Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  All that is clear from your letter so far is that your wife has been prescribed creosote and that she has had pleurisy … I’ve had a cough for a long time and coughed up blood, but I’m still fine, putting my faith in God and science, which is now curing the most serious lung diseases. So you have to have hope and try to avoid disaster. The best thing, of course, would be to go and take koumiss [fermented mares’ milk].

  Although Anton gave him letters of recommendation, as he had once given money, Ezhov never forgave Dr Chekhov the deaths of his wives.

  In April Melikhovo came to life. Whitebrow, the young dog Pavel had given away to Semenkovich while Anton was away, came running back after six weeks’ absence. He was caught up and banished again. The starlings flocked. Evgenia wrote to Misha and Olia:

  The starlings came on Friday 5th and have nested in the two new boxes, one opposite the dining-room window, the other the one you built on to the house so that I could see them from the corridor window. Antosha and I are listening to them singing … Aniuta [Naryshkina, the maid] has got engaged to a man in Vaskino, there’ve been two balls, but for us their wild parties are very disturbing and unpleasant.1

  The late spring; the starlings; the coughing of blood; the rowdy peasants and the neighbouring gentry; endless troubles with labour and materials for the new school; a morning spent with Tolstoy: all was grist to Chekhov’s narrative mill. After a winter’s inactivity, he had got down to a long work – originally intended to be a novel for the popular monthly, The Cornfield. The fee, more than 1000 roubles, was the temptation, the censorship of popular magazines the stumbling block. Known as ‘My Life’, the work was first called ‘My Marriage’ as a companion piece to ‘The House with the Mezzanine’ (which was printed in Russian Thought that April and could have been called ‘My Non-Marriage’). ‘My Life’ too is a first-person narrative, ‘a provincial’s story’ instead of ‘an artist’s story’. As Chekhov worked, its scope broadened.

  ‘My Life’ contains everything Chekhovian – a gruesome anonymous provincial town, inconclusive wrangling between activist and quietist philosophers, lyrical landscapes, dialogue of the deaf between man and woman, the lure of the theatre, the peasantry’s instinctive values. The story tests intuition against ideas: how ‘a little profit’ (the hero’s nickname) is gained from following instinct and enduring one trial after another. The narrator’s loss of status, of wealth, of a wife is outweighed by inner peace, despite the melancholy ending, where we see the hero visiting with his little niece the cemetery where his sister is buried. Chekhov takes another look at Tolstoy’s slogans – non-resistance to evil, simplification – and his hero becomes a test-bed on which Tolstoyan principles are tried to breaking point. Chekhov does not debunk Tolstoy, but strips his ideas of sanctimony. The Tolstoyan refrain uttered by one character, ‘Lice eat grass, rust eats iron, lies eat the soul’ is moral poetry, but not a blinding light. ‘My Life’ is both an existential story and a classic, using devices of Tolstoy (the railway as an instrument of destruction) and Turgenev (the living consoled at the graveside). The composition of ‘My Life’ took virtually the entire year; by the end of April less than half was drafted.

  The fiction was fed by the events that summer (not least by Anton’s many railway journeys); writing such freshly inspired prose reconciled him to the drudgery of revising The Seagull, and quarrying Uncle Vania out of the ruins of The Wood Demon. Confessional though it is, ‘My Life’ breaks with the parodic mode of The Seagull or ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. The use of autobiographical material is freer from caricature and vindictiveness. The conflict between a violent father and an introverted son may have been autobiographical for Anton, but the son breaks out, not from the lower classes to the gentry, but downwards. The story has some cruelties: the hero’s sister is a failed actress called Kleopatra, and the character’s début, dumbstruck and pregnant in an amateur production, was painful reading for both Karatygina and Lika Mizinova. Nevertheless, the reader of ‘My Life’ is moved to compassion, not mockery. The traits of Misail, hero and narrator of ‘My Life’, recall Aleksandr (also known as ‘a little profit’ for his trade in songbirds in Taganrog). Aleksandr’s vegetarianism and weakness for alcohol are ascribed to Misail, but so are his open mind and versatility as a craftsman.

