Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Anton was beginning to be cast down by the antagonism of Petersburg to his work. His mood was worsened by a letter from Isaak Levitan, in the throes of manic depression, staying in the appropriately named resort of Serdobol [Heartache] on the Gulf of Finland:

  The rocks here are smoothed by the ice age … Ages, the sense of the word is simply tragic … Billions of people have drowned and will drown. We are Don-Quixotes … tell me in all honesty, it’s stupid, isn’t it!! Yours – what a senseless word – no, just Levitan.

  Anton’s reply, if any, is not extant, but his own depression is clear in a letter he wrote to Alekseir Kiseliov:

  I live out my years as a bachelor, ‘We pluck a day of love like a flower.’ I can’t drink more than three glasses of vodka. I’ve stopped smoking.

  He became restless. On 20 July, for the fourth time in seven months, Anton left Melikhovo to see Suvorin. He gave no reason for such a hasty trek. Suvorin’s country house in Maksatikha, where the Mologa and the Volchina rivers meet, was reached by train to Iaroslavl and then river boat. Did Anton go for the fishing, or for counselling on his personal, theatrical or financial affairs? Had he intended to travel further north, to console Levitan? Petersburg was uninviting, for Aleksandr had become demented after his drunken binge in Kiev, although he was writing articles on the care of the insane. He complained to Anton: ‘The old woman Gaga is wasting away … I have an abscess between my cheek and my gum. We’ve got a puppy named Saltpetre, it messes.’ Natalia’s postscript asked why Chekhov had ‘forgotten his poor relatives’.

  On Anton’s return to Melikhovo he found that Lika’s behaviour changed. Neither affectionate nor angry, she wrote in a scrawl that betokened emotional disarray, heralding her arrival, hinting that she had found a new lover: ‘Viktor Goltsev and I will come on Saturday for the consecration of the school. I’m not yet fully infected; when I kiss you I shan’t infect you.’

  The consecration of the school galvanized everyone. Anton spent a whole day at council meetings in Serpukhov. He could stand the formalities only because he was leaving next month to see Suvorin in the Crimea. He was besieged by mad patients. One of the Tolokonnikovs, whose factories polluted the village of Ugriumovo [Sullen], kept a female relative on a chain to stop her abusive shrieking: for weeks Anton searched for a hospital to take her.2 On the eve of the consecration, a peasant showed violent melancholia con delirio.

  Aleksandr did not come to the consecration: Dr Iakovenko and Olga Kundasova represented the mentally unstable. The occasion was so alcoholic that guests were immobilized for two days at Melikhovo with hangovers. The servants made merry, except for Roman, whose baby son had died. The consecration was so moving that Chekhov transmuted it into an episode of ‘My Life’. Even Pavel’s thirst for ceremony was satisfied: ‘The village elders offered the school governor bread and salt, an icon of the Redeemer and speeches of thanks. Cherevin the manager offered Masha a bouquet. Girl choristers sang May you live many years.’ Chekhov himself made a rare diary entry:

  4 August. The peasants from Talezh, Bershovo, Dubechnia and Shiolkovo offered me four loaves, an icon, two silver salt cellars. The peasant Postnov from Shiolkovo made a speech.

  Next came the consecration of the bell tower. (Anton had the church painted orange.)

  ‘My Life’ was sent to The Cornfield – ‘I’ll put the sweetening in and polish it up in proof form,’ he told Lugovoi. He sent the last draft of The Seagull for Potapenko to take over the next hurdle. The Moscow News of the Day was advertising the play – ‘Chekhov’s Seagull flies towards us,/ Fly, my darling, fly to us,/ To our deserted shores!’ wrote the poetaster Lolo Munshtein. Anton cringed. It was time to leave.

  Notes

  1 Lugovoi was Aleksei Tikhonov, the brother of V. A. Tikhonov, editor of The North.

  2 Iakovenko refused beds to the insane whom Chekhov wanted interned; relatives had to apply for a council grant of 5 roubles a month to pay for a chain, a guard and sedatives. Tolokonnikov gave Anton a violin as a mark of his gratitude for the bromide he prescribed.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Night on a Bare Mountain

  August–September 1896

  ANTON WANTED to make the best use of the rail pass Suvorin had given him. He decided first to visit Taganrog, and end up in Feodosia with Suvorin, but was vague about the itinerary. He told only his sister that he would go to Kislovodsk, a spa in the north Caucasus. He teased Potapenko: ‘I’ll be in Feodosia, I’ll make a pass at your first wife’ – for Potapenko, saddled with alimony, wanted a pretext for divorce. Potapenko could not, however, fathom Anton’s motives: ‘What mad idea to go to Feodosia? It’s utter horror! Do you really want to write a novel about the life of cretins! … I hear you have some convict’s travel warrant.’ On 23 August 1896, a few days after Anton left, Potapenko wrote to him about the The Seagull, literary adventures and liver stones. He began: ‘And where you’ve vanished to, nobody knows. You gave me a Feodosia address, but I think you’ve gone to the Caucasus.’ The frankest of men, Potapenko suspected from Anton’s evasions that he had abducted Lika.

  Three clues might point to a journey with Lika. Firstly, the route that Chekhov took was one that Lika had proposed for a journey four years ago. Secondly, Lika vanished at the same time as Chekhov. Thirdly, Lika’s letters that autumn would suggest that Anton had promised her marriage exactly a year after his arrival in the spa of Kislovodsk. Yet would Anton, who valued privacy so much, have provoked gossip by taking a woman as attractive and alluring as Lika to his birthplace and then to a fashionable mountain spa? And does a promise of ‘mutual bliss’, as Anton had put it, have to be sealed with a preliminary honeymoon? In any case, would Lika have gone to Feodosia? She knew that Suvorin advised Anton not to marry her, and panicked at the thought of meeting him.

  Where did Lika vanish to? On 19 August Chekhov left Melikhovo with Lika and her friend Varia Eberle for Moscow, where Anton would catch the express train south. Even Granny Ioganson was nonplussed. She had no news of Lika until 5 September, after which Lika reappeared in Podolsk, between Melikhovo and Moscow:

  5 September: They’ve brought Christina and the nanny.

  6 September: How could Lika send [the baby’s] things off in such a rush? Now the child has no clean linen, it’s terribly annoying.

  16 September: Lika still hasn’t moved from Podolsk, I am so disappointed, as I expected to see her in Pokrovskoe tomorrow.1

  Nobody in Kislovodsk or Taganrog saw Lika; Anton spent his time in both places with male friends. If Lika disappeared with any man, it was probably not Anton, but Viktor Goltsev. Maybe the date, 1 September 1897, for ‘mutual bliss’ was set before Anton’s departure south, or after his return.2

  Anton spent a day or two in Taganrog, seeing cousins and the library, avoiding admirers. He wrote no letters from his birthplace, and almost nothing until his holiday ended. He sent instructions: Masha was to buy timber for a new school at Novosiolki, Potapenko was to act for The Seagull. His diary is terse:

  In Rostov I had supper with my old schoolmate, Lev Volkenshtein … At General Safonov’s funeral in Kislovodsk I met A. I. Chuprov, then A. N. Veselovsky in the park.3 On the 28th went hunting with Baron Steingel, spending the night on Mt Bermamyt; cold and a very strong wind …

  To cousin George in Taganrog Chekhov revealed only that he had met friends in Kislovodsk ‘as idle as himself.’ Kleopatra Karatygina recalls stumbling on Anton in Kislovodsk: hot and irritable, he was cajoled into posing for a photograph. Anton found relief from the heat by going on a boar hunt on Mount Bermamyt with a man who should have known better, his colleague Dr Obolonsky, who was next to appear in Anton’s life when catastrophe struck. Mount Bermamyt is a remarkable place for climbers and hunters, but no careful doctor would let a tubercular patient spend a night there. The guide books of the time warned:

  8559 ft above sea level, 20 miles from Kislovodsk … Bermamyt is a virtually bare rock usually swept by winds blowing off Mt Elbrus. There are ruins of a Tatar village, b
ut no protection from rain and wind … People travel to Bermamyt to watch the sun rise … It is always cold on Bermamyt and snow falls even in August and the temperature falls well below zero … The northeast winds that prevail at this time often strengthen at Bermamyt to hurricane level … It is especially important not to chill the stomach: it should be wrapped in a woollen cummerbund.4

  The trip to Mount Bermamyt undoubtedly shortened Anton’s life.

  A day or two later, Anton made for the warmth of the Black Sea. Reaching Novorossiisk, where his brother Alexandr had been so unhappy, Anton was only a night’s sailing from Feodosia. Suvorin had waited for him for eleven days. The ten days that Chekhov spent with Suvorin, regardless of his ‘cretinous’ sons, he would call the ‘one bright spell’ in 1895 and 1896. The fact that he wrote no letters is evidence of his bliss, not distress. He and Suvorin were more relaxed than ever in each other’s company, even though – or perhaps because – Suvorin now deferred more to Anton, than Anton to Suvorin, and Anton saw clearly the flaws in Suvorin’s character. On 22 August at dinner with Shcheglov, Suvorin conceded: ‘Chekhov is a man of flint and a cruel talent with his harsh objectivity. He’s spoilt, his amour propre is enormous.’ The same summer Chekhov told Shcheglov: ‘I’m very fond of Suvorin, very, but, you know, Jean, sometimes at grave moments in life those with no strength of character are worse than evildoers.’5

  Iavorskaia’s marriage to the young Prince Bariatinsky was the topic of the day. Both were already married, and needed the Tsar’s consent. The prince’s mother was horrified, but the Bariatinsky sons needed Iavorskaia’s earnings. Moreover, Bariatinsky, a budding writer, wanted a mascot. Iavorskaia broke with Tania. Suvorin’s diary echoes what he told Anton, who still had an interest in both women:

  5 August. Shchepkina-Kupernik … was having lunch with Iavorskaia and her husband Bariatinsky, the conversation touched on these two ladies’ past, which there was so much gossip about. ‘No smoke without fire,’ said Tania … After lunch Iavorskaia-Bariatinskaia flew at Tania in front of her maid, speaking in French, accused her of gossiping and so on …‘My husband is in hysterics,’ she said … ‘He doesn’t want to see you again, and you must leave right now.’ – ‘But I’m just wearing a blouse, let me change.’ – ‘You can change, but that’s all.’ Tania left without even changing. She borrowed 500 roubles from me and is off to attend lectures in Lausanne. She is very upset.

  Suvorin noted Anton’s sigh at the mention of Iavorskaia, but Anton was not seriously affected by her marriage. He was content to pass the warm Crimean days drinking, chatting in the sun, by the water. Suvorin’s chief ‘cretin’, as Potapenko called him, Aleksei the Dauphin, was elsewhere, usurping his father’s power. Moscow and Melikhovo left Anton in peace: he merely read the proofs for the first third of ‘My Life’. A few telegrams arrived from Petersburg. Potapenko had done Anton a final favour (in an act of ineffective benevolence or effective revenge), propelling The Seagull through the Imperial Theatres Committee. Unfortunately the play was given to the theatre least suited to Chekhov, the Aleksandrinsky theatre with its Sarah Bernhardt techniques, and its repertoire of French farce. The Seagull was to be directed by Evtikhi Karpov, who was inexperienced, unimaginative and cocksure. Worse, the first performance was set for Levkeeva’s benefit night on 17 October. Levkeeva, a comédienne, would find in the heroine of The Seagull only a satire on her own career as an actress, and her followers would be outraged. The one good omen was that Potapenko and Karpov had cast some fine actors, notably Savina and Davydov, and the still unknown Vera Komissarzhevskaia.

  Suvorin, now sixty-two years old, was depressed as Anton left Feodosia:

  The earlier you are born the sooner you die. Today Chekhov said: ‘Aleksei and I will die in the 20th century.’ – ‘You may, but for sure I’ll die in the 19th,’ I said. – ‘How do you know?’ – ‘I’m utterly certain, in the 19th. It’s not hard to see, when every year you get worse.’

  Unable to shake Suvorin’s pessimism, Anton telegraphed Masha to have Roman meet the local train from Serpukhov with a coat and galoshes, and left the Crimea where the weather had turned as bitter as his host’s mood. On 17 September 1896 he stepped out in sunshine at Lopasnia. The burden of running Melikhovo had fallen on Masha and Pavel. She had bought four magnificent beams for the new school. Pavel had the schoolteacher paper the annexe for Antosha’s return, and then his own room. Four weeks in charge had restored Pavel’s patriarchal confidence. He told Misha:

  We expected you for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, you had two government holidays, you could have come, but you refused to accept our hospitality and see us. Mother baked an excellent pie, sturgeon gristle with mustard oil, which you would have liked … For the cattle we made the same 40 tons of hay as last year, that’s not enough. Mariushka only bothers Antosha with her ducklings and chickens, he will build a run in the cattle yard for the fowls, but she hatches them in her kitchen and feeds them there, they grow up and get into the garden. Our summer is still magnificent … All summer we have been eating mushrooms fried in sour cream. The clock goes well, on time and strikes every five minutes. The weathercock on the annexe spun nicely, but a storm has shaken it to bits.

  Chekhov had handed ‘My Life’ over to the censor, who baulked at the narrator’s disrespect for a provincial governor and at the author having a general’s widow take a drunken lover. The editors talked the censor round, and Anton was free of his story and of The Seagull; Suvorin had the script for the play and the Imperial Theatre Committee passed it for performance, albeit with condescension:

  the ‘symbolism’ or ‘Ibsenism’ … has an unpleasant effect … If that seagull weren’t there the comedy would not change in the slightest … We cannot pass … quite unnecessary characterization, such as Masha taking snuff and drinking vodka … some scenes seem to be thrown onto paper haphazardly with no proper connection to the whole, without dramatic consequentiality.6

  The Imperial Theatre Committee represented Petersburg attitudes and made it clear how the city would receive the play. Chekhov nevertheless went ahead.

  Notes

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

  2 This is not the view in Rynkevich’s Puteshestvie k domu s mezoninom, Rostov, 1990.

  3 Volkenshtein was the Jewish boy Chekhov had saved from expulsion in 1877; Chuprov taught Chekhov statistics at Moscow University; Professor Veselovsky was an academician.

  4 See Grigori Moskvich, Putevoditel’ po Kavkazu, SPb, 1911, 83.

  5 See LN68, 479–92; Leontiev-Shcheglov’s diary.

  6 See PSSP, XIII, 364–5.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Fiasco

  October 1896

  THE GLOW of Feodosia faded slowly. ‘I’m overwhelmed by laziness. I was terribly spoiled in Feodosia,’ Anton told Suvorin. He bought tulip bulbs, inspected his schools, treated his patients, agitated for a paved road from the station to the river Liutorka and sent Dr Obolonsky a book ‘in memory of the boar we killed on Mount Bermamut’. Lika reappeared the following week. Whatever had happened that August, her attitude to Anton was cooler. Letters stopped, and she came with a male companion (this time, the flautist Ivanenko). The day she arrived death struck Melikhovo: the brightest girl in the village, Dunia, died of a twisted gut. She was buried in the churchyard. Lika always took flight when any tragedy or even tumult struck Anton’s household: she left with Ivanenko the next day, not to return, until Anton begged her a month later.

  While he was away, Anton had transferred decisions on casting The Seagull from Potapenko to Suvorin and Karpov. Now that Lopasnia telegraph office was open, he sent countless messages to Petersburg, booking tickets and lodging for friends and relatives. Chekhov composed the audience as carefully as Suvorin and Karpov did the cast: the drama in the auditorium was to be as tense as the one on stage.

  All summer Anton had helped others by stealth and been found out by accident. He paid half the school fees for a Taganrog boy, Veni
amin Evtushevsky, the nephew of Anton’s aunt Liudmila, and lobbied publishers to subsidize Dr Diakonov’s journal Surgery. The same systematic organization behind the wings is characteristic of his love life and his new writing. To the two last weeks of September 1896, or the two first weeks of August 1896, we can ascribe one of Chekhov’s most furtive achievements: rewriting The Wood Demon as Uncle Vania. He cut the cast by half, removing confidants and confidantes, merging a drunken Don Juan with the saintly conservationist doctor, ‘The Wood Demon’, to produce a flawed Doctor Astrov. He took out virtually all the music from Tchaikovsky and cut the melodrama; in the new play the lovesick uncle no longer kills himself. Uncle Vania, unlike Uncle Georges, cannot even hit a target at point-blank range. The last act of The Wood Demon with its sentimental reconciliations al fresco is thrown out altogether. Chekhov had finally found ‘a new ending’. Idyllic comedy (despite the suicide) is transformed into bitter ‘scenes from country life’: the city dwellers leave their country relatives devastated by their wrecked lives. Anton added just one new character, the nanny Marina, the one religious believer in the household, the keeper of its awful secrets. Why was Chekhov so secretive about his new play, a work of genius that he had created out of a work he had disowned? When publishers or actors appealed to Chekhov to let them have The Wood Demon, the very mention of which was painful to him, Anton told nobody that he was revising it. In late autumn he baldly announced to Suvorin the existence of ‘Uncle Vania, which nobody knows about’.1