Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Anton and Suvorin longed for each other. Suvorin wanted to sit and walk with Anton, ‘silently and idly exchanging the odd phrase’. Anton begged Suvorin to come to Moscow in May: ‘we could travel round the cemeteries, the monasteries, the woods at the edge of the city.’ But Suvorin’s newspaper and, above all, his théâtre libre, held him captive, and Anton lacked a pretext to abandon Melikhovo. An estate could only be run if every member ‘regardless of rank or sex, worked like a peasant’. Mice were stopped from stripping the bark off the cherry trees; a pig was slaughtered and hams smoked; timber was hauled for a new workman’s shed. The summer of 1895 brought a drought as bad as the rains of 1894; the birch leaves were stripped by larvae. Fruit blossom was spoilt by frosts; sudden heat generated mosquitoes ‘which bite like dogs’. Anton could not leave Masha with such drudgery again. In vain Suvorin tempted him with the Volga and Dnepr, or Leikin with the lakes and monasteries of the North. He himself longed for the sea, the Baltic or the Azov, but had to stay at Melikhovo.

  Anton’s youngest and eldest brothers stayed away in spring 1895. Misha was even in April snowbound in Uglich. He was bound in other respects: the death of Sablin, his protector (the brother of the editor ‘granddad’ Sablin), had blocked hopes of a transfer to the livelier city of Iaroslavl. Anton lobbied for him, first with Bilibin, who told him that Misha was unqualified to be a postmaster, and then with Suvorin. In Petersburg Natalia angled for an invitation: ‘You describe your garden and its inhabitants, so that I salivate’. Aleksandr felt put upon: Natalia (‘my whore’) was showing signs of increasing eccentricity – hoarding food and clothes; his mother-in-law was dying of emaciation (it took four more years); he was up all night indexing New Times for a paltry 100 roubles a year; he had stopped drinking again, and his ‘loins hurt like an onanist’s’.

  All Anton’s irritation of the previous year, his tangle with Lika and Potapenko and his reading of the German misogynists went into a story called ‘Ariadna’. The heroine Ariadna Grigorievna is named after the girl who ruined the life of his Latin teacher, Starov. Her flamboyance was Iavorskaia’s; her predicament was Lika’s. Like Lika, Ariadna fails to ensnare the introverted narrator, Shamokhin, and takes up instead with a frivolous married man, Lubkov, who abandons her in Europe. Unlike Anton, however, Shamokhin rescues Ariadna and brings her back to Russia, and unlike Lika, Ariadna only seems pregnant. Like Potapenko, Lubkov has the gall to sponge money from his rival. Shamokhin paraphrases Schopenhauer when he describes Ariadna’s need to charm and to lie as being an innate as spurting ink is to a cuttlefish. Shamokhin tells the story to Chekhov – for once Chekhov appears in his own story – as they sail from Odessa to Yalta. Shamokhin is after all the ship’s bore, and this distances Chekhov from his protagonist. ‘Ariadna’ explores a conflict – between misogyny and common sense – in Chekhov’s own mind.

  ‘Ariadna’ had been commissioned for The Performing Artist. Its editor, Kumanin, had since incurred Chekhov’s disfavour and, as he neared death, his journal folded, Kumanin sold his subscribers and contracts, including Chekhov’s 620-rouble advance, to Russian Thought, and Lavrov and Goltsev found themselves, at the end of 1895, printing a work offensive to their egalitarianism. Chekhov was able, however, to offset ‘Ariadna’ with ‘Murder’, a brooding story of fanatical violence, inspired by what he had seen on Sakhalin and by Misha’s stories of Uglich. In May 1895 The bland of Sakhalin passed, as Lavrov put it, ‘from the belly of the whale’ and came out as a book (published by Russian Thought) which proved Chekhov’s radical credentials. Chekhov had, however, now finished with the penal island. His hope that the work would win him the right to lecture in Moscow university was thwarted; the University was ill-disposed to a man who ‘had it in for professors’.

  Misogyny permeated another story conceived that summer, printed in The Russian Gazette in October – ‘Anna Round the Neck’. The phrase is Aleksandr’s: he called his dying first wife ‘Anna round the neck’ – a pun on the civil service award of St Anna. Chekhov’s Anna is a girl married off to an elderly civil servant to save her destitute family. Realizing she is sexually attractive, she turns the tables and tyrannizes her husband. Anton was, understandably, in no mood for marriage, the cure that Suvorin proposed for his melancholy. On 23 March 1895 he retorted:

  All right, I’ll get married if you want me to. But my conditions are: everything must be as it was before, that is she must live in Moscow, and I in the country, and I shall visit her. I couldn’t stand a happiness that went on morning noon and night … I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not rise every night in my sky. NB. Marrying won’t make me write any better.