  While ‘My Life’ was being written, Aleksandr gave Anton frequent cause for pity, anger or laughter. First Toska caught scarlet fever, and Aleksandr’s colleagues shunned him for fear of infection. Then Aleksandr went to Kiev as a freelance reporter on the doctor’s conference, only to be robbed, together with seven doctors, in his sleeping compartment. ‘Disgracefully robbed in the carriage under anæsthetic,’ he claimed. Aleksandr began drinking again in Kiev.

  The grimness of country life in ‘My Life’ reflects reality. At the end of April, Pavel recorded, ‘There is no food in the house for the cows. The horses get 2½ measures of oats per day.’ In early May life was still hard: ‘Assumption. Because of the rain the clock in the dining room has stopped. The herd of horses got into the garden. We tried to stoke the stoves in the rooms, but there was no wood to be found.’ Chekhov complained to Elena Shavrova: ‘It’s devilish cold. A savage northeast wind is blowing. And there’s no wine, there’s nothing to drink.’ In spring a troika sent over half-thawed mud to meet the train from Moscow was a dangerous vehicle, so that Anton had to forgo Lika: ‘If Lika comes, she’ll squeal all the way.’ It needed only a breakdown in communication for the affair to falter again, and although Anton, to judge by the circumstantial evidence, was close to committing himself to Lika, he again began a double game. His tone towards Elena Shavrova, who was staying with her mother and sisters in Moscow, became affectionate. On Iavorskaia’s notepaper, he asked her why she wanted to flee: ‘Actually, you ought to take a trip to Australia! With me!’ – and apologized for seeming ‘very unkind:

  This paper was brought on Rue de la Paix, so let it be the paper of peace! … Let this cutting, bright colour wring tears of forgiveness from your eyes … Now guess: who gave me this paper?

  The banter became mutual; Elena Shavrova pondered a liaison with her cher maître. She sent him her ‘Indian Summer’ (literally: ‘A Woman’s Summer’), inscribed ‘a sign of deep respect, gratitude and other warmer feelings’.

  Unknown to Anton, a hundred miles south in Iasnaia Poliana, the story led Tatiana, Tolstoy’s daughter, to record in her diary for 19 April 1896:

  Today papa read Chekhov’s new story ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. And I had an unpleasant feeling, because I sensed the reality in it and because the heroine was a 17-year-old girl. Now Chekhov is a man to whom I could become wildly attached. Nobody has penetrated my soul at the first encounter as he has. On Sunday I walked to the Petrovskys and back to see his portrait. And I’ve only seen him twice in real life.2

  Tatiana told her mother; the countess, forgetting that she was a doctor’s daughter and a leveller’s wife, retorted that Chekhov was too poor and of too low a birth to be considered as a husband. Tatiana questioned common friends about Anton: ‘Has he been spoilt by women?’ she asked the editor Menshikov3, and she urged Anton to visit. Faced with her mother’s hostility and Anton’s unresponsiveness, she fell instead for a married man, Sukhotin, whose wife she eventually became.

  Chekhov’s lowly birth bothered only aristocrats. Poverty bothered Anton more. He was committed not only to an extended family and to friends fallen on hard times, but also to the peasantry. The council and richer peasants might contribute, but he was liable for 1000 roubles towards the new school at Talezh. Suvorin gave him an advance on his collected plays and stories, but Anton was now wary of debts to Suvorin. He put out feelers to his new publisher, Adolf Marx, the proprietor of The Cornfield, who published his authors superbly. Marx would not tell him what Fet had been paid for his Collected Poems, but equally told Chekhov not to reveal his fee for ‘My Life’. The idea of selling his collected works to Marx for a substantial sum was born. For the time being, Anton had a little le
eway. The Talezh teacher, Mikhailov, became the foreman for the school building. Anton instructed the carpenters, who were putting on the roof timbers, not to take orders from his father and left for a few days in Moscow.

  On his return the roads were still ‘vile, mud, deep ruts filled with water’, but visitors crowded the house and the annexe. Both younger brothers brought their wives. It became hot. The starlings’ eggs hatched and they stopped singing; by 13 May it was over 30°; mosquitoes plagued everyone. Finally Lika came. She had taken a cottage with her baby and the nanny near Podolsk, half way along the line from Moscow to Lopasnia. Meetings and journeys to and from Moscow could now seem casual. Once again a family friend, she came down with Vania, the flautist Ivanenko, or even the postmaster. Pavel occasionally mentioned her sourly in the diary as Mlle Mizinova.

