Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  By mid April Aleksandr, Vania and Masha had left Anton in Yalta. The tame crane flew back for spring. Anton took bismuth for his guts and opium for the pains in his chest. (Altshuller issued heroin in case the pain became worse.) Nothing relieved his emphysema: ‘How short of breath I am,’ he groaned to Olga. His teeth were crumbling but Ostrovsky, the grubby Yalta dentist, was away. Anton was upset by the casualties on the Manchurian front: there would be no news of Uncle Sasha until May. Once spring had set in, Anton fled to Moscow. Olga’s doctor Taube would examine him and send him abroad for treatment. He arrived on 3 May, so ill from the journey that he went straight to bed from the lift. He would never get up again for more than a few hours at a time. ‘The Germans are coming to pay their respects,’ Masha wrote to Evgenia, as Taube and his colleagues gathered. Their diagnosis was pleurisy and emaciation, their prescription enemas and yet another special diet. Anton was to consume brains, fish soup, rice, butter and cocoa with cream. Coffee was forbidden. Taube stopped Altshuller’s boiled eggs and Spanish fly compresses. Too weak to sit, irritable and dejected, Anton conceded that he was in good hands: ‘My advice, let Germans treat you … I have been tortured for twenty years!!!’ he told his Yalta colleague Dr Sredin.

  When Masha found out that Olga was planning to take Anton to Germany, she bitterly opposed her sister-in-law. She feared he would die there. In any case, Olga kept even Anton’s kith and kin away from his bedside. Masha told Evgenia: ‘I don’t see him often – I am very afraid of Olga.’5 Olga and Masha had a violent quarrel and on 14 May Masha took leave of her brother and left Moscow for Yalta. Vania called daily and found out from the servants how Anton was. The only close friend to break through the cordon that Olga had erected around Anton was the indomitable Olga Kundasova; she had what she later told Suvorin was ‘one of the most upsetting encounters [with Anton] a mortal could endure’, so upsetting that she refused to reveal what had passed between them.

  Anton’s letters to Yalta calmed his mother and sister, but privately he colluded with Olga and Dr Taube. Three opiates set his mind at rest: morphine controlled his pain; opium, as a side effect, had finally staunched his diarrhœa; the heroin would ease anything worse. He knew that he could hope for a merciful death, like Levitan’s, from heart failure, rather than from a hæmorrhage. To die in Germany, far from a distraught family, in the arms of a skilled nurse like Olga, was his most attractive option. To one visitor Anton said, ‘I am going away to croak’. Maddened by idleness, he tried to read Goltsev’s manuscripts. He longed for coffee. 20 May brought a severe attack of pleurisy, but Dr Taube saved him. On 22 May Olga bought railway tickets for 2 June to Berlin and Badenweiler, a spa in the Black Forest, where Taube’s colleague, Dr Schwörer, practised. Hail and snow fell. In Yalta Masha was struggling with the cesspit. Olga begged her to write to Anton:

  he sat several times in the dining room and had supper there. Taube came. He says that the pleurisy is definitely better and that it is lack of air and motion that makes him so difficult. Tomorrow we’ll let him have morning coffee. His guts are strong, so enemas can be given.6

  On 25 May Anton asked for his 4500 roubles from Knowledge for The Cherry Orchard, even though Gorky and Piatnitsky faced insolvency, because Adolf Marx had ignored Anton’s pleas and pre-empted their publication of the play. The 4500 roubles arrived. Olga and Anton were ready to depart, when new agony struck, despite morphine. On 30 May, at dawn, Anton sent a note to Vishnevsky: ‘Get me at once Wilson the masseur. I haven’t slept all night, in agony from rheumatic pains; tell nobody, not even Taube.’ Wilson came round immediately. The next day Anton went for a last carriage ride through Moscow’s streets. He told Masha that he feared spinal tuberculosis. Olga also wrote to Masha: she now doubted that Anton would be able to travel. To relieve the muscle pain Taube administered aspirin and quinine and Olga injected arsenic. She could spare only a few minutes a day for the theatre. In Yalta Masha despaired and confided in Misha: ‘My heart aches. Something is going to happen to him. The Yalta doctors say he would be better off staying in Yalta. Olga was very harsh to me and I could hardly see Antosha at all, I didn’t dare go into his room.’7 Misha offered Masha clichés: ‘Where there is hope, even a weak ray of it, not all is lost.’ He hoped to bring his family to Yalta, while Anton was away, for a holiday.