  Notes

  1 See LN68, 502.

  2 Misha said that the story was based on the Iaroslavl tax inspector Sablin’s unhappy marriage.

  3 See OR, 331 82 59: Misha’s letters to Masha, 1890–6: 12 Jan. 1895.

  4 See MXaT, 5323/19: S. M. Ioganson’s diary, book 5, 1895–7.

  5 See M. A. Sheikina, ‘Iz pisem I. V. Chekhova k S. V. Chekhovoi’ in Chekhoviana: Melikhovskie trudy i dni, 1995, 315–27; RGALI, 2540 1 238–43.

  6 See RGALI, 289 1 16: N. Ezhov’s letters to Leikin, 1894–1903.

  7 In August 1895 Ezhov asked Leikin for an advance of 200 roubles for the marriage. Leikin replied that he was glad Ezhov had found the love of his life, and sent him 50.

  8 Chekhov asked Korobov to translate a passage from Nietzsche for his new play.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Incubating The Seagull

  June–September 1895

  IN SUMMER 1895 Anton began to mention his archive. Like his father, Anton scrupulously kept letters and documents. The family always asked Anton if they were looking for a certificate. Anton alarmed Suvorin, who did not want his private thoughts to be widely known, by saying that he had put all his letters in order. This became an annual ritual, which Anton and Masha carried out: letters were sorted into two categories, family and literary, then into boxes, by author, Anton marking the date if the writer had not. Afraid of compromising themselves, people now wrote less spontaneously to Anton, or wrote mainly to provoke a saleable answer. Anton joked at their fears and hopes: he headed a letter to Anna Suvorina ‘not for Russian Antiquity’, but his own tone, as time went on, became more guarded.

  The archive shows Chekhov’s growing self-esteem. He could see himself as Russia’s greatest living writer of fiction. On 21 February Leskov, who had anointed him as ‘Samuel anointed David’, had died. Nobody mourned the most cantankerous of Russian novelists. Even Anton expressed only indignation that Leskov in his will demanded an autopsy to prove his doctors wrong. A diary entry two years later, however, shows how deeply he felt Leskov’s importance: ‘Writers like Leskov … cannot please our critics, because our critics are almost all Jews who do not know the core of Russian life and are alien to it, its spirit, its forms, its humour …’ Leskov’s idiom – ‘you stepped on my favourite corn’ – found its way into The Seagull.

  Melikhovo became all Anton’s. After dinner, on 3 June, Misha, Masha and Vania left Melikhovo for the south. They stayed for two days with Georgi in Taganrog. This was Masha’s first visit since she was a child: she bathed in the Sea of Azov. From Taganrog Vania returned to Melikhovo three weeks later, but Misha and Masha took Anton’s route of 1888, by sea to Batum and then overland to Kislovodsk. They returned late on 28 June ‘thin, tired, exhausted, yet full of the joys of life,’ Vania reported to his wife. While Anton enjoyed three weeks’ solitude. Pavel ploughed the parched earth, sold the hay, called out the vet1 to a sick cow, and bought new striking clocks – the elder Chekhovs’ main extravagance.

  Olga Kundasova began to frequent the house: Pavel recorded her as ‘living with us’. To Suvorin Anton complained: ‘This person in big doses, no thanks! It’s easier hauling water from a deep well.’ Olga left to spend the rest of the year with her sister, 1500 miles away in Batum. Anton managed her better, as she acknowledged next April:

&
nbsp; I am struck by many things in your attitude to me that have come to the surface recently, I am struck because I myself am now stony ground, and there was a time when I was good soil. (I ask you when reading this part of my letter not to indulge in the pornographic ideas so typical of you.)

  Anton had learnt to say no with yet more determination. He refused to help Olga assemble a library for the psychiatric hospital. He did however defend the peasant arsonist, Epifan Volkov, and after a year, the investigating magistrate, an admirer of Anton’s plays, released Volkov. Mitrofan’s younger son, Volodia, was expelled from a seminary, and Anton interceded to save him from conscription.

