Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Has Strauch said you can have children? Now, or later? Oh my darling, time is passing! When our baby is 18 months old I shall probably be bald, grey and toothless.

  Anton wrote more intimately: ‘The longer I lived with you, the deeper and broader my love would be.’ He asked her where Nemirovich-Danchenko’s wife was, and Olga dismayed him by telling him that she, Olga, not ‘Kitten’, was nursing Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was prostrate with an ear abscess.

  Anton totally rewrote his farcical monologue On the Harm of Tobacco, and sent it to Adolf Marx. Anton told Stanislavsky that this was all he had the energy for. Evgenia and Polia, the kitchen maid, set off for Moscow ahead of him. From Sevastopol Evgenia took the fourth-class freight and passenger train; she felt trapped in an express, and preferred trains that lingered at every town on the route. Evgenia stayed in Moscow for four days, then set off for Petersburg, travelling third-class in order to sit with Polia (servants were banned from first-class compartments). At long last she would see her four Petersburg grandchildren.

  In Yalta the dogs and the cranes were sated, but Anton starved, revolted by the dead flies floating in old Mariushka’s borshch and coffee. Anton sent instructions for his own reception in Moscow. Olga was to buy cod liver oil, beech creosote, export beer. She promised to meet him with a fur coat, ‘a warm bed and a few other things too.’ On 14 October he arrived at the ‘convent’ where Olga, Masha and their tenant, a piano teacher, lived. He brought with him the first sketches of his valedictory story, ‘The Bride’.

  Notes

  1 See V vospominaniakh, 583–96.

  2 See OR, 331 77 10: Olga’s letters to Evgenia Chekhova, 1900–2: 24 June 1902.

  3 See Harvey Pitcher, Lily: An Anglo-Russian Romance, Cromer, 1987; see OR, 331 59 2: Lily Glassby’s letters to Anton, 1902.

  4 See OR, 429 3 12: Masha’s letters to Bunin, 1901–3: 5 Aug. 1902.

  5 See OR, 331 105 4: Masha’s letters to Olga, 1902: 17 Aug.

  6 See OR, 331 77 16: Olga’s letters to Masha, 1902: 24 Aug. 1902.

  7 See Perepiska, 1936, 369–71.

  8 Only Chekhov, Korolenko and a mathematician, Markov, resigned over Gorky.

  EIGHTY

  ‘The Bride’

  October 1902–April 1903

  ON ARRIVAL Anton wrote a note to summon Ivan Bunin, who visited. What transpired, we do not know, but almost certainly Anton was again intervening in Masha’s personal life, perhaps at her request. She was seven years older than Bunin, not a noblewoman, and Bunin was unlikely to offer her marriage. Masha was shocked by the outcome of this meeting. The next day she left to stay with their mother in Aleksandr’s freezing quarters in Petersburg. She returned too ill to receive anyone. Anton made a joke of his intervention: he sent Bunin a photograph of a man inscribed with a notorious decadent verse ‘Cover your pale legs’. Bunin packed to go abroad. Masha’s letters to him in November 1902 are downcast: ‘Darling Bouquichon, What’s happened? Are you well? You’ve vanished and God knows what I’m to think! I’ve been very ill … Is it a new love affair? Your Amarantha.’ They would, however, meet again in December, when Anton withdrew to Yalta, and their involvement would flicker on and off for some years.

  Chekhov summoned a masseur to ease the pains that were plaguing his limbs: TB was entering his spine. Suvorin came from Petersburg to supervise the Moscow staging of The Question, his play on sex before marriage. He called on Anton, but neither enjoyed the meeting. Adolf Marx dashed Anton’s hopes of renegotiating the agreement. He brought out a cheap reprint of all Chekhov’s works as a bonus for subscribers to The Cornfield, so the market was flooded. No publisher would now help Anton break free. Gorky and Piatnitsky’s efforts had been in vain. Even so Anton was to tell Olga a year later that he did not feel cheated by Marx:

  I hadn’t a brass penny then, I owed Suvorin, I was being published in a really vile way, too, and above all, I was about to die and wanted to put my affairs in some sort of order.

  Meanwhile Anton’s main source of income was under threat, for deep splits rent the Moscow Arts Theatre. The theatre could survive Vsevolod Meyerhold, too magnetic a rival for Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, going to Kherson on the Black Sea,1 but Sanin’s departure did harm. He took Stanislavsky’s methods to Petersburg, where The Seagull was a success in the Aleksandrinsky theatre. Sazonova’s diary on 15 November conceded, ‘If they meant to show how boring rural life is, they succeeded fully’.

  Anton announced to Miroliubov, the editor of Everybody’s Magazine, that his new story was ‘The Bride’. Submitting to Olga’s regime, he tinkered with the work, and wrote a few letters. He complained: ‘I’m not allowed out anywhere, I’m kept at home, they fear my catching a chill.’ In six weeks, however, he and Olga had repaired their relationship: ‘We had no unpleasant minutes,’ Anton recalled. On 27 November, driven out of Moscow by his incessant cough, he left for Yalta with the faint hope of a child. Olga saw him off at the station, and took home his fur coat and boots. At the flat a dachshund was waiting for her. Brom’s and Quinine’s offspring lived in Petersburg; this dog came from another line. Olga called him Schnap.

  Anton returned to five months of solitude. Snow was falling in Italy and, because of an outbreak of plague in the Mediterranean, Odessa was a quarantine port, and travel to and from Europe by sea was restricted. Anton despaired of wintering abroad, even though the new season promised an income of 3000 roubles from Petersburg performances alone. He now had assistance from cousin Georgi, who ran the Russian Steamship Company offices in Yalta. Anton liked Georgi, but feared the influx of Georgi’s kin from Taganrog. In Autka, for conversation, he had the pious cant of Arseni, the cranes, who lived with Mariushka in the kitchen, and two mongrel dogs, one-eyed Tuzik and stupid Kashtanka. By early December he was begging Suvorin to visit him.2 On 9 December Olga wrote to tell him:

  Unwanted visitors [menstruation] have arrived and hopes for a little otter cub have collapsed. My darling Anton, will I really not have children?! This is awful. The doctors must have been lying to console me.3

  Anton immediately consoled her:

  Dog, you’ll definitely have children, that’s what the doctors say. All you need is to be fully recovered. Everything is intact and in working order, rest assured, all you lack is a husband living with you all year round.

  A week later, he insisted that he was not hiding from her anything about her health. Olga revived and The Lower Depths triumphed, despite Stanislavsky’s disdain for its sordid setting and crude socialist rhetoric. Dr Chlenov, the venereologist, took Olga to see Moscow’s whores and give her role authenticity. Olga’s brother Volodia married and at the wedding she ate, drank, danced and sang, while the bride’s mother danced a cancan. She had apparently stopped pining for the ‘little half-German who would rake through your wardrobe and smear my ink over the desk’.

  Passions ran high in the theatre. Hardly had they toasted the new season with dinner at Testov’s and a telegram to Yalta, hardly had Vishnevsky declared that they needed a noisy success, than they celebrated the triumphant première of The Lower Depths with supper, cognac and gypsy songs at the Ermitage. Gorky, who had regaled everyone with accounts of his lovelife, and brought a bedraggled example, left early. For no reason that anyone could recall a drunken row burst out, and Savva Morozov was beaten up.

  After Berlin Gorky’s play took Moscow by storm. It moved the theatre’s political profile sharply to the left: some supporters were repelled. The Lower Depths made money: Vishnevsky, the theatre’s accountant, reported 75,000 roubles banked by the New Year, and actors were given a pay rise. Olga would now receive 3600 a year, and was disappointed only because her enemy Maria Andreeva was paid the same. Olga was less annoyed by disorder in the theatre than by the bedbugs and mice that infested their flat whose lease would expire in March 1903. She was feeling well now and longed for quarters well away from Vishnevsky, whom she found a bore and a noisy eater.

  A week before Christmas 1902, Masha arrived in Yalta to lo
ok after Anton. His mood was lachrymose. He expressed a fondness for a poem by his acolyte Fiodorov: it ends ‘A barrel-organ sings outside. My window is open … I thought of you and was sad. And you, you are so far.’ Masha told Olga on 20 December:

  Altshuller said that he has listened to Anton’s chest and found a deterioration which he blames on his long stay in Moscow. He had a temperature, hæmorrhage and constant coughing. Altshuller points out that one of us must be with him because he plays up with mother … Altshuller is serious and does not mince his words.

  Gorky, freed from police surveillance, had been sent by his wife and doctor to rest in Yalta: he too was coughing blood. The next day he and three doctors turned up at Anton’s house. One was Dr Sredin, who claimed (prematurely, for nephritis was to fell him) to be recovering from TB even more advanced than Anton’s. Anton removed the compress that Altshuller had put on his chest. He felt so much better, he assured Olga, that he was going to the dentist. The dentist, Ostrovsky, was a barbarian – ‘dirty hands, instruments not sterilized’ – and deserted Anton in mid operation for his duties in the Jewish cemetery. In any case, by Christmas Anton had fever, aching limbs, insomnia, coughing and pleurisy. Altshuller diagnosed flu. Masha nursed him, constantly cooking, providing a breakfast of five soft-boiled eggs, two glasses of cod-liver oil and two tumblers of milk. She left Yalta for Moscow on 12 January. Anton relapsed. The Odessa News announced that ‘Chekhov has fully recovered from his chest disease.’

