Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Anton also watched a rehearsal of Tsar Fiodor by Aleksei Tolstoy and was bewitched by the actress, Olga Knipper, who played the Tsaritsa Irina. She had also noticed him, at the rehearsals of The Seagull a few days before:

  We were all taken by the unusually subtle charm of his personality, of his simplicity, his inability to ‘teach’, ‘show’ … When Anton was asked a question, he replied in an odd way, as if at a tangent, as if in general, and we didn’t know how to take his remarks – seriously or in jest.10

  Old friends also waited for Anton. They saw that he was no more Avelan leading his squadron into new revels. Even Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, who greeted him with enthusiastic doggerel, seems to have realized that things were different now.11

  Suvorin came to Moscow. He and Anton dined at the Ermitage and then went to the circus, with the artist Aleksandra Khotiaintseva. Three weeks later, Anton wrote to Suvorin à propos of the latter’s criticism of the Moscow Arts Theatre. He said nothing about The Seagull or Olga’s interpretation of Arkadina, but he was overwhelmed by the rehearsal of Tsar Fiodor on the eve of his departure. In it he singled out, without naming her, Olga Knipper: ‘Irina, I think, is splendid. The voice, the nobility, the depth of feeling is so good that I have a lump in my throat … If I had stayed in Moscow I should have fallen in love with this Irina.’

  He took the train for the Crimea on 15 September, preoccupied by Nemirovich-Danchenko’s and Stanislavsky’s troupe and by their liveliest actress, Olga Knipper.

  Notes

  1 See RGALI, 459 2 14: A. S. Suvorin’s letters to Anna Suvorina; quoted PSSP, 7, 567.

  2 See RGALI, 459 1 4172, May 1898: Nastia Suvorina seldom mentioned Chekhov in her letters.

  3 See OR, 331 73 11: Evgenia’s letters to Misha, 1888–1903: 8 May 1898.

  4 Married to Ekaterina (‘Kitten’, formerly Baroness Korf), Nemirovich-Danchenko was both teacher and lover of the twenty-eight-year-old Olga Knipper. (Anton’s familiarity with Nemirovich-Danchenko’s wife ‘Kitten’ once aroused Lika Mizinova’s jealousy.) Knipper, after an affair with a student Dmitri Goncharov (an aristocrat with a hereditary disease), forced her mother, a singer, to let her study for the stage.

  5 Quoted in V. Lakshin, Proval in Teatr, 1987, 4, 86.

  6 See Perepiska, 1984, II, 153–4.

  7 Tychinkin set type by night and taught in school by day; reputed to be Petersburg’s most absent-minded man, he was the only employee of New Times widely trusted by the writers whom Suvorin published.

  8 See OR, 331 48 79a: Olga Kundasova’s letters to Anton, 1892–1904.

  9 Lidia Avilova was convinced that ‘About Love’ told of Chekhov’s renunciation of love for her. She angered Anton, by accusing him of exploiting intimate secrets for literary gain.

  10 See Olga Knipper’s memoirs in Vokrug Chekhova, 381–2.

  11 See Perepiska, 1984, II, 82; OR, 331 64 2; T. Shchepkina-Kupernik’s letters to Anton, 1893–1900: minuscule script on mauve and white card, 8 Sept. 1898.

  SIXTY-SIX

  The Broken Cog

  September–October 1898

  IN JULY NATALIA rejected Aleksandr. He complained to Anton: ‘Veneri cupio, sed “caput dolet”, penis stat, nemo venit, nemo dat.’1 In August 1898, while Natalia was away, Aleksandr bought an exercise book, bound it himself in leather and made indelible blue-black ink out of oak galls. He entitled this diary The Rubbish Dump.2 It catalogues his domestic miseries. On his wife’s return, Aleksandr became impotent. On 28 September 1898, he told Anton: ‘I am schwach and even by the domestic hearth cannot produce enough material for coitus, let alone onanism.’ Natalia demanded that he ask Anton for treatment.

  On 4 October Vania’s wife, Sonia, wrote from Moscow:

  Dear Aleksandr, Kolia [Natalia’s elder stepson] refuses to work, he behaves so badly that even our patience is exhausted. He won’t obey anybody, even the most gentle treatment is useless. I even resorted to Masha’s help, but he just turned his back on her and wouldn’t even talk to her … How do I get him to you?

  On 5 October Aleksandr’s Rubbish Dump expresses complete turmoil: ‘I howled like a wolf … Natasha is trying to calm me, saying that Sonia wrote and sent the letter in the heat of her wrath.’ Aleksandr wrote to Vania: ‘Nikolai has written his own death sentence: now he won’t be accepted anywhere … Put him on a train … there is no hope for his correction.’

  In Petersburg Suvorin was thinking about Anton. Aleksandr noted:

  There was a conversation between Suvorin and Tychinkin about buying all Anton’s work at once, to give Anton the maximum amount of money at once, and then starting to publish ‘The Complete Works’.

  To consider publishing his ‘Complete Works’ meant that Anton now feared that he would soon die. He was seeking a capital sum to see him through terminal illness and take care of his family after his death. Most Russian writers towards the end of their creative lives hoped to publish their ‘Complete Works’. Tolstoy had advised Chekhov to do his editing now, and not to entrust the work to his heirs. Suvorin’s publishing, however, was sloppy: he generously corrected accounting mistakes as soon as Chekhov mentioned them, but could not offer good proof-reading, production or distribution. As the sons took over, their father’s empire crumbled; Suvorin could not bring the Dauphin to heel. Tychinkin, the head printer, advised Chekhov against ‘Complete Works’, arguing that Anton would make more money by reprinting individual volumes. The typesetter, Neupokoev, had mislaid Anton’s manuscripts – and begged him not to tell Suvorin. Anton’s affection for Suvorin was not enough to stop him leaving. Sytin, the publisher in Moscow, to whom Anton had thought of selling the rights to his works, now angered him by breaking a promise to print a medical journal, Surgery.3 Anton was at a loss. Fellow writers, upset at his plight, took it upon themselves to market Chekhov’s ‘Complete Works’. They knew that his departure for the Crimea marked the final phase of his life. The novelist Ertel, himself tubercular, wrote to a friend on 26 September 1898:

  What is Chekhov? One of the prides of our literature … Now once this major young writer is seriously ill – and I believe he has consumption … money has to be sought, because the works of a writer whom all Russia reads won’t cover the costs of rest, nor a journey south, nor the necessary surroundings for a sick man, especially one with a large family on his hands. Judge for yourself, isn’t this disgraceful?4

  Anton showed less distress than his sister. Masha had bad headaches. Anton told her on 19 September to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, fish, to take aspirin, then subcutaneous arsenic, potassium iodate and electric shocks: ‘and if that doesn’t help, then wait for old age, when all this will pass and new diseases will start.’ Masha had endless messages to pass to Moscow and Petersburg, items to be sent on to the Crimea – ties, cuff links, a balaclava to be bought from Muir and Mirrielees, a waistcoat to be repaired. She had to send Anton all his postage stamps from Lopasnia. Anton didn’t want the local postmaster, Blagoveshchensky, to lose his job now that his main customer was 800 miles away. She was equipping the third school, for which Anton had donated his 1000 roubles from the Moscow Arts Theatre. Melikhovo had become a millstone. Pavel and Masha had to cope with the autumn work that Anton instructed them to carry out on the estate: fencing the hayrick against the horses, planting an avenue of birches, ploughing the park. Masha had the moral support of Aleksandra Khotiaintseva who frequently came to stay, and they hired a new workman. Masha found relief only in art: she and Aleksandra Khotiaintseva began to paint Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik.

  Winter came early: three inches of snow fell on 27 September; the horse and cows went on winter fodder. Four sheep and two calves were slaughtered. On 8 October Pavel made a diary entry: ‘The windows are iced up as in winter. A bright sunrise. It is cold in all the rooms. They still haven’t brought wood.’

  The Crimea, at first bathed in warm sunshine, was not as dreary as Anton had feared. He was in a romantic mood. Stopping at Sevastopol, awaiting the boat to Yalta, he was befriended by a
military doctor who took him to the moonlit cemetery. Here Anton overheard a woman telling a monk: ‘Go away if you love me.’ In Yalta his Romantic mood persisted. Olga Knipper was on his mind. He told Lika that, despite the bacilli, he might flee to Moscow for a few days: ‘Or I’ll hang myself. Nemirovich and Stanislavsky have a very interesting theatre. Pretty actresses. If I’d stayed a bit longer, I’d have lost my head.’

  In Yalta he found women eager to befriend him. Mrs Shavrova was staying there with her third daughter, the frail Anna. So were Suvorin’s granddaughters Vera and the flirtatious Nadia Kolomnina. The headmistress of the Yalta girls’ school, Varvara Kharkeevich, took Anton under her wing and made him a school governor. Anton had distinguished male company in Yalta: the opera singer Fiodor Chaliapin, the poet Balmont, and a cluster of tubercular doctors around Dr Sredin, but the man who was most useful to him was Isaak Sinani, who ran Yalta’s book and tobacco shop. Through Sinani newspapers, telegrams, letters and visitors all found Anton.

  For the first weeks Anton migrated from one rented apartment to another in the hilly suburbs of Yalta. Soon he was so resigned to this ‘flowering cemetery’ that he decided both to buy a country cottage and to build a town house. On 26 September Sinani took Anton seventeen miles west along the precipitous coast road to Küchük-Köy, to look at an estate a Tatar farmer was selling for 2000 roubles. Anton sketched it for Masha: a stone, red-roofed Tatar house with a cottage, cattle shed, a kitchen, pomegranates, a walnut tree and five acres, hospitable Tatar neighbours – the drawback being a terrifying access road. Soon, however, access would be easier, for the government had that year decided to build a coastal railway, and next year there would be a fast coastal boat service. Masha replied that stone was safer than the flammable rotten wood of Melikhovo, and that no road was worse than Melikhovo’s tracks (Serpukhov council procrastinated over building an all-weather road from Lopasnia.) Vania, who liked the prospect of holidays in a family dacha, also approved. It was too cheap to miss. A week later Anton decided also on a house in Yalta: a site at Autka, 200 feet above and twenty minutes from the centre, was for sale at 5000 roubles. He would build on it for the whole family.

  During this flurry of decisions, on 12 October 1898, Sinani had a telegram: ‘Kindly communicate how Anton received news of death of his father.’ Sinani did not tell Anton until next day. Bewildered, Anton wired to Masha: ‘Kingdom heaven eternal peace father deeply sorry write details healthy completely don’t worry look after mother Anton.’ Nobody had warned him during the three days that led to Pavel’s death.

  On the morning of Friday 9 October, when Masha was still in Moscow, Pavel dressed without putting on the truss for his hernia. He went to the stores and lifted a twenty-pound bag of sugar. As he straightened up, a loop of gut was pinched by his abdominal muscles. In agony he crawled back to bed. Evgenia panicked; it was some time before she sent to Ugriumovo for the doctor. After ‘fussing around him for four hours’ he insisted Pavel be taken to Moscow. Evgenia sent a servant to Lopasnia with a telegram for Masha.5

  Jolted over frozen ruts, Pavel was driven to Lopasnia. It was dark. The doctor put him on a train for Moscow. Three hours later he delivered Pavel to Professor Liovshin’s clinic and vanished. Liovshin administered chloroform to the patient immediately.

  Masha was with Vania that evening and still knew nothing. At 10.30 they received a second telegram, and she rushed to the clinic. Next Sunday she wrote to Anton:

  After 3 a.m. Professor Liovshin came down and started shouting at me for abandoning an old man – there was nobody with him. He said the operation had been difficult, that he was worn out, that he had cut out two feet of gut, and only a healthy old man could stand such a long operation … he took pity on me and started saying that the operation was successful, that I could even hear my father’s voice. He took me upstairs, I was surrounded by bloodstained house surgeons and I heard our father’s voice, fairly cheerful. Again the professor addressed me and said that so far all was fine but anything could happen and told me to come back at 8 a.m. and to pray.

  Masha and Vania returned next morning and waited until 1.00 p.m., when Pavel awoke, his pulse and temperature normal:

  In the evening I found father far better, cheerful, amazingly well cared for! He asked me to bring mother, started talking about the doctors, saying that he liked it here, he was worried only by slight pain in his belly and black and red matter he was bringing up.

  Vania telegraphed Aleksandr, who caught the overnight Moscow express, bringing with him his camera and glass plates. On the morning of Monday 12 October he went straight to Vania’s school house. His Rubbish Dump records:

  He was alone in the ward, all yellow from the bile … but fully conscious. Our appearance gave him much joy. ‘Ah, Misha too has come, and Aleksandr is here!’ … Two or three times in the conversation he said, ‘Pray!’

  Pavel then began to show symptoms of gangrene, but Misha and Aleksandr repressed their mutual dislike, and the three brothers dined together at one of Moscow’s best restaurants, Testov’s. A second operation was performed. After dinner Aleksandr called at the clinic. The porter called out, ‘It’s all over.’ Pavel had died on the operating table. Aleksandr wired an obituary to make New Times the next day.

  Evgenia complained that four days of suffering was too little. Aleksandr felt that she believed ‘the longer a man takes to die, the closer he is to the Kingdom of Heaven: he has time to repent his sins.’ Aleksandr wanted to photograph the body:

  The porter told me that father’s body was still in the basement and for 20 kopecks took me there. On a sort of catafalque I saw my father’s body, completely naked, with an enormous bloody plaster covering the whole belly, but the light made it impossible to photograph.

  The clinic refused to wash the body until Misha brought a new shroud. Misha, furious that Aleksandr had brought his camera, took charge, as the only civil servant. Aleksandr felt ‘completely out of place and unwanted’ and was taken to the station by Vania. (Misha and Aleksandr barely spoke to each other again.) Pavel was buried in the absence of his two eldest sons, Aleksandr and Anton. The funeral was a shambles. Masha took 300 roubles from her savings bank and borrowed another hundred. Sergei Bychkov, Anton’s faithful servant in the Great Moscow hotel, followed the coffin to the cemetery. Misha wrote to Anton that the funeral was ‘such a profanation, such a cynical event that the only thing I am pleased about is that you did not come.’ Anton confessed that he felt all the more guilty: had he been in Melikhovo, the mishap might not have been fatal.6

  Pavel, even if more resented than obeyed, had been a pivot on which life at Melikhovo revolved. Anton saw Pavel’s death as the end of an era. Ignoring his mother and sister’s wishes that they should stay on at Melikhovo, he told Menshikov: ‘The main cog has jumped out of the Melikhovo machine, and I think that life in Melikhovo for my mother and sister has now lost all its charm and that I shall now have to make a new nest for them.’

  *

  Anton found a young architect, Shapovalov, to design a house at Autka: he hoped it would be completed by April 1899. A week later Masha left Evgenia in the care of the lady teacher at Melikhovo, and took the train south for a fortnight. (Evgenia refused Misha’s invitation to Iaroslavl: perhaps she loathed his letters addressing her as ‘greatly weeping widow’.7) On 27 October Masha was greeted by Anton in Yalta: ‘I’ve bought a building plot, tomorrow we’ll go and look at it, amazing views.’

  The Russian public felt for Anton. He was deluged with letters, while the papers worried about his own imminent demise. Misha urged Anton on 20 October:

  Buy an estate, marry a good person, but definitely get married, have a baby – that is a happiness one can only dream about … Let your future wife – somehow I’d like it to be Natasha Lintvariova or Aleksandra Khotiaintseva – arrange your life to be just happy.8

  Misha wrote to Masha of Khotiaintseva: ‘such a glorious person and so talented that I’d like Anton to marry her.’9 Anton thought of Lint
variova and Khotiaintseva as the salt of the earth, but not as potential wives. He was thinking instead of Knipper, annoyed that Petersburg’s papers ignored her Irina. He shared Nemirovich-Danchenko’s anger when Suvorin accused the Moscow Arts Theatre of plagiarizing others’ productions. Nemirovich-Danchenko, recasting The Seagull, had told Anton: ‘Suvorin, as you foretold, was Suvorin. He sold us in a week. To your face he was delighted with us, once in Petersburg he fired off a vile little article, I can’t forgive myself for talking to him about joining his Company.’10

  From Paris Anton received two photographs of a leaner Lika. One was inscribed: ‘Don’t think I really am such an old witch. Come soon. You see what just a year’s separation from you does to a woman.’ The other carried the words of a romantic song she used to sing to Anton:

  To dear Anton Pavlovich, in kindly memory of eight years’ good relations, Lika.

  Whether my days are clear or mournful,

  Whether I perish, destroying my life,

  I know only this: to the grave

  Thoughts, feelings, songs, strength

  All for you!!

  (Tchaikovsky, Apukhtin)

  If this inscription compromises you, I’m glad.

  Paris 11/23 October 1898

  I could have written this eight years ago and I write it now and I shall write it in ten years’ time.