Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  She dared not drag Anton to Moscow’s frozen air, but, faced with her conditions for coming down to Yalta, Anton was now backing off. He wrote to Bunin on 25 March: ‘I’ve changed my mind about marrying, I don’t want to but all the same … then if I must I shall.’ Shortly after Masha had left for Yalta, it was Olga who gave in. She telegraphed: ‘Leaving tomorrow Yalta’ and got the reply, ‘Expect arrival’. On Good Friday, 30 March 1901, she was there.

  Bunin was also there for the two weeks that Masha and Olga stayed. They went to the seaside cottage at Gurzuf, where they picnicked, and Anton wrote Bunin a joke bill for his share. When Masha left for Moscow and Bunin for Odessa, Olga left with them. She cried bitterly all the way to Moscow – Masha believed it was from a tooth abscess. Olga’s letter to Anton suggests otherwise:

  There was no need to separate … It was for decency, was it? … You stayed silent. I decided that you did not want me to be with you once Masha had left. Que dira le monde? There is a sediment of things left unsaid. I was so looking forward to spring, and now I’ve just been on a visit… everyone in Moscow was amazed to see me … Come soon; let’s get married and clear off, do you want to?

  The next day Olga wrote, ‘You have already cooled towards me, you don’t look at me as somebody close … you don’t like all this woman’s chatter.’

  While Olga Knipper was in Yalta, Olga Vasilieva let Anton know that she had come to Gurzuf for two months with her foster-child Marusia: ‘Will you curse me very much for my desire to have one more look at you? Your Marusia is a wonderful child, but I get very spiteful with her.’ At the beginning of April she sent her photograph to Anton’s mother and wrote that she was bequeathing Marusia to Anton, as thanks

  for all the happiness and joy you brought me with your visits in Nice – after Mama’s death I was never so happy and shan’t be. Marusia is a good, kind child – I am not worthy of her. I often envy her that I cannot, as she can, count on an affectionate word from you.

  A week later she wired: ‘Voudrais venir Gourzouff être plus près vous, puis-je, ne vous fâchez pas.’ Anton replied that there was a hotel in Gurzuf and sent regards to ‘our daughter Marusia’, telling her to behave ‘or else daddy will get angry and pick up the cane’. A week after Easter Anton arranged to see them. Vasilieva had moved to Autka, to the house next door. She sent Anton coins, ostensibly as a pledge for a loan to pay her landlady. The day that Bunin, Masha and Olga left, Anton wrote to Vasilieva. He told her that he did not mind her living next door with no chaperone.7

  Anton’s reply to Olga Knipper, however, was as intimate a letter as she would ever receive from him:

  I didn’t keep you because I hate being in Yalta and I also had the idea that we would soon meet anyway in freedom … you had no reason to be angry … I had no secret thoughts.

  He appealed to her pity and theatrical ambitions:

  My cough takes all my energy and I think languidly about the future and am reluctant to write … Occasionally I have a very strong desire to write a 4-act farce or comedy for the Arts Theatre. And if I do, if nothing gets in the way, I shan’t give it to the theatre before the end of 1903

  They would marry and honeymoon anywhere, the Black Sea or the Arctic Ocean. Anton undertook to bring his passport to Moscow for the ceremony: she was now ‘Olia’, his ‘little Lutheran’, his ‘dog’, as henceforth she signed her letters to him. He would marry her the day he arrived ‘so long as you promise nobody will know in Moscow’: he loathed congratulations, champagne and having to maintain a fixed smile. Waiting for health and warm weather, he chatted every day with Kuprin, a fascinating companion who, as he later boasted, had done everything in life except get pregnant. Anton’s notebooks reflect a darker mood:

  a feeling of non-love, a peaceful state, long, peaceful thoughts … love is either the remains of something degenerating or part of something that will develop in the future into something enormous, but in the present it doesn’t satisfy, it gives far less than you expect.

  Olga’s next letter to Anton contained an inauspicious joke: ‘The revolting Vishnevsky swears by God and crosses his heart that in a year or two I’ll be his wife – how about that!’ A Grand Duchess, Olga said, had accosted her mother and asked, ‘When is her marriage, and how is his health?’ Thus Anna Knipper learnt of the betrothal.8 Anton said he would write a will forbidding Olga to remarry after his death. For a fortnight he pleaded illness: he was locked in his study, thinking and coughing. He worried about Vania, who was, although never complaining, barely communicating, in fact, overworked and losing weight; about Gorky and Posse, the editor of Life, in prison; about his sick dog; about Olga Vasilieva leaving for France. On 6 May he had a talk with Vasilieva. He deterred his Taganrog cousins from visiting Yalta: Evgenia might be in Petersburg, Masha in Moscow and he in the Arctic or on the Volga.

  When Anton came to Moscow a week later, he had his first breakfast with Olga Vasilieva, not Olga Knipper, so that he could introduce Dr Chlenov the venereologist to Vasilieva the potential patron for his clinic. On 16 May Masha left for Yalta to care for Evgenia. On 17 May Anton went, under duress, to see Dr Shchurovsky, who after a thorough examination and interrogation took a full history. Anton gave wild guesses when asked how long his relatives had lived. He admitted that coughing and diarrhœa had plagued him since infancy and hæmorrhages for the past seventeen years. Shchurovsky noted9 that Anton drank moderately, had given up smoking, that he had not had syphilis, but had been treated for, and cured of, gonorrhœa. Shchurovsky suspected that Anton’s childhood ‘peritonitis’ might be due to a hernia. He found Anton’s mental state good and his nerves ‘tolerable’. (Anton assured Shchurovsky that his depression was ‘autointoxication’ due to constipation and lifted after a dose of castor oil.) The lungs, however, were bad, with irreversible necrosis, and his gut was badly affected. Severe pulmonary damage and chronic colitis, Shchurovsky hoped, might respond to koumiss, a treatment Anton had not tried. Anton was referred to Dr Varavka at the Andreev sanatorium, in the wilds of Bashkiria, 1200 miles east of Moscow. Olga wrote to Masha the next day:

  There is not much comfort – the process has not stopped. He prescribed him a course of koumiss drinking and if he can’t, then it’s Switzerland. I am cooking up a medicine for Anton, I pound it in the mortar, I let it stand and I boil it, it’s for the intestines. God grant that the koumiss does him good! As soon as I sort everything out, we are off. I am awfully sad. Masha, why did you go away! I am sad and afraid.10

  Olga told Masha everything, except that she and Anton were about to Marry. Anton wrote to Masha two days later to say that both lungs now had lesions, that he had the choice of fermented mare’s milk in the Urals or Switzerland for two months. As for the wedding and the journey with Olga to the Urals, he even now denied it: ‘It’s boring to go on one’s own, it’s boring to be on the koumiss, but taking somebody with me would be selfish … I would get married but I don’t have the papers on me, everything is in the desk in Yalta.’ He asked for a few blank cheques. Masha wanted him back in Yalta.

  On Thursday 24 May 1901 Anton took Vania on an errand, near the clinic where their father had died. He sent his last proofs to Marx and had his mail directed to Aksionovo, a village half way between the Volga and the Urals. He received a telegram from Dr Varavka: ‘Welcome. Have place.’ Anton then wired Olga: ‘I have everything ready. Need meet before 1 to talk. We definitely leave Friday.’ That day Masha could contain her jealousy no more and, despite her close friendship with Olga, told Anton:

  Now let me express my opinion about your marriage. Personally I find the wedding procedure awful. And you don’t need these extra worries, if you are loved you won’t be abandoned and there is no sacrifice involved … It’s never too late to get tied. Tell that to your [sweetheart erased] Knipper woman. The first thing to think about is getting you well. For God’s sake don’t think I’m guided by selfishness. You’ve always been the person closest and dearest to me … You yourself brought me up to be without pre
judices. My God, how difficult it will be to live two whole months without you, what’s more in Yalta … If you don’t answer this letter quickly I shall be hurt. My regards to ‘her’.11

  The day of his marriage Anton left instructions for Vania and 50 roubles which he insisted Vania spend on a first-class boat journey down the Volga. He telegraphed his mother, ‘Dear Mama, bless me, I am getting married. All will stay the same.12 I am off to drink koumiss. Address Aksionovo. Health better.’ Evgenia was, Masha later reported, mute with shock, but Anton received a telegram from her, ‘I bless, be happy, healthy.’

  On the morning of 25 May Olga wrote to Masha:

  Today we are getting married and leaving for Aksionovo, Ufa province, on the koumiss. Anton feels well, is nice and gentle. Only Volodia [her brother] and uncle Sasha (at Anton’s request) and two student witnesses will be in the church. I had a tragedy and rows with mama yesterday because of all this I don’t sleep at night, my head is splitting … I am awfully sad and hurt, Masha, that you are not here with me these days, I would feel different. I am utterly alone, I have nobody to speak to. Don’t forget me, Mashechka, love me, we must, you and I must always be together … My regards to your mother. Tell her I shall be very hurt if she cries or is upset because of Anton’s marriage.

  Three days later, waiting for a boat, Olga described to Masha Anton’s best farce:

  At 8.30 I set off to the dentist to have my tooth finished … at 2 I had lunch, put on a white dress and went to Anton’s. I had it all out with my mother … I myself did not know to the last day when we would get married. The wedding was very queer … There wasn’t a soul in the church, there were guards at the gates. Towards 5 p.m. I arrived with Anton, the bride’s men were sitting on a bench in the garden … I could hardly stand with my headache and at one moment I felt I should burst out either crying or laughing. You know, I felt awfully odd when the priest came up to me and Anton and led us away … We were married on the Pliushchikha by the same priest as buried your father. I was asked only for a certificate that I was a spinster, which I fetched from our church …13 I was terribly upset that Vania wasn’t there … Vania knew we were getting married, Anton had gone to see the priest with him … When I got back from the church our servants couldn’t control themselves, they lined up to congratulate me and raised a howling and weeping, but I nobly controlled myself. They packed my things, and Natasha that pig let me down … she didn’t bring the silk bra and the batiste embroidered blouse. At 8 p.m. we went to the station, only our family saw us off, quietly, modestly.14

  Elsewhere in Moscow, at a reception which Anton had asked Vishnevsky to organize, a bemused crowd wondered what had happened to the newlyweds.

  Notes

  1 See Smirnova-Sazonova’s diary, LN87, 311–12.

  2 Partially cut from Perepiska 1934; see OR, 331 76 9: Olga’s letters to Anton, Feb. 1901.

  3 Cut from Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 10: Olga’s letters to Anton, Mar. 1901.

  4 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina’s letters to Anton, 1889–1901: Apr. 1901.

  5 See S. M. Chekhov O semie, 1970, 212–13.

  6 See OR, 429 3 12: Masha’s letters to Bunin, 1901–3: 8 Mar. 1901.

  7 When this poor little rich girl is mentioned in Anton’s correspondence with Olga Knipper, his tone is so casual that it would seem that Vasilieva was not the shadow between them. Had Marusia been Anton’s child – and I believe she was not – it would be unlikely for a man of Anton’s circle not to acknowledge the fact.

  8 Olga’s account conflicts with what Nemirovich-Danchenko told Stanislavsky, see fn. 52.

  9 See RGALI, 549 1 49: Shchurovsky’s scribbled notes, a mix of abbreviated Russian, Latin and German, on two sides of a sheet of paper, will need further deciphering.

  10 Not in Knipper-Chekhova, 1972, II; see OR, 331 77 15: Olga’s letters to Masha, 1901: 18 May.

  11 See OR, 331 79 25: Masha’s letters to Anton 1901: the Pis’ma, 1954 text is almost complete.

  12 Maria Sergeenko claimed that before the wedding Anton, drinking with friends, deplored men who married actresses, and left saying that he had ‘a little business to attend to’. (See LN87, 348.) On that day Anton had a demented plea for a meeting from a teenager Olga L. (See OR, 331 49 3.)

  13 Olga, as a Lutheran marrying an Orthodox, risked expulsion from her community. ‘At Mama’s concert our Ober-pastor twice told me off for marrying, so that I was quite frightened. He said that their church cannot leave the matter unpunished … I shall threaten to convert to Orthodoxy.’ Cut from Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 15: Olga’s letters to Anton, Nov. 1901: 30 Nov.

  14 Cut in Knipper-Chekhova, 1972, II, 20–4: see OR, 331 77 15: Olga’s letters to Masha, 1901.

  X

  Love and Death

  The best protection against dragons is to have one of your own.

  Evgeni Shvarts, The Dragon

  The bedroom smelt of fever, infusions, ether, tar, that indescribable heavy smell of an apartment where a consumptive is breathing.

  Maupassant, Bel-Ami

  SEVENTY-SIX

  Honeymoon

  June-September 1901

  ANNA KNIPPER offered the couple a quick meal before they caught the train to Nizhni Novgorod. Anton and Olga were met at Nizhni by Dr Dolgopolov, who had tickets for the thousand-mile river journey to Ufa, from where they would get a train to the village of Aksionovo and the sanatorium. Dr Dolgopolov had just certified Gorky as too consumptive for prison, and took Anton and Olga to see him. One policeman opened the door; another sat in the kitchen. Gorky’s wife was in hospital giving birth. Gorky talked volubly and, when Anton and Olga finally blurted out that they had just got married, thumped Olga on the back.

  Dolgopolov put Anton and Olga on a boat that took them down the Volga and up the river Kama towards the Urals, dropping them at a quay called Piany Bor, ‘Drunken Grove’. Here they had a long wait for the connecting boat. They should have changed boats in Kazan. There was no hotel; they camped on the ground, in the rain, while a consumptive spat. ‘I shall never forgive Dolgopolov. In “Drunken Grove” and sober. The setting is horrible,’ Anton wrote. Olga found a hut and made a bed on the floor. They ate salted sturgeon and tried to sleep. At 5 a.m. a tiny, crowded boat for Ufa picked them up; they slept in separate cabins. Anton was lent a rug, but pestered by admirers. They chugged up the river Belaia through wooded hills; the sun tanned Anton’s face and bleached the pink blouse Masha had sewn for Olga. After two nights on the Belaia, at dawn on 31 May 1901, they docked at Ufa. They rushed to catch the 6.00 a.m. train, but there had been a derailment and the train did not leave until two in the afternoon. The windows were jammed and the station carpenter could not budge them. They endured five hours of stifling heat. From Aksionovo wickerwork carts took them over a rough hilly track six miles to the sanatorium.

  It was dark when they arrived. They were met by dozens of telegrams and letters and by the news that an Anna Chokhova was there. She was the wife of Mikhail Chokhov, a vulgar cousin whom Anton had avoided for fifteen years.1 Morning showed the beauty of Aksionovo – an outcrop of hilly forest in the dreary steppes between the Volga and the Urals, it could have been a resort in lower Austria. Olga regaled Masha with her first impressions:

  The air was saturated, the fragrance amazing, and it was remarkably warm. Here we were met by Dr Varavka (a great name [it sounds like vorovka, thieving woman D.R.]) … Anton travels like a student; I had told him that he would have to bring everything with him. He assured me we could buy everything locally. It turns out there are no sheets or pillows here. The doctor sent over his own … The sanatorium has 40 little chalets … and a house with ten rooms, a dining room, a drawing room, billiard room, a library and a piano. From a distance the chalets look like big privies. Each has two rooms connected only by a narrow verandah, the rooms are middling, all white. You get a table, three chairs, a rather hard bed and a cupboard, the washstand is on three legs with a jug instead of a sink. Spartan, you can see. They
will send over some softer beds and I have been given a mirror. Our chalet is the end one, so that we get an excellent view of the open country; there is a birch wood right by. We get morning coffee brought to us, at 1 we go to lunch, two hot courses, at 6 a three-course dinner, and at 9 tea, milk, bread and butter. Anton was weighed and he began to drink koumiss, so far he takes it well, eats very well and sleeps a lot.2

  Dr Varavka fawned on his new patients: a famous colleague and a distinguished actress. Anton studied the twenty house rules and named the place ‘a corrective labour camp’. There was no running water, no bathhouse; the ‘park’ was scrub, the flowerbeds full of weeds. The Bashkirs farmed horses and sheep, but no fruit or vegetables. Anton laughed hysterically and would have fled, but for a landowner who offered him his sauna, and for the river Dioma, where, with Dr Varavka and a young patient, Anton sat trout-fishing. Olga lazed with a book, bathed in the stream, made herself a silk bra, or gathered strawberries and flowers in the woods. Olga’s only ordeal was a trip to buy bed-linen, which meant travelling to Ufa, which she cursed – a ‘pit: hell, suffocation and dust!’

  For the first time since childhood, Anton put on weight. Four bottles of koumiss daily made him twelve pounds heavier by mid-June. Fermented mares’ milk was easily digestible. It was also thought to raise the body’s defences against tuberculosis, encouraging the growth of benign flora at the expense of tubercular bacilli in the gut. Olga, although she found her own ten stone excessive, tried it herself. Koumiss made them drowsy, drunk and lascivious.

  Letters were Anton’s lifeline, but they soon became disagreeable. After she had been informed of her brother’s marriage Masha, feeling deceived and jealous, turned on Olga: