Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  On 18/30 October La Pension Russe said goodbye to Maxim Kovalevsky, who went to lecture at the Sorbonne. Kovalevsky had promised to take Anton to Algiers, and Anton waited anxiously for his return. Meanwhile he expected Suvorin, but although caviar and smoked sturgeon arrived, Suvorin did not. On 7/19 November Suvorin turned back to Russia, to his wife’s surprise, for she thought that Anton would dispel his gloom. Professor Iakobi, although even iller than Anton, was wintering in Russia. Anton confessed to Dr Korobov that he was bleeding again: he took potassium bromate and chloral hydrate every two hours. He told Anna Suvorina on 10/22 November:

  … the last hæmorrhage which is still going on today, began three weeks ago … I walk slowly, I go nowhere except the street, I don’t live, I vegetate. And this irritates me, I am out of spirits … Only for the Lord’s sake, don’t tell anyone about the bleeding, that is between us … if they find out at home that I am still losing blood, they will shriek.

  The women in Anton’s circle wanted him back in Russia: Evgenia suggested that he come back for Christmas and then leave again. Anna Suvorina lauded Russia’s powdery snow and called his illness ‘treachery’: she blamed it on exertions with Margot and, earlier, with Lidia Iavorskaia. She told him to come to Petersburg. The Suvorins’ daughter Nastia was to star in Viktor Krylov’s farce Let’s Divorce on 20 December. Apart from her acting, her fiancés (once the Suvorins gave up the idea of marrying her to Chekhov, Nastia went through several engagements) were the talk of Petersburg.2 Emilie Bijon, however, reminded Anton of the reality of a Russian winter: ‘je n’ai pas vu le soleil depuis mon retour …’

  In La Pension Russe Anton moved downstairs and saved himself the effort of climbing two flights of stairs. Kovalevsky still promised to accompany Anton to Algiers, but by December he was wavering, telling Sobolevsky:

  Chekhov was showing blood even before I left Beaulieu. I hear it still happens to him at times. I think he has no idea of the danger of his state, although to my mind he is a typical consumptive. I am frightened of the idea of taking him to Algiers. Suppose he gets even iller? Advise me.3

  Anton told Kovalevsky that he ‘dreamed of Algiers all day and all night’.

  Anton was content in Nice. Russia excelled, he decided, only in matches, sugar, cigarettes, footwear and chemists’ shops. Had he been tempted to return early, a letter that Sobolevsky wrote on 12 November would have deterred him:

  Crossing the Russian frontier after a quiet life abroad is the return of a patient who has been discharged from fresh air into his unventilated room smelling of sickness and medicines … Starting with our governess detained on the border for a passport irregularity and ending with the revolting stench and filth of Moscow in autumn, crowded with cursing drunks, etc., all this put me into a state you could call demoralization.4

  Anton appeased Melikhovo with a stream of presents which returning Russians delivered – ties, purses, scissors, corkscrews, gloves, perfume, coin-holders, playing cards, needles. Pavel and Masha were placated; in return they sent all the newspapers. Masha ran two local schools, mediating between a radical schoolteacher and conservative priest; she taught in Moscow; she helped ewes lamb, caught runaway dogs, nursed sick servants, paid off importunate monks. She moaned loudest to Misha (who summoned Evgenia to help his pregnant wife Olga): ‘Papa is rebellious … I am not going to let mother go to you soon. There is nobody to do the house work … I am utterly worn out, my head never stops aching. Come for Christmas yourself.’5

  Pavel wanted full cupboards for an influx of guests: he stocked up on kvas and begged Misha for ham. Misha sent frozen river fish and fresh grouse from the Volga, so tempting that Pavel induced Evgenia to break their strict fast and eat Arctic herring on a Wednesday. Pavel ordered entertainments from Vania:

  Mama asks you to bring your Magic Lantern with you with pictures, gifts will be given to the Boys and Girls in the Talezh school on the 2nd day of Christmas and it is good to show, for greater solemnity, the village schoolchildren pictures they have not yet seen, which will bring them in particular indescribable joy … Antosha will pay for everything.6

  Misha and Olga sent a goose, but did not come. Pavel had promised to teach his grandson Volodia to ride, but Vania came alone. The only guest, to Pavel’s disgust, was Maria Drozdova. On Christmas Day the family treated the three local midwives to sausages and vodka. New Year’s Eve was little merrier, Pavel wrote: ‘Vania and the Schoolteacher came. We had supper at 10. Mlle Drozdova got the lucky coin. Then we started playing cards.’

  In Petersburg, Aleksandr reported, at the Suvorins’ New Year party, Anna drank to the absent Anton, while Suvorin moodily lurked in his study, telling Aleksandr he would not go to Nice, as Anton was off with Kovalevsky to Algiers. In January 1898, however, Kovalevsky plucked up courage and told Anton that rheumatism and flu prevented him sailing for Africa. This, Anton replied dejectedly, ‘depressed me very much for I have been delirious about Algiers.’

  Lika Mizinova had mortgaged her land, but the bank withheld funds and she could not come to France. Instead she would open a milliner’s shop; physical work would heal her dejected spirits. Masha was scornful: Lika was too disorganized to compete with professionals. On 13 January Lika told Anton she had her old looks and her former self, ‘the self that loved you hopelessly for so many years.’7 Anton told Lika he approved, and would flirt with the prettier milliners, but privately agreed with Masha: ‘Lika will hiss at her milliners, she has a terrible temper. And what’s more she is very fond of green and yellow ribbons and enormous hats.’

  In France Anton celebrated Russian New Year’s Eve on 12 January 1898, watching the roulette wheel with a new companion, Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, who had moved to the pension on Russian Christmas Day. Khotiaintseva feigned a polite interest in roulette, but proved good company. They did not stay long at the tables: Anton was monitored by a Russian doctor, Dr Valter (another Taganrogian staying at the pension) and had to be in his room by 4.00 p.m. Khotiaintseva and Anton liked shocking the guests: Aleksandra would stay in his room until the signal for her departure, a donkey that brayed at ten. She painted cutting watercolour caricatures of the women guests. She and Anton called them Fish, the Doll, Red Ribbons, the Clothes Moth and the Slum. She observed Anton with loving sharpness, telling Masha, whose close friend she had become:

  Here it is thought indecent to enter a man’s room, and I spend all my time in Anton’s. He has a wonderful room, a corner room, two big windows (here the windows always reach the floor), with white curtains.

  11/23 January 1898 … we have to listen to the stupid talk of the most repulsive ladies here. I tease Anton that he is not recognized here – these fools really have no idea about him … Anton and I are great friends with Marie the maid and join her cursing the other clients in French.8

  Brewing tea in his room, Anton spoke with passion on one topic: Alfred Dreyfus.

  Notes

  1 Russia had refused to sign the international convention on copyright, so Russian authors had no right to be paid for foreign editions of their work.

  2 Grigorovich still hoped: he wrote to Suvorin (29 Oct. 1898): ‘As for your Nastenka, I’ve always dreamt of Chekhov … he is himself so nice and talented that nothing better can be desired. But how does Nastenka feel?’ See Pis’ma russkikh pisatelei k Suvorinu, 1927, 42–3.

  3 18 Dec. 1897: quoted in PSSP, 7, 517.

  4 See OR, 331 59 25: Vasili Sobolevsky’s letters to Anton, 1892–1904.

  5 See OR, 331 73 11: Masha’s postscript to Evgenia’s letter to Misha, 3 Nov. 1897.

  6 See OR, 331 81 23: Pavel’s letter to Vania, 22 Dec. 1897.

  7 See OR, 331 52 2d: Lika’s letters to Anton 1898; some printed in Perepiska II, 1984, 16–59.

  8 Quoted in PSSP, 7, 493.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Chekhov Dreyfusard

  January–April 1898

  IN 1894, AT a travesty of a trial the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island
for betraying French military secrets to Austro-Hungarian intelligence. In autumn 1897 a colonel of the security services and a senator forced the French government to re-open the Dreyfus case. Dreyfus’s brother Matthieu named the real traitor, Major Esterhazy, in Le Figaro. French and Russian public opinion polarized: anti-Semites and nationalists faced democrats and internationalists. Major Esterhazy was, however, ‘cleared’. Anton wondered if ‘someone had carried out an evil joke’. Two weeks’ study convinced him of Dreyfus’s innocence.1 On 1/13 January Emile Zola’s polemical article J’accuse came out in 300,000 copies of L’Aurore: the storm led to Zola’s prosecution. Nothing that Zola had written won such vindictive fury from the French establishment, or such admiration from Chekhov, as his J’accuse. Chekhov made his first political stand. He now praised Korolenko, who had gone mad after undergoing the same ordeal as Zola when he stood up for Udmurt villagers accused of human sacrifices. Anton read the Voltaire he had bought for Taganrog library – Voltaire’s defence of Calas, the judicially murdered protestant, was a precedent for Zola’s defence of Dreyfus. Chekhov’s fondness for Jews was rather like his fondness for women: even though, to his mind, no Jew could ever fully enter into Russian life, and no woman ever equal a male genius, he vigorously defended their rights to equal opportunities.

  Aleksandra Khotiaintseva had gone, leaving Anton a portrait of himself. To Kovalevsky (29 January/10 February 1898), Anton denied he would marry her:

  Alas, I am incapable of such a complex, tangled business as marriage. And the role of husband frightens me, it has something stern, like a regimental commander’s. With my idleness I prefer a less demanding job.

  A new girl had entered his life: on Russian New Year’s Day a bouquet of flowers came from Cannes, followed by a letter from an Olga Vasilieva. Khotiaintseva was amused. She told Masha around 9/21 January:

  Two little girls came from Cannes to see Anton, one of them asked permission to translate his works into foreign languages … Little, fat, bright pink cheeks. She lugged a camera along to photograph Anton, ran round him saying, ‘No, he’s not posing right.’ The first time she came with daddy and noticed Anton cursing French matches, which are very bad. Today she brought two boxes of Swedish matches. Touching?2

  Like Elena Shavrova, Olga Vasilieva was just fifteen years old when she came under Anton’s spell. Unlike Shavrova, she was a sickly, self-sacrificing orphan. Now an heiress, she and her sister had been adopted by a landowner. She spoke English – which, like many Russian girls brought up by an English governess, she knew better than Russian – and set about translating Chekhov. To her he was a god who would dispose of her fortune and her person. She would follow Anton from France to Russia, seeking affection and advice, offering everything. In Nice she found him newspaper cuttings, looked up quotations, sent him photographs she had taken, and asked him the meaning of the most basic Russian words. He treated her with a gentleness rare even for him, and tongues were soon wagging.

  Anton was growing to like the women folk of the pension. The Fish, the Doll, Red Ribbons, the Clothes Moth and the Slum were more good-natured than he or Aleksandra had allowed. The Fish, Baroness Dershau, became a fanatical Dreyfusarde under Anton’s influence, as did many Russians in Nice. When Suvorin’s granddaughter, Nadia Kolomnina, came to Nice, Anton used flirtatious banter to convert her too. Only Anton’s brothers sat on the fence: Aleksandr and Misha, dependent on Suvorin’s patronage, could not afford their own opinion.

  Anton now found New Times repulsive, and ordered instead the liberal World Echoes, which exposed the bias of Suvorin’s paper.3 Suvorin saw Dreyfus as the villain in a war between Christendom and Jewry, on which hung the future of civilization: the question of whether Dreyfus was innocent or guilty was a technicality. Anton argued so vehemently with Suvorin that the latter conceded: ‘You’ve convinced me’. Nevertheless, attacks on Dreyfus and then on Zola – even while New Times was pirating Zola’s novel Paris – were even more virulent in the weeks following Anton’s remonstrations. Pavlovsky, the Paris correspondent of New Times, and himself a supporter of Dreyfus, found his copy either binned or distorted. The Russian correspondent on the Riviera, Michel Deline (Mikhail Ashkenazi), sent Suvorin a protest:

  It’s not my attitude to the Dreyfus case, but yours which is disgraceful. I refer you to someone whom you love and respect, if you are capable of loving and respecting anybody: A. P. Chekhov. Ask him what he thinks of your attitude to this case and to the Jewish question as a whole. Neither you nor New Times will be unscathed by his opinion.4

  Deline’s rebuke upset Chekhov more than Suvorin: he hated his name being cited in a public airing of what he still considered private differences, and he ostracized Deline. Anton was bewildered because Suvorin would not retrieve New Times’s honour from the Dauphin and Burenin. Anton told Kovalevsky that Suvorin was the most weak-willed man he knew when it came to reining in his own family.5 Anton’s tone to Suvorin cooled: he joked that a Jewish syndicate had bought him for 100 francs. He told Aleksandr that ‘he no longer wanted letters from Suvorin, in which he uses love of the military to justify his paper’s lack of tact’: he was disgusted by Suvorin’s pirating of Zola, while pouring filth on the man. Yet the two friends still wanted to meet in March.

  Dreyfus helped Anton forget Algiers, if not illness. He added guaiacol, an exotic creosote, to his medication. He was downcast at the death of Dr Liubimov on 14/26 January and his burial. Nuisances in La Pension Russe, such as Maksheev the gambler, tempted him to move to a French-run hotel. The Fish, the Doll and the Slum joined forces to dissuade Anton from moving. Maksheev was leaving; the newly converted Chekhovians and Dreyfusardes demanded that the manageress let them and Anton dine separately in the drawing room. Baroness Dershau (‘Fish’, signing herself Neighbour) showered Anton with notes. She borrowed glue to mend her fan, and brewed him tea. Nevertheless Anton was tired of Nice. On 17 January his name day was celebrated very quietly with a visit from Iurasov, the consul. Anton wrote to Suvorin on 27 January:

  The Russian cemetery is splendid. Cosy, green and you can see the sea. I do nothing, I only sleep, eat, and make offerings to the Goddess of Love. My present French woman is a very nice creature, 22, with an amazing figure, but I’m now a bit bored with all this and want to go home.

  Chekhov’s notebooks spawned ideas, but ‘A Visit to Friends’ the last story that he wrote in Nice, reworked the woes of the Kiseliovs in Babkino into ironic fiction. It was written very slowly. A dissolute husband and self-deceiving wife are faced with the bankruptcy of their estate: they invite the narrator, an old friend, to advise them. He realizes that his hostess is inveigling him into marrying her sister, and thus bailing them out. Too strong to succumb, too weak to protest, he flees, pleading an appointment. The scenes of false merriment and the evocation of a derelict garden are among Chekhov’s finest creations, but the story must have had unhappy associations. ‘A Visit to Friends’, published in February 1898, went unnoticed by the critics and was never republished, although it would be recycled into The Cherry Orchard. Anton’s inspiration lapsed into a prolonged hibernation.

  In winter Melikhovo was even quieter; Pavel even put up with Roman’s idle wife Olimpiada. The livestock lambed and calved, giving milk for Evgenia and delight to old Mariushka who, Pavel reported, ‘is beside herself with joy at lambs gambolling and bleating, and kisses them’.6 Only the dogs gave cause for distress. Village boys fed them broken glass wrapped in bread and killed both the laikas that Leikin had given Anton. (Leikin was later told that the laikas had died of distemper.) The dachshunds, Pavel complained, were attacking everybody, the family, visitors, children. Brom bit Pavel so severely on the hand that all the medical workers of the district were mobilized. Presents, delivered by the ‘Fish’, ‘Doll’, ‘Slum’ and ‘Clothes Moth’, consoled Pavel. At Shrovetide Pavel watched his guests carefully: ‘Everyone ate pancakes … Drozdova 10, Kolia 6, Masha 4.’

  On 5 February Evgenia had a telegram from Iaroslavl, which gave her an
escape. She left to see her newborn granddaughter, whom Misha and Olga had named Evgenia after her. Misha announced to Masha: ‘We’ve registered Antosha as the godfather … I’ll ask you to deduct 11 roubles from Antosha’s money that you keep … Mother wonders if Antosha will be offended that I’ve arranged such a cheap christening.7

  Aleksandr had written a farce for Suvorin’s theatre. It was taken off after one night because it had no part for the director’s mistress. He fulminated to Anton: ‘My play is off because of cunt; … expect an offprint of my play which depends so disgracefully on the vagina of Mme Domasheva and the penis of Kholeva … Our theatre, led by Iavorskaia, is a very mangy cloaca.’8 Aleksandr took to drink. Family gave him no pleasure. Natalia loved only Misha, shielding him from his delinquent step-brothers, and found her husband repellent. Little Kolia was rebelling at Vania and Sonia’s tutelage, spending, while Uncle Anton was in Nice, his holidays at Melikhovo.

  At the end of February toothache struck: the dentistry was brutal. Anton needed a powerful distraction. His fervent admirer, the dramatist Sumbatov-Iuzhin, had come to the Côte d’Azur to win 100,000 roubles to build a theatre. Anton went with him to Monte Carlo. Potapenko was heralding his arrival for the same reason: