Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Chekhov sat behind Knipper and peered out from there. He was dressed, unlike Gorky, very fastidiously. Gold cuff links, yellow shoes, a jacket, coat, all most elegant. I went over to Andreeva. Chekhov has a more than ordinary liking for her.

  Evgenia and Masha left Autka for the cottage by the sea at Gurzuf. Anton and Olga were alone in the house, recalling Chekhov’s entry at that time in the notebooks which he sporadically kept, that to keep visitors away he should keep a French woman in his house and pretend she was his concubine. They no longer feared the creaking stairs that disturbed Evgenia or Masha, when Olga crept with pillow and candle to Anton’s room, or when she visited him at dawn after a swim in the sea. (She called herself an ‘otter’.)

  Supplicants and visitors were ignored, except for the teenager, Olga Vasilieva, whom Anton had taken pity on in Nice and who had embarked on the translation of his works into English. Iurasov, the consul at Menton, begged Anton to humour her: ‘Olga Vasilieva loves you very much and your word is law to her … She doesn’t know what to do with her fortune – and she has nobody to lean on. She is an unhappy creature, pathetic and worthy of compassion.’5

  Vasilieva sent Anton an Oriental rug and asked which English journals might print her translations.6 Anton replied ‘I am of so little interest to the English public that I don’t care in the least.’

  On 22 July Levitan died. Everyone Levitan had known received a scrap of paper with the line: ‘Burn all letters when you hear of my death.’7 Masha lovingly did as Levitan asked; Anton did not.

  A different perturbation spoilt the end of Olga’s stay. Early in August a letter arrived from the first Seagull, Vera Komissarzhevskaia: ‘I’ve come to Yalta for a few days, I’m at Massandra and should be very sad not to see you, if only for a minute.’8 Olga felt that it was the author, not his new play, that Komissarzhevskaia sought. On 3 August Chekhov took his original Seagull to his coastal cottage at Gurzuf, but she won neither the right to stage the new play, nor the author’s love – just a photograph inscribed ‘on a stormy day when the sea roared, from quiet Anton Chekhov.’ Two days later, Anton sailed with Olga to Sevastopol, where they stayed at a hotel. We can only guess why Olga wept on the train about ‘all that I went through in your house’. Was it Evgenia’s disapproval or Komissarzhevskaia’s arrival? Back in Yalta, Anton saw nobody. Komissarzhevskaia wired from Gurzuf: ‘I’ve waited two days. Coming by boat to Yalta tomorrow. Upset by your lack of intuition.’ They met. Komissarzhevskaia, after a rough sea voyage, complained a week later:

  I thought that when I saw you I’d flood you with questions and say something to you in exchange … You know it’s awfully strange but I felt sorry for you for a time … sorry, sorry to the point of sadness. And there was something elusive in you all the time, which I don’t trust.

  Despite an affectionate letter from Anton, Olga still felt ‘thrown overboard’, but told Masha: ‘We parted tenderly. He was very emotional; I was too, I howled.’9 Their future seemed uncertain. Vania assured Olga that Anton would winter in Moscow. Olga, however, told Masha: ‘Odd of you to ask what your brother and I have decided? As if one could decide anything with him. I don’t know myself and it makes me suffer.’

  Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko hoped to see Olga and Anton more closely united. They wanted Anton Chekhov bound to their theatre. Stanislavsky wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko on 8 August:

  Yesterday I wrung it out of Chekhov: he’s off tomorrow to Gurzuf to write, and a week later will come to Alupka to read what he has written … A play set among the military with four young female roles. top secret.10

  Nemirovich-Danchenko knew something more binding, apparently before Olga, let alone Anton, told anybody else. He told Stanislavsky, ‘The business of Knipper’s marriage to Anton is settled.’11 As he worked on Three Sisters, Chekhov was unwittingly writing his marriage contract to both a theatre and an actress.

  Notes

  1 That day, Anton told Sobolevsky, he wanted to be in Monte Carlo, betting on quatre premiers.

  2 See Lazarevsky’s diary, LN87, 319–56.

  3 See OR, 331 60 62: Anna Turchaninova’s letters to Anton, 1895, 1900: 20 May 1900.

  4 See OR, 331 77 14: Olga’s letters to Masha, 1900: 7 June.

  5 See OR, 331 64 28: Nikolai Iurasov’s letters to Anton, 1898–1904.

  6 See OR, 331 38 14: Olga Vasilieva’s ninety-seven letters to Anton, 1898–1904.

  7 See OR, 331 92 56: Adolf Levitan’s letter, enclosing the request, to Masha.

  8 See OR, 331 48 7: Vera Komissarzhevskaia’s letters to Anton, 1896–1904: 1 Aug. 1900.

  9 See OR, 331 77 14: Olga Knipper’s letters to Masha, 1900: 9 Aug.

  10 See PSSP, 9, 365.

  11 See PSSP, 9, 381: Nemirovich-Danchenko, after Olga’s mother, was in the second week of August 1900, the first to be told.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Three Sisters

