On 1 October Anton set off for Petersburg in an even more cynical frame of mind about the city’s theatres after reading the August issue of The Theatregoer, where a certain S. T. pointed out that the director’s mistress was always a lead actress in productions. ‘From this contribution, written frankly and in detail, I learnt that Karpov is living with Kholmskaia,’ Chekhov told Suvorin.
First Anton had a week’s work in Moscow. A new project, encouraged by Suvorin, preoccupied him. He wanted to take advantage of new press laws to become joint editor, with Viktor Goltsev, of a liberal newspaper. It says much for Goltsev that Anton took this, his last collaboration, so far. Anton’s room at the Great Moscow was a rallying point for all his contacts. He had a loyal ally, the young corridor footman Semion Bychkov:
I’d been a factory worker, a yard man, worked in a puppet theatre, in pantomime and done everything … Of all the people staying at the hotel only Anton Chekhov spoke to me simply, man-to-man, without pride, with none of that looking down on you. And he gave me his writings, I started reading and that minute a new light illuminated me … ‘Why,’ I said, ‘Mr Chekhov, do you live alone? You ought to get married.’ ‘How could I, much as I’d like to, Semion,’ he laughed, ‘I never get any time! My public wears me out.’ … I loved him fervently with all my soul.2
Semion Bychkov had his work cut out as Anton’s social secretary. A number of women – Tania, Lika, Shavrova, Kundasova – wanted to be sure of seeing Anton alone in his room. Anton begged Kundasova ‘meet me on very urgent business’ there. Tania, packing her bags for exile, asked to see Anton before she left. There is until mid October no record of Lika’s whereabouts.
Arriving in Petersburg, on Wednesday 9 October, after two days, presumably full of discussions of which we know nothing, Anton fell into the arms of the Suvorins. He handed over the manuscript of his Plays, including Uncle Vania, for Suvorin’s printers and, as in January, began a round of theatrical visits. To the cast’s dismay, Anton missed their first reading of The Seagull, just nine days before the first performance. Neither did Savina, who was to play Nina the ‘Seagull’, turn up to that reading. The first night was just nine days off. Lev keeva, whose benefit night it would be, came to listen, glad that she would not be acting in so glum a piece. For a while Levkeeva had thought she might play Masha. The cast was horrified and she withdrew. On the 9th Anton missed the first rehearsal (he had gone instead with Suvorin to watch Vera Komissarzhevskaia act).3 ‘Never had there been such a shambles in our ant hill,’ recalled Maria Chitau, who now played Masha.4
Anton, anxious to prepare the audience, not the cast, contacted Potapenko: ‘I need to see you. We have business [Chekhov’s code for anything embarrassing] … Would you like to come and see me around midnight? We need to talk in confidence.’ The business in hand is clear from Chekhov’s note to Masha, due to arrive for the first performance:
I’ve been to see Potapenko. He’s in a new flat, which he pays 1900 roubles a year for. He has a fine photo of Maria [his second wife] on his desk. This person never leaves his side; she is happy, brazenly so. He has aged, he doesn’t sing or drink and is boring. He will be at The Seagull with his whole family and he may happen to have a box next to our box, and then Lika will have a very bad time … The play will not be a sensation, it will be dismal. Generally my mood is bad. I’ll send you the money for the journey today or tomorrow, but I advise you not to come. If you decide to come alone without Lika, then telegraph Coming …
Anton felt as diffident about the play as about Lika, but Lika came under her own steam, a day before Masha. Anton succeeded in keeping the Potapenkos away until the second performance, to lower the tension in the Chekhovs’ and Suvorins’ box, where Lika would have to endure sitting with Suvorin.
Anton was ill, and confessed to Suvorin that he had coughed blood again. Nevertheless, he went to examine Grigorovich, for whom he still felt reverence and gratitude. Grigorovich, the last survivor of the first ‘realists’ was mortally ill. Suvorin recorded: ‘He is a dying man, no doubt. Chekhov talked to him about his illness and, to judge by the medicines he is taking, thinks he has cancer and that he will soon die … Actually, I have the same trouble in my mouth.’
