During Lent Mariushka cooked nothing edible for a consumptive. Anton grew testy. After booking a Pullman compartment from Sevastopol to Moscow, he stopped his almost daily letters to Olga. Stairs were bad news, and she had again withheld her exact addresses in Petersburg and Moscow. Anton raged. On 17 March 1903 he asked Vishnevsky where his wife and sister lived. Olga retaliated by demanding he take her mother’s portrait down and send it: ‘nobody needs it in Yalta, and I’m never there’. Under threat of divorce proceedings, she finally wired the new address. (After this spat, jokes spread around Moscow that Olga would divorce Anton and marry Vishnevsky.) Anton sent her no Easter greetings. Marriage seemed very unalluring.9 Olga relented. In mid March the Stanislavskys took her to spend a few days at St Sergei monastery. The monks had read Chekhov and told Olga that she should ‘dine, drink tea with her husband and not live apart’. Protestant by confession and nature, she was nevertheless subdued by their admonitions.
Anton disliked the theatre’s bargain with Suvorin: in exchange for the right to stage Gorky’s Lower Depths in Petersburg, Suvorin would lease the Moscow Arts Theatre his own building for their Petersburg season. (Suvorin had by now stopped vilifying Stanislavsky.) Gorky was outraged: ‘Between me and Suvorin there can be no agreements.’10 The man who had staged the anti-Semitic Smugglers, or Sons of Israel two years before should not have The Lower Depths. Despite these ructions, the season was sensational. Anton earned 3000 roubles, as well as 2000 for performances in other cities and theatres. Uncle Vania received ovations. At the première of The Lower Depths in Petersburg secret policemen replaced the ushers.
Two weeks before Easter, Masha came down to Yalta to soothe her disgruntled brother. Anton had checked the proofs of ‘The Bride’: the censor had left it untouched. He left the house just once, for the funeral of his colleague Dr Bogdanovich. On 10 April Olga summoned him to Petersburg. She had a large room to herself and the weather was warm. ‘You and I could flirt.’ He wired back ‘Don’t want go Petersburg. Well.’ and left, with Schnap, for Moscow. He arrived on 24 April 1903, the day before Olga returned from Petersburg. He felt very ill, but went to the baths and had five months’ worth of dirt steamed and beaten out of his skin.
Notes
1 Meyerhold blamed Knipper for alienating him from Chekhov.
2 Suvorin did not come, but began sending Chekhov copies of the forbidden revolutionary newspaper Liberation, which Suvorin coded as ‘works of Ezhov’.
3 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972; see OR, 331 76 27: Olga’s letters to Anton, Dec. 1902.
4 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972; see OR, 331 76 31: Olga’s letters to Anton ii 1903.
5 See PSSP, 11, 442.
6 See OR, 331 81 66: Evgenia’s letters to Masha, 1891–1914: 20 Jan. 1903.
7 For a fuller account of the genesis of The Cherry Orchard see the author’s The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy, New York, Twayne, 1994.
8 See OR, 331 59 80: Aleksandr Sumbatov’s letters to Anton, 1889–1903: 12 Feb. 1903.
9 At this juncture Anton was receiving many confessions from unhappily married friends: he had a desperate letter from his old admirer Shcheglov, whose wife had betrayed him for years. See OR, 331 50 6i: Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov’s letters to Anton 1900–4.
10 See PSSP, 11, 470.
EIGHTY-ONE
‘The Cherry Orchard’
May 1903–January 1904
THE FIVE FLIGHTS of stairs up to the new Moscow flat were ‘martyrdom’ for Anton. It was very cold outside. For a week he sequestered himself with Olga, Schnap and proofs for Marx and Miroliubov, and wrote letters. Friends and old colleagues descended, diagnosing and commiserating. He emerged in the second week of May to buy Evgenia spectacles for church and for the garden. He summoned Suvorin, who came and talked for two days. Anton urged him to publish his old friend Belousov, a crippled tailor who made trousers by day and translated Robert Burns by night.
