Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  You managed to trap my brother! Suppose you’re like Natasha in Three Sisters! I’ll strangle you with my own hands. I shan’t bite your throat, just strangle you. You know I love you and must have got strongly attached to you in the last two years. How odd that you’re a Chekhov.3

  The whole family was in turmoil. Vania went to Petersburg to tell Misha of the marriage, and Misha closed ranks with Masha against the intruder. By 8 June Vania was in Yalta, trying to reconcile Masha and Evgenia to what had happened. On 6 June Masha wrote bitterly to Bunin:

  Dear Ivan, My mood is suicidal, I sense the pointlessness of my existence. The reason is my brother’s marriage … why did Olga need all this disturbance for a sick man … I’m afraid my relations with Knipschitz will change … dear Bouquichon, find me a rich generous groom.4

  It took Olga a week to seek a reconciliation: she invited Masha to join their honeymoon. Masha dithered, then declined. She doubted if she and Olga could live together even in Moscow, as they planned: she would sell her flat and live with a family. ‘Anton keeps writing everything will stay the same,’ Masha wrote to Bunin, ‘like hell it will, I want the reality, not a pretence.’ Masha feared, as did Dr Altshuller, that Olga would lure Anton to live in Moscow and wreck his health. Evgenia, Masha told Misha, ‘dislikes Antosha’s spouse and Olga knows that.’ On 20 June Olga wrote to Evgenia: ‘I thought I’d explain everything … when we met … I know how you love Anton, so we’ve tried to make everything good and friendly at home [the Moscow flat], so that Anton will feel good among his womenfolk.’5 Others were disturbed by Anton’s marriage. Maria Drozdova wrote from Yalta to tell him of her feelings at the news:

  I was painting at the time and all my brushes and palette flew to hell. Right to the last minute I didn’t lose hope of marrying you myself. I thought the others were just jokes, while God would give me happiness for my modesty. How I hate Olga, my jealousy is frantic, I can’t bear to see you, I hate her and you too, always and for ever.6

  Suvorin, hurt not to have been even informed of the marriage, wrote to Misha:

  Anton has astounded me. Where is he now? I mean, what is his address? His getting married was the last thing I thought would happen after last November when I met him … It’s fine if he knows what he needs. But suppose he doesn’t! It’s a lottery.7

  Others’ congratulations were lukewarm: Professor Korotniov talked of the Rubicon; Sobolevsky of ‘the other shore so rarely attainable to people like me and you’. Bunin expressed polite amazement.

  Anton could not bear to remain at Aksionovo for the two months prescribed. After one month he was determined to leave. Worry about what was happening at Yalta and irritation with his tedious fellow patients drove him away. In vain Dr Varavka promised health and offered improvements; on 1 July 1901 Anton signed the towel that Dr Varavka kept for distinguished patients, to have the signatures embroidered later, and abandoned Aksionovo. He was in such a hurry that he left his passport behind. On 6 July the Chekhovs arrived back in Yalta. ‘I’m now asking for a divorce,’ Anton wrote to Bunin, inviting him to join them at Autka.

  Masha felt depressed by the new status quo. She complained to Misha:

  I am a nothing. I’m neither an artist nor a teacher, but I think I am working hard to build someone else’s nest … My relations with my sister-in-law are still pretty bad … Mother has turned out better, she is being handled well and has calmed down. My mood is nasty, I can’t adapt to this new life at all, I pine, I cry a lot and I have to hide it all, and I don’t always succeed … In Moscow there is a lot of gossip about me, everybody is sorry for me and there are rumours that I’ve run away … Anton is poorly, the koumiss didn’t do him much good.8

  Anton coughed, bled and fretted. Dr Varavka asked him to send a portrait of himself for the chalet where he had stayed. A student doctor at Aksionovo promised good cuisine, fountains, running water, a conservatory and fresh vegetables for next year,9 but Anton had finished with koumiss. On 3 August 1901, he drew up a will and had it witnessed. Addressed to Masha, it was entrusted to Olga:

  I leave you for your lifespan my Yalta house, the money and the income from my plays; my wife is to have the cottage in Gurzuf and 5000 roubles. You can sell the real estate if you wish.

  A few thousand roubles went to his brothers; the residue to Taganrog’s schools. The will ended: ‘Help the poor. Look after mother. All of you live in peace.’