  Olga was impatient to leave: she was now injecting Anton with morphine. She blamed their new flat, where the heating boiler had broken down, for his rheumatic pains. On 3 June, as Gorky prepared to sue Adolf Marx for publishing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard too early (the litigation would prove abortive), the Chekhovs left for Berlin.

  In Berlin Olga’s brother Volodia, now a singer, was waiting for them. So was Gorky’s rejected wife, Ekaterina, with her children. Anton wrote to Masha, more gently than before, and thanked Altshuller. Here, at the Savoy, he could enjoy coffee. On 6/19 June Anton was treated to a carriage drive to the Zoo; he was introduced to Iollos, the correspondent for Sobolevsky’s Russian Gazette – ‘interesting, agreeable and infinitely obliging,’ Anton reported to Masha. Iollos was to be the Chekhovs’ guardian angel in Germany. On 7/20 June a leading Berlin specialist, Professor Ewald, forewarned by Taube, visited the hotel. Ewald examined Anton, shrugged his shoulders and left the room without a word. ‘I cannot forget Anton’s smile, gentle, cooperative, somehow embarrassed and dismayed,’ Olga recalled. Ewald was appalled at the idea of a dying man being shunted across Europe.

  Iollos wrote to Sobolevsky ‘Chekhov’s days are numbered, he is terribly emaciated … cough, breathlessness, a high temperature, he cannot climb stairs.’ The Chekhovs crossed Germany by train to Badenweiler. Here they settled in the best hotel, the Römerbaden. Anton seemed to improve. After two days, however, the hotel asked the Chekhovs to move: Anton’s cough distressed the other guests. They settled in a small pension, the Villa Frederika. Anton wrote to Dr Kurkin that he was now bothered only by emphysema and thinness, and was desperate to escape the tedium of his life in Badenweiler and flee to Italy.

  Dr Schwörer, who attended Anton, was married to a Russian, a Zhivago, whom Olga had known in her school days. He was a considerate doctor, but to Anton’s dismay offered the same advice as Dr Taube. Again, coffee was forbidden. Anton sunned himself on a chaise longue and had massages. To his mother he wrote that he would be well in a week. Masha wrote to him of her distress: ‘Vania came down on his own. We wept when he said … that he couldn’t sleep at night, because he kept seeing your sickly image.’ Olga dutifully sent Masha regular bulletins and on 13/26 June hinted at the likelihood of Anton’s dying:

  I beg you, Masha, don’t lose control, don’t cry, there is nothing dangerous, but it is very grave. Both of us knew we could hardly expect complete recovery. Take it like a man, not a woman. As soon as Anton feels a little better I shall do everything I can to come home quickly. Yesterday he was so out of breath that I didn’t know what to do, I galloped for the doctor. The doctor says that because his lungs are in such a bad way, his heart is doing double the work it should, and his heart is by no means strong. He gave him oxygen, injected camphor, we have drops to give him and ice to put on his heart. At night he dozed upright and I made him a mountain of pillows, then injected morphine twice and he went to sleep properly lying down … Of course don’t let Anton sense from your letters that I have been writing to you, or that will torment him … I don’t think your mama should be told that he is not getting well, or put it gently, don’t upset her … Anton has been dreaming of coming home by sea, but that is impossible … I have just been to Freiburg, he ordered me to get him a light-coloured flannel suit … If Taube had hinted that something could happen to his heart, or that the process was not stopping, I’d never have decided to go abroad.

  To Evgenia Olga praised the food, the beds, the landlord, the weather, so cheerfully that cousin Georgi congratulated Anton on his full recovery, even though Dr Altshuller had just told Georgi: ‘They’ve taken a year off his life. They’ll have destroyed Chekhov.’8) Once m
ore Anton appeared to pick up. While Olga went thirty miles to Basle to have her teeth crowned, Anton proudly came down to the dining room. To a young colleague, Dr Rossolimo, Anton wrote ironically: ‘I just have shortness of breath and serious, probably incurable, idleness.’

  Olga told Nemirovich-Danchenko the bald truth:

  Anton is sun-tanned, but feels bad. His temp. all time, today even in the morning it was 38.1°. Nights are agony. He can’t breathe or sleep … You can imagine his mood … He never complains.9

  Sometimes Anton forgot about death. He devised a subject for a play: passengers on an ice-bound ship. Olga took him on carriage rides around Badenweiler. He envied on behalf of the Russian peasant the German peasant’s prosperity. In the evenings Olga translated the newspapers: he was pained by the Schadenfreude of the German press at Russia’s defeats in the war with Japan.

  Villa Frederika was boring and dark, with monotonous food. The Chekhovs moved to the Hotel Sommer, where Anton watched people coming and going to the post office from a sun-drenched balcony. Two Russian students staying in Badenweiler offered to help. Anton discussed summoning a dentist and sent Masha instructions on writing cheques and gardening. Masha could no longer bear the wait. On 28 June she and Vania, using cousin Georgi’s 50 per cent discount, took a Black Sea boat to Batum, for ten days in the Georgian spa of Borjomi. A Yalta seamstress kept Evgenia company.

  On 27 June/10 July 1904 Olga wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko: ‘He is losing weight. He lies down all day. He feels very miserable. A change is taking place in him.’ Schwörer let him drink coffee and administered oxygen and digitalis, while Olga injected morphine. Anton warned Masha ‘the only treatment for breathlessness is not to move’, but still made Olga fetch his new suit from Freiburg.

  A letter came from Potapenko in San Moritz: ‘I stretch out my hand and squeeze yours.’ Anton, however, was locked in his own racing mind. He improvised a story. Diners in a hotel wait for dinner, not knowing that the cook has vanished. At 2.00 a.m. on 2/15 July, he awoke delirious, despite a dose of chloral hydrate. He raved of a sailor in danger: his nephew Kolia. Olga sent one of the Russian students to fetch the doctor and ordered ice from the porter. She chopped up a block of ice and placed it on Anton’s heart. Dr Schwörer came and sent the two students for oxygen. Anton protested that an empty heart needed no ice and that he would die before the oxygen came. Schwörer gave him an injection of camphor.

  German and Russian medical etiquette dictated that a doctor at a colleague’s deathbed, when all hope was gone, should offer champagne.10 Schwörer felt Anton’s pulse and ordered a bottle. Anton sat up and loudly proclaimed ‘Ich sterbe’ [I’m dying]. He drank, murmured ‘I haven’t had champagne for a long time,’ lay down on his left side, as he always had with Olga, and died without a murmur, before she could reach the other side of the bed.

  Notes

  1 There was reason to let Andreeva go: she had been denouncing Knipper and Nemirovich-Danchenko to Stanislavsky; she was fainting on stage; Gorky had fallen in love with her (while everyone felt for Gorky’s wife, who had TB); Andreeva’s husband was accused of embezzling. (In 1905 Andreeva was reinstated. Her career as a Bolshevik and as Gorky’s consort was assured.)

  2 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972: see OR, 331 77 6: Olga’s letters to Anton 15–29 Feb. 1904.

  3 This mad desire to cross Siberia again was stimulated by new grounds for jealousy. Olga casually mentioned on 16 March that she had met her first love, the mill-owner Dimitri Goncharov, and that, despite his illness, he wanted to act with her in the Moscow Arts Theatre.

  4 Cut from Knipper-Chekova, 1972: see OR, 331 77 8: Olga’s letters to Anton Apr. 1904: 15 Apr. Anton hints at relations with Krestovskaia in his letter to Suvorin from a Blagoveshchensk brothel.

  5 See OR, 331 79 31: Masha’s letters to Evgenia, 1903–14: 9 May 1904.

  6 See OR, 331 77 18: Olga’s letters to Masha, 1904: 22 May.

  7 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha’s letters to Misha, 1884–1904: 27 May 1904.

  8 See PSSP, 12, 353.

  9 See PSSP, 367, 374, 377.

  10 I am grateful to M. A. Sheikina for this information.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  Aftermath

  July 1904

  DR SCHWÖRER, his wife and the Russian students did all they could to help Olga. The consul came down from Baden-Baden. Olga’s sister-in-law Elli and Sobolevsky’s correspondent Iollos took the train from Berlin. Anton’s body lay all day in the hotel room. Telegrams were sent to every close relative, except Anton’s aunt Aleksandra. Olga wrote about Anton’s last hours to her mother. The first letter of condolence came. Dunia Efros, Chekhov’s first fiancée, staying by the Vierwaldstättersee, opened a French newspaper: ‘What horror, what grief,’ she wrote. Olga’s telegram to Vania was forwarded to the Caucasian resort of Borjomi. It read, ‘Anton quietly passed away from weakness of heart. Tell mother and Masha carefully.’ Vania and Masha were 500 miles from Yalta. Masha wired the boat at Batum. The captain delayed sailing until the bug-ridden overnight train from Borjomi had brought Chekhov’s brother and sister. The same day, 3 July 1904, Misha and Aleksandr, independently, instructed by Suvorin, left Petersburg. In Yalta the telegrams were no secret. Bells tolled; posters went up all over town announcing a requiem mass in Autka, by the Chekhov house. Evgenia alone was kept in the dark until her family had gathered. On the boat from Batum a woman came up to Masha and gave her an icon of the Virgin.

  Olga presumed that she would bury Anton in Germany and return to Russia alone, but a flurry of telegrams from Russia, few of which expressed any sympathy for her bereavement, forced her to change her mind.

  When and where will Anton be buried reply prepaid Suvorin.

  Communicate New Times details my brother’s death Aleksandr Tschechoff

  Bury Anton Moscow Novodevichie convent Vania and Masha in Caucasus Misha with mother Mikhail Tschechoff.1

  Repatriating a body required the services of a Leichenführer on special trains, and a petition from the Russian embassy in Berlin to fourteen German railway regions, to allow a refrigerated car carrying a sealed coffin to be coupled to a passenger express. Olga waited and wrote to her mother. Then she went to Berlin, and waited in the Savoy hotel for Anton’s body. At the Potsdamer station the embassy chaplain held a service on a siding, while diplomats continued to lobby the railway.

  Russia was flooded with memoirs. In Yalta the bereaved assembled. On 7 July Misha broke the news to Evgenia: with Vania and Masha, they took the train to Moscow. That morning a train carrying Anton’s body (in a red luggage van) and Olga in a first-class carriage pulled into Petersburg. Kleopatra Karatygina was one of a dozen people waiting for it. So was Natalia Golden, who told a student who accompanied her how close a friend and collaborator she had been to Anton twenty years before. A government minister also met the train, but he was there to pay respects not to Chekhov but to a General Obruchiov, whose corpse was also being repatriated. Suvorin was the only representative of the state. The philosopher Vasili Rozanov watched Suvorin run to sit and talk to Olga:

  He almost ran with his stick (he walked terribly fast), cursing the inefficiency of the railways, their clumsiness in shunting the carriage … Looking at his face and hearing his half-swallowed words, I felt I was watching a father meet the corpse of his child or the corpse of a promising youth, dead before his time. Suvorin could see nothing and nobody, he paid attention to nobody and nothing, he was just waiting, waiting, wanting, wanting the coffin.2

  On leaving Olga’s compartment, Suvorin collapsed to his knees. A chair was brought and he sat alone and motionless. Suvorin arranged a requiem, a refuge for Olga, and a refrigerated carriage for the journey to Moscow. A priest and a few choristers held a brief service on the platform.

  Suvorin had other concerns: he immediately sent Aleksandr to Yalta to retrieve his frank letters to Chekhov. Unable to get a reply out of Misha, Aleksandr turned back halfway and wired him again from Moscow: ‘Bring without fail from archive
old man’s letters. My instructions not to leave without them, am buying grave, at Vania’s flat.’3 In Moscow Aleksandr was told to meet the coffin in Petersburg, and on 8 July he headed back. His brother’s body sped past him, from Petersburg to Moscow. He missed Anton’s funeral as he had his father’s.

  On 9 July a procession of 4000 began a four-mile walk across Moscow, from the station to the Novodevichie cemetery. Olga leant on Nemirovich-Danchenko’s arm. The family arrived from Yalta when the procession was midway. Evgenia, Vania, Misha and Masha broke through to the catafalque, with great difficulty, for Evgenia’s legs were weak, and the students guarding the cortege did not recognize them. Masha and Olga embraced; months of hostility were set aside. At the graveside Nikolai Ezhov placed a silver wreath on Suvorin’s behalf. Gorky wrote to his wife:

  I am so depressed by this funeral … as if I were smeared with sticky, foul-smelling filth … Anton who squirmed at anything vile and vulgar was brought in a car ‘for transporting fresh oysters’ and buried next to the grave of a Cossack widow called Olga Kukaretkina … People climbed trees and laughed, broke crosses and swore as they fought for a place, they asked loudly. ‘Which is the wife? And the sister? Look, they’re crying … You know he hasn’t left them a penny, Marx gets the lot … Poor Knipper … Don’t worry about her, she gets 10,000 a year in the theatre,’ and so on. Chaliapin burst into tears and cursed: ‘And he lived for these bastards, he worked, taught, argued for them.’4

  At the apartment, Lika Mizinova joined the family. She stood in black, silently staring through the window for two hours.