Anton followed Suvorin to Petersburg, to see not him, but Adolf Marx, who was now willing to re-negotiate the contract if Chekhov came in person. Marx offered Anton 5000 roubles ‘for medical treatment’ – which Anton hastily refused – and a trunk of Marx editions, which he accepted. He and Marx put off discussions until August. Although the weather was warm and Anton had not seen Aleksandr, he would not stay. Anton avoided Lika too. Sanin, her husband, on military training, was worried and wrote to her: ‘I can’t wait for you to come to Moscow – I can’t bear life without you … Chekhov is in Petersburg now. Are you sure he won’t be looking in on you?’1
Masha had gone to Yalta to care for Evgenia and the garden. All at the Moscow apartment would have been peaceful, had Schnap not run under a cab. Schnap survived, his neck awry, but Anton was summoned for losing control of him; it took ten days to secure an acquittal. In May, Anton spoke to other doctor friends: none would countenance his plan to travel to Switzerland. Finally, on 24 May, he allowed Professor Ostroumov, who had taught both him and Dr Obolonsky, to examine him. Anton disliked Ostroumov, who used the ty form and called him ‘a cripple’. Ostroumov found both Anton’s lungs to be heavily damaged by emphysema and his intestines ruined by TB. He prescribed five medicines, and countermanded his pupils’ recommendations. Anton had wasted four winters in Yalta: he needed dry air. Olga could renew the search for a house near Moscow. To Olga’s relief, Ostroumov told Anton to bathe.
Masha was distraught at the implications of Ostroumov’s new recommendations. Just as she was about to repaper Anton’s study, she feared that the Yalta house might be sold, for Anton had already put the cottages at Gurzuf and Küchük-Köy back on the market. If so, she could not take up the post of headmistress of Yalta girls’ school, which, rumour had it, was hers for the taking. Suddenly her home and her career were threatened. She could not sleep, she told Misha, for anguish. Misha encouraged defiance – ‘If I’d obeyed the man who opposed my marriage and my move to Petersburg, I wouldn’t have what I have now’2 – and travelled 1300 miles to see her. He had hidden plans: he coveted the Gurzuf estate for himself. When he found that Masha wanted 15,000 roubles for a house that had cost 2000 – for the planned coastal railway had inflated prices – he turned on her: ‘You high-principled people of rare purity of soul have been infected by the general tightfisted Yalta mood. It’s a sin. I’m sad, sad, sad.’3
Anton assured Masha he would spend Moscow’s treacherous spring and autumn in Yalta, when the Crimea, Ostroumov agreed, was safer for consumptives. The day after he saw Ostroumov, Anton left with Olga for the country: an admirer, Iakunchikova, had lent them her dacha on the Nara river southwest of Moscow. He fished the Nara, and invited his brother Vania to come and join him. He wanted silent company and told Vishnevsky that excitement might be bad for him. Did Vishnevsky not recall a performance where ‘three workmen in make-up had to tie down your genitals with string to stop your trousers bursting on stage and causing a scandal?’ Safe from voluble visitors, Anton wrote by the large window of the cottage or ranged the countryside west of Moscow, with Olga, in search of a house.
Anton accompanied Olga north to his haunts of the early 1880s, when, a novice doctor, he worked in Zvenigorod and Voskresensk. On 12 June, after sending off ‘The Bride’, rewritten in proof, he visited the dilapidated grave of Dr Uspensky of Zvenigorod, then stayed with Savva Morozov at New Jerusalem. Old friends like Eduard Tyshko, were as crippled as Anton. No property suited Anton and after a fortnight he was back at Nara. He had not visited Babkino where he had spent three summers with the Kiseliovs, but memories merged with summer impressions into The Cherry Orchard. Kiseliov was bankrupt and Babkino under the hammer: when all failed, Kiseliov found, despite his gross incompetence, like Gaev in the play, a post in a bank.
Masha waited for the couple, tempting them with enormous peaches and plums and a lush green garden at Yalta. On 6 July Anton and Olga set out to join her and Evgenia, for two months. Olga put up with her sister-in-law and mother-in-law to ensure that Anton could work at The Cherry Orchard undisturb
ed. A third season with no new Chekhov play would doom the theatre. Anton had begun the play at Nara, but the search for a house had broken his train of creative thought and several pages had been lost when they blew out onto the rain-soaked grass. On 17 July 1903, resting on his wife’s estate, Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote to Olga: ‘I am very pleased you are in Yalta.’ To Stanislavsky he wrote a week later, ‘Olga writes that he sat down to his play again once they arrived in the Crimea.’4 Anton blamed ‘idleness, the wonderful weather and the difficult plot’ for his sluggish progress. Stanislavsky wrote to Olga at the end of July 1903:
What upsets us most is that Anton does not feel very well and is sometimes down in the mouth. We have often cursed Ostroumov. He talked rubbish and spoiled Anton’s good mood … we think about the play at other times, when we worry about the fate of the theatre.5
Olga drove visitors away. Only Tikhomirov, her colleague, could sit in the house for six hours at a time. The poet Lazarevsky’s visit was cut short. His diary reads: ‘once Knipper comes everyone is tense in the house … he is in love with his wife’.6 Masha told him that even she had limited access to Anton. The theatre was in rehearsal, but gave Olga leave until mid September to be Anton’s ‘Cerberus’, as she put it. She felt strong: ‘I am round and tanned. I get up at 6 a.m., run to bathe and swim a lot and pretty far. I eat, sleep and read and nothing else,’ she reassured Stanislavsky. She made Anton work every day when he was physically able. She was now getting ready for The Cherry Orchard and ‘drowning her new part with tears’. Vishnevsky was preparing for his new part too: Anton put him on a diet.
Others doubted Anton’s stamina. Sanin wrote to Lika on 14 August 1903:
I hardly recognized the old Chekhov. It was very painful to look at the photo … But Knipper puts a brave face on it … then asked with embarrassment, ‘Do you see anything wrong?’ She’s afraid to admit it to herself.
Olga had the company of her brother Kostia: she had used her influence to get him transferred from the fever-ridden Persian border to Yalta, where he would assist the writer and engineer Garin-Mikhailovsky in building a grandiose coastal railway.
The absence of visitors was both a comfort and an exasperation, and Anton resumed his banter with Aleksandr. He wrote to him in a language Olga did not understand: ‘Quousque tandem taces? Quousque tandem, frater, abutere patientia nostra? … Scribendum est. [How long are you going to be silent? How long, brother, are you going to try our patience … You must write.]’ On 22 August 1903 Aleksandr responded with a warmth and robustness (in Latin and Greek) that seemed to have faded from their relationship fifteen years ago. Aleksandr pleaded for Masha and Olga’s maid, the pregnant Masha Shakina:
she could be expelled by Olga for abusing her ‘cactus’ with a married man whom I do not know … please intercede with my dear belle-sœur: would she not forgive the guilty girl? … Don’t forget that a woman’s shift is a curtain to the entrance into a public assembly where only members are allowed entry on condition that they remain standing.7
He was content with his sons, though Kolia had killed a dachshund, and Anton was too backward to chase the servant girls. Misha, his pride, was at twelve years old chatting in French and German, reading, despite Natalia’s ban, his uncle’s works, acting in amateur theatricals and chasing girls. As for Aleksandr’s own potency:
My life is pretty celibate,
But I don’t curse my luck.
I fuck, although not well, but
All the same, I fuck.
By September, despite his painfully slow pace, Anton was sure of his plan for The Cherry Orchard. He warned Stanislavsky’s wife: ‘At places it is even a farce; I fear I shall get it in the neck from Nemirovich-Danchenko.’ Stanislavsky feared worse, telling his sister Zinaida on 7 September: ‘I imagine it will be something impossible on the weirdness and vulgarity of life. I only fear that instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy. Even now he thinks Three Sisters a very merry little piece.’8
Like The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard is subtitled ‘comedy’, even though it focuses on the destruction of a family and their illusions. The new play is crowded with reminiscences of earlier work and of personal traumas. The cherry trees that blossom in Act 1 recall those of his boyhood in Taganrog; the cherry trees axed in Act 4 recall the trees of Melikhovo, bought ten years earlier and now felled by Konshin. As in Anton’s first play, feckless owners face an auction. The merchant Lopakhin, who urges them to sell land for cottages and then betrays them at the auction, has overtones of Gavriil Selivanov in Taganrog twenty-seven years before. The breaking string that punctuates Act 2 and Act 4 was first heard in the steppe stories of 1887. The seedy student Trofimov reminds us of the mentor, Sasha, in ‘The Bride’; the feckless heroine marrying off her children to save the estate uses the tricks and phrases of the heroine in ‘A Visit to Friends’. Anton’s friends furnish the plot: Gaev and Ranevskaia lose the estate, as the Kiseliovs lost Babkino; Charlotta and the servants recall the motley entourage at Stanislavsky’s Liubimovka.