  Olga demanded bulletins by telegram, accusing Anton of hiding his illness. She was fed up with living apart, and embarrassed to be an absent wife. She did not, however, come to see him as the doctor asked. ‘I can’t believe Altshuller on his own,’ she told Anton 11 February, ‘he is not that expert.’ She sketched out a life: they would buy a properly heated dacha near Moscow where Anton could see her often. From mid January, she went on expeditions with colleagues, inspecting country houses where a consumptive might survive a Moscow winter.

  For his forty-third name-day Olga gave Anton mints, a large leather wallet, a tie, a case of beer, and sweets. Travellers brought these presents to Yalta. Anton became irritable. The beer had frozen in the freight car and exploded; the mints were from the wrong shop and had no taste; the wallet was too big for banknotes; the tie was too long. He complained to Masha that nobody came to his name day and that all her presents were useless too. (He was delighted, however, with bronze piglets from Olga’s Uncle Sasha and ivory elephants from Kuprin.) Olga treated him like a petulant child. She sent Shapovalov, the architect, with new mints. On 1 February Anton listed what he really wanted: chocolates, herrings, bismuth, toothpicks and English creosote. Suvorin, equally depressed, wanted contact again, but Anton was too wan to maintain the friendship, even though it had sparked into life the previous autumn. Olga Kundasova begged Anton, in five close-written pages, to forgive the old man his political crimes: ‘Don’t be so imperturbably calm and write to him … there are many things it is best to forget.’ Anton wrote, but brusquely. Suvorin, now that the Dauphin ‘was ruining his life’, was no longer a stimulating correspondent.

  Flotsam from Anton’s past surfaced in Moscow. The actor Arbenin, who had married Glafira Panova, told Olga that Anton had pursued Glafira in Odessa fourteen years before. Anton vehemently denied seducing her. Vera Komissarzhevskaia confronted Olga in Moscow. She wanted to have the rights to stage Anton’s new play, and warned him, ‘You seem to have forgotten my existence, I exist all right, and how.’ ‘If the actress bothers you,’ Olga told Anton on 3 February, ‘be sure I shall wallop her. I think she’s mentally ill.’4 A crone, the sister of the dramatist and inventor Pushkariov, whom Anton had known in his student days, called on Olga with her comedy set in Bulgaria: Pushkariova wanted the Chekhovs to have it staged. As she was, through Aleksandr and Natalia, a remote sister-in-law, Olga was polite. To Anton she was sarcastic:

  She has eyes like olives, poetic curls and a single tooth which hangs on her soft lip, crimson and tasty. You have good taste … You propose when you come to Moscow to sleep three in a bed, so I’ll invite her.

  Lika Mizinova, with her husband Sanin and her old friend Viktor Goltsev, also braved Olga, who disabused Anton of any fantasies he might have had: ‘Lika has got horribly stout – she is colossal, gaudy, rustling. I feel so scrawny by comparison.’

  Altshuller’s compresses of Spanish fly pulled Anton through pleurisy. By his forty-third birthday, 16 January, he could sit at his desk. Altshuller warned Olga a week later: ‘The stay in Moscow has had a far worse effect on his lungs than any previous journey.’5 Evgenia was worried: she wrote to Masha and to Vania’s wife in Moscow: ‘For several days I was in floods of bitter tears in case you found out he was ill. I asked Georgi to write that Anton was well, but thank God he is now.’6 At the end of January Altshuller allowed Anton to ride into Yalta for a haircut, but henceforth forbade him to walk or to wash. Surely, Olga demanded, he could stroll on the covered veranda and wash with buckets of hot water, or eau de cologne? Anton had no illusions: ‘You and I have little time left to live.’ He relented about his presents and made the wallet a portfolio for drafts of his story. A better present arrived: Olga was bored with Schnap, the dachshund which had been given to her, and Shapovalov brought the dog down from Moscow.