As in 1889 after Kolia’s death, Anton’s sexual desire surged after contact with the grave. Intriguing fragments from Potapenko to Anton survive. The first runs: ‘Thanks, but alas! I can’t [come?]! Furious dictation from home.’ The second includes the line: ‘I surrender a certain actress to you in her entirety.’ Potapenko was formally transferring to Anton Liudmila Ozerova; Anton showed interest not only in Liudmila Ozerova, but in the actress Daria Musina-Pushkina, with whom he had been close five years before: she responded eagerly. He attended the second rehearsal of The Seagull, distressed after seeing Grigorovich, uneasy after a dream that he was being forcibly married to a woman he disliked, a dream natural enough after all the attempts friends in Petersburg had made over the years to marry him off.
Just six days before the first night, the forty-two-year-old Savina refused to act the eighteen-year-old ‘Seagull’; the next day the role was given to Vera Komissarzhevskaia, at thirty-two a more plausible jeune naïve. Actresses argued over whether Savina could now play Masha. Savina withdrew in a huff. Anton was unhappy with Karpov’s staging, which was using sets meant for bourgeois farces and quite unsuited to Chekhov’s scenes in a dilapidated country estate.
Bad omens did not spoil the rehearsal Anton attended with Potapenko on 14 October in the theatre. Anton began to trust the cast, and was impressed by Komissarzhevskaia. (Suvorin had thought her dreadful as Klärchen in Sodom’s End and neither he nor Chekhov had at first shared Karpov’s infatuation with her genius.) Komissarzhevskaia hit on a solution to the play’s most intractable monologue, Treplev’s symbolist play-within-a-play which Karpov feared would make the audience laugh. Her fine voice hypnotized the listener, as she worked from her lowest alto to a climax and then lowered to inaudibility as ‘all lives, completing their sad cycle, perish’. She decided (and Anton was won over by her musicality) to render Treplev’s piece not as parody, but as poetry.
The next night, the dress rehearsal was dismal. Wrapped in a white sheet, Komissarzhevskaia looked absurd, and, clearly, Karpov had a bad eye for sets and costumes. Maria Chitau as Masha was lost in a dress meant for the ample Savina. Sazonova was indignant at the way her husband Nikolai was made up for Trigorin:
Rehearsal without an author, sets and one actor missing … Nikolai protected Komissarzhevskaia from Karpov who is so inexperienced that he is making her do her main final scene from the rear wings, blocking her with a table … when I told Karpov that the play was under-rehearsed, he left … Chekhov was invited [to dinner] but didn’t come.
The next day, 17 October 1896, Lika arrived, but did not join Anton, Suvorin and Potapenko at the full dress rehearsal. The cast were tired by ten days’ work. Chekhov sensed that the play was doomed and told Suvorin he wanted to take it off. The morning of the performance Chekhov took Masha to Lika’s room in the Angleterre. Forty years later, Masha recalled her reception:
Sullen and stern, Anton met me at the Moscow station. Walking down the platform, coughing, he said: ‘The actors don’t know their parts. They understand nothing. Their acting is horrible. Only Komissarzhevskaia is good. The play will flop. You shouldn’t have come.’
Chekhov feared that Potapenko might not stay away and that his wife might attack Lika. He watched the dismal last rehearsal, had his hair cut, and steeled himself.
The first night caused a scandal in the auditorium, the worst that anyone could then recall in a Russian theatre. The play had been put on in the wrong city, in the wrong month, at the wrong theatre, with the wrong cast, and above all before the wrong audience. Many had come to applaud Levkeeva, who was performing two hours later in a warhorse of a farce. Others came to vent their dislike of Chekhov and modern drama. Very few at all had any idea at all of what they were going to see. The actors, perturbed, tried to adapt to t
he audience’s mood, but Komissarzhevskaia, the most sensitive of actresses, lost her spirit: her ‘Seagull’ was earthbound. After Act 1, shuddering, in tears, she ran to Karpov: ‘I’m afraid to go on stage … I can’t act … I’ll run from the theatre.’ Karpov forced her back, but the play was lost. All Anton’s friends and all the performers in The Seagull that night were shocked in their own ways; all agreed that Petersburg’s vindictiveness had killed the play. Suvorin’s and Chekhov’s diaries have the same understatement: ‘The play was not a success.’
Suvorin concluded that: ‘The audience was inattentive, they didn’t listen, they chatted, they were bored …’ Masha recalled:
From the very first minute I sensed the public’s indifference and ironic attitude to what was happening on stage. When, later in the act, the curtain rose on the inner stage and Komissarzhevskaia, who was acting very hesitantly that night, appeared wrapped in a sheet and began her monologue: ‘People, lions, eagles, grouse’, you could hear open laughter, loud conversations, sometimes hissing, in the audience. I felt cold inside … Finally a real scandal broke out. At the end of Act 1 thin applause was drowned by hissing, whistles, offensive remarks about the author and the performers … I sat it out in my box to the end.
Maria Chitau found Anton sitting in Levkeeva’s dressing room. She wrote:
[Levkeeva] was looking at him with her bulging eyes, half apologetic ally, half pityingly, her hands were still. Chekhov sat, his head a little bowed, a lock of hair falling over his brow, his pince-nez sitting crooked on the bridge of his nose … They said nothing. I stood with them in silence. A few seconds passed. Suddenly Chekhov leapt up and rushed out.
Even Sazonova, who had found the play depressing and Anton rude, was appalled:
The audience was somehow spiteful, they were saying ‘The devil knows what this is, boredom, decadence, you wouldn’t watch if it were free …’ Someone in the stalls declared, ‘C’est du Maeterlinck!’ At dramatic points people laughed out loud, the rest of the time they coughed in a way that was quite indecent … That this piece flopped on a stage where any rubbish is a success speaks for the author. He is too talented and original to strive with mediocrities. Chekhov kept disappearing behind the wings, to Levkeeva’s dressing room, and disappeared after the end. Suvorin looked for him but couldn’t find him; he was trying to calm down Chekhov’s sister who was in the box … Levkeeva’s celebrations were as usual, with speeches, gifts, kisses, the audience clapped furiously a mediocre actress after booing our greatest writer after Tolstoy.
Like Suvorin, Leikin was dismayed. He recalled ‘Reviewers walked the corridors and the buffet with Schadenfreude and exclaimed “The fall of a talent”, “He’s written himself out.”’5 As Suvorin, lost for words, left his box, Zinaida Gippius’s husband, the novelist Dimitri Merezhkovsky, told him that The Seagull was not clever, because it lacked clarity. Suvorin retorted rudely, and from that moment Zinaida Gippius took charge of the anti-Chekhovian camp.
Karpov retreated to his office. Chekhov entered, his lips blue, his face frozen in a grimace, and said in a barely audible voice, ‘The author has flopped.’ Anton then vanished into the freezing streets of Petersburg.6
Notes
1 The revision was done after The Seagull had been completed. Firstly, Uncle Vania, like The Seagull, has no scene divisions. Secondly, August and September 1896 are the only months between two works (‘My Life’, ‘Peasants’) when Anton could have found time to rewrite the play. Thirdly, details added to Uncle Vania reflect Melikhovo in summer 1896: Mariushka, the cook’s tame chicks (the Konovitsers refused to eat them), and Marina’s speckled hen on-stage in Uncle Vania; in June Chekhov’s visit to Malitsy for dysentery, and Dr Astrov’s to ‘Malitskoe’ for typhus; on 15 August a visitor Menshikov ‘in dry weather wears galoshes, carries an umbrella, so as not to perish of sunstroke’, and Vania mocks Serebriakov: ‘An oppressively hot day, and our great scholar goes out with an umbrella, in his overcoat, gloves and galoshes.’
2 Bychkov’s memoirs, told to V. E. Ermilov, are in Kavkazskii krai Krasnodar?, 1913, No. 145.
3 Sazonova wrote: ‘We were all at Sodom’s End. We saw Chekhov. He came to see our actors.’
4 See V vospominaniiakh …, 350–5.
5 See LN68, 499–510 for Leikin’s diary.
6 Karpov’s memoirs (dubious) are in V. F. Komissarzhevskaia … Materialy, 1964, 214–5.
FIFTY-SIX
The Death of Christina
October–November 1896
WHILE THE reviewers scribbled to meet their deadlines, the author wandered the streets. Anton’s disappearance caused a commotion. Seven weeks later, he gave vent to his disgust in his diary:
True, I ran out of the theatre, but not until the play was over. I sat out two or three acts in Levkeeva’s dressing room … Fat actresses, in the dressing room, talked to officials in respectful buoyant tones, flattering them … serfs visited by their masters.