  Anton’s inspiration had run dry; now his only income came from the theatres. His plight worried Gorky and his editor Piatnitsky, who asked to see Adolf Marx’s contract. By suing or shaming Marx they thought they might be able to beak the contract that offered Anton next to nothing for a life’s work, but made Marx a fortune. Anton, horrified at the thought of reneging on his agreement, demurred, but sent copies of the contract for Gorky’s lawyers. Gorky boasted:

  How I’d love to tear Sergeenko’s famous block off for dragging you into this mess. And I’d bash Marx on his bald patch too … We’ll pawn our wives and children, but we’ll tear Chekhov out of Marx’s thrall.10

  Anton read the proofs for Marx’s final volumes: revising later work was easier than the earlier work in which he found so many imperfections. He busied himself with the problems of others. His cousin Aleksei Dolzhenko asked for 800 roubles to build a cottage: Anton arranged for Olga to hand the money over in Moscow, warning her twice to be polite and gentle to her poor relation. In Taganrog Gavriil Selivanov, after twenty years’ silence, was again causing trouble: he threatened to pull down Uncle Mitrofan’s sheds unless the Chekhovs ceded terrain. Georgi sought Anton’s advice. Olga Vasilieva still wanted help to convert her wealth into a clinic. A Jewish boy needed a letter of support to get into school at Yalta.

  Olga felt unwanted. On 20 August 1901, after just six weeks, she left Autka, alone, for Moscow and the theatre. Evgenia refused to bless her as she stepped into the carriage. Anton sailed with her to the railhead. Weeping in the train, Olga wrote to Masha. She posted the letter in Kharkov:

  Do you feel better now I’m gone? You know, I want to shake off all our misunderstandings in the summer months like a vile nightmare … We do love each other.

  Nobody met Olga in Moscow. She sought out a five-room apartment, a wooden house in a courtyard, for herself and – she hoped – Masha. Her unease persisted. She asked Anton:

  In your house nobody ever mentions me, do they? I shall always stand between you and her. And I fancy that she will never get used to me as your wife, and will thus turn you off me. I am avoided like a sore.11

  Anton deplored her jealousy: ‘What rubbish! Just be silent for a year … all life’s comforts are to be found in nonresistance for the time being.’ In Yalta Masha resigned herself to her new situation, telling Misha on 30 August:

  Recently Antosha has been so gentle and kind that I wouldn’t have the strength to abandon him, anyway his health is no better. The sister-in-law has rented a flat in Moscow where I shall live and Antosha will come for a time … bad though I feel, I still want to stay with him.

  The young poet Lazarevsky, who had become a ‘Person from Porlock’ in the Autka house, recorded Masha as ‘the first and last of old maids, more likeable than the most beautiful ladies … a charming, suffering face’. On 31 August 1901 Masha left for Moscow; she stayed first with the Knippers and then with the Konovitsers until the new quarters were ready. Sharing was bearable, for Masha spent days at school, Olga evenings at the theatre, and servants, notably Masha Shakina who became pregnant every year, ran the household. Olga’s passport listed her as the wife of a Yalta doctor. She bore her colleagues’ teasing that Chekhov’s latest play was Two Sisters, as the author had taken one (Masha, played by Olga) away for himself.

  The day he was left alone with his mother, Anton took the draft of a new story, ‘The Bishop’, out of his suitcase and wrote. He would join Olga while Moscow was still warm, in mid September. Now that he was married, few Antonovkas bothered to call. Anton renounced old dalliances and gave Lazarevsky a
rude message for Avilova.12 A Polish girl, another Masha, was hired to cook; Arseni the gardener resumed work; the tame crane trumpeted with delight. Finally Ivan Bunin arrived on 5 September. Finding Anton ‘ill and lonely’, he visited daily; his tact and wit restored Anton’s spirits. Nearby, at Gaspra, Tolstoy was recuperating from a nearly fatal attack of pneumonia. Anton’s concern at this time was for Tolstoy’s health, not his own. (The government forbad bulletins, and stationed a priest outside the house in Gaspra, to announce his deathbed recantation of heresy.) If Tolstoy died, Anton believed, Russian literature would lose its moral bulwark. His attendants, when Anton visited, found Chekhov ‘aged, coughing all the time, talking little’, but apparently happy to be without his sister and his wife.

  Anton still had Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko as a rival, but Anton’s and Olga’s marriage made it possible to ignore his role in Olga’s life. Anna Knipper, Olga’s mother, now lifted her ban on the Moscow Arts Theatre director’s visits. ‘Your mama has made up with Nemirovich-Danchenko? So she no longer fears for her daughter?’ Anton asked. Olga, for her part, dismissed Anton’s former girlfriends as ruthlessly as she had once courted them.13 Lika Mizinova was a marked woman. On 25 August 1901 she presented herself at the Moscow Arts Theatre for public entrance tests. Lika was told to read Elena in Uncle Vania, a role which Olga had made her own. Unabashed, Olga told Anton how she and Nemirovich-Danchenko had humiliated Lika:

  Lika Mizinova tried to imitate me, a dirty trick, but everything she read was complete rubbish (just between ourselves) and I was sorry for her, frankly. We rejected her unanimously. Sanin suggested she open a hat shop. Tell Masha about Lika. Perhaps she can have a non-speaking part.