  August–November 1900

  IN FINE AUGUST sunshine Anton stayed behind in Yalta while Olga went to Moscow. Anton had to get Three Sisters onto paper, even though the play had already been worked out in his mind. The subject had deep personal reverberations for Anton: after the Golden, Markova, Ianova, Lintvariova and Shavrova sisters, Chekhov must have felt ‘three sisters’ to be the fairy-tale motif of his life.

  There was also an English inspiration. In 1896 Anton had sent to Taganrog library a biography of the Brontë sisters: three talented, unhappy girls, stranded in Yorkshire; a despotic father; a mother they do not recall; a brother, once their idol, now a drunken ne’er-do-well. Chekhov’s Prozorova sisters have much in common with the Brontës. The Geisha, a Sidney Jones operetta popular in Moscow in 1899, in which three English officers woo three geishas, also underlies Three Sisters. Memories, too, shaped the play: the officers with whom Anton was friendly at Voskresensk in 1884; a wait in Perm in the Urals, on the way to Sakhalin. Like ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, the play shows marriage as tyranny: the tensions between the real Olga and Masha are anticipated in the fate of the gentle sisters, forced by their sister-in-law’s pregnancies, room by room, out of their house. In this cruellest of Chekhov plays the sisters do not deserve their fate: comedy is incidental. Only the Moscow Arts Theatre could realize the polyphony of Three Sisters, where two or three conversations are heard simultaneously, or where nonverbal effects – the clock and the camera, the fire, the trees in the garden and the songs and music – mark the progression of time as strongly as the words of the text.

  It was hard to write a play. Vania’s wife and son were staying. Varvara Kharkeevich brought two girls, and ‘Kitten’ Nemirovich-Danchenko, bored without her husband, called to talk nonsense. Anton fled to his bedroom, then moved out to Gurzuf, but it was all in vain, for ‘some snout crawls in’, he complained to Olga. He compiled hate lists: ‘a playful Jew, a learned Ukrainian and a drunken German’; ladies who asked for a summary of Herbert Spencer. The Stanislavskys came and would not go; Anton led them off to Varvara Kharkeevich to hear a Hungarian playing the harp.

  Stanislavsky was, he admitted, ‘raping creativity’. Anton had to be made to finish Three Sisters before the autumn. Anton procrastinated: would next year not be soon enough? Olga wanted the author as well as the play in Moscow. Could he not write it in the Hotel Dresden? It would be, Olga lamented, ‘too cruel to separate all winter’ and not spend the autumn together. Like Komissarzhevskaia, she wanted intimate discussion: ‘we have talked so little and so vaguely’, but Anton loathed ‘a conversation with serious faces’. She cajoled him: ‘Do you remember seeing me onto the stairs and the stairs squeaking so treacherously? I loved all that so awfully.’ She fussed over him. Who was cleaning his study and ironing his shirts? ‘You’re not quarrelling with your mother? And you’re being kind to Masha?’ she wrote on 16 August. She sent him another ‘Green Reptile’. She and other actors kept up pressure on their author: they were midwives to Three Sisters as much as Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, but the midwives could not make th
e birth of the play any less painful.

  Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, meanwhile, held gruelling rehearsals for Ostrovsky’s Snow Maiden. Moscow swallowed Olga’s time. Lonely People opened on 25 September. Uncle Sasha confided in his niece: alcohol, debauchery and loneliness had brought him to the verge of suicide: he wanted her to consult Anton about him. On 19 August 1900 Masha left for Moscow, to sell Küchük-Köy for cash. (Konshin had defaulted altogether on Melikhovo and was secretly trying to sell the estate.) Olga was to help Masha find new quarters; they spent their spare time together and slept at each other’s apartments, attended assiduously by Vishnevsky. Round them gathered Anton’s friends: Lika, Kundasova (‘turned into a shadow,’ said Masha), Bunin, Gorky, and a new acolyte, the Tolstoyan sailor-turned-gardener Sulerzhitsky. Anton was the magnet that held these disparate people together.

  As summer ended, one tame crane flew away and the other, now blind in one eye, hopped dejectedly after the gardener. The maid Marfa Motsnaia was recalled to Livadia by her uncle. Even so Anton was not as isolated as he wanted to be. He asked Masha to have Evgenia with her in Moscow in the autumn. Masha resisted:

  If you only knew what a hard time I had getting her back to the Crimea [from Moscow]! The household I have in Moscow is in student style, there isn’t a bed, there’s too little crockery, I sent it all in spring to Yalta. The rains will pour down, her legs will start aching, it’s cold, damp.

  Where was Anton off to, she asked, and for how long? Masha wanted to enjoy the theatre season: she would have Evgenia only from January until Easter 1901. Anton overruled her. On 23 September he put Evgenia on the boat for Sevastopol, where a friend of the Chekhovs offered her dinner (she declined because of her false teeth) and put her on the Moscow express.

  ‘I am very grateful, thank you very much for giving me the pleasure‚’ Evgenia wrote to Anton.1 Masha was too angry to write. Olga took Evgenia to the theatre when A. K. Tolstoy’s magnificent costume drama Tsar Fiodor opened on 3 October. Evgenia even asked to be taken to The Snow Maiden, but never to her son’s plays. (She, like Pavel, seemed to be convinced that Anton’s plays and stories were a source of income too shameful to be spoken of.) Olga told Anton 11 October: ‘Poor woman, she keeps imagining I’ll get my claws into her Antosha and make him unhappy.’ Evgenia accepted Olga’s hospitality but kept her guard up. Anton relished his solitude and resisted Olga’s cajoling: ‘Do you really not want to see your actress, to kiss her, to caress her, to fondle her? She is yours.’2 Three Sisters took shape, even though, Anton complained, one sister had ‘gone lame’. Adolf Marx’s editor, Julius Grünberg, wrote: they had heard that Chekhov was writing ‘Two Sisters’ and could hold up volume VII of The Complete Works to include it. (Anton replied that Marx would have Three Sisters only after it had been staged and after it had been published in a periodical.)

  Visitors to Autka were kept at bay, except for the irrepressible Sergeenko3 and for Olga Vasilieva. Eighteen and independent, she came to Yalta from Nice, bringing with her a nanny and a little girl of three, Marusia, whom she had adopted, she said, from an orphanage in Smolensk. Anton took to the child. Aleksandr Kuprin was bemused to see Marusia clamber onto Anton’s knee, and, babbling, run her fingers through his hair. Anton had never been seen to fondle any creature except a dachshund in public. Gossip would have spread like wildfire, had others seen Anton’s letters to Vasilieva, where he playfully called himself Marusia’s ‘daddy’.

  On 9 September the Yalta theatre burnt down, not that Anton cared: ‘It was quite superfluous here, by the way.’4 Life at Autka with old Mariushka as cook was rough. Anton wrote Three Sisters on a diet of soup and fish. He stopped work only to recover from bouts of ‘flu’, catch mice or attend to Kashtanka’s broken paw. He ignored his siblings. Vania and Masha sulked: ‘I can’t imagine why,’ he told Olga. Olga begged Anton to come to Moscow, but he insisted that they lived apart not by choice, but because ‘of the demon that put the bacilli into me and love of art into you’. Anton would not come until he had finished the play and could attend rehearsals: he would not, he said, leave four heroines to Stanislavsky’s mercy. Olga, however, needed a shoulder to cry on. She was hurt by poor reviews of The Snow Maiden, by being out-performed by Stanislavsky’s wife in Hauptmann’s Lonely People, and by anti-Semitic outbursts from spectators in Chekhov’s Ivanov.

  After many telegrams, Anton arrived in Moscow on 23 October 1900 with a manuscript of Three Sisters. The next day he read the whole play out to the assembled theatre. There was a dismayed silence afterwards – nobody expected anything so complex or sad. Then Anton went to watch Ibsen’s Dr Stockmann. He returned to the Hotel Dresden, where a note from Olga was waiting to seduce him: ‘Stay at the Dresden and copy [out the play], I’ll come, I’ll bring perfume and sweets. Do you want me? Answer yes or no.’

  On 29 October Anton attended a reading of Three Sisters. Stanislavsky was thrown by Anton’s diffidence. Those around him were becoming more and more excited. Misha wrote that he had been asked by a lady in a train when Anton was getting married, and that an actress saw Nemirovich-Danchenko raise his glass to the union of Knipper and Chekhov: ‘… it would be very nice if these rumours turned out true.’5 Yalta speculated: Lazarevsky’s diary for 12 November reads: ‘I’ve heard Chekhov has got married. I don’t believe it.’

  Masha and Anton had promised to keep an eye on Isaak Sinani’s son, Abram, a student in Moscow. On 28 October Abram killed himself. Anton summoned Sinani to Moscow and took him to the funeral, telling him his son had died of ‘melancholy’. He warned Masha not to utter the word suicide in Yalta. That night he watched the hero in Hauptmann’s Lonely People kill himself; the following week Anton’s editor at Marx’s, Julius Grünberg died. Anton revised Three Sisters in a very gloomy mood. Komissarzhevskaia was still asking for the play. Anton disabused her, yet appealed for her sympathy: ‘I’m on the treadmill, i.e. I run round visiting and at night I sleep like the dead. I came here perfectly well, now I’m coughing again and am evil-tempered and, I’m told, jaundiced.’ By day Anton lived with Olga and Masha; he slept at the hotel. It was high time he was away. November in Moscow would be fatal. News of the Day reported that he was off to Africa and America and that Three Sisters was postponed.

  In fact Three Sisters detained him. So did Suvorin. Anton was taken aback that Nastia had married and that he had not been told. He reproached Suvorin: ‘I am almost as fond of your family as of my own,’ and asked Suvorin to Moscow. Suvorin, though busy with his theatre, came within days, with Burenin. He noted:

  Chekhov was leaving for the south, for Algiers, he asked me to come and see him. I wanted to be back on the 22nd for the dress rehearsal of Sons of Israel or The Smugglers as we christened the play. Chekhov talked me out of it. I stayed. On Wednesday I could have met Tolstoy. I had a telegram from Petersburg that there had been a scandal in the Maly Theatre. I took the express at 12 a.m.

  The play that Suvorin was staging in Petersburg was a melodrama about smugglers, written by a farce-writer, Viktor Krylov and a renegade Jew, Saveli Litvin. Its anti-Semitic ranting revolted even a Petersburg audience. Orchestrated by Lidia Iavorskaia, the auditorium threw binoculars, galoshes and apples at the cast. Suvorin’s beloved son-in-law, Aleksei Kolomnin, backstage, died of a massive heart attack. In this bereavement too, Anton was unable to console Suvorin.

  In late November Anton saw Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken and annoyed Stanislavsky and Olga by his ‘subtle smile, making fun of what we respect’. (Chekhov always claimed to be unable to see any merit in Ibsen.) Two acts of Three Sisters were in rehearsal. Anton would revise acts 3 and 4 in France. He had withdrawn 2000 roubles from his account in Yalta; Adolf Marx sent 10,000 to Moscow (he owed a final 15,000). Anton had money to travel and Olga reluctantly concurred that he had to leave for warmer climes. On 11 December Anton took the train to Vienna. In Nice Suvorin’s granddaughter Nadia Kolomnina, as well as Olga Vasilieva with little Marusia, were waiting.

  Notes

&nbs
p; 1 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia’s letters to Anton, 1875–1904: 26 Sept. 1900.

  2 Cut from Perepiska, 1934: see OR, 331 76 5: Olga’s letters to Anton, Sept. 1900.

  3 See LN68, 621–8, memoirs of Sergeenko’s son.

  4 Two months later the department store Muir and Mirrielees burnt down in Moscow. (Anton remarked to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik in 1899 that to get rid of women playwrights one should invite them to Muir and Mirrielees and burn it down.) Fires in Yalta and Moscow inspired the fire in Three Sisters.

  5 See S. M. Chekhov, O semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 196–8.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Nice Revisited

  December 1900–February 1901

  AS THE VIENNA TRAIN steamed off, Olga Knipper walked to the end of the platform. Anton’s new friend, the Tolstoyan Sulerzhitsky, escorted her home in distress, and Masha attended her until she recovered her buoyancy. Masha, too, was miserable, but would not say why. ‘The poor thing didn’t sleep all night: something has been happening all this time,’ Olga wrote to Anton. Masha’s distress may have had something to do with a new friendship. Ivan Bunin had taken upon himself to be, in Anton’s absence, attentive to Masha and helpful to Olga.

  Europe was now thirteen days ahead of Russia: Anton had forgotten that in Vienna shops would be shut and theatres full for Christmas Day. In his hotel room he looked ‘with concupiscence at the two beds’. The next day he took a first-class train for Nice, and on 14/27 December 1900 was back in La Pension Russe, in two rooms with a wide soft bed. In four days Anton made fair copies of the last two acts of Three Sisters, expanding Act 4. He devised Chebutykin’s ominous lines ‘Balzac got married in Berdichev’ and cut Andrei’s speech in defence of the ghastly Natasha to ‘A wife is a wife’. The play that had haunted Anton for two years was now off his hands. Anton was upset that Olga was apparently not writing to him, until he found that another Russian in Nice was being handed all the letters addressed to Chekhov.