Dear Antonio, … I did think that our true spiritual bond must not be broken by any external circumstances. And if I were to let myself doubt your friendship, I still should say ‘That will pass, that is temporary.’ So – everything is bright between us, as before, and I am terribly glad.
Anton devised a suitable penance. Potapenko accepted without demur. He, the man most ridiculed in The Seagull, was to oversee the play’s realization. Potapenko was easily supervised: he was one of Suvorin’s dependants, and he dined regularly with Aleksandr at the Petersburg monthly writers’ dinners. Potapenko found Chekhov a typist in Moscow, a Miss Gobiato, who at snail’s pace, for a few kopecks a page, made two copies for transmission to Petersburg. Potapenko had one last laugh: Aleksandr sent Anton a newspaper cutting from Zhitomir (in the Ukraine) which showed that library users preferred Potapenko to Chekhov.
Miss Gobiato was too slow: Anton finally sent a manuscript to Suvorin, who was told to expect it from the hands of ‘a tall handsome widow’ – Sasha Selivanova. Anton told Suvorin to let Potapenko, and nobody else, read it. Suvorin (who admired Potapenko’s wife Maria) was shocked by the play; he told Anton that Trigorin, torn between Nina and Arkadina, was too obviously Potapenko, torn between Lika and his wife. Anton disingenuously, replied that if this were so, the play would be unstageable. Suvorin, as Chekhov might have suspected, showed The Seagull to his confidante, Sazonova. She was already worried by Suvorin’s fondness for decadent drama. On 21 December her diary anticipated public opinion:
I read The Seagull. A thoroughly depressing impression. In literature only Chekhov, in music Chopin make that impression on me, like a stone on your soul, you can’t breathe. It is unrelieved gloom.
Iavorskaia still hoped that Chekhov would provide her with a triumphal chariot of a play, that The Seagull would be in the same neoromantic vein as Rostand’s La Princesse lointaine, which she and Tania were taking to Petersburg for the new season. In Moscow, in early December, Chekhov read The Seagull to a large company in the blue drawing room at Iavorskaia’s hotel. Tania recalls:
Korsh … considered Chekhov his author, since he had put on the first production of Ivanov … I remember the impression the play made. It was like Arkadina’s reaction to Treplev’s play: ‘Decadence!’ ‘New forms?’ … I remember the argument, the noise, Iavorskaia feigning delight, Korsh’s amazement: ‘Dear boy, that’s bad theatre: you have a man shoot himself off-stage and don’t even let him speak before he dies!’ etc. I remember Chekhov’s face, half embarrassed, half stern.
Iavorskaia and Chekhov had no more to say to each other. Anton then took his manuscript to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose suggestions he respected and adopted.
Anton now treated Lika as lightly as his old sweetheart Sasha Selivanova. He was celibate, he told Suvorin on 10 November:
I am afraid of a wife and family life which will restrict me and as I imagine them won’t fit in with my disorderliness, but it is still better than tossing about in the sea of life and going through storms in the frail boat of dissipation. Anyway I don’t love my mistresses any more, and with them I gradually become impotent.
Anton visited Sasha Selivanova in Moscow to drink beer and vodka, and invited Lika to sing and walk in the woods. Only the faraway aroused desire. Liudmila Ozerova, the Petersburg actress, intrigued Anton even more after a fiasco in Schiller’s Intrigue of Love. He wrote to Suvorin on 21 October: ‘Reading The Petersburg Newspaper, where her acting was called simply absurd, I can imagine the little Jew-girl crying and going cold.’
After searching the attic in Melikhovo, Anton found Elena Shavrova, now Mrs Iust’s manuscripts, which he had mislaid. He offered to make up to her for his delinquency and confided that he was writing a story (‘My Fiancée’, the future ‘House with the Mezzanine’), as well as a play, about lost love: ‘I used to have a fiancée’. Inviting each other to rendezvous in the Great Moscow hotel, she and Anton began a cautious game. Shavrova’s letters become flirtatious. On 11 November she hinted at the relationship – of a young actress with a distinguished older man – that she sought: ‘You know, I often recall Katia from “A Dreary Story” and I understand her.’ On 3 December she wrote: ‘It’s nice to know that cher maître has loved, which means he could have and understand this earthly feeling … I think somehow that you analyse everything and everyone too finely to fall in love …’1 For the New Year Shavrova praised ‘Ariadna’ as a vraie femme aux hommes, and wished Chekhov ‘as few boring days, hours and minutes as possible’.
Autumn left Anton no time for love or boredom. The creative impulse that had started in spring 1894 intensified. As soon as The Seagull was despatched, he sat down to work on his most nostalgic story, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. The scenery and the secondary characters (an idle landowner and his domineering, weeping mistress) stem from 1891, the summer of the mongoose at Bogimovo. The narrator (an artist, never seen to paint a picture), stumbles on a decaying estate where a mother and her two daughters live, argues with the elder daughter and falls in love with the younger, only to have her snatched away when she responds. The sense of loss lies in the decaying pine needles and lime trees, the half-abandoned house and the narrator’s passivity. The secondary theme of the story was to run through Chekhov’s later plays and stories: the narrator argues the pointlessness of social activism in the face of the misery of the peasantry’s condition. The elder sister is an activist and denounces art and idleness. The puzzle for the critics is that neither the active sister nor the artist is approved. In Chekhov’s work the conflict is often between two sides of himself, the active landowner and contemplative artist, or the egalitarian and the misogynist.
As an activist, Chekhov now proposed a new school for the villagers, pooling his resources with the peasants’ and whatever Serpukhov council granted towards the 3000 roubles needed. His neighbours were unhelpful. The Chekhovs and Semenkoviches, the new owners of Vaskino, visited each other, but Anton barely spoke to the seedy Varenikovs who lived to the east of Melikhovo. Varenikov offered to exchange a large amount of forest for a small amount of hayfield, but Masha would not agree. Varenikov had behaved badly in August: when the Chekhov cows strayed, he demanded a rouble per head to release them. Anton told him to keep the cattle. Varenikov surrendered: ‘Have your cows collected; please forbid your servants to let them into your hayfields.’2
Anton in Moscow drank with Sasha Selivanova and chased up Miss Gobiato the typist. Masha taught from Monday to Friday. Pavel managed the estate tyrannically and the servants got drunk, quarrelsome and disobedient. After opening the kitchen windows to freeze the cockroaches to death, Pavel complained to Masha:
Roman has quarrelled with his wife, and she has turned nasty, she wouldn’t milk the cows, I had to ask and beg Aniuta to go and do the milking, and Mashutka to feed the hens and ducks, the old woman [Mariushka] with tears in her eyes put the bread in the oven … What is happening, can we allow the servants and workmen such freedom that they don’t obey those that live in the house? Whom do they serve? … Roman used to be considerate when he wasn’t allowed so much freedom and rope, now he has got above himself, he has become hypocritical, he has found out Antosha’s weak point … All week two strapping lads have failed to get the manure out of the stables, we’ve had to hire a daily woman. We are sitting with no firewood, it’s cold in the rooms.3
Pavel’s despotism irritated Anton. He complained to Aleksandr of Pavel ‘nagging at mother over dinner and lecturing us at length about medals and awards.’
When Anton was in Melikhovo, harmony reigned, but he restricted his commands to the garden. He would prune raspberries, manure asparagus, minister to sick dachshunds, but would not reprimand the men-of-all-work, Ivan, Roman and his brother Egor. Anton would wander off to the woods: Pavel’s diary, in Anton’s hand, for 8 November reads: ‘Clear morning: went hunting with the dachshunds, but didn’t find the badger in his den.’
Levitan, still prey to depression, came on a few of these walks – this
time without a gun. He was touchingly grateful for Anton’s visit after his attempted suicide. Anton gave him The Island of Sakhalin, inscribed ‘in case he should commit murder in a fit of jealousy’ and end up a prisoner there. At the end of July Levitan wrote:
I constantly observe myself and see clearly that I am completely going to pieces. And I am fed up with myself, and how fed up.
I don’t know why, but the few days you spent with me were the most peaceful days this summer.
In October Levitan came back to Melikhovo for two days.
Others needed Anton’s support. Misha, downcast at being denied a tax inspectorate at Iaroslavl, asked Suvorin for help. Suvorin thought his letter muddled and tactless; Anton had to explain what Misha wanted. Suvorin went to the Finance Ministry and fixed Misha’s posting, sending Chekhov a telegram: ‘Say merci, my angel.’ Misha would not be leaving Uglich alone. After Mamuna’s betrayal, he fell in love with Olga Vladykina, a governess to Uglich’s richest manufacturer. He drove her home from a party across the dangerous ice of the Volga. She agreed to marry Misha, but was hurt that Misha would not announce the engagement until he had received Anton’s approval.
