthrift, unfaithful wife.2 Chekhov’s recurrent topic in 1895, an idealist thwarted by an amoral woman, stems from private disillusion and from a more general misogynistic undercurrent in Russian literature at that time. Repeatedly toying with, and then rejecting, the affections of one woman after another, Anton was not so much searching for his Dulcinea, as reiterating a bitter experience: each liaison seemed an obstacle to creative and personal freedom. Like Tolstoy, Anton felt at heart that Schopenhauer was right to assert that ‘only a male intellect befuddled by sexual drive’ could worship woman. Schopenhauer was widely known in Russia and the heroine of ‘The Spouse’ is a Schopenhauerian Weib, as are Chekhov’s next heroines, in The Seagull and in the stories ‘Ariadna’ and ‘Anna Round the Neck’.

  When Anton returned to Melikhovo, he avoided the sirens. Tania had to seek him out at the end of March. Iavorskaia was by March on tour 300 miles away to the east, in Nizhni. The Moscow critics, Anton warned Suvorin, ‘had hunted her down like a hare’ for her ‘parody of a countess’ in Giacosa’s La dame de Challant. Anton no longer wished to share Iavorskaia with Korsh and Tania, while she could not understand why he was so unresponsive. Feverish with flu and desire, she pleaded in bad free verse:

  O Charudatta, worthy of envy! …

  You don�
��t know how the lively Vasantasena

  Your southern flower, ‘little sun’,

  Suffers here in the theatre galleries

  Which take 4 roubles a day off her

  And a hotel room so unlike

  Alas that room in the Great Moscow hotel

  In which you and she

  Tasted true bliss.

  My darling … I am in no state at all to write to you in prose about

  our feelings, so send Tania to me …

  At Easter Iavorskaia would make her Petersburg début. She reverted to the formal vy and pleaded the state of the roads as her reason for not coming to Melikhovo. She still begged Anton to come and join her in her Petersburg hotel. By 5 April 1895 Anton had not responded; Iavorskaia cajoled him from Petersburg:

  Put in a word to defend the unhappy one,

  Your beautiful Vasantasena,

  Or Suvorin and the reviewers

  In savage fury will destroy thy lotus

  And tear to pieces thy Vasantasena

  And hurl her wondrous body for the hungry Muscovite

  Reviewers to devour. O save me, Charudatta!!

  My darling, Happy Easter, I wish you every bliss, bodily and spiritual! I met Burenin, a venomous man in a mask of amiability. We spoke about you. He asked me if I was in love with Anton Chekhov (you see, darling, it’s obvious to everyone? Yes … yes … yes …) … I want to meet Suvorin only through you. Put in a word for me with him. Your word works on him just like the word of a much-loved woman (!)

  Anton did not respond or put in a word, but gossiped instead, telling Suvorin that Korsh was Iavorskaia’s chief lover, but did not forbid her to have affairs. Suvorin saw Madame Sans-Gêne and damned Iavorskaia with faint praise. (Both Suvorin’s theatre and Chekhov’s drama would take up arms against her histrionics.) Offering Iavorskaia up to Suvorin, Anton was angling for a protégée of Suvorin’s, the Jewish Liudmila Ozerova, who had had a sensational début in Hauptmann’s mystical and sentimental Hannele’s Ascension. In early May Chekhov asked Suvorin where Ozerova would spend the summer: ‘Why not invite me to be her doctor?’ Only two years later would Ozerova respond to Anton’s hints.

  None of the Chekhovs had put Lika out of their thoughts. Misha complained to Masha in January that he missed ‘educated’ girls: ‘At least there used to be Lika, but now she is no more.’3 Anton wrote to her for the first time in three months and, apparently, the last for fifteen. He expected her soon and would come to talk; although he was aware of her baby, there was ‘nothing to write about, since everything is as it was and there is nothing new’. He asked her to bring gloves and perfume for Masha. Lika now wrote not to Anton, but to Masha, to Granny and to her mother. For Granny she kept up the fiction that she was busy studying singing; she assured her mother ‘you are my only and my best friend.’ To Masha, in letters of 23 January and 2 February, Lika admitted she was thin – her waist was nineteen inches – she had a French admirer, but could neither sleep nor drink: her one consolation was that she would die soon. She was proud only of her baby, who, the wet nurse said, was the spitting image of Potapenko. She asked if Masha would marry Levitan, now that Kuvshinnikova had left him. She defended her lover:

  I have had one friend and I hope he will remain a friend for both of us – that is Ignati … I had the idiotic illusion that I also had a friend in Anton, but this turned out to be a stupid fantasy … I regret nothing, I am glad that I have a little creature who is beginning to give me joy … I believe Ignati loves me more than anything in the world, but he is the most wretched man! He has no will power, no character and what’s more he has the bad luck to possess a spouse who will stop at nothing.

  Masha was moved by Lika’s sufferings, but she envied her the experience of love and childbirth.

