On New Year’s Day Anton made a pilgrimage to the Beau Rivage where he had first stayed in Nice with Suvorin nearly ten years ago, and only then sent Suvorin belated condolences on the death of Aleksei Kolomnin. To Suvorin Chekhov mused that ‘life here is not like ours, it is rich, healthy, young, smiling’. Nice brought out francophilia in him. The Russians, he told Knipper, were all ‘squashed-down, as if oppressed … outrageous idleness’. Despite an unseasonal frost, he told Dr Sredin in Yalta, Nice was paradise and Yalta was Siberia: people here were happy, with no magistrate and no ‘puffy-faced Marxists’. A week later Anton saw Nemirovich-Danchenko’s mortally ill sister Varvara in Menton, stopping on the way in Monte Carlo. Anton gambled with his friend Franz Schechtel for two weeks, won 500 francs and exclaimed to Olga ‘How much Russian money is being lost here’.
The Nemirovich-Danchenkos joined Anton on the Côte d’Azur. To please Olga, perhaps, Anton belittled Nemirovich-Danchenko’s wife ‘Kitten’, whom he had once liked: ‘Nemirovich is under house arrest: Katichka won’t let him a step from her side, so that I don’t see him … she’s just like a merchant’s wife …’ Nemirovich-Danchenko had been unwilling to talk about Three Sisters at first, but he came to love and understand it as the weeks went by. Stanislavsky did not write about it until mid January. He was puzzled about the death of Tuzenbakh: should the body not be carried across the stage, could Anton insert a crowd scene to explain the sisters’ calm? These queries did not distress Anton so much as Stanislavsky’s delusion that the play ends with ‘the author’s uplifting thought which will redeem the play’s many depressing minutes’. Nemirovich-Danchenko was practical: he demanded cuts in the sisters’ monologues. So did Olga, who found Masha – the one passionate sister, the challenging role Anton had written for her – difficult to act.
Olga was worked to exhaustion by Nemirovich-Danchenko. He wanted her to feel ‘the tone’ of her part in the new play. When Masha and Evgenia left for Yalta on 19 December, Olga collapsed with a bad cold. She went deaf, took morphine and went to bed. Performances were cancelled, but she did not mope. Had Anton met ‘beaucoup de jolies femmes … Ecrivez-moi si vous y trouvez de bien intéressantes’. She made him write to his mother – ‘Why upset the old woman? She’ll think I made you change towards her.’ Obediently he sent Evgenia 10 roubles and a card every three days. Masha, however, angered Anton. She had delayed banking 15,000 roubles received from Marx: ‘not careless, simply swinish’. Masha cried at the injustice of his fury. When he sent instructions to Yalta on repairing the stoves and digging round the fruit trees, she would not reply. He had to ask Dr Sredin if Autka and its inhabitants were safe. ‘My family, darling, don’t spoil me,’ Anton commented to Olga.
Masha and Evgenia had caught the servants Arseni and Mariushka unawares: the house was unheated, moths had eaten a bedside rug and the divan had collapsed under the weight of old newspapers. Masha looked at the garden and told Anton it was bare. He replied tersely that everything was planted to plan and in five years’ time she would see that he was right. The crane that had flown away came back, but it injured itself when it began to dance with the one-eyed crane that had stayed behind: it lay dying in the kitchen.
Yalta was cold and Masha was lonely. Olga wrote to Anton:
Bunin has been with me today, his nerves all shattered, he doesn’t know what to do with himself; I am sending him to Yalta; he’s angry at Masha for letting him down and keeping her departure quiet, but she was delayed here and did not know what to do, afraid of tying him down. He is talking about Nice.
On Christmas Eve Bunin left for Yalta. He was a godsend. He lived downstairs next to Masha and worked in Anton’s sunny study. She called him Bouquichon; he called her Amarantha. Masha’s letters to Anton began to sparkle and, while Arseni dug the garden, Bunin appended verses in her name:
Snow falleth, blizzard bloweth:
I have fled down to the south.
Here the cold is not a joke,
Bunin and I look at the views.
All day with wood the stoves we stoke
And go for walks like little ewes.1
Masha did not want to teach any more, or cope with Anton’s ungrateful finances. She told Olga on 3 January 1901:
Bunin escorts me … I have no time to visit [the sick]. I saw the New Year in at the Elpatievskys’ with Bunin and yesterday I went to another fancy dress ball in the Kursaal – pretty good … In Yalta people are dying like flies, several friends died after the holidays – it’s loathsome.2
Ever a dutiful sister, however, Masha left the balls and returned to Moscow on 12 January. Thanks to Bunin, at least she could leave Evgenia behind in Autka. Evgenia was happy: Bunin showed her more affection than her children. She told Anton: ‘I’ve stopped being afraid, I’ve calmed down, as if I’ve arrived in paradise.’ Bunin explained to Anton that his country estate was as cold as the North Pole, whereas in Chekhov’s sunny study, while the Tatars hammered paving stones into the driveway, he scribbled and read. For a whole month Bunin deputed for Anton and Masha. Anton approved and Masha wrote Bunin affectionate notes.
Misha had a different view of life at Autka and wrote to Vania: ‘Mother has been left on her own in Yalta … It is a sin, a bad sin. If the old woman gets ill, there’s nobody to give her water. Poor Mama!’ Misha had a newborn son and wanted Evgenia in Iaroslavl to help, but she stayed in Yalta. On 15 February 1901, the day Anton was due back, she wrote:
Misha, you write strange things about our life, especially to Masha, why she isn’t staying in Yalta, but what would she do here, you ought to ask, and also you mention my going to Moscow and back to Yalta, even now I’m embarrassed at burdening Antosha with the expense, but what can you do, I was so unhappy, I couldn’t live, Antosha saw that and he suggested it … Please tear up this letter. Why do you imagine Antosha has thousands? He never did, Melikhovo was 23,000, 5 for the bank, 8 owed, we’ve got only 5 thousand. The Yalta land cost 5000 and the house, outsiders built it and ran up a big sum, Gurzuf, he’s taken a lot of money from Marx too, there’s not much left, he can’t hold on to money.
Once she had found a new place to live in Moscow Masha went to see Misha in Petersburg. He had sent four letters begging her to come: he was burning his boats, planning a new life working for Suvorin. When she got back to Moscow, Masha wrote firmly to Misha that Anton and she had no spare money.
Olga Vasilieva had busied herself in Nice searching the newspapers for news of deserving poor that she could help. She now wanted to sell a house she owned in Odessa and put the proceeds towards a clinic. In Moscow that summer Anton had been approached by Dr Chlenov, who, despite the puns (his name meant ‘penis’), wanted to found a clinic for Moscow’s syphilitics. Anton decided to direct Olga Vasilieva towards this venture and became embroiled in the sale of her property and the making of Dr Chlenov’s clinic, a project which never came to fruition.
In mid January Anton felt that he had exhausted the human material in the pension. He told Kovalevsky that he had exhausted Yalta too, and that leaving Melikhovo, where he knew about life in forty villages, had been a creative disaster. Once again he wanted to go to Algiers. Kovalevsky prevaricated: he saw that Anton was even iller than three years ago. He told him the sea was too rough, and then refused outright. With Kovalevsky and Professor Korotniov, Anton took instead the coast road to Italy. Olga Vasilieva begged him not to forget her, and left for Geneva. Anton and his companions stopped in Pisa, then went to Florence. On 30 January 1901 they went to Rome. Anton’s mood grew grim: he told Kovalevsky he was writing nothing long, because he would soon die. Anton stayed four more days in Rome and watched a penitential procession in St Peter’s. Asked how he would describe it, he replied, ‘A stupid procession dragged past.’3 Feeling deserted by his friends, Anton took trains from Rome to Odessa and, despite his status as an academician, was harassed by the Russian customs. In Odessa he had an estate agent value Vasilieva’s house. On 15 February 1901, across terrible seas, he arrived in a freezing Yalta.<
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Anton had been travelling for three weeks. He had missed the furore surrounding Three Sisters. Olga had wired the news of the play’s triumph to Nice: ‘Grand succès, embrasse mon bien aimé’, but news took a long time to reach Anton. Rehearsals had been troubled: the ex-colonel the theatre had hired to make the military dress and behaviour authentic had dared to overrule Stanislavsky. Olga had argued against the heavy red wig that Stanislavsky wanted Masha to wear. The opening night of Three Sisters on 31 January 1901 confirmed Chekhov as Russia’s greatest dramatist and Moscow Arts Theatre as its leading theatre. The public saw their lives enacted: the three sisters stood for all educated women marooned in the provinces. Olga as Masha had every unfaithful wife in the audience in tears. So moved was the audience that the curtain fell to total silence.
In the audience was Ezhov. He saw the cuckolded schoolteacher Kulygin as a caricature of himself, and reported to Suvorin on 1 February 1901:
All the heroes whine, none is satisfied. There is a drunken old doctor who has read nothing … There is adultery (Chekhov’s favourite theme) … The content: three sisters, daughter of a brigadier-general, their brother studying to be a professor, all passionately desire to move to live in Moscow … The play is acted splendidly … I shall not be writing about this play in New Times.4
Suvorin thoroughly disliked the play when he saw it a year later in Moscow.
Notes
1 See Vokrug Chekhova, 357 (Maria Chekhova’s memoirs).
2 See OR, 331 105 3: Masha’s letters to Olga Knipper, 1901: 3 Jan.
3 Kovalevsky’s memoirs of Anton Chekhov are in Vokrug Chekhova, 361–6.
4 See RGALI, 459 2 1233: Nikolai Ezhov’s four letters to Suvorin, 1897–1901.
SEVENTY-FIVE
The Secret Marriage
February–May 1901
WHEN ANTON ARRIVED, Bunin moved out to sleep at the Hotel Yalta, where there was a corpse in the next room. Bunin’s humour and tact endeared him to Anton, who pressed him to stay. Masha in Moscow was propitiated by a parcel of gifts from her brother: a tartan rug, lace handkerchiefs, scissors and a blotter.
Olga Knipper was still further away. In Moscow the theatres closed for Lent, so Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky took their company to Petersburg, where the theatres closed only for the first, fourth and last weeks of Lent. The public enthused in Petersburg as they had in Moscow. Unadvertised, all seats were sold; people queued for tickets until midnight. The press, however, was brutal. Burenin denounced a ‘press claque puffing Chekhov’. New Times derided Olga in Lonely People. Kugel in The Petersburg Newspaper reviewed the first night of Uncle Vania on 19 February 1901: Knipper is ‘a very phlegmatic lady … praise of this actress is for me an utter mystery.’ Amfiteatrov’s Courier declared: ‘Knipper is a very bad actress.’ Critics praised Maria Andreeva, whose Kätchen, the dowdy wife in Hauptmann’s play, was more beautiful than Olga’s siren Anna Mahr. Olga and Andreeva became enemies. Three Sisters changed a few minds: Amfiteatrov, for one, decided that Knipper was a great actress.
When the curtain fell the audiences called out the wording of congratulatory telegrams to Chekhov, but Suvorin’s critics accused the Moscow Arts Theatre of destroying him. Nikolai Sazonov told his wife he would never have passed the play when he was censor. The Ministry of Education banned it from ‘people’s theatres’. Finally, on 20 March, Burenin published a vicious skit: Nine Sisters and Not a Single Groom. Burenin’s sisters, Hysteria, Cretina and Idiota, utter Chekhovian gibberish, Tra-ta-tam and Tsip, tsip, tsip and his cast includes trained cockroaches. Nine Sisters ends with the sisters sucking their blankets and the theatre collapsing to thunderous applause. Burenin’s parody upset Chekhov – all the more so because it was published in Suvorin’s paper.1
Olga was distraught about her bad reviews: she loved Petersburg and wanted her love reciprocated. Stanislavsky explained to the cast that every critic was the husband or lover of an actress whose nose had been put out of joint by their performance of Chekhov. Petersburg actors queued to apologize and Lidia Iavorskaia showed her support. She took a red carnation from between her breasts and threw it to Stanislavsky, then came backstage and invited the cast to stay as her guests for the fourth week of Lent. Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, to Olga’s disgust, accepted. Iavorskaia, Anton’s notorious old love, repelled her:
24 February … Iavorskaia crept into my dressing room again, she pushes in, flattering and keeps inviting me to see her. The brazen woman.
3 March … Iavorskaia has invited me on 5 March, but I certainly shan’t go. I can’t bear the sight of that coarse woman and have given orders for her not to be allowed in my dressing rooms in the interval.2
Another old flame of Anton’s approached Olga. She wrote to him on 2 March to say: ‘I just had a letter from L. Avilova, you seem to know her. She wishes … to get a ticket to the Sisters. I replied politely. I cannot get a ticket.’ She was angry with ‘Kitten’, Nemirovich-Danchenko’s wife, as well.3
Anton was upset by the ordeal the company had endured, but reproached Olga for quarrelling with Iavorskaia (who had sent him a telegram of praise). Anton even renounced writing plays in a country where actresses were abused. Suvorin was punished: for the twenty-fifth anniversary of New Times students organized a ‘cat’s concert’ under the windows of his offices; police had to drive demonstrators away. Another student demonstration was attacked by Cossacks and police; news came that the Church’s Holy Synod had excommunicated Tolstoy. In a tense and excited Petersburg theatre audiences became even more emotional. Sazonova took a friend, Evgenia, to see Three Sisters on 1 March 1901: ‘She left the theatre in tears. Masha’s affair with an artillery colonel is her own story.’ One persona found Anton’s drama and personal life amusing. Anna Suvorina wrote to Anton at Easter: ‘We all went to see Uncle Vania, six times in a row … it makes me laugh since I can see and hear many of my kith and kin … I’d like to say hello to your “wife” [Olga Knipper], but how can I?’4
In the middle of all the turmoil Misha Chekhov turned up in Petersburg to take up Suvorin’s offer of employment: Suvorin ‘could not think what you’re fit for’, and forgot to assign Misha a salary. Masha supported her youngest brother: ‘it’s the fate of the boys in our family to be writers, not officials’. Misha declared that he was doing what Anton had advised him to do ten years ago. Now Anton reminded him that Suvorin published New Times and was ‘an awful liar, especially in his so-called frank moments’; also that Anna Suvorina was petty. The only honest employment with Suvorin would be with Tychinkin in the print shop. Despondent at Suvorin’s offhandedness and Anton’s disapproval, Misha went back to Iaroslavl to rehabilitate himself. Suvorin wired him. Misha returned to Petersburg, apologizing to Suvorin on 17 March: ‘I was always being terrified in my childhood that God would punish me and the Devil lead me astray … [My parents] made me a weak character.’5 Misha was employed with Suvorin first as an editor, then in his advertising agency, for 350 roubles a month. Suvorin had won another Chekhov.
Alone with his mother in the Crimea, Anton was reaching a decision. To Bunin he joked: ‘marrying a German is better: they are tidier’. Gorky, keeping Olga company in Petersburg, wrote to Anton: ‘Why have people everywhere been saying that you are married?’ Meanwhile the almonds blossomed and Anton gardened. He was reading proofs for volume IV of The Complete Works, but not writing. He had promised another story to the journal Life: that journal was now banned. His old editor, Mikhail Menshikov, left The Week to work for Suvorin, and another outlet vanished. Anton grew iller. Nikolai Sazonov reported back to his wife that Chekhov would share the fate of the poet Nadson: ‘he will be wiped out by consumption and Burenin’s parodies’. Masha picked up the ominous adverb in a letter from Bunin: ‘Anton is relatively well’, and asked for his support in Yalta, when she came for Easter.6 Anton was expecting Olga to come for four whole months. On 5 March, she made him an ultimatum:
I shan’t come to Yalta; think and you’ll realize why. It’s impos
sible. You have such a sensitive soul and yet you invite me! Can you really not understand?
Anton made a joke of her refusal: she had a lover in Petersburg; he did have a wife, but would divorce her; he had brought expensive perfume for her to fetch from Yalta. On 7 March, he gave in: ‘Let me make you a proposal.’ Olga held out:
How can I come? … How long must we stay hidden? And what’s the point? Because of people? People are more likely to shut up and leave us in peace once they see it’s an accomplished fact.
Although he loathed trains and hotels, Anton announced he would come to Moscow. To Bunin (who, himself seeking a divorce, had to repress his horror) he made his first unambiguous written declaration: ‘By the way, I intend to marry.’ He told Olga he was coining to Moscow, but stressed that she would ‘get a grandfather, not a spouse.’ He would let her act for five more years. A week after this letter Olga told members of the theatre that she had resolved: ‘to unite my life to that of Anton Chekhov.’ But she still did not have from Anton the firm offer on which she was insisting:
We cannot live just as though we were good friends … to see your mother’s suffering, Masha’s puzzled face – it’s awful! In your house I’m between two fires. Say something about this. You never say anything. I have to have a bit of peace now. I am terribly tired.
Anton Chekhov Page 62