  Anton never let Olga read his manuscripts. She was hurt to be almost the last of his intimates to read ‘The Bride’. What had taken him a day in 1883, and a week in 1893, took a year in 1903, a slowing down which marked not just the decline in Anton’s vitality, but the extreme care with which, in his final period, every phrase was chosen. When it was published in autumn 1903, all who knew Chekhov read it as a farewell. As with all the work he treasured, he grudged the censor the slightest change. ‘The Bride’, like Three Sisters, portrays three women trapped in a remote northern town, but this time they are ordered vertically: grandmother, mother, and Nadia the heroine. Nadia deserts her fiancé and her windswept garden for university. Her liberation at the end of the story from provincial boredom would be a triumph, but for the narrator’s sly interpolation of the phrase: ‘or so it seemed to her’. ‘The Bride’ shows inspiration, perfectionism and thrift. It recycles material from Three Sisters. In the speeches of Nadia’s mentor, Sasha, who dies while taking a koumiss cure, Chekhov adumbrates the ragged-trousered philanthropist Trofimov of The Cherry Orchard.

  The Cherry Orchard, through superhuman effort on the part of Anton, was now crystallizing too. The image of cherry blossom had recurred in Chekhov’s prose for fifteen years. In autumn 1901 he first mentioned it to Stanislavsky as a setting for a future play. The title The Cherry Orchard was first mentioned to Masha in 1902, shortly after the news came that the cherry trees at Melikhovo had been chopped down by Konshin, the purchaser. Not until 1903, however, did Anton confirm to Olga that this play would be the ‘vaudeville or comedy’ he had vaguely promised to the theatre.7 He weighed each of its four female roles as a vehicle for Olga. She saw the play as hers and was furious when he thought of letting Komissarzhevskaia stage it in Petersburg. She told him that Nemirovich-Danchenko needed a monopoly, and that Anton, as a shareholder, could not let the company down. Nemirovich-Danchenko backed her that February: ‘Your wife is pining manfully. Really, can’t you live near Moscow? What doctor do you really trust? We awfully need your play.’ The degree to which Anton was still spellbound by his first Seagull is shown by his frankness when he wrote to Komissarzhevskaia and disassociated himself from Olga’s intransigence: ‘My wife is either sick or travelling, so we never make a proper go of it.’ To nobody else would he confess so unambiguously his unhappiness with his marriage.

  While he struggled to write, Olga went skiing. Shrovetide came and she had a pancake party. In April she took her first automobile ride with the actors, delighted that Nemirovich-Danchenko’s wife was left behind. The company was seriously split at this time: Savva Morozov and Olga’s bête noire Maria Andreeva wanted revolutionary plays that filled the house; Olga, the Stanislavskys
and Nemirovich-Danchenko wanted to stage drama of literary value. On 17 February the Moscow season ended with a triumphant Three Sisters.

  A row erupted in the theatre on 3 March. Morozov backed the left wing who would one day destroy capitalists like himself; he blamed Nemirovich-Danchenko’s conservatism for the theatre’s ups and downs. Nemirovich-Danchenko walked out, Olga shouted, Andreeva wept. The split was hard to mend: Olga apologized to Morozov and persuaded him that the theatre needed both Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky. Nemirovich-Danchenko then left for Petersburg to prepare for the company’s tour there.

  Olga’s brother Kostia was in Moscow and she bought her four-year-old nephew birthday toys. ‘I hellishly wanted a son like that for you and me,’ she wrote to Anton. She urged him to take second opinions: her doctor Strauch would prescribe life near Moscow. Next winter she would adopt a different, but unspecified, plan for their conjugal life ‘about which I have not spoken to Masha, so as not to upset her for no good reason’. Anton’s friend from his Nice days, Prince Sumbatov, also rejected Altshuller’s prescription of Yalta and compresses: a friend had ‘definitely and radically recovered after two years in Switzerland on a special mountain air cure … I can’t help thinking that you’re not fighting the illness forcefully enough’.8

  Anton agreed to go to Switzerland at Easter with Olga, on one passport ‘so that you can’t run away from me’, but would not talk of the future. In March life improved. Cubat, the Petersburg delicatessen, opened in Yalta: now Anton could buy caviare, smoked meats and other northern delights he had missed. The only visitor he wanted was Bunin, but Bunin let him down by travelling past the Crimea without stopping off on his way to see his sister in Novocherkassk. In Moscow Olga and Masha had now moved to yet another apartment. Despite Anton’s veto, Olga allowed a smoky tomcat to move in with her. She was pleased with her bright bedroom next to Anton’s study, high ceilings and room for her mother’s grand piano. Olga made light of Anton’s shortness of breath: ‘Don’t fear the stairs. There’s nowhere to hurry to, you can rest on the landings, and Schnap [which Anton was to bring with him] will console you. I shall say silly things to you.’