Nadia, the loveliest Antonovka, did not visit. Nadia’s father, the archpriest, had quarrelled with Varvara Kharkeevich, the headmistress who was providing Anton’s dinners, and Anton, in sympathy, ostracized both father and daughter. Anton’s social conscience cost him much. When he found a bed for a sick teacher, News of the Day printed ‘Chekhov’s Colony: in his new estate the writer is setting up a colony for village teachers of Serpukhov district, a cheap hotel for intellectual toilers.’ Anton was flooded with appeals and, once the telephone was put in, he knew no peace. Although it linked him only to Yalta, telegrams often came just before dawn, when Moscow actors stopped celebrating. Anton ran, coughing, barefoot across unfinished floors, to answer the telephone.
On September 1899 Anton met the boat bringing Evgenia, Masha, Dr Kurkin and old Mariushka from Sevastopol, all prostrate with seasickness, Evgenia terrified of drowning. Mustafa climbed to the first-class deck to collect their luggage. A ship’s officer, seeing a Tatar among the first-class passengers, struck him in the face. Mustafa bore the blow, then pointed to Anton, whose face was distorted with rage, and said: ‘You haven’t hit me, you’ve hit him.’ The Crimean Courier reported the incident. Shortly afterwards Mustafa left Chekhov’s service – either because of this outrage or because Evgenia did not want a Moslem in her house – and the Chekhovs hired Arseni Shcherbakov, who had worked in the Nikita Botanical Gardens and whose hobby was reading the Lives of the Saints. With Arseni, the house acquired its first pets, two tame cranes who danced after the gardener, and to whom old Mariushka became devoted.
The house was hardly fit to live in. Until October there were no internal doors: newspapers hung over the doorways. Visitors still gathered: the Chekhovs’ old neighbour at Melikhovo, Prince Shakhovskoi, his marriage broken, clung to Anton, asking why families fell apart. Vania announced that he was coming for Christmas. Elena Shavrova, devastated by the death of her baby, sent her translation of Strindberg’s The Father and came to Yalta.1 In Moscow Ezhov insisted that Epifanov should die in Yalta, and that Chekhov should pay the sick man’s fare.
Masha, on leave from teaching, toiled hard. She told Olga on 12 September:
The house is charming, amazing views, but alas, far from finished. My room is not ready, nor is the lavatory, of course, there’s dust, shavings, flies and a mass of workers banging away constantly. But the telephone works. Yalta ladies invite my brother to eat, but he is inexorable and prefers to dine at home. By evening people gather and carriages stand in a long line on our street, just like outside a theatre. We give visitors tea and jam, that’s all. I’m quite good at being chambermaid. At 7 in the morning mother and I go to market for food. I don’t get tired at all, the weather is enchanting, the air ravishing, my suitors delightful! Yesterday Prince Shakhovskoi sent me an enormous basket of fruit and roses.
Shakhovskoi took back to Moscow a pair of cuff links depicting two birds, one melancholy, one coquettish, for Olga Knipper, and Anton’s cassowary blanket, which had moulted: this he handed to Anton’s in-law Petrov at Muir and Mirrielees.
In the country Stanislavsky devised the staging of Uncle Vania, while in Moscow Nemirovich-Danchenko struggled to interpret the text; privately, he expressed to friends the same reservations as the Imperial Theatre Committee. Nemirovich-Danchenko spent days drilling Olga Knipper, who dithered: was the Professor’s wife Elena wanton or idle? As Nemirovich-Danchenko, fearless of Suvorin’s critics, wanted to take Uncle Vania to Petersburg, too, into enemy territory, Anton withdrew the permission he had given for Uncle Vania to be staged by others there.
Just as Nemirovich-Danchenko wanted a monopoly of Anton’s plays, so Olga was seeking a monopoly of Anton’s love life. One by one, she got to know his women friends. She met Lika the day after parting with Anton. Kundasova could be ignored. On 21 September Olga Knipper told Anton:
She [Kundasova] stood in the living room, saying she was paralysed, that she had forgotten where she was. Then she recovered; we chatted, had tea and lemon, and rye porridge. She was so elegant, sheer charm. But, you know, it was painful to look at her – she has been so knocked about by life she needs peace and affection so badly.2
On 29 September 1899 the Moscow Arts Theatre opened its new season with Uncle Vania, A. K. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan the Terrible and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Lonely People. Anton sent the company a telegram: ‘we shall work mindfully, cheerfully, tirelessly, unanimously.’ The theatre appointed him ‘inspector of actresses’. Clouds were gathering, however, over Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky. Their patron Morozov was charged with fraud. Ivan the Terrible was coolly received. Olga wrote to Anton: ‘Nobody is delighted by the Terrible’s acting. You rightly distrusted Stanislavsky playing Ivan … What a night poor Stanislavsky is having today. The trouble is that audiences don’t like him as an actor …’3 Chekhov and Hauptmann, in his most Chekhovian play, Lonely People, were the last hope. Nemirovich-Danchenko and Olga both urged Anton to write them a third play.