  Peace ended on 20 June, when Mitrofan’s widow Liudmila came to stay for forty days with her two teenage daughters, Aleksandra and Elena. Anton delighted in their domesticity, and the two girls were exceptionally pretty. Only Pavel counted the days to their departure, despite Liudmila’s enthusiasm for Matins and Vespers at Vaskino and the Monastery. Three weeks after these relatives left, Aunt Marfa Loboda, the widow of Ivan Morozov (Evgenia’s brother), came for a week. Of all her in-laws Evgenia liked Marfa best: together they prayed at the monastery church.

  The gestation of Chekhov’s new play, The Seagull, was interrupted by a suicidal incident that Anton was to use as the play’s crowning touch. Levitan was at Gorki, a remote estate, half way between Moscow and Petersburg, which belonged to his mistress, Anna Turchaninova. Like Sofia Kuvshinnikova, she was married and ten years older than Levitan. She had three daughters, of whom Levitan seduced at least one. He had a row with Anna Turchaninova, and on 21 June he pulled out a revolver and shot himself in the head. The wound was slight, but Levitan’s mood was not. On 23 June he wrote to Anton:

  Dear Anton, if at all possible, come to see me, just for a few days. I am horribly unhappy, worse than ever. I would come to see you but I have no strength left. Don’t refuse. A big room is at your disposal in a house where I live alone, in the woods, on the shore of a lake.

  Neither compassion nor the fishing moved Anton, so Anna Turchaninova wrote:

  I don’t know you, Mr Chekhov, but I have an urgent request at the insistence of the doctor treating Isaak. Levitan is suffering very severe depression which is pulling him into the most terrible state. On 21 June, in a minute of despair, he tried to kill himself. Fortunately we managed to save him. The wound is no longer dangerous, but Levitan needs meticulous, loving and friendly care. Knowing from what he has said that you are a close friend, I decided to write and ask you to come and see the patient immediately. A man’s life depends on your coming. You, only you, can save him and bring him out of complete indifference to life, and at times a furious determination to kill himself.2

  On 5 July, telling nobody where he was going, Anton made his way to Gorki and saw Levitan. From Gorki he wrote to Leikin to say he ‘was on the shores of a lake 50 miles from Bologoe’ for ten days. He told Suvorin that he was with a patient on the Turchaninova estate, ‘a marshy place, smelling of Polovtsians and Pechenegs’.

  Anton stayed only five days and, instead of turning home, travelled just as secretively from Bologoe to Petersburg. Leikin learnt that Anton was at Suvorin’s. He drove straight round to see Anton there ‘thin and jaundiced’; Anton claimed Suvorin had telegraphed for him. Leikin’s were not the only prying eyes; Kleopatra Karatygina hoped to join Suvorin’s new theatre and, like many actresses Anton had known, she named him as a referee.

  Anton was back in Melikhovo by 18 July. Tania and Sasha Selivanova, whom he now called the ‘enchanting little widow’, joined him. Four days later, Anton went back to Moscow to see Suvorin: they spent two days walking and talking. Suvorin came down to Melikhovo to meet Tania and talk about the theatre. On 24 July Pavel’s diary records: ‘Full moon. The guests went for a walk in the woods.’ The walk shaped Tania’s future. She charmed Suvorin, who would prepare the way for her in Petersburg. Tania was translating Edmond Rostand’s La Princesse lointaine – a source for the cult of the ‘Beautiful Lady’ in Russian symbolist drama. (Tania’s enthusiasm for modern French drama made Anton spend several weeks studying French grammar.) In The Seagull, the little play that Treplev stages to annoy his mother parodies Russian plays yet unwritten: the Symbolist drama which Tania was adapting and Hannele’s Assumption, in which the pretty Liudmila Ozerova had made her debut, helped Chekhov imagine what such drama might sound like in Russian.

  The Seagull is full of cruel parody. The shot bird symbolizing youth destroyed was aimed at Ibsen’s Wild Duck; the young writer Treplev, jealous of his mother’s lover, parodies Hamlet and Gertrude. The middle-aged actress, Arkadina, who holds all the men – her brother Sorin, her son Treplev and her lover Trigorin – in thrall, caricatures every actress that Anton had ever disliked, and echoes Iavorskaia’s mannerisms, such as kneeling before Anton, like Vasantasena before Charudatta, calling him ‘my only one!’ The boring schoolteacher Medvedenko mimics Mikhailov, the teacher in the village of Talezh, near Melikhovo. The medallion that Nina gives Trigorin with the coded reference to his lines ‘If you need my life, come and take it’, mocks Avilova and her medallion. The lakeside setting of The Seagull, the pointless killing of the seagull, and Treplev’s first attempt to shoot himself, all commemorate Levitan. The unhappy fate of Nina, adored by Treplev and seduced by Trigorin, reflects – and, as we shall see, anticipates – the story of Lika, Anton and Potapenko.

  Chekhov was most cruel to himself. Trigorin, the traditional writer, and Treplev, the innovator, standing for old and new movements, both ineffectual and mediocre, really personify two aspects of Chekhov, one the analytical follower of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the other the visionary prose-poet. Much of Trigorin is Anton – with his fishing rods, his dislike of scented flowers, his self-disparagement. Lines from Chekhov’s prose (a description of a broken bottle on a weir) and from his letters (to Lika about obsessive writing) are given to Trigorin in the play. Like Potapenko, however, Trigorin seduces and abandons Nina; like Anton, Treplev is the man to whom she briefly returns, undeterred in her desire for a career on stage. The Seagull is nevertheless not primarily a confessional work: Trigorin is only part Potapenko and Anton only part Treplev. The authorial Chekhov is there as Doctor Dorn who looks on with amused compassion, and deflects possessive women.

  The Seagull develops to a surreal degree the pattern of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country of 1849: a country estate, an ironical doctor, a dominant heroine and an absurdly long chain of unrequited love – nobody loves the schoolteacher Medvedenko, who loves Masha, the manager’s daughter, who loves Treplev, the young writer, who loves Nina, the neighbour’s stepdaughter, who loves Trigorin, the older writer, who is in thrall to Arkadina, the actress. The structure is innovative: four acts flow, not broken into scenes. Act 4 reiterates, like a musical piece, the motifs of Act 1. Never did Chekhov write such a literary play: the text alludes to Maupassant, whom Chekhov admired as much as his heroes do. The opening lines ‘Why do you always wear black?’ – ‘I’m in mourning for my life.’ are out of Bel-Ami, while the passage Dr Dorn reads in Act 2, on the dangers of writers to society and of women to writers, is from Maupassant’s travel book Sur l’eau. Shakespeare too, in particular Hamlet, is grafted into the play. Traditions are reversed. All the material of comedy – couples in love, youth against age, servants outwitting their masters – is there, but the action resolves uncomically. There are no happy reunions; age is unscathed, youth perishes, and the servants sabotage the household.

  On 21 October 1895 Chekhov told Suvorin that his comedy, satirizing his intimates, attacking the theatre and its actresses, was unstageable: ‘I am writing it not without pleasure, though I offend stage rules terribly. A comedy, three female parts, six male, four acts, landscape (view of a lake); a lot of talk about literature, not much action, 13 stone of love.’ Anton did all he could, from conception in May 1895 until its first performance in October 1896, to stir up the hostility of those who had to watch and act his play. It is as if the author against his own will propell
ed The Seagull into reality.

  Notes

  1 Glukhovskoi, the vet, had, as an insurance agent too, a double interest in the Chekhov cows.

  2 See OR, 331 60 62: Anna Turchaninova’s letters to Anton Chekhov, 1895, 1900.

  FORTY-NINE

  The Fugitive Returns

  September–December 1895

  ON 6 AUGUST 1895 Lika Mizinova brought her baby to Moscow. She made her peace with her mother and looked for work. Then she went to Tver province with chocolate for Granny Ioganson’s name day. Christina was put, as Lika had been, in Granny Ioganson’s care: a nurse was found. On 23 September Masha brought Lika to Melikhovo. In November Lika wrote to Granny:

  Masha Chekhova often stays with me and I with her. She lives with her brother Vania and still works in the Rzhevskaia boarding school. When I’m home, I read, play the piano and sing, and time passes quickly … I’ve been twice to the Chekhovs’ estate, once when I arrived, before term started, and spent two weeks there and I’ve also been going down for Saturday and Sunday with Masha, I am loved there as I used to be …

  Lika’s mother, Lidia Iurgeneva, doggedly independent, could not afford wood to heat her quarters. Physically and emotionally, the Chekhovs gave Lika warmth that autumn.

  Potapenko was still banned from Melikhovo, but, in December 1895, back in Tver, Lika stood up for him against Masha: ‘I have and shall have only one thing – my little girl! … never blame Ignati for anything! Believe me he is the man you and I thought he was.’ Ignati Potapenko by November had made an act of contrition, at least to Anton, for he felt the lack of sympathetic company in Petersburg: