Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Winter was cold in Yalta. Dr Altshuller confined Anton to the house for the whole of January 1902. Olga persisted in inviting Anton to Moscow; she reported a Dr Bobrov at the Pirogov medical congress of January 1902 saying that consumptive southerners, like Anton, were best treated by northern air. Dr Altshuller insisted that Yalta was the only haven in a Russian winter. The medical congress had Dr Chekhov in mind: on January 11 the Moscow Arts Theatre gave them a matinee performance of Uncle Vania and they responded with telegrams to the author and the gift of a large reproduction of the Braz portrait that Anton loathed.

  Anton wrote to Olga of the weather, which, as she told him, she could find out from the newspapers. To Masha Anton spoke of finance: they had failed again to sell an estate. The purchaser of Küchük-Köy did not like what she had bought, and had to be repaid. (The Chekhovs had no prospect now of being paid for Melikhovo.) There were consolations in January 1902. Three Sisters was awarded the Griboedov prize; after injections of arsenic, Tolstoy recovered his health.

  Evgenia and Mariushka were too set in their ways to heed diet sheets. They fed Anton the rich food they had always cooked and, unable to digest fat, he lost all the weight that koumiss had put on. By 9 January it was –10° in Yalta. Anton felt that he had been ‘in Kamchatka for twenty-four years’. He had nowhere warm to wash. Masha left for Moscow on 12 January and broke her promise to take Evgenia: Anton could not be left on his own. He complained of boredom and loneliness, not breathlessness and emaciation. He despaired of writing the comedy he had half-promised the theatre. If he deserted literature for gardening, he wrote, he might live ten years longer, but he had to sit down after pruning one rose bush.5

  Misery worked its way into ‘The Bishop’, which was completed by 20 February 1902. In Bunin’s opinion the finest Russian story, a short work which took fifteen years to pupate, ‘The Bishop’ is Chekhov’s last analogy between the cleric and the artist. On Palm Sunday a provincial bishop, taken ill, wonders why he reduces the congregation to tears. By Easter he is dying, attended only by a grumbling old monk. His awed mother talks to him as a bishop, not a son. Only his niece shows no fear. Harassed by visitors and typhoid, he dies with a vision of himself striding the fields: a phantom resurrection after the crucifixion of disease. Years later not everyone believes that his mother had a bishop for a son. The bishop’s life is eerily like Anton’s, as are his intimations of early death and doubts about his renown; the similarities would make painful reading for those who knew Anton and his mother. ‘The Bishop’ was Chekhov’s swan song, and a progenitor of modern prose about loneliness and death, such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

  Anton had given up Misha to Suvorin’s clutches. Aleksandr, meanwhile, felt lonely and cold, and broke the ice with a letter to Anton: New Times, he said, was to him ‘a latrine’, and hostility to Chekhov in Petersburg might lose him his job. He lived all year, sometimes alone, in a freezing dacha he had built, with fancy poultry in runs he had designed, writing pot-boiler novels during his sober spells. This year Anton’s affection for his elder brother was rekindled as he himself deteriorated. In January 1902 Altshuller warned Olga:

  The process has taken a step further … he has been very badly nourished … his irresponsible excursions north are harmful and dangerous to his health … loneliness cannot fail to have a bad effect.6

  In Moscow Dr Dolgopolov, Olga complained: ‘simply swore at me for not giving up the theatre.’ The Chekhovs’ new friend, Sulerzhitsky, who was in Yalta, getting over pleurisy, reproached Olga:

  Anton is more depressed than anyone. Yesterday he had another small bleed, he is suffocating confined to the house. You must come, he is not just your husband but a great writer whose well-being is vital to everyone, to all Russian literature. The Arts Theatre must … despatch you here.7

  In letters all that winter Olga bewildered her own egotism, but her flattery of Anton sounds like Arkadina’s from The Seagull: ‘You are the Russian Maupassant!’ She made sentimental journeys, taking tea in Room No. 35 in the Hotel Dresden from which Anton had ‘abducted’ her. She promised erotic delights – ‘I kiss you hard, tastily, long and penetratingly, so all your sinews feel it’, ‘I shall bite off your ear’, ‘I shall hug you till your ribs crack’ – and demanded: ‘be rough to me and I’ll like it, then you’ll kiss and caress me.’8 She talked of loneliness in letters that told with relish of excursions and parties until dawn. She asserted ‘I must build you a life that is good, pleasant, peaceful,’ and added the rider ‘that’s my dream for old age.’

  The sisters-in-law got on harmoniously in Moscow until March 1902: living together, they could enjoy a private life without gossip. Olga had Nemirovich-Danchenko to lean on; Masha had Bunin. Masha’s letters to Anton depict Olga on Anton’s name day, carousing past dawn with a crowd of men. The Stanislavskys also hinted to Anton at her joie de vivre – Maria that she flirted with Konstantin, Stanislavsky that her neckline shocked even the roué Aumont, at whose theatre they were rehearsing.9

  Now Antonovkas visited Olga in Moscow, not Anton in Yalta. Curiosity about Olga drove Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik and Nina Korsh to risk rebuff; Maria Drozdova shocked Olga by flirting with her brother and talking of her sexual adventures. Olga could not endure either Lika Mizinova or Maria Andreeva, both of whom Masha persisted in cultivating. At Christmas Olga told Anton: ‘Lika was drunk and kept pestering me to drink with her, but I evaded her, I don’t like it.’ To Masha she portrayed Lika (whom many in the company now adored) as a man-crazed, drunken harridan. Ousting Olga’s rival, the beautiful Maria Andreeva, from the theatre was harder. To Anton Olga accused Andreeva of acting so badly as to destroy Nemirovich-Danchenko’s reputation as a playwright.’10 Olga saw him as one writer facing three merchants – Stanislavsky, Morozov and the actor Luzhsky; Nemirovich-Danchenko was a David among Philistines, ‘plucked and gnawed at on all sides’. If he left the Moscow Arts Theatre, she said, she would go too. Anton was aware that Olga was loyal to the director, not to the theatre.

  Back in Moscow, Masha set out Olga’s dilemma to Misha: ‘I can’t understand her – she’s sorry for her husband and she is lonely, at the same time she cannot bear to be away from her roles, probably she’s afraid someone might act them better.’11 Olga meanwhile signed a three-year contract. Savva Morozov, the patron, made the theatre into a shareholders’ company. The three ‘merchants’ invited twelve trusted actors to take 3000 rouble shares in the theatre. Morozov offered a subsidy of 30,000 and a building refurbished by Franz Schechtel at a nominal lease. The shareholders’ overall profit in the first year, Vishnevsky reckoned, would be 50,000 roubles. Olga Knipper took a share. The talented actor-director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the producer Sanin-Schoenberg were cut out. Within a year both left.12 Olga Knipper was as tied to the theatre as to Chekhov. Suvorin visited Moscow in early February 1902, to stage his play The Question. He visited Olga and praised her, to her face and by letter to Anton. Possibly this was Suvorin’s ploy to win back Anton’s friendship, but Olga never forgave the vilification of Suvorin’s reviewers.

  In fact Anton prized Olga’s independence. She earned more than 3000 roubles a year, and only once asked him to cover a mysterious debt. He would not ask her to break a contract. He would rather be with her in Moscow’s political ferment, than drag her to the tedious tensions of ‘this mangy Yalta’. ‘You need not weep,’ he told Olga, ‘you live in Moscow not because you want, but because we both want that.’ He complained nevertheless about her masters’ ruthlessness in depriving him of her company. Stanislavsky assured him it was more fun to be married to an absent actress than an ever-present nonactress. Nemirovich-Danchenko, however, finally succumbed to Masha’s appeals and Anton’s hints. At the end of January 1902, returning from his sister’s death bed in Nice, he promised ‘I shall definitely let Olga come and see you for a short time … I am very frightened (as a director) by her extraordinary pining for you.’ He then telegraphed, ‘I guarantee Olga will be free 21 February to 2 March.’13 Anton
called this ‘a teaspoonful of milk after forty years’ famine’.

  Notes

  1 Maria Andreeva complained to Stanislavsky of Nemirovich-Danchenko and Knipper’s ‘close relationship’.

  2 She and Evgenia each had a secret monthly 35 roubles from Suvorin, paid via Misha.

  3 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha’s letters to Misha, 1884–1904: 6 Oct. 1901.

  4 See A. Goldenveizer, Vstrecha s Chekhovym in Teatral’naia zhizn’, 1960, 2, 18.

  5 Illness was all around. Anton was a governor of Yalta’s sanatorium, gruesomely named Yavuzlar (The Inexorable Ones) for indigent consumptives.

  6 See V vospominaniiakh, 698.

  7 See PSSP, 10, 452.

  8 Cut from Perepiska, 1934: see OR, 331 76 16–18: Olga’s letters to Anton, Dec. 1901–Jan. 1902.

  9 See PSSP, 10, 447, 459.

  10 Cut from Perepiska, 1934: see OR, 331 76 17: Olga’s letters to Anton, 1–16 Jan. 1902.

  11 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha’s letters to Misha, 1884–1904: 21 Jan. 1902.

  12 Morozov begged Anton to take a share too; he secured Anton’s consent by undertaking to recover as investment the 5000 roubles that was owed by Konshin for Melikhovo.

  13 See PSSP, 10, 454, 462.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Conjugal Ills

  February–June 1902

  ON FRIDAY 22 FEBRUARY 1902, Olga and Anton embraced after four months apart. They spent five days in seclusion. ‘The Bishop’ was sent to Petersburg. No visitors came; correspondence stopped. Masha was in Moscow. Their week together was clouded twice. On Tuesday Olga bled: she presumed she would not conceive. Parting on Thursday was muted: Anton did not kiss her goodbye as she left for the dash over the mountains. ‘You were coming outside,’ she wrote to him, ‘but the wind stopped you, and I … only realized what had happened when the driver had moved off.’ Olga had a roast duck and a bottle of wine to fortify her until she reached Simferopol.

  At the station there were no Pullman cars, so Olga took an ordinary train. She suddenly fell ill: ‘I couldn’t get to the door of the ladies’, I collapsed and couldn’t get up, my arms and legs wouldn’t obey me, I broke out in a cold sweat. I thought I had food poisoning.’ On the train Olga confided in a sympathetic fellow-traveller, who told her she must be pregnant. She doubted it. In Moscow she felt little better. She changed trains and proceeded straight to Petersburg, where the theatre performed in Lent. She had lost weight, her head ached and she dosed herself with quinine. Another actress gave her stimulants. She took painkillers and bandaged her head. By 9 March she was more her old self, eating grouse. Anton stopped worrying. He was cross with her: she would not give him an address.

  During their reunion, Anton had received a telegram: Gorky, barely out of prison, had been elected to the Academy of Sciences, whose president was a cousin of the Tsar. In a final round he had won the necessary majority, nine white to three black balls. Gorky was unexpectedly pleased. Then the government and Tsar annulled the election. The radical Korolenko immediately announced his resignation, and pressed Chekhov to resign. Anton pondered. His sympathies were radical, but like Tolstoy he distrusted political gestures.1

  Marital life left Anton with a coughing fit that went on for days and nights, but pleasant memories. The day that Olga left, four Antonovkas re-emerged – the headmistress Varvara Kharkeevich, her sister-in-law Manefa, Sophie Beaunier and Dr Sredin’s wife, Sofia. Anton told Olga: ‘They all have an identical little smile: “we didn’t want to disturb you!” As if we’d spent five days sitting naked and doing nothing but make love.’

  In Petersburg that March Olga acted almost every night. New Times now praised her, but the reviewer was Misha Chekhov, her brother-in-law, and she was embarrassed. The Petersburg Newspaper attacked Nemirovich-Danchenko’s play mercilessly as ‘a waste of effort, dead meat’. The author leant on Olga for moral support, while she too needed comfort. Suvorin came to tempt Olga: 1000 roubles a month to join his theatre. There were also painful encounters. Lika Mizinova was in Petersburg, following the director Sanin-Schoenberg who, driven out of the Moscow Arts Theatre, now worked for the Aleksandrinsky theatre; Lika and he were betrothed. Their happiness upset Olga. Anton calmed her down:

  Why so sour? I’ve known Lika for a long time and, whatever else, she’s a good, clever and decent girl. She’ll be unhappy with Sanin, she won’t love him and above all won’t get on with his sister and probably in a year will have a big fat baby and in eighteen months start being unfaithful.

  Anton’s prophecy, wrong on all counts, did not reconcile Olga to her rival.

  Olga also disliked Misha and his wife, her namesake – ‘Where did he get a wife like that from?’2 She dined with them, but could not stop his fawning reviews. Anton washed his hands: ‘He loves Suvorin and rates Burenin highly. Let him write what he likes.’ Masha lied to Olga. ‘You made a good impression on him, he liked you.’3 In fact Misha had let his sister know of his true feelings:

  I saw In Dreams on the office ticket and our sister-in-law arranged Three Sisters … Every time we met, the sister-in-law asked if I’d seen one thing or another? I answer no. She knew full well that I had no ticket, but I simply can’t ask her to get me one … One evening O. visited me! She brought the children sweets … as though she were duty-bound to visit us, because we are damned relatives who’ll take offence if not … [Late one evening] I went to see Lika (for the fifth time) and of course she was out. I passed by O.’s lodgings, knocked. ‘Come in!’ I did. And, it seemed, at a bad time. Nemirovich-Danchenko was with her, they were having tea and jam. I had interrupted a conversation. I didn’t know what to do with myself. O. apparently did not know what to do with me.4

  On this occasion Nemirovich-Danchenko and Olga had attacked Misha as Suvorin’s hack (even though they were off to see the old man themselves). Offended, Misha left.5

  On 31 March 1902, Olga acted Gorky’s Petty Bourgeois, a play in which she had to run up and down stairs. Back in the wings she collapsed in agony, and surgeons were sent for. Professor Jakobson and Dr Ott chloroformed their patient and operated at midnight. Olga woke in the morning, badly shocked; in pencil she scrawled a note to Anton, but did not post it for four days:

  I left Yalta with hoping to present you with a little Pamfil, but I didn’t realize, I kept thinking it was gut trouble, I didn’t realize I was pregnant, much though I wanted to be … Ott and the other one decided on a curettage and confirmed that it was an embryo of 1½ months. You can imagine how upset I was. I’ve never been in the hands of gynæcologists before.6

  Nobody telegraphed Anton, for fear that the news would bring him to Petersburg in spite of the winter cold, but, because Olga’s daily letters had stopped, Anton began to worry. Olga wrote on 2 April from the Obstetrical clinic: she said she was sitting up and Stanislavsky was taking her back to her lodgings; the season was over, and she hoped to come to Yalta on Easter Saturday.

  If this had been just an early miscarriage, Olga could have travelled. Anton, a good gynæcologist and obstetrician, must have been perplexed: how could Olga have been six weeks pregnant, when she had only spent seven nights with him, five weeks previously, at the end of her cycle? Why did two of Petersburg’s most distinguished surgeons operate in the middle of the night for an early miscarriage? Nemirovich-Danchenko and his wife set off for Yalta on 6 April to put Anton’s mind at rest. Stanislavsky’s telegrams swore that there was no danger. Olga gave other clues: ‘pains in the left side of my belly, bad pains from an inflamed ovary and maybe that’s why I miscarried … I still have an inflamed left ovary. My poor belly is swollen and hurts all over.’7 She told Masha: ‘Don’t tell Anton! the pains are horrible and I am still suffering.’8 On Easter Sunday she sat up; she began daily enemas and was allowed to Yalta only with a midwife. She grudged the 3 roubles a day. She told Anton she would sleep in the drawing room, ‘I do have various female instruments and need my own room. It’s embarrassing to keep these vile things where a great writer can see them.’ O
n 14 April, a week after Easter, Olga was carried on a stretcher from the boat and taken straight to bed in Autka. Nilus, who was painting Anton’s portrait, packed up his equipment and fled. Anton and Masha became Olga’s doctor and nurse.

  Anton never talked of his doubts about the diagnosis and operation on Olga. His behaviour was caring, but distant. Three months later he wrote to Wilhelm Jakobson and received a telegram from the surgeon in reply: ‘No suspicions, remains of egg removed, inflammation of lining.’ Bleeding in February, illness throughout March, Olga’s collapse and unspeakable ovarian pain, the midnight operation, the swollen belly, followed by peritonitis, indicated, however, not so much miscarriage and curettage as an ectopic pregnancy, laparotomy and infection.9 Only recently had Petersburg surgeons first dared remove an embryo in a Fallopian tube: abdominal surgery was risky in 1902 and ectopic pregnancies were fatal. Anton would have known that an ectopic pregnancy erupts between eight and twelve weeks from conception. If this was what had happened to Olga, conception must have taken place when she and Anton had been 800 miles apart.