Prince Shakhovskoi demolishing the stove and smashing the walls with an axe to get at the flames, stoked by the draught from a badly made chimney, was a sight that Chekhov recreated in ‘Peasants’. Peasants doused flames in the attic and the corridor; November’s mud and slush flooded the floors that Aniuta had scrubbed; the stench of soot was unendurable. Anton’s water closet was out of action. Evgenia, her bedroom wrecked, took to another bed and did not get up for a fortnight. Pavel forgot the pose he had adopted for Drozdova’s portrait and roared at all whom he held to blame. The bereaved Lika, brought up, however negligently, in a genteel household, could not bear the shambles into which the fire had thrown the Chekhovs and left the next afternoon.
Constables and the insurance agent came. Masha saw the insurers in Moscow and sought builders and a stove-maker. The temperature was dropping to minus20°C, so the need for a stove-maker was pressing, but the first one they found remembered working under Pavel and refused to come. Weeks passed before Melikhovo was habitable, but the insurers paid, and for a long time Aleksandr teased his brother as ‘the arsonist’.
Chekhov wanted to see Suvorin again, but fire or Lika, or both, had stopped him inviting Suvorin to Melikhovo. Instead, he wrote:
In the last 1½–2 years there have been so many different events (a few days ago we even had a fire in the house) that my only way out is to go to war like Vronsky [in Anna Karenina; war was feared in late 1896] – only not to fight, but to treat the wounded. The only bright spell in these 1½–2 years has been staying with you in Feodosia.
Small clouds passed between Anton and the Suvorins. Anna Suvorina had forgiven his flight, but had been hurt to find that The Seagull was not dedicated to her. Chekhov discovered that, instead of 10 per cent of the takings from five performances of The Seagull in the contract that Suvorin had arranged, he was receiving 8 per cent, on the basis that the play had only four acts.4 In any case, until they received the contract the Society of Dramatists would not pay him, and Anton had left it on Suvorin’s desk from which it had vanished. Short though the play’s run had been, it had had full houses and the author was owed 1000 roubles. To cap Suvorin’s sins, his printers sent proofs of plays and stories haphazardly.
After the fire Lika stayed away. On 1 December Masha warned her brother: ‘Viktor Goltsev was at Lika’s this morning.’ Despite his rival’s presence, Anton invited Lika. Chicken pox had stopped classes at the ‘Dairy’ school so that Masha could bring Lika, but Lika did not come. She threatened not to come for New Year ‘so as not to spoil your mood’. If he wrote her a pleasant letter by the 30th she might come. She had endured worse embarrassment, as more people identified her as the prototype of The Seagull: ‘Today there was a reading of The Seagull … and people were raving about it. I even went upstairs … so as not to hear it.’ Now Lika had for consolation a young landscape painter, Seriogin, whom she proposed to bring with her, as Masha’s guest. She knew it would upset Anton: ‘You can’t bear young people more interesting than yourself.’ Anton invited her, affectionately calling her Cantaloupe. He mentioned Seriogin only in his diary.
On 20 December Anton went to Moscow to prescribe not for Lika (whom he avoided, despite inviting her to Melikhovo), but for Levitan, whose heart was worn out and whose mind was ravaged by depression that twice brought him to the brink of death. Anton examined Levitan and noted: ‘Levitan was widening of the aorta. He wears a patch of clay on his chest. Excellent sketches and a passionate thirst for life.’ He pressed Levitan to come to Melikhovo: the artist replied that he couldn’t bear trains, and feared upsetting Masha.
The approach of New Year enlivened Melikhovo. The stove-makers and carpenters left; a house painter papered the walls; mice were poisoned. Twenty flagons of beer were delivered. Misha and Olga came; Vania arrived alone. Pavel had the snow swept from the pond, so that the guests could skate. The widowed Sasha Selivanova, Anton’s childhood sweetheart, partnered Vania on the pond. Gentry and officials gathered like rooks. Never had Melikhovo seen such a crowd. Those who could not come wrote. Usually they begged: Anton’s cousin Evtushevsky wanted a job in Taganrog cemetery; Elena Shavrova wanted a critique of her new story; a neighbour wanted a publisher for his article on roads.
The strain told on Anton. Franz Schechtel had heard that he was ailing. ‘You need to get married to a worldly, daredevil girl.’5 Anton’s reply was half serious:
You obviously have a bride you want to get off your hands as fast as possible; but sorry, I can’t marry just now, because, firstly, I have the bacilli in me, very dubious tenants; secondly, I haven’t a penny, and thirdly; I still think I’m too young.