Masha had a measure of independence in the form of a monthly allowance of 30 roubles from Misha and ‘granddad’ Sablin. Misha gave her the 1600 roubles due from the publication of his smallholder’s encyclopaedia. Only Aleksandr still grumbled: he could not get his elder sons into school; little Kolia threw a cat from a third-floor window and expressed no remorse. Aleksandr turned to Vania and Sonia, as pedagogues:
Would you take over the training of my piglets? … As soon as I leave the house they dash off God knows where, grab their hats and clear off … better that you should have the money than a stranger. Kolia … is useful, he can fetch vodka from the pub.4
Vania was willing, but it took two years to weaken Sonia’s opposition.
By autumn 1895 Chekhov had regained his hold over old acolytes, although Bilibin objected to being exploited for his Post Office connections. When Shcheglov asked after eighteen months’ silence why Chekhov could not drop him a few friendly lines, he was won over by the response and opened to Chekhov ‘both my heart and my hotel room’. He recorded in his diary (10 October 1895): ‘There remain three persons, meeting whom makes my heart race: A. P. Chekhov, A. S. Suvorin and V. P. Gorlenko [a Kiev critic].’ A planned reunion never happened, however, and Shcheglov left, disappointed, for the provinces.
For years Anton had put off meeting Tolstoy, but in August 1895 he stayed with Tolstoy at Iasnaia Poliana for thirty-six hours, even though a private talk with Tolstoy was now no more feasible than with the Pope. Anton had avoided being brought in, like a trophy, by Sergeenko and other Tolstoyans. Access to Tolstoy, even for intimates, was controlled by his disciple, Chertkov. Anton’s visit was arranged by the journalist Mikhail Menshikov.5 Anton had an audience, not a conversation, with Tolstoy. The following morning, Chertkov and Gorbunov-Posadov, in the master’s presence, read extracts from his unpublished novel Resurrection. Anton let Tolstoy’s vegetarianism and anarchism pass, merely pointing out the heroine’s implausibly light sentence for conspiracy to murder.
Tolstoy, compiling readers for the masses, had read Chekhov’s prose and praised many of his stories, though not for what Anton liked in them. He deplored Chekhov’s lack of a guiding idea: his most perceptive remark was that Chekhov merged with Garshin would make a great writer. Anton’s person, however, charmed Tolstoy, in particular his ‘young lady’s gait’. Chekhov did not return like a Muslim from the haj, but he did feel admiration for the man, largely because he saw how much Tolstoy’s daughters loved their father, and believed, as he later told Suvorin, that a mistress, wife or mother could be deceived, but a daughter could not.
Anton did not become a Tolstoyan: on 1 December he told Suvorin that he would enter any monastery that took unbelievers. He was, however, inspired to Tolstoyan activity. He pestered Aleksandr, who briefly edited a journal for the blind, until a blind old soldier who was begging at Iasnaia Poliana was housed. That autumn and winter Anton sent hay for the schoolteacher’s cow, built a new school for the peasants, found cousins Volodia and Aleksandra places in a seminary and a dressmaking school, nagged Sytin, the Moscow publisher, to honour his agreement to publish The Surgical Chronicle run by Professor Diakonov. Innumerable writers – such as a Jew, Gutmakher, from Taganrog, and a derelict bookseller, Sveshnikov – owed publication of their work to Anton.
Anton spent the first two weeks of December in Moscow in the Great Moscow Hotel, working on ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. Ivan Bunin, then an unknown writer, later to be a kindred spirit, and his companion, Balmont, the drunken decadent poet, were in the hotel. Balmont reached for an overcoat and was stopped by a porter: ‘That is Anton Chekhov’s overcoat.’ Balmont and Bunin were overjoyed at a pretext for meeting Chekhov, and entered his room in the morning. Anton was out, but Bunin sat down and furtively read the manuscript of ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’. Years passed before he met Anton and confessed.
After an all-night party at Russian Thought, Anton arrived in Melikhovo at 6.00 a.m. on 17 December to what he feared would be ‘hellish boredom’. The family gathered. Masha arrived, followed by Vania, accompanied not by his wife, but by Sasha Selivanova. Misha came on Christmas Eve for a parental blessing on his marriage to Olga. Pavel was happy because the samovar had been repaired and he had bought a new washstand:
Matins at 7 a.m. Mass at 10. We dined without the priest [but with] the schoolteacher, visitors and family. We spent the day well, the Boys came then Peasants with Felicitations. The servants received good presents.
Dr Saveliev, fellow Taganrogian and medical student, also came. Anton wanted to write, not to celebrate, but he revealed his resentment only to Suvorin on 29 December: ‘All day eating and talking, eating and talking’.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 63 4v: Elena Shavrova-Iust’s letters to Anton Chekhov, 1895.
2 See Ilia Sats, Iz zapisnoi knizhki, Moscow-Petrograd, 1923, 53–4.
3 See OR, 331 81 24: Pavel’s letters to Maria Chekhova, 1885–98: 15 Dec. 1895.
4 See RGALI, 2540 1 149: Aleksandr’s letters to Ivan Chekhov, 1882–97: 31 July 1895.
5 Menshikov’s articles upset all Serpukhov district, proving that Prince Viazemsky was not a precursor of Tolstoy, emancipating peasants and giving away property, but a dissolute drunkard. The meeting with Tolstoy was marred for Anton by neuralgia which struck the whole of his right face. He took painkillers, quinine, ointment, and had a tooth pulled, but the pain persisted for two weeks; a year later an optician would diagnose the cause.
VII
The Flight of the Seagull
To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you.
Shakespeare, Hamlet II, ii
FIFTY
Two Diversions in Petersburg
January–February 1896
WHEN NEW YEAR’S DAY 1896 DAWNED, it was nearly minus 30°C at Melikhovo. Guests dispersed to Moscow while Anton packed his bags for Petersburg. The peasant women and children gathered for New Year gifts from Pavel. The Chekhovs’ reactionary neighbour Semenkovich rode over from Vaskino: one of his anecdotes struck a chord in Anton’s heart – his uncle, the poet Fet, so loathed the University of Moscow that whenever his carriage passed the building, he stopped his driver, opened the window and spat.
Peasant beggary and sociable gentry were soon out of mind. Anton took the morning train to Moscow with Vania. From Moscow he took the overnight express to Petersburg and the Hotel Angleterre. Ignati Potapenko was less in evidence: his second wife had reined him in. On one quiet evening in a frantic fortnight, with Aleksandr’s encouragement Chekhov took the insortable Natalia to the theatre. Every other evening Anton moved like a comet through a galaxy of actresses. He took Kleopatra Karatygina to see Ostrovsky’s Poverty is no Vice at Suvorin’s Literary-Artistic Circle. She recalled:
Chekhov grabbed me beh
ind the wings and dragged me off … Suvorin in his overcoat and hat, holding a stick, was sitting in the front box. He was banging the stick and growling, I felt a savage outburst coming and pleaded with Chekhov to let me out, but he assured me it would be fun and persuaded me to sit down … We could hear Suvorin [cursing one of the actresses]: ‘You bitch, you bitch! …’ Chekhov managed to seize him by his coat sleeve … I took fright, rushed out of the box and then Chekhov and I laughed so loud that he said his spleen would burst.1
Kleopatra, like Natalia, was abandoned for more fashionable company. Schadenfreude and curiosity drove Chekhov to Lidia Iavorskaia’s benefit night on 4 January. She starred in Rostand’s La Princesse lointaine, in Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik’s version. This magnificent translation was the last service that Tania performed for Lidia. Now that Iavorskaia was betrothed to Prince Bariatinsky, she was turning her back on her lesbian past. After an all-male dinner with the cadaverous Grigorovich, Anton went to the theatre with Suvorin. The next evening Anton scandalized Sazonova by calling Iavorskaia, as the ‘distant princess’, a washerwoman covering herself in garlands. On the subject of Tania’s verse he was milder – she had a vocabulary of only twenty-five words, ecstasy, prayer, aquiver, murmur, tears, dreams, but could write entrancing verse. After this sally, Chekhov went off to dine with Potapenko, the critic Amfiteatrov and the novelist Mamin-Sibiriak. Suvorin could not come. ‘A pity,’ said Anton cruelly, ‘You’re an excellent companion. You pay for everyone.’ Suvorin felt an outsider: some blamed Anton’s liberalism for Suvorin’s disagreements with his rabid colleagues. The journalist Gei yelled at Chekhov on the steps of the Maly Theatre, accusing him of alienating the magnate from his acolytes. On 8 January, to escape these tensions, Chekhov went to Tsarskoe Selo to drink and dine with a fellow-provincial, the Zola of the Urals, Mamin-Sibiriak.
Anton Chekhov Page 43