  Pavel was preoccupied with Moscow’s churches. Tsar Nicolas II, three years after his accession, was to be crowned in Moscow, the old capital; the city had a week of pomp in mid May. Unknown to each other, Pavel and Suvorin (accompanied by Iavorskaia), watched the five-hour coronation in the Uspensky cathedral. Pavel returned to Melikhovo directly and was not among the crowd of some 700,000 people, for whom the authorities had erected on Khodynka field in western Moscow 150 stands, each barred by a narrow gate admitting only two at a time: these stands were to distribute half a million ‘presents’ – a tin mug and a coronation sausage – with the lure of a special prize, a silver watch, at each stand. On 18 May a stand collapsed in the stampede. The horror was worsened by the callous authorities: the honeymoon of Nicolas II and his people ended. Khodynka precipitated the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. (The dynasty sensed nothing: the ball at the French embassy, even after the ambassador had inspected the corpses, went ahead.) A journalist to the marrow of his bones, Suvorin went to Khodynka:

  Up to 2000 people were crushed to death. Corpses were being carted all day and the crowd went with them. It’s a rutted place with pits. The police arrived only at 9, and people had started gathering at 2 … There were a lot of children. They were lifted up and saved over people’s heads and shoulders. ‘I haven’t seen any gentry. It’s just workmen and artisans lying there,’ said a man about the suffocated … What bastards these police officials are, every one of them, and these bureaucrats.

  Suvorin returned to Moscow three days later, obsessed by Khodynka, meeting more eye-witnesses and public servants. On 30 May he left a third time for Moscow and invited Anton to the Hotel Dresden. Anton spent all day examining the children at Talezh school and joined Suvorin late at night. The next day was one of the most horrible in Anton’s life, even for a man who had seen the prisons of Sakhalin. In west Moscow he stood on the site of a massacre. His diary is laconic: ‘On 1 June we were at the Vagankovo cemetery and saw the graves of those who perished at Khodynka.’ Suvorin’s diary gives a more graphic account:

  Chekhov and I were at the Vagankovo cemetery a week after the catastrophe. The graves still smelt. The crosses were in rows, like soldiers on parade, mostly six-cornered, pine. A long pit had been dug and the coffins were placed next to each other. A beggar told us that the coffins were put on top of each other in three layers. The crosses are about four feet apart. The inscriptions are in pencil, about who is buried, sometimes with a comment: ‘His life was 15 years and 6 months.’ Or ‘His life was 55 years.’ ‘Lord, accept his spirit in peace.’ ‘Those that suffered at Khodynka field.’ … ‘Thy grievous path of agony came on thee unawares, The Lord has liberated thee from all thy grief and cares.’

  The next day Anton went home to Melikhovo, while Suvorin went north, to his villa on the Volga at Maksatikha. Suvorin had, a fortnight later, nightmares of corpses. Anton said little about it, but Vagankovo cemetery and Khodynka affected him profoundly. He stopped writing for a fortnight after hearing the news of the disaster and did not begin work on ‘My Life’ again until 6 June. After his walk among the mass graves with Suvorin he did not write a letter for five days.

  Khodynka swept Lika from Chekhov’s mind. She sent a furious note, outraged that he had passed Podolsk on 30 May and not taken her with him to the Hotel Dresden: ‘Very nice of you, Anton, to send a postcard and let me know that you’ve steamed past! The fact that you stayed in Suvorin’s hotel room is of absolutely no interest to me …’ Anton alleged that he had never received her angry response, though it was neatly filed away in his archive at the end of the year, and pleaded with her ‘to leave together for Moscow on the 15th or 16th and have dinner together.’ This made Lika relent, and she agreed to meet him once again on the Moscow train. Again, Anton was not there, and she showered him with reproaches. She then received another invitation from Anton, who made it clear that a visit to the optician was the most pressing reason for him to travel to Moscow. Missed trains, like muddy roads, seemed sufficient cause for mutual affection to collapse again into reproaches and irony.

  Lika replied angrily, and Chekhov put off his journey to Moscow by a day and arranged to meet Lika for lunch with Viktor Goltsev at Russian Thought. Now Viktor Goltsev was to play the same role in Anton’s relations with Lika as Potapenko had, becoming a second string, just as Elena Shavrova was to Chekhov. Anton’s next letter to Lika ended with a telling remark which applied to his relations with both women: ‘I can’t tie up and untie my affairs any more easily than I can tie a necktie.’ The words ‘tie up’ and ‘untie’, zaviazyvat’ and razviazyvat’ connect Chekhov’s love life to his writing: they also mean ‘to devise a plot’ and ‘to devise the end of the plot’.

  Notes

  1 See OR, 331 73 11: Evgenia’s letters to Mikhail Chekhov, 1885–1903.

  2 See T. L. Sukhotina-Tolstaia Dnevniki 1979, 372.

  3 See Menshikov’s letter to Chekhov 20 Aug. 1896, quoted in PSSP, 500–1.

  FIFTY-THREE

  The Consecration of the School

  June–August 1896

  ANTON SAW LIKA IN MOSCOW and also commissioned a bell tower for Melikhovo church; building was to begin once Talezh school was finished. He saw an optician who cured his headaches: Anton’s short-sighted right eye had been strained by the long-sighted left: a pince-nez put the finishing touch to Anton’s image. Other prescriptions, electric shocks, arsenic and sea-bathing, were ignored.

  In July Elena Shavrova departed south for the summer and autumn, hurling an affectionate letter to Anton out of the Moscow–Kharkov mail train as it steamed through Lopasnia: Anton found her arch catch phrases Chi lo sà? and Fatalité irritating. He and Lika were for the time being in harmony: she came for five days to Melikhovo. No rival was in sight or in touch.

  Summer visitors to Melikhovo spent their time out of doors: Ezhov came on a bicycle; the Konovitsers brought Dunia’s brother, Dmitri, another pioneer cyclist. Olga Kundasova, again patient and assistant in Iakovenko’s clinic, disturbed the peace. Depression made her look, Chekhov told Suvorin, ‘as if she’d been a year in solitary confinement’. At the end of June Masha returned from the Lintvariovs and Evgenia came back from Moscow: the household ran smoothly. Misha and Olga stayed in the annexe where The Seagull had been written. There were only routine distractions: a neighbour’s cows in Chekhov’s woods; dysentery in a nearby village.

  To his editor, Lugovoi,1 Chekhov sent the first third of ‘My Life’: ‘a rough-hewn wooden structure which I’ll plaster and paint when I finish the building’. Lugovoi liked the manuscript and tucked it away in Adolf Marx’s fireproof safe. As well as Marx’s generous fee came more bounty: Suvorin sent Anton a three-month railway pass. Anton paid his mortgage interest and dreamed of journeys. In Petersburg, however, his affairs were going less smoothly. The censors were baulking at The Seagull. Sazonova noted (3 June): ‘Chekhov is melancholic. Suvorin too. The former is upset because of the play, the other is complaining of weakness and old age.’ Potapenko, however, was optimistic, for the censor Litvinov, a crony of Suvorin’s, was well disposed towards Chekhov. Unfortunately, Potapenko was not on the spot:

  Hotel Fassman. Dear Antonio! As you can s
ee, I’ve ended up in Karlsbad, my aim being to rid my liver of stones etc., etc. A little bit of a problem with your Seagull. Contrary to all expectation, it has got caught in the nets of the censorship, but not badly, so it can be rescued. The whole trouble is that your decadent has a lax attitude to his mother’s love life, which the censor’s rules don’t allow. You’ll have to insert a scene from Hamlet: ‘A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother/As kill a king and marry with his brother.’ … Actually, we’ll get out of it more easily. Litvinov says the whole thing can be put right in 10 minutes.

  Potapenko wanted Anton to tour Germany with him and his friend – it would be cheap and, Potapenko swore by his liver, enjoyable – but Anton would never travel with Potapenko again. Potapenko did not get back to Petersburg and the censor until late July. By then Litvinov had returned the play to Chekhov with blue pencil marks where he wanted changes. Reluctantly, Chekhov made Treplev more indignant about his mother’s liaison with Trigorin, and deleted a scene where Dr Dorn is revealed to be Masha Shamraeva’s father. Potapenko belatedly took up the baton:

  I don’t know what’s happened to your Seagull. Have you done anything about it? Tomorrow I’ll go and see Litvinov … There are rumours that literature is to be abolished; so we shan’t need censors … Lavrov will have a stake put up him, Goltsev will have his tongue cut out.