An elegy for a lost world, estate and class, The Cherry Orchard nevertheless displays Anton’s farcical invention at its richest. As in all Chekhovian comedy, however, the ending is grim, for the old retain power while the young are scattered to the winds. One factor alone is missing from the play: passion. Only the mistress of the house, Ranevskaia, who comes to Russia from her lover in France and then leaves again, is a sexual being. Nobody else expresses ardour, any more than Charlotta’s rifle or Epikhodov’s revolver ever fire. The doctor, increasingly inert in Chekhov’s plays, fails to call. Death, in an ending which heralds Samuel Beckett, is banal: a senile servant is forgotten in a locked house. Black humour, menace, wistfulness, the characters’ doll-like quadrilles, the dominance of landscape over inhabitants; all these qualities make The Cherry Orchard the progenitor of modern drama from Artaud to Pinter. The engineer Garin-Mikhailovsky saw the same incongruity between Anton’s creative imagination and his doom as we see in the owners of The Cherry Orchard. He noted: ‘Chekhov could hardly walk, noises came from his chest. But he seemed not to notice. He was interested in anything but illness: … Why are such precious contents locked up in such a frail vessel?’9
Olga was happy. Her compliant husband even let her cat into the house. They slept in separate rooms, but she came to Anton each morning after her dawn swim. On 19 September 1903 Olga left, with Schnap but without the cat, for Moscow, for the opening of the theatre season. She was hoping that she had conceived, and was confident that the play would follow her shortly. Anton bathed in the afterglow of her affection: he wrote to his ‘little horse’: ‘I stroke you, groom you and feed you the best oats.’ He was finishing The Cherry Orchard with pleasure – for once ending a play not with a gun, but an axe – but he was tormented by his cough and pains in his muscles. Altshuller forbade him to wash, applied Spanish fly and beseeched him not to go to Moscow. Anton would ignore this advice.
Masha returned to Moscow on 8 October and reported on Anton’s progress under her care. The same day Olga exploded with jealousy to Anton:
You are doing something about your health at last?! Why is that so difficult when I am there? … Probably Altshuller thinks I am wearing you out. He avoids talking to you about health when I am there. And when I leave, you begin to eat twice as much and Masha can do anything.
Anton retorted that in Moscow he would live apart from her in furnished rooms. All he wanted was somewhere to sit in the theatre and a large lavatory; she could take a lover if she wanted. Diarrhœa, coughing and Altshuller’s Spanish fly compress were making Anton’s life unbearable. He complained to Olga: ‘Once Masha left, the dinners naturally got worse; today for example I was served mutton which I am forbidden now, so I missed the main course … I eat eggs. Darling how hard it is to write a play.’ Olga barely sympathized: her constipation was a match for Anton’s diarrhœa. Masha had left a diet sheet in Yalta and Anton had written instructions for Mariushka and the cook. One of them even jotted d
own an invalid’s menu. They were to provide chicken and rice, cherry compôte and blancmange; they blithely served beef, salt fish and potatoes. Anton went on hunger strike: on 15 October he was at last fed his diet.
The theatre rehearsed Julius Cœsar with a heavy heart: Shakespeare was not their territory and Stanislavsky was a weak Brutus. When it opened, Julius Cœsar was an unexpected success, but Anton still felt Stanislavsky’s pressure to deliver The Cherry Orchard forthwith. On 14 October Anton packed up the new play and posted it to Moscow. He did what he said was absurd in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: he sent the only copy. In Moscow Olga’s visitors queued for permission to copy it or merely to glance. Gorky offered 4500 roubles to print it in his annual, Knowledge. Anton was dubious. Did his contract with Marx permit this? Was an annual a periodical? To get round the stipulations of Marx’s contract with Anton, Gorky then promised 10 per cent of the proceeds to charity. (Despite his proletarian affiliations Gorky could behave like an aristocratic patron, for he was both Russia’s best paid author and her most lavish commissioning editor.)
Anton wanted the play kept secret, but Nemirovich-Danchenko recounted the plot to Efros, the company’s most sympathetic critic, on The Courier. Efros garbled the résumé and his garbled version was reprinted in the provincial papers. Anton berated Nemirovich-Danchenko for this breach of confidence, in a telegram too violent to show to Olga; he broke off all relations with Efros. Never had he been so touchy about a play and its production. He dictated the casting, the scenery and the mood. Altshuller could not stop him planning a journey to Moscow to supervise everything.
Anton Chekhov Page 68