  After this rebuff Masha, Vania and Misha made a point of befriending Lika, while the theatre company found her a role as an unofficial, unpaid social secretary.

  When Olga wanted to install her cat Martin in the new flat, Anton forbade her: ‘I am afraid of cats … Get a dog instead.’ He was furious with Olga’s refusal to give her new address when she moved apartments – she preferred to receive her letters at the theatre – and stopped replying to her, but he had met a woman with willpower to match his own. She remonstrated with telegrams. To build up his health for renewed conjugal life, he drank bottles of kefir (Tatar fermented milk); Dr Altshuller also made him massage himself with eucalyptus oil and turpentine.

  On 17 September, after ignoring Olga’s birthday on the 9th, Anton arrived in Moscow for the Arts Theatre’s new season.

  Notes

  1 Anna Chokhova, of whom Olga knew only dimly, had brought her consumptive son.

  2 See OR, 331 77 15: Olga’s letters to Masha, 1901: 2 June 1901.

  3 Partly cut in Knipper-Chekhova, 1972; see OR, 331 105 3: Masha’s letters to Olga, 1901.

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

  5 See OR, 331 77 10: Olga’s letters to Evgenia Chekhova, 1900–2.

  6 See OR, 331 42 46b: Maria Drozdova’s letters to Anton, 1900–4.

  7 See OR, 331 73: A. S. Suvorin’s letters to Misha 1890–1902: 10 June 1901.

  8 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha’s letters to Misha, 1884–1904: 11 Aug. 1901.

  9 See OR, 331 38 8: Dr Varavka’s letters to Anton, 1901; 331 36 54: A. Bernshtein’s, 1901–3.

  10 Quoted in PSSP, 10, 322.

  11 Cut in Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 12: Olga’s letters to Masha, August 1901: 30 Aug.

  12 If Lazarevsky is telling the truth, this belies the love letter that Avilova claims Anton wrote her on his wedding day.

  13 Olga Vasilieva seemed to offer no threat: Knipper’s mother was giving her singing lessons.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  When Doctors Disagree

  October 1901–February 1902

  FOR THREE SEASONS in a row the Moscow Arts Theatre had put on a Chekhov play that was new to the Moscow public. For October 1901 Anton had given them nothing. Three Sisters was still a magnet; it had played for only half of last season. They also had Gorky’s first play, The Petty Bourgeois, which promised to cause a scandal. They opened with Ibsen’s Wild Duck, but the public and critics agreed with Chekhov: ‘tired, boring and weak’. Stanislavsky was shattered by a fire that had burnt down a family factory, and then he was struck down with tonsillitis: his performances let the theatre down. Then Nemirovich-Danchenko made the mistake of staging his own introspective play In Dreams. The reviewers slated the play, Olga had no confidence in her part in it, and she was worried by Nemirovich-Danchenko’s depression.1 After three rehearsals, Stanislavsky cancelled a revised production of Ivanov. Anton was pressed for a new play. At rehearsals of Three Sisters, he hindered more than he helped, but the author’s presence at performances of this play and of Uncle Vania filled the house: Anton earned some 8000 roubles that season (and another 1000 roubles from productions all over Russia).

  Moscow was still warm enough for his lungs. Petersburg, where he planned to go, was not. Aleksandr came to Moscow to talk to Masha and Anton. Though he stayed the night, he never met Olga. He told Misha that Anton looked ‘pretty bad’. Aleksandr, on his way to the Caucasus for New Times, was sober. He hid his drinking until he was far away. Suvorin sent Ezhov to Moscow. Ezhov twice met the man who had, he felt, libelled him in Three Sisters; ‘a shadow of the old Chekhov,’ he told Suvorin. The weather grew colder. Olga used friends as sitters while Anton was confined indoors. Anton left the house only to help Olga Vasilieva. At nineteen she was adopting a second orphan girl, and asked Anton to come to her solicitor’s to witness her will.

  Masha was rarely at home. She taught at a school for 40 roubles a month.2 She went with Aleksandr Khotiaintseva to an art studio, where they were painting Abram Sinani for his bereaved parents. She sold a painting. In the evenings she received girlfriends whom Anton no longer met, while Olga’s relatives kept Anton company. Anton liked Olga’s Uncle Sasha, another Aleksandr in name and character, with his womanizing, drinking, and public outrages. Uncle Karl the doctor and Olga’s brothers, the lawyer Volodia and the engineer Konstantin, left Anton cold. Masha told Misha: ‘The worst thing about Antosha’s marriage is his wife’s numerous bourgeois relatives who have to be taken into account.’3

  In Yalta, Evgenia moaned, begging to be fetched to Moscow. Anna told her she must wait until he got back, and Masha placated her by saying that the apartment Olga had chosen had a smelly lavatory, rats decomposing beneath the floorboards and walls too thin for privacy. If Evgenia agreed to stay, Masha would bring her to Moscow in the New Year. Anton guaranteed this journey and Evgenia calmed down.

  It was cold, and by mid October Anton knew he had to leave Moscow. To Miroliubov, the editor of Everybody’s Magazine, Anton confided: ‘My wife is crying, and I forbid her to leave the theatre. In a word, commotion.’ Vania told a friend that Anton would not let Olga quit, telling her that life ‘without work was impossible.’ In the end Olga let him go alone. She sent Evgenia a complicated and patronizing list of instructions which confused and insulted her, even though Olga’s intention was to provide Anton with a diet that was easily digested as well as nourishing:

  Here he has been eating grouse, turkey, partridge, poussin; he eats salt beef, pork chops, but not often. He likes tongue, cook him kidney, liver, fry mushrooms in sour cream. Make fish soup, but give him rissoles very sparingly. And please give him a sweet or fruit pastille, or get chocolate from Vernet’s. Find fresh eggs for his breakfast.

  On 28 October Anton travelled from the railhead to Yalta, frozen from the six-hour coach ride over the mountain. He brought with him an ox tongue that had gone off in the heat of the railway carriage and yet another clock, broken on the journey. Intact were dried and salted mushrooms, slippers for Evgenia and felt boots for the ancient Mariushka. A passionate letter from Olga was following him: ‘Antonka, how much I want to have a little half-German, to use your phrase “a half-German which would distract you and fill your life”. There is confusion and struggle inside me.’ Olga reproached Anton
for not begetting a child as soon as they married; yet the longing for a child was his. A fortnight later she reported the arrival of her period: ‘Once again we shan’t have a little half-German … why do you think that this little half German will fill my life?’ Masha and Olga moved again to a bright new flat, in the same building as Vishnevsky, close to the Sandunov baths, with central heating and electric lighting. (The servant girl’s baby daughter, Anna, was sent to a baby farm in the country and was not heard of again.) Olga’s letters regaled Chekhov with what she had eaten and drunk; Masha’s with the absurdities of theatre life.

  Until the New Year Anton led a monotonous life in Autka, working desultorily at ‘The Bishop’. His health deteriorated. After Dr Altshuller examined him on 8 December 1901 he suffered a hæmorrhage and began to take creosote. Diarrhœa and hæmorrhoids followed. Altshuller decided to abandon his trip in the New Year to the Pirogov congress in Moscow. At Christmas Dr Shchurovsky came to the Crimea to Tolstoy’s bedside. Dr Altshuller and he compared notes. Shchurovsky found Anton’s state ‘serious’.4 Altshuller used more drastic remedies: large compresses, some with cantharides (Spanish fly) to irritate the tissues and disperse pleurisy. There were few diversions. The pianist Samuelson came and played Chopin’s C-major nocturne for Anton. Gorky, after illegally stopping in Moscow for an ovation at the Moscow Arts Theatre, kept Anton company. (When he visited, a gendarme patrolled outside.) A wild crane broke off its flight south to join the surviving tame crane in Anton’s garden and kitchen. Visitors filled Anton’s study with smoke and made him miss meals. Masha did not come until 18 December, followed by Bunin. Anton begged Olga to secure leave from the theatre for Christmas. How else could they conceive a child? She offered a few days, perhaps in Sevastopol to save travelling, but she did not come, blaming her director for keeping her in Moscow. Anton’s colleagues, Dr Chlenov and Dr Korobov, she said, claimed that Moscow could do him no harm. On Christmas Day 1901 Olga begged Masha for affection; she felt ‘very lonely and utterly abandoned’. The next day she had Masha’s report that Anton was ‘iller than we thought’ and promised to rush to Yalta, with or without leave: ‘I know I must give up my personal life … but it’s hard to do it straight away.’ Still she did not come. In Moscow, as winter deepened, Olga’s thoughts turned to babies. On Anton’s forty-second name-day, 17 January 1902, she told Anton: ‘I began to squawk like a baby, I can. Everyone was alarmed and began telling people that a baby Chekhov has been born and congratulating me. God grant they are prophetic.’ A week later there was a wild party in the theatre from midnight until morning. The actors slid down waxed boards; the actor Kachalov fought a boxing match in drag – pink tricot and high heels; Chaliapin sent for beer and sang gypsy songs; Masha laughed hysterically; everyone exchanged joke presents. ‘I had a baby in nappies: Dr Grinevsky broke its head off,’ Olga reported. This was horribly prophetic.