While Levkeeva reclined on her laurels, Chekhov walked to the Peripheral Canal; back in the centre of Petersburg, he found Romanov’s restaurant still open and ordered supper. Perturbed, Aleksandr called on the Suvorins in search of his brother. Then Anton walked back to Suvorin’s house, spoke to nobody, went to bed and pulled the blanket over his head. Masha waited for two hours in silence with Lika at the Angleterre; then Aleksandr rang. Neither he, Potapenko nor Suvorin had seen Anton since Act 2. At 1.00 a.m. Masha took a cab to the Suvorins:
It was dark and only miles away, after a whole enfilade of rooms did a light shine through the open doors. I went towards the light. There I saw Anna, Suvorin’s wife, sitting alone with her hair down. The whole setting, darkness, an empty flat, depressed my mood still further. ‘Anna, where can my brother be?’ I asked her. Apparently trying to distract and calm me, she started chatting about trivia, about actors and writers. After a while Suvorin appeared and started to tell me about the changes and reworkings he thought were necessary to make the play a success in the future. But I was in no mood to listen to this and just asked him to find my brother. Then Suvorin went off and quickly came back in a cheerful mood. ‘Well, you can calm down. Your brother is back, he’s lying under a blanket, but he won’t see anybody and refused to talk to me.’
Through the blanket Suvorin and Anton exchanged words. Suvorin reached for the light switch. ‘I beg you, don’t turn the light on,’ Anton shouted. ‘I don’t want to see anyone. I’ll tell you just one thing: you can call me [a very coarse word, says Anna] if I ever write anything for the stage again.’ ‘Where have you been?’ – ‘Walking the streets, sitting. I couldn’t just say to hell with that production. If I live another 700 years. I won’t let the theatre have another play.’1 Anton said he would take the first train out of Petersburg: ‘Please don’t try and stop me.’ Suvorin told Anton that the play did have faults: ‘Chekhov is very proud, and when I let him know my impressions, he listened with impatience. He couldn’t take this failure without deep upset. I very much regret that I didn’t go to the rehearsals.’
Confident of the play’s triumph, Suvorin had written his review in advance; now he had to compose new copy. Then he left a letter by Chekhov’s bed.
While Anton slept, Lidia Avilova tossed and turned. Unlike Lika, she had had no inkling that her life would be publicly enacted. She watched the Seagull hand Trigorin the same silver medal on a chain that she had inscribed and given to Anton, but the page and the line numbers no longer referred to Chekhov’s lines ‘If you need my life, come and take it.’ At home, she picked up the Chekhov volume from which she had encrypted her message. The new message made no sense. Only in the early hours of the morning did she decide he might have encoded one of her own books of stories. She found the page and line: they now, she claims, gave the message ‘Young ladies should not go to balls.’2 Rebuffed, she went back to bed.
Modest Tchaikovsky had been in the audience: ‘It is many years since the stage last gave me such pleasure and the audience gave me such unhappiness as on Le
vkeeva’s benefit night,’ he wrote to Suvorin.3 Elena Shavrova, the youngest of Chekhov’s admirers, had also been there; profoundly shaken both by the play and by its reception, she consoled her cher maître:
All I know is that it was amazement, ecstasy, intense interest and at times sweet and awesome suffering (the monologue of the World Soul) and pity and compassion for them, the characters in the play – the pity you feel only for real, live people. The Seagull is so good, so touching.4
Shavrova would soon give her cher maître a physical token of her compassion.
In mid morning Chekhov got up, not waking Suvorin or his wife, rang Potapenko, wrote a note for Masha, a letter to Suvorin and one to Misha in Iaroslavl and then left the house. Masha’s note ran:
I’m leaving for Melikhovo … I shall be there by two p.m. [tomorrow]. What happened yesterday has not stricken me or embittered me very much, because the rehearsals prepared me for it – and I don’t feel all that bad. When you come to Melikhovo, bring Lika with you.
The letter to Suvorin ended: ‘Hold up the printing of the plays. I shan’t ever forget last night, but I slept well and am leaving in a very tolerable mood. Write to me.’ To Misha, Anton made fewer pretences:
The play has flopped and failed sensationally. There was a heavy tension of misunderstanding and disgrace in the theatre. The acting was abominable, stupid. The moral is: don’t write plays. Nevertheless I’m still alive, healthy and in perfect eupepsia. Your Daddy Chekhov.
Before leaving the Suvorins, and without asking, Anton took from the library the last three issues of The European Herald, in which a long essay by Sokolov, ‘At Home’, presented a shattering picture of the miseries of the Russian peasant. ‘At Home’ was to be one of the progenitors of Chekhov’s harsh post-Seagull prose.
Anton Chekhov Page 47
