Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Accompanied by Potapenko and Vasili, Suvorin’s manservant, who was, like Emilie the governess, as much Anton’s follower as his master’s, Chekhov went to the station. He would not wait for the overnight sleeper. He showed his rail pass and took the first train to Moscow, the slow noon goods and passenger train. After wandering at night in an icy city, he sat for a day and a night in an ill-heated train. The effect on his lungs would soon be apparent. As the train trundled the 440 miles to Moscow, Chekhov took out Aleksandr’s note. It was to be the only time that Aleksandr praised Anton’s serious plays: the gesture brought them closer:

  I got to know your Seagull tonight in the theatre for the first time; it is a wonderful, excellent play, full of deep psychology, thoughtful and heart-rending. I shake your hand firmly and with delight.

  On the back of Aleksandr’s note Anton drafted a placatory letter to Anna Suvorina:

  Dear Anna, I left without saying goodbye. Are you angry? The fact is that after the performance my friends were very upset; someone was looking for me in Potapenko’s flat after 1 a.m., they searched the Moscow station for me … It’s touching, but unendurable. In fact I’d decided that I’d leave the next day regardless whether it was a success or a failure. The sound of glory overwhelms me: I left the next day even after Ivanov. So I felt an irresistible urge to run, and it would have been impossible to get downstairs and say goodbye to you without giving in to your charm and hospitality and staying on. I kiss your hand firmly, in the hope of forgiveness. Remember your motto! I’ve had my hair cut and now look like Apollo. Imagine, I think I’m in love.

  Though the motto on Anna Suvorina’s writing paper was ‘Comprendre – pardonner’, Anton was cautious when he wrote to her, and when he copied out his draft letter, he excised the phrases about being in love. This love was not Lika, but Liudmila Ozerova.

  On the train Anton’s mind was soon embroiled in the misery of peasants. The journals he had taken from Suvorin led him to write to the author for an offprint. He arrived in Moscow before dawn on 19 October 1896 and got into the last third-class non-smoking carriage of the first train to Melikhovo. At 8 a.m. he stepped out of the train, leaving behind his dressing gown and bed linen. (The station master retrieved them for him the same day.) Melikhovo provided opportunities to forget. On Sunday drunken peasants caroused in the Chekhov kitchen: Aniuta Naryshkina, betrothed by her father against her will in exchange for the vodka the Melikhovo men were drinking, was being married. Sick peasants had gathered in the three weeks that Anton was away. A three-day council meeting in Serpukhov, to thank Chekhov for his school building and to promise him a new road from Lopasnia, took up the end of October. Anton planned a reference library for Taganrog. ‘Peasants’, the first work for four years purged of personal material, began to obsess him: he tried (for his command of French was inadequate) to have Vignier d’Octon’s Le Paysan dans la littérature française published in Russian.

  Meanwhile Suvorin was taking steps to salvage The Seagull. He and Karpov made cuts and changes so that the play would be less provocative. The next night a full house applauded wildly, although of the actors only Komissarzhevskaia was inspired. The intelligentsia, rather than high society, were watching, and The Seagull revived, although the older actors still felt half-hearted. In Suvorin’s revision it was performed again on the 24th, 28th and on 5 November, to full houses. Then it was dropped from the repertoire.

  Anton ignored reviews, but friends kept him informed. Sympathy was hard to endure, especially Suvorin’s frank insistence that Anton had to take responsibility and that he lacked stage experience. Leikin (still smarting because Chekhov had not called on him on this visit to Petersburg) blew hot and cold about The Seagull in a sketch in Fragments, in a letter to Chekhov and in his diary, which runs:

  If Chekhov gave this play to any run-of-the-mill dramatist the latter would pump it full of effective banalities and clichés and make it a pleasing play … If the play really is a flop, that’s no reason to knock Chekhov off his writer’s pedestal. Look at Zola’s plays.

  Zina Kholmskaia’s consort, Kugel, reviewer for The Petersburg Newspaper (but two years later the most perceptive Chekhovian critic in the city), was not unbiased. He mocked Chekhov with questions: ‘Why is the writer Trigorin living with an ageing actress? Why do they play lotto and drink beer on stage? How can a young girl take snuff and drink vodka?’5 Kugel (whom Chekhov compared as a writer to ‘a pretty woman with bad breath’) shrewdly compared Chekhov’s use of recurrent images and phrases, Leitmotive, to Wagner’s; unfortunately, Kugel loathed Wagner and misunderstood Chekhov. Kugel was undermined on his own paper. Avilova forgave Anton for flaunting her medallion and, as the editor’s sister-in-law, was allowed to defend The Seagull and its author in the same paper: ‘They say The Seagull is “no play”. Then look at a “no play” on the stage. There are plenty of plays.’

  Praise for the play grew louder. The second performance attracted Chekhov’s admirers. Potapenko sent an exultant telegram and Komissarzhevskaia herself, not easily swayed by applause, wrote ecstatically to Anton:

  I’m just back from the theatre. Anton, darling, we’ve won! Sheer wholehearted success, as it should have been and had to be. How I want to see you right now, I want even more for you to be here, hearing the unanimous shout of ‘Author!’ Your Seagull, no, ours, for my soul has fused with her, lives, suffers and believes so ardently that it will make many others believe.6

  Lavrov and Goltsev begged Anton to let Russian Thought publish the play. Chekhov was regaining faith in himself as a dramatist when Leikin, as snide as he was supportive, wrote that he had remonstrated with Kugel and his editor: ‘You have a few true friends in Petersburg.’ The difference between ‘few’ and ‘a few’ in Russian is just an inaudible gap between two words, ne mnogo or nemnogo.

  Masha and Lika took the overnight express and arrived in Melikhovo only a little later than Anton. Without a hint of resentment at what Anton had done to her, Lika stayed for three days and nursed him through what he called flu. She was rewarded by renewed affection. Then, reassured that Anton was not going to hang himself, Lika left with Masha, carrying her reward, a tan dachshund puppy. Anton took up the cudgels, angrily dismissing Suvorin’s taunt that he had fled like a coward. To Leikin he complained that he had a cough and fever – but never mentioned The Seagull. Tatiana Tolstaia invited him to Iasnaia Poliana, but Lika’s invitation of 25 October excited him more:

  Take the express to Moscow, it has a restaurant car and you can eat all the way … I’ve seen Goltsev, he has solemnly announced to me that his illegitimate son, Boris, has been born. He is happy, apparently, that he can still father a baby. Though he puts it on a bit, saying he’s too old and so on. So ‘certain men’ could take a lesson from him … I cross each day out in the calendar, and there are 310 days left before my bliss!

  Chekhov read the warning. Goltsev’s child by his secretary (as proud as the father) was the talk of Moscow; Anton even envied Goltsev: ‘for at his age I shan’t be capable’, he told his friend, the dramatist Nemirovich-Danchenko. Lika’s mention of Goltsev, as of Levitan five years and Potapenko three years before, was not casual. Nor was the reference to ‘certain men’. And could ‘bliss’ be anything except a date for marriage, or at least commitment? The word provoked Anton to retract, in words as cruel as any of his panic responses to Lika’s emotional demands:

  Darling Lika, You write that the hour of our bliss will come in 310 days. Very glad, but couldn’t this bliss be put off for another two or three years? I’m so afraid! I enclose a sketch for a medal which I mean to offer you. If you like it, write and tell me and I’ll order it from Khlebnikov [the jeweller].

  The design for the medal is inscribed: CATALOGUE OF PLAYS BY MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY OF RUSSIAN DRAMATIC WRITERS 1890 edition, Page 73, line 1. Lika decoded a title: Ignati the Idiot, or Unexpected Madness. Ignati Potapenko, the father of her child, was the last name Lika wanted to recall. All hope of bliss crushed, she went to Granny and Chris
tina and answered Anton:

  How bliss frightened you! I so much suspect you think that Sofia [Kuvshinnikova] will prove right and I shan’t have the patience to wait three years for you, which is why you offer three years. I am stuck for reasons beyond my control in Tver province and have no hope of being in Moscow before the middle of next week. Although it’s real winter here, the Hundred Dachshunds haven’t frozen and send their greetings.

  I like the medal, but I think with your usual meanness you will never give it to me. I like it in all respects, even its edifying content, and above all, I am moved by your fondness and love of ‘your friends’. That really is touching … You don’t seem to know that I am collecting your letters to sell and keep me in my old age! And Sapper [Goltsev’s nickname] is really a very good man! He is better than you and treats people better than you do! … You can stay with me without fear. I shan’t allow myself any liberties, just because I’m afraid of proof that there will never be bliss … Goodbye. Your [Ariadna crossed out] twice rejected, etc. L. Mizinova … Yes, everyone here says that The Seagull is borrowed from my life as well [as Ariadna], and, what’s more, that you did a good job on someone else [Potapenko] too!