  In spring 1895 Lika made a flying visit to Russia, leaving Christina with the wet nurse in France. Granny Ioganson yearned for Lika: her diary for 8 and 14 May exults:

  Today is my dear dove Lidiushka’s birthday. The Lord send her health, happiness and wellbeing for the 26th year of her life … I’m expecting Lidiusha! She has come, I’m godlessly glad to see her – now I shall die easier.4

  On 12 May Lika went straight from Moscow to Melikhovo. Only after twenty-four hours, did she go to see Granny in Tver province. On 25 May Anton went to Moscow and stayed with Vania, who reported to his wife: ‘Anton spends the night with me but vanishes the whole day on business.’ Anton came back to Melikhovo on Sunday 28 May, bringing Lika. She stayed another twenty-four hours, then vanished until September, to the relief of Vania’s wife who was jealous of the young bohemian women who frequented Melikhovo.5

  That spring only males flocked to Melikhovo. Dunia Efros, Anton’s fiancée nine years before, married to a lawyer, Efim Konovitser, was again one of Masha’s intimates. They met in Moscow. A year passed before Dunia and her family were invited to Melikhovo. At Easter Tania, beloved by Pavel and Evgenia for attending communion, all-night vigils, and christenings of workmen’s children, was the only female guest at Melikhovo. As family, she was sent lists of produce – cheese, salami and halva, wine and olive oil – to bring from Moscow.

  The only man banned from Melikhovo was Potapenko. He was hurt that Anton, ‘the object of my undying envy’, now communicated with him only on scraps of yellow paper. Potapenko was, however, busy: he was writing ‘an uncountable number of stories and novels’ to pay for his two wives, and Lika, Christina and the wet nurse, quite apart from paying off his debts to Anton and Suvorin. On 10 March Leikin, Gruzinsky and Ezhov arrived. Leikin approved Anton’s attempts to be, like him, farmer, gardener and dog-breeder. He and Chekhov grew to like each other better. Leikin recorded:

  From Lopasnia station to Melikhovo, where Chekhov’s estate is, we drove through a terrible blizzard. You could hardly make out the road markers … We drove in two sledges. Me in front, Ezhov and Gruzinsky behind. A pair of horses was harnessed in single file to my sledge. The road was literally swept away … when we got to Chekhov’s we were buried in snow, icicles in the beard and on our temples … Chekhov gave us a full welcome, even came out onto the porch with the servants. Two very young chamber maids, round as dumplings, girls with full-moon faces, grabbed our bags and rugs … Chekhov’s house is fine, bright rooms, all repainted and repapered, spacious, with a nook for every member of the family and comfort you won’t find even in some Moscow apartments. It is pleasant to see that a fellow writer (I mean a gifted one) has finally escaped penury and become well off. Inside we were greeted by his mother and his brother Misha, the tax inspector, come from Uglich, where he works, to stay a few days. Two dachshunds got under our feet, and I nearly shouted ‘Pip! Dinka!’, they were so like my own.

  After dinner Chekhov took me around the farmyard and outbuildings. The latter are decrepit but he has new hewn-wood stables, cow-shed and stores. A bath house is being built. A two-room cottage for visitors has been built and furnished and there were three beds and bedding. A really charming cottage. This is where Ezhov and Gruzinsky spent the night, while I slept on the divan in Chekhov’s study.

  Ezhov left the next morning, unimpressed. On 31 March he wrote to Leikin:

  I don’t like Chekhov’s estate: first of all it’s in the middle of the peasant village; if there’s a fire there the manor won’t escape. Secondly, there’s no water. The pond Anton showed us is fit only for piglets to bathe in.6

  Chekhov did not think much of Gruzinsky and Ezhov. He told Suvorin that they were ‘two young wet blankets who said not a word and spread raging boredom over the whole estate’, although Leikin ‘has coarsened, become kinder, more jovial – he must be going to die soon.’ Leikin was so touched by his reception that he sent Chekhov’s dachshunds a picture of their parents and Masha seeds of Siberian buckwheat, which became yet another weed at Melikhovo. The cycle of presents ended with Chekhov commissioning an artist to paint Leikin in oils for only 200 roubles. Overjoyed, Leikin sent seed of his prize beet and cucumbers.

  When Gruzinsky and
Ezhov were invited back to a green, warm Melikhovo in early June, Ezhov changed his mind: ‘I liked it. The bathhouse we saw is finished and, thanks to Anton’s kindness, is a resort for all the Melikhovo peasants.’ Perhaps Ezhov felt more gracious because he was about to marry again, this time ‘a girl of no means’.7 It took all summer, however, to lure Suvorin, used to greater comforts, to Melikhovo. When he came at the end of August he stayed just one night.

  At Easter Ivanenko came. He annoyed Pavel by oversleeping and not kissing the priest. Giliarovsky, the superman-reporter of Anton’s student days, visited, Anton received for three days Doctor Korobov, who had boarded with the Chekhovs when he and Anton were first-year students. Nikolai Korobov was now besotted with Nietzsche. Chekhov had once commented: ‘I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche in a railway carriage or on a boat and talk the whole night.’ Korobov’s visit was the next best thing. Nietzschean views and phrases seep into the conversation of Anton’s fictional protagonists.8 His correspondence with Suvorin was also enlivened by sympathy with the latter’s pro-German and Nietzschean views, often eccentric: Suvorin advocated compulsory cricket in Russian universities, for example, to defect students from idle radicalism.