Anton sent a jewel box instead. His mind plotted a garden, not a play, and his creativity was still dissipated revising early work for Adolf Marx. Never had he felt so detached from writing, or so absorbed in horticulture. He tore himself away from the garden only once in October, to show Evgenia Küchük Köy. The mountain road shook her and Anton resolved that this summer residence would have to be sold. The Autka house was becoming habitable, Anton’s study now had a desk and a door, and the Chekhovs had hired a maid, Marfa Motsnaia, for 8 roubles a month. Masha told Misha:
Everyone now has their own room, we are sorting ourselves out, there is very little furniture. Anton’s study and bedroom have turned out pretty well, we now have an upright piano. There is masses of cleaning – lime everywhere, impossible to wash off, everything covered in dust … I have to leave my Moscow flat and look for a little one, cheaper, of course – those are my orders. To move to Yalta for good, before I have a job in the Yalta school, is something Anton finds unsuitable for me, and that’s it.
Masha rebelliously dreamed ‘of getting some money and living as freely as I can’. Konshin, however, still failed to pay what he owed for Melikhovo.
Anton’s health succumbed to an exceptionally wet autumn. He talked again of surgery for hæmorrhoids; his intestines lost in a day’s diarrhœa a month’s painstakingly gained weight. He feared loneliness, telling a colleague, Dr Rossolimo, ‘without letters one could hang oneself, learn to drink bad Crimean wine and couple with an ugly, stupid woman’. Rumours that Anton was about to marry had fed Petersburg and Moscow gossip for years. Now the gossip became warmer. Aleksandr asked first, on 11 October 1899, ‘Petersburg is persistently marrying you off to two actresses, what shall I tell them?’ (The second, Olga Knipper’s ‘shadow’, was the stunningly beautiful Maria Andreeva.) Rumours even reached Nizhni Novgorod. Gorky, still a happily married man, told Anton: ‘It’s said you are marrying an actress with a foreign surname … if it’s true, I’m glad.’
After four dress rehearsals, Uncle Vania was performed for the first time in Moscow on 26 October 1899, two years after it had been published. Masha arrived in Moscow from Yalta too late for the triumph. Only Nemirovich-Danchenko and Olga were at first unhappy with the play: Nemirovich-Danchenko had removed forty of the fifty pauses Chekhov had specified; Olga blamed Stanislavsky for making her act Elena as highly sexed. Nemirovich-Danchenko had made Stanislavsky ‘go through [his] part literally like a pupil in drama school’. (Having seen Stanislavsky act Trigorin, Anton could not believe he could be lecherous enough as Dr Astrov: ‘Inject some testosterone into him,’ he had advised Nemirovich-Danchenko.) The second performance on 29 October, at which Masha accepted the author’s acclaim by proxy, was even more triumphant: the theatre and Chekhov’s fame were safe. There were to be twenty-five performances of Uncle Vania this season, and The Seagull would be played once a fortnight: Anton’s share of the earnings, with full houses, would be some 3000 roubles. The theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko announced, stood, like the world in Russian
folk myth, on three whales: A. K. Tolstoy, Hauptmann and Chekhov.
The Knippers and Chekhovs drew closer. Masha reported on 5 November: ‘Knipper and I meet very often, I’ve dined several times at her home and now know her Mama, i.e. your mother-in-law, and a drinking aunt.’ Olga befriended Masha, as the gateway to intimacy with Anton. Masha praised her: ‘What a fine person she is, I am more sure every day. A very hard worker and, I think, extremely talented.’ Olga spent nights with Masha, who lived near the theatre, though the flat was in chaos. (The servant girl had given birth to a baby daughter.) In the same letter, Masha revelled in her new life, telling Anton: ‘With the girls we have a servant, a French teacher, the German teacher often calls, the class assistants keep visiting, the headmistress, Masha and her baby which squeals and Olga Knipper’s laughter – just imagine!’
Both Anton and Masha touched on an impediment to the Knipper-Chekhov alliance: Olga’s relations with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko were more than professional. A charismatic teacher, he held her in thrall, despite her mother’s opposition. In Russian theatres a leading actress tended to be the director’s mistress. There was no break in the liaison between Knipper and Nemirovich-Danchenko, even when Olga and Anton behaved as if they were betrothed (not that Nemirovich-Danchenko showed any jealousy).4 Conversely, Anton and Nemirovich’s wife ‘Kitten’, whom Olga detested, were old friends.5 On 5 November Masha offered to help Anton: ‘Nemirovich … came to see me, stayed for a long time, we chatted a lot, and it occurred to me that I might lure him away from Knipper.’
Unlike Olga, Anton had no other irons in the fire. Although Lika Mizinova was back in Moscow and lonely, Anton did not write to her, and Masha repelled Lika’s attempts to join the theatrical throng. Anton thought only of Olga Knipper and he told Masha forlornly on 11 November, ‘I envy Nemirovich, I have no doubt that he enjoys success with a certain person.’ Anton felt, he said, like the piano: neither it nor he was played on. At Autka he planted cypresses, and put up barbed wire between himself and the Tatar cemetery. In the Indian summer, his self-esteem boosted, he felt well. He decided to sell Küchük-Köy and buy a cottage and a few acres of rocky coast at Gurzuf nearby, for swimming. Nemirovich-Danchenko talked of bringing the Moscow Arts Theatre to Yalta so that Anton might see Uncle Vania performed.
Anton had given Marx copies of his works: now only proofs would arrive to plague him. That autumn inspiration came back For Russian Thought he wrote his archetypical Yalta work, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’: a cynical adulterer, Gurov, on holiday in Yalta, seduces the unhappily married Anna, only to find her image so haunting that he travels to the provincial town where she is stifling and turns an affair into an intractable involvement. Just as the reader wonders how it can end, the author talks of new beginnings and ends the narrative. ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ seems to defend adultery and to explode Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: of all Chekhov’s works it upset Tolstoy most. Gurov is a very ambiguous hero: he is Don Juan in love. We first meet him classifying women as predators or victims or, with Nietzschean scorn, as a lower race: has he in the end fallen in love, or have his first grey hairs frightened him? The only unambiguous elements are the mountains and sea, against which what ‘we do or think when we forget the higher purpose of existence’ is ephemeral. The story’s empathy with adulterers awoke Chekhov’s readers. ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ showed them that, despite the rumours of Chekhov’s moribund state, he had something new to say.
On 24 November 1899 Anton finally confirmed to Nemirovich-Danchenko that he was mulling over a new play. ‘I have a plot for Three Sisters,’ he wrote, but would not start it until he had finished ‘The Lady with a Little Dog’ and another story. Before winter set in, he planted a lemon tree from Sukhum, oleanders and camellias. A stray puppy slept under the olive tree and was adopted by the Chekhovs. Stray cats in search of a home, however, were mercilessly shot – even though Aleksandr in Petersburg now edited the Journal of the Society for the Protection of Animals. November’s winds ripped the leaves off the magnolias and kept Anton indoors. He watched flames fan across the mountain scrub, towards his uninsured property. It was cold: he slept in a hat and slippers under two eiderdowns, with the shutters closed. He struggled with a new story, and made notes for Three Sisters, his most complex and subtle play to date. He wrote few letters; even Olga Knipper received none that November. Anton’s brothers were resentful. Misha complained to Masha:
Mother is somewhere at the edge of the world, way over the mountains, I am in the far north, you are neither here nor there … Anton has become proud … This year he gave me just one minute of his time, in an express railway carriage … How has the money been spent this year: 25,000 from Marx, 5000 from Konshin, 3000 from The Seagull and Uncle Vania? If the house and estate cost 25,000, then, by my reckoning, 8000 has gone missing.
Anton had over 9000 roubles in his Yalta Mutual Credit passbook.
His spirits fell when he left the house on 20 November. Epifanov, a colleague from his freelance days, was in a hospice in Yalta. Anton found him lying in filth on a straw mattress. Epifanov asked for apple fudge. Anton brought him a piece. The dying man’s face lit up; he hissed, ‘That’s the real thing!’ In a day or two Epifanov was dead. Anton’s notebooks brood on mortality and Yalta: ‘aristocrats, commoners, the same revolting death’. He told Gorky: ‘I am overwhelmed by consumptive paupers … they upset my sated and warm peace. We’ve decided to build a sanatorium.’ He began an appeal for the penniless incurable intellectuals who were flocking to Yalta. Undoubtedly the example set by Chekhov was as great a lure for the sick as the reputedly therapeutic climate of the Crimean coast.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 63 4z: Elena Shavrova-Iust’s letters to Anton, 1899. Anton left unanswered Shavrova’s next letter on 13 Dec. 1899: ‘There is in the world a person who has some points of contact with your soul, who loves you hopelessly, from afar, and wants nothing.’
2 See Perepiska, 1934, and OR, 331 76 1: Olga Knipper’s letters to Anton, June-Sept. 1899.
3 Cut from Perepiska, 1934. See OR, 331 76 1: Olga Knipper’s letters to Anton, June–Sept. 1899.
4 Forty years late, Olga Knipper the grande dame was heard, in a penetrating sotto voce, saying to Nemirovich-Danchenko, ‘Volodia, do you remember when you used to call me your vaulting horse?’
5 Masha wrote to Anton 31 Oct. 1899: ‘I completely share your liking for Katichka Nemirovich.’
SEVENTY-ONE
In the Ravine
November 1899–February 1900
IN NOVEMBER 1899 Anton was composing ‘In the Ravine’. It opens with an anecdote that Bunin had told him, of a deacon who ate all the caviare at a funeral. It then moves to sombre memories of Melikovo, and especially the Tolokonnikovs, the ruthless peasant-manufacturers. A novel in miniature, giving the lie to any criticism that Chekhov’s plots lack action, ‘In the Ravine’ maps the collapse of the Khriumin family: a woman scalds to death her sister-in-law’s baby, and drives her father-in-law into beggary. The ‘ravine’ is both a moral and a physical abyss: only the hills overlooking the ravine, where the victims wander and keep their faith, rise above the gloom. (At this time Anton was himself literally in a ravine, for the engineers were raising the Autka road by fifteen feet, so that ‘every Amazon riding past can see what is happening in our yard’.)
He was distressed by death all round. On 27 December he told Prince Shakhovskoi: ‘I am terribly bored and lonely because of an involuntarily virtuous life. I just drink a bit of wine.’ A damp cold winter worsened his health. The Dutch stoves that the architect had installed worked badly: he asked Masha to send paraffin stoves. Evgenia and Mariushka found cooking an invalid’s diet beyond them. Anton’s ‘catarrh’ grew so recalcitrant, meanwhile, that he gave himself strong enemas. He had pleurisy and wore a compress over his left collarbone. His exercise was catching the mice that plagued the house (for cats now avoided his territory) in a humane trap on a bookcase and carrying them by the tail for relea
se in the Tatar cemetery. The stray dog now sheltered on shavings in a shed and was named Kashtanka.
Yalta speculated about the source of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. When the weather cleared, women, originals or copies, appeared on the promenade with Pomeranians on leads. In Moscow Anton was talked of even more. Uncle Vania was seen by members of the Tsar’s family and by the Procurer of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Savonarola of Tsarism. Tolstoy noted in his diary: ‘outraged’. He told Nemirovich-Danchenko that Telegin’s guitar and the cricket chirruping (which the actor Vishnevsky had spent a month learning from a cricket in the Sandunov public baths) were the only good things. He told the actors that Astrov and Vania should marry peasant girls and leave the Professor’s wife alone.
Masha was again in a whirl, enjoying the success of Uncle Vania and studying three times a week at an art school set up by Khotiaintseva. She treated the exhaustion and headaches of her new life with injections of arsenic in her back. She taught at school; she sued Konshin, the purchaser of Melikhovo. She dined with Olga Knipper, Prince Shakhovskoi and his new love. ‘Alas, the poor Princess! I have learnt to chat a lot and therefore feel fine in society … something like a salon has come of it,’ she told Anton. She was also friendly with Olga’s rival, Maria Andreeva, whom Anton found attractive. Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, Lika Mizinova, Dunia Konovitser and Maria Drozdova all gathered around Masha and Olga. Their pretext was that they were collecting money, by raffles and subscriptions, for Anton’s projected sanatorium; they hoped, in vain, to be invited to Yalta.
Anton Chekhov Page 59