  Anton was only a little abashed. He told Goltsev on 7 November that he would see him and Lika in Moscow. Elena Shavrova had also moved to Moscow. On the day he wrote to Lika, Anton, grateful ‘for the healing balsam on authorial wounds’, sent an affectionate letter to Elena: she had sent him a card with a picture of a masked girl. Elena wanted to stage The Seagull in Moscow and perform in farces in Serpukhov. Which was aim and which pretext – staging the play, or seducing the author – was hard even for Anton to decide. Anton’s distraction affected all Melikhovo; the servants slacked, and the family bickered. ‘Nobody fed the cattle this morning,’ grumbled Pavel.

  Fate had reserved its cruellest twist. The plot of The Seagull had reflected Lika’s misfortunes: it now foreshadowed them. Lika had left Anton to be seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by Potapenko, just as Nina leaves Treplev to be seduced and abandoned, pregnant, by Trigorin. Chekhov darkened his play by adding one event: Nina’s baby dies. 8 November was Christina’s second birthday. Granny Ioganson’s diary ends the story of an unlucky love-child:

  9 November, Saturday: Little Christina is very poorly. Wheezing, chest full of phlegm.

  10 November, Sunday: The doctor came, thank God, examined her, and there is hope he can help.

  12 November, Tuesday: Lika took the evening train to Moscow … Little Christina still wheezing.

  13 November, Wednesday: Lika has come back from Moscow, Christina is dangerously ill. She has croup. We telegraphed Lika’s mother to come. Our doctor came, no hope of recovery. The Lord’s Holy will be done.

  14 November, Thursday: Our darling Christina passed away at 4 a.m. Poor Lika, what an angelic little girl she has lost, may the Lord console her and turn her mind to all that is good, to lead a sensible life.

  Notes

  1 Anna Suvorina’s memoir, in M. D. Beliaev, A. S. Dolinin, A. P. Chekhov. Zateriannye proizvedneiia, Neizdannye pis’ma, Novye vospominaiia … Leningrad: Atenei, 1925, 185–95.

  2 I have not been able to trace this line in Avilova’s printed works.

  3 PSSP, 6, 523.

  4 See OR, 331 63 4g: Elena Shavrova’s letters to Anton, 1896.

  5 Kugel had not met Lika, who drank, or her friend Varia Eberle, who took snuff.

  6 Quoted in PSSP, 6, 532; written 21 Oct. 1896.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Cold Comfort

  November – December 1896

  NEWS OF Christina’s death took days to reach Melikhovo. Anton had put Lika out of his mind, as he wrote a report on all fifty-nine schools of the district. Petersburg gave him no peace: the 8 November issue of The Theatregoer graphically recalled the audience’s unruliness at the first performance of The Seagull, and though the reviewer sympathized, his list of abuse – ‘an inflated entity, the creation of servile friends’ – was hurtful. Suvorin, like Anton, was sick of the theatre: ‘Iavorskaia tells all sorts of foul stories about me. And I have to die in this bog! … The theatre is tobacco, alcohol. It’s just as hard to wean yourself off it.’

  Aleksandr had again surmounted his own particular addiction, and had written Alcoholism and Possible Ways of Fighting It, a pamphlet which argued for a colony for alcoholics on a Baltic island, but he had quarrelled with the Dauphin; his children were failing in school and the eldest, Kolia, was torturing the dog. From Petersburg Potapenko sent grim news of Anton’s latest devotee: ‘Dear Antonio, … I gave your regards to Komissarzhevskaia. She is in deep sorrow. Enemies, anonymous letters, undermining – in a nutshell, the usual story of any talent that turns up in the actors’ milieu.’

  While Misha was brewing beer for the Chekhov family on Saturday 16 November, Christina was being buried. Sofia Ioganson recorded: ‘They’re cleaning the whole house, afraid, as the heartless doctor puts it, of infecting other children … Lika is with the two nannies. I’m sorry, very sorry for Lika.’ The news made Anton put off his journey to Moscow by a day or two. Then he left Melikhovo before dawn and took a room in the Great Moscow.1 Evgenia was staying in Moscow with Vania’s family. Anton sent her a note:

  Dear Mama, I’ve arrived today, Sunday at 11. I need to see you, but as I am up to my neck in business and am leaving tomorrow, I shan’t get round to visiting you. Please come and see me on Monday morning at nine or ten. You can have coffee with me. I shall get up early.

  Lika stayed with Anton all day and he prescribed her a sedative. At 7.00 p.m., when Lika had left, Elena Shavrova arrived with a manuscript, leaving a chaperone in her carriage. She and Anton discussed life in Italy. After a Biblical seven years, the inevitable happened in the hotel room. The cher maître became the intrigant (as she put it). When Elena came to her senses and asked the time, Anton’s watch had stopped. Shavrova regained her carriage and frozen chaperone: it was midnight. All that year broken timepieces – a motif for Three Sisters – had put the Chekhovs’ lives in disarray. Now an erotic whirlwind swept Anton off his feet. Shavrova’s next letter to Chekhov was decorated with a hand-painted devil in a red coat. She wrote that she wanted fame even more than love, and she would be back with a watch that worked.

  Evgenia never got her coffee. At dawn Chekhov sent a porter with a note, ‘Dear Mama! Have to go home. Halva!! Buy and bring. Off to the station.’ Early the same morning Misha had left Melikhovo to take Masha to the station; he brought back Anton, off the first train from Moscow. Like a returning prodigal son and grateful father rolled into one, Anton had the white calf slaughtered; Melikhovo’s rhythm resumed. Chekhov wrote the briefest note to Lika: ‘Dear Lika, I’m sending you the prescription you were talking about. I’m cold and sad and so there’s nothing more to write about. I’ll come on Saturday or on Monday with Masha.’

  Lika came to Melikhovo instead, a week later with the painter Maria Drozdova and Masha. It is hard to say what distressed Lika more – to have lost Christina or to be superseded by others in Anton’s affections. She spent four desolate days in Anton’s study, silently playing patience on his desk, while he wrote letters in pencil on his lap. Drozdova painted Pavel’s portrait; Evgenia’s new crockery arrived from Muir and Mirrielees; old Mariushka moved out to live in the cattleyard, and a new cook took her place. Books were ordered, sorted, and sent to Taganrog library. On Monday, without Lika, Chekhov went to Moscow to settle his accounts: he had missed the small print in Marx’s contract and only now discovered that he could not reprint ‘My Life’ as a book for a year. He took the watch that had compromised Elena to Bouret, the watchmaker, who gently told Anton he had forgotten to wind it up.

  When Anton got back, bearing felt slippers he had bought for Pavel, a disconsolate Lika was still in his study. Chekhov read a letter from Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who lamented, as did other friends, that they never talked properly

  because … you crush me with your giftedness, or whether because we all, even you, are unbalan
ced or lack conviction as writers … But I fear that so much diabolical pride – or, to be exact secretiveness – has accumulated in you, that you will just smile. (I know your smile.)2

  On 26 November Anton gave Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was soon to be more his interpreter than his friend, the same defence of silence as he had to Lika. He sounded like his own fictional doctors in ‘A Dreary Story’ or Uncle Vania:

  What can we talk about? We have no politics, we have no life on a social, circle or even street level, our town existence is poor, monotonous, oppressive, boring … Talk about one’s personal life? Yes that can sometimes be interesting, and perhaps we might, but we straight away get embarrassed, we are secretive, insincere, held back by an instinct for self-preservation … I’m afraid of my friend Sergeenko … in every railway carriage and house loudly discussing why I am intimate with N when Z loves me. I am afraid of our moralizing, afraid of our ladies.

  After Anton had posted this letter one of the stoves began to smell of smoke and the whole family developed headaches. Then tongues of flame spurted out between the stove and the wall.3 As Pavel recorded: ‘Tonight we caught fire, the wooden beams above the chimney in Mama’s room. The Prince and the Priest took part in extinguishing it and put it out with a fire-hose in ½ an hour.’ Even Anton was moved to open his diary: ‘After the fire the Prince told us that once when he had a fire in the early hours he lifted a barrel of water weighing four hundredweight.’ The Herculean Prince Shakhovskoi was a welcome guest; fortunately Melikhovo was surrounded by ponds and Anton, who had seen every year one house or another nearby burn to the ground, had prudently bought a fire engine – a stirruppump with a bell and a long hose mounted on a cart. Moreover, he and Masha had insured everything from the house to the cows.