When Shcheglov gave the same advice, Chekhov specified as a wife a ‘blue-eyed actress singing Tara-ra-boom-de-ay’.
As Lika drew back, Elena Shavrova came forward: ‘I’ve been taking bromide and reading Charles Baudelaire … When will you be in Moscow? I’d like to see you. – You see, I’m being frank.’ On New Year’s Eve, she wished him ‘love, lots of love: boundless, calm and tender.’ Out of the blue, Emilie Bijon, governess to the Suvorins, whom Chekhov had known for ten years, was also emboldened:
Vous trouvez peut-être étrange de recevoir de mes nouvelles, je n’en disconviens pas, maintes fois je désirais vous écrire mais au fond je sentais trop bien que je suis un rien et même misérable en comparaison de vous par conséquent je n’osais risquer cette demande mais cette fois-ci j’ai pris le courage dans mes deux mains et me voici écrivant quelques mots à mon cher et bon ami et docteur.6
Emilie was one of the most self-effacing of the women who pined for Anton.
New Year approached. A sheep lambed. The Chekhov family dressed up as mummers and called on the Semenkoviches. Chekhov dressed his sister-in-law Olga as a beggar, and gave her a note:
Your Excellency! Being persecuted in life by numerous enemies I have suffered for truth and lost my job and also my wife is ill with ventriloquy, and my children have rashes, therefore I humbly ask you to grant me of your bounty quelque chose for a decent person.
Lika came with Seriogin and saw the New Year in. In the kitchen the servant girls, dropping wax onto cold saucers, looked into the future. Vania, in no hurry to get back to his family, took Sasha Selivanova to the Talezh school and put on a magic-lantern show. Whenever his guests let him. Chekhov would creep into his study to ‘Peasants’ and write, or cross out, a few lines.
Notes
1 See E. M. Shavrova-Iust’s memoirs in I. M. Sel’vaniuk, V. D. Sedegov, Sbornik statei i materialov 3ii, Rostov, 1963, 267–308.
2 See Perepiska, 1984, II, 150–1.
3 See K. A. Chaikovskaia, ‘Melikhovskie pozhary’ in Chekhoviana, 1995, 272–7.
4 Russian dramatists usually received two per cent of the gross takings for each act of their play.
5 See OR, 331 63 25g: Franz Schechtel’s letters to Anton, 1894–1900: 17 Dec. 1896.
6 See OR, 331 36 72: Emilie Bijon’s letters to Anton, 1896–1900.
FIFTY-EIGHT
A Little Queen in Exile
January–February 1897
PRETTY, SMALL, regal though forlorn, someone else had, like Emilie Bijon, brooded for months before sending Chekhov her New Year wishes for 1897:
To my dear doctor, A. C.
I have known ephemeral happiness
And am plunged by you into an ocean of suffering.
I am too weak to struggle – I am dying
The light of life is barely glimmering in my eyes …
Liudmila Ozerova.1
Once Anton’s guests had gone the family succumbed to chills, migraine and fever; the district nurse, Zinaida Chesnokova, was on constant call for codeine. Nursing his parents, writing ‘Peasants,’ planning his rest in the Great Moscow Hotel, Anton took another burden: the 1897 census. He agreed to supervise fifteen census-takers for the district and make returns for his village.2 It was a task as onerous as his survey of Sakhalin; the gain for ‘Peasants’ was not worth the drain on his strength. The house was besie
ged by officials and the piano buried in papers.
Kolomnin, Suvorin’s son-in-law, sent them a new table clock to replace the clock that rain had stopped, but the post gave it such a hard ride that it arrived in fragments. Anton made another journey on 14 January to Bouret, who shook his head: the clock was beyond repair. It was a bad time for timepieces: that evening Anton invited Elena Shavrova to room No. 9 in the Great Moscow: he was there just that night, he told her, and could not leave the hotel. ‘Despite Mrs Grundy, I shall come and see you,’ she replied. Nevertheless, they went for a ride in a cab. In a journey around Moscow as eventful as Madame Bovary’s with Léon around Rouen, Elena Shavrova lost the hood of her coat, broke a brooch, and her watch, which, she promised, kept good time, went haywire. After Elena returned to stay with her mother that night, she had, she told Anton, nightmares ‘of poisoned men and women, and I blame you for that.’3
Anton stayed another night at the hotel. He called on Viktor Goltsev, who held a party every 15 January, although Masha had warned him that he would find Lika there. He actually seemed to be relieved by Lika’s liaison with Goltsev. He and Goltsev calmly discussed their plans jointly to edit a newspaper.
After Anton went home, he devoted his energy until mid February, to the census, the school for Novosiolki, and to ‘Peasants’, which he was now finishing. He even joined the Moscow doctors’ campaign against corporal punishment. Lika faded from his life, and Elena Shavrova’s affection was deflected into useful work. The performances that she was to put on in late February in Serpukhov were to be in aid of the new school. Anton treated Shavrova as he had Lika: he teased her too about other suitors, real or imaginary, as a pretext for his neglect. It needed only a few weeks of intimacy for Anton to feel an irresistible urge to tease, deflect and even repulse a woman.
Winter at Melikhovo was dominated by food: the family gorged, the animals starved – there was abundant livestock and little fodder. Pavel’s diary records: ‘We ate a goose … We ate a roast piglet … Half the hay in the barn is gone, God grant it lasts to spring. There’s no more wheat straw. We’ve burnt all the brushwood, we haven’t bought wood yet.’ A dog was mauled to death by Zalivai, a new hound; Roman shot a cat. This grim tally, like the tedium of the census, was magnified into the horror of ‘Peasants’.
Chekhov’s thirty-seventh name-day was dismal. None of his brothers came: only the priest and the cantor. The census cast a pall. Chekhov was disturbed by angry demands from a person in Rostov: someone calling himself Anton Chekhov had been borrowing money. Halfway through his expected life span, he began to think religiously. His diary affirms agnosticism as a valid faith:
Between ‘God exists’ and ‘There is no God’ lies a whole enormous field which a true sage has great difficulty in crossing. But a Russian knows only one of these two extremes and the middle between them doesn’t interest him, which is why he knows either nothing or very little … A good man’s indifference is as good as any religion.
On 6 February, the census over, after attending a peasant wedding and helping Quinine give birth to a single puppy, Chekhov fled to Moscow for a very wild fortnight, some of it with Liudmila Ozerova, who had written again on 31 January: ‘Dear, very, very good Anton, You’ve probably forgotten her and she understands that she has no rights, but she begs, begs you not to fail to visit her as soon as you come to Moscow, The very littlest Seagull.’ Their first night was not happy. Liudmila wrote on 9 February: ‘Perhaps it wasn’t my fault, but you recalled some other woman whom you love and that’s why you found me so repellent and despicable … Your little Queen in exile. P.S. Don’t fail to come tomorrow.’ When Anton left Moscow to watch Shavrova performing in Serpukhov, Liudmila took the train with him as far as the outskirts of Moscow. Anton’s enchantment with her had faded as soon as she fell into his arms. He wrote to Suvorin two days later:
Guess who visits me? What would you think? Ozerova, the famous Ozerova-Hannele. She comes, sits with her feet on the sofa and looks sideways; then, when she goes home, she puts on her little jacket and her worn out galoshes with the awkwardness of a little girl ashamed of being poor. She’s a little queen in exile.
In his diary, Chekhov now called her ‘an actress who fancies she is great, an uneducated and slightly vulgar woman’. Her feelings were very different:
Dear Anton, I’m back! Moscow is empty and bottomless. And I don’t doubt that you despise me deeply. But, amidst the gloom that surrounds me, your kind, simple, tender words have penetrated very very deep into my soul, and for the past eighteen months I couldn’t help dreaming how I’d see you and surrender to you all my sick, hurt soul and you would understand everything, sort it out, console and calm it, and instead I met Kolomnin [Suvorin’s son-in-law] … The first night, after you left, I got a very bad chill, and I spent the last day of Shrove Tide so ill that I didn’t peck at my corn, and I can’t wait for my little white birdy to fly to me, I am burning with desire to caress it as soon as possible.
Elena Shavrova saw more of Anton than did Ozerova. The author of ‘Caesar’s Wife’ had her writings and acting as a pretext. She asked her cher maître or ‘a certain intrigant’ to meet her. Anton coyly answered: ‘A certain young man (a civilian) will be at the Assembly of the Gentry at the Georgian evening.’ Olga Kundasova also surfaced. No longer subsidized by Anton and Suvorin, she was rushing around Moscow, giving lessons, engaging distinguished minds in debate. Her relations with Anton relaxed: she agreed to come to Melikhovo. Rumours of Anton’s frenetic love life spread. Masha, who had taken Maria Drozdova to Melikhovo, joked, ‘Give my regards to all the ladies who are visiting you.’ Aleksandr wrote on 24 February: ‘I hear you spent a long time in Moscow and led a life of fornication, the buzz of which has even reached Petersburg.’
Chertkov, the grandson of the man who had owned Chekhov’s grandfather, was just then being expelled from Russia for his activities on behalf of Tolstoy. (He went to England and began to preach non-resistance to evil there.) Tolstoy went to Petersburg for the first time in twenty years to see Chertkov off. The furore over Chekhov’s deportation jolted Chekhov’s liberalism to the left. On 19 February, a dinner at the Continental for Moscow’s literati to celebrate the supposed emancipation of the peasantry thirty-five years before sickened Anton:
To dine, drink champagne, roar, make speeches about the people’s self-awareness, about the people’s conscience and so on, when slaves, the same serfs, in frock coats scurry round the tables, and outside in the freezing cold the coachmen wait – that’s like lying to the Holy Ghost.
There were other dinners, just as alcoholic. At a gathering at Russian Thought, with the architect Schechtel on 16 February 1897, Anton and Stanislavsky met for the first time though eighteen months would pass before anything came of it. More upsetting were the consultations Levitan asked for:
I’ve nearly kicked the bucket again. I’m thinking of arranging a council of physicians at my place, with Ostroumov in charge … Shouldn’t you drop in on Levitan and just as an ordinary decent person offer some advice on how to arrange it all? Do you hear, you viper? Your Schmul.
After Goltsev’s Shrovetide pancake party (which Lika shunned), Anton visited Levitan’s studio with an acquaintance and covertly studied the artist. In Levitan’s wrecked body he saw his own future. Anton discussed Levitan’s tuberculosis with his old teacher, Professor Ostroumov, who was one day to deliver Anton’s sentence. Death, Ostroumov predicted, was imminent. Levitan, Anton noted, was ‘sick and afraid’.
After some unhappy nights, Chekhov left with Ozerova to watch Shavrova and her company act in Serpukhov. The dresses came from Paris, the diamonds were real, and the actors were good, but they made only 101 roubles for the new school. After the show Anton reached Melikhovo at 2.00 a.m. on 23 February 1897 and slept all day. In his absence the family had celebrated Shrovetide with pancakes, coped with shortages of fuel, and dealt with veterinary emergencies, while Maria Drozdova painted a portrait of Pavel. On Anton’s return Masha and Drozdova glad
ly fled to Moscow. Masha was too dutiful to protest at his long absence; Maria Drozdova too much in love with Anton, though he teased Maria as Udodova (Hoopoe), instead of Drozdova (Thrush). Pavel’s dislike of Maria Drozdova, who ate more pancakes than he did, was tempered by her painting him. In Anton’s absence Pavel had asserted himself as usual. He had the servants chop the ice on the pond and one poor woman load it into the cellar. The horses fared badly: Pavel’s diary for 13 February shows his ruthlessness: ‘minus22°C in the morning … The horses were worn out, deep snow, God forbid we take such a cart load of wood again. Why doesn’t the Society for the Protection of Animals do something about it?’
Anton rested. On 1 March he announced to Suvorin that he would hereafter ‘lead a sober chaste life’. Aleksandr and Vania had been taken aback by Anton’s philandering: Vania, seeing the array of potential sisters-in-law, begged him not to marry. Elena Shavrova planned one more performance in Serpukhov, to see her intrigant again, as she packed her bags to be a virtuous wife in Petersburg. Liudmila Ozerova, however, was in Moscow; her passion all the stronger, for Anton giving reasons, such as the lack of a dowry, not to marry her. On 26 February she wrote:
All my things, to wit: my pink jacket, my slippers, my handkerchief and so on and also Neglinny Passage, Tverskaia Street, the Moscow City Duma etc. send their regards, are impatient for your arrival and miss you very very much. I’ll tell you in secret that they are very jealous not just of you and Petersburg, Serpukhov and Lopasnia but of the air, and I was indescribably saddened because you love and want money, but perhaps you need it for some good cause.
Anton Chekhov Page 49
