Anton Chekhov. A life

In Yalta Anton's health was so bad that he forbade Altshuller to examine him. On 4 September Masha left Yalta to join her sister-in-law and resume teaching in Moscow. Coughing uncontrollably and unable to eat what the new cook, Polia, prepared, Anton was buoyed up only when the actor-manager Orlenev, a likeable rogue, engineered a visit from Suvorin. The day Masha left, Suvorin and Orlenev came to lunch and stayed. Suvorin's diary is terse: 'I spent two days there, almost all the time with Chekhov, in his house.' Of this encounter Anton revealed only that Suvorin 'talked about all sorts of things, and much that was new and interesting.'

Anton's interest in the outside world revived. He belatedly resigned from the Academy over Gorky's disqualification.47 He took up his share in the theatre. He lamented Zola's mysterious death from carbon monoxide poisoning, possibly murder. He wanted to travel. Inspired by Suvorin, cautioned by Altshuller, he decided to visit Moscow when the first frosts dried the air, then winter in Italy. Anton warned Olga that Altshuller had allowed him only a few days in Moscow on his way abroad - which augured badly for begetting a child. Masha assured him that Olga was 'quite healthy and very cheerful, she can climb to the third floor.' Dr Strauch came to the Crimea and called, formally dressed, on Anton. He pronounced Olga cured. Anton asked her: 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.

564

565

I.OVI: AND Di ë i è JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1002

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'.

EIGHTY Ô

'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: ÒÂ 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.

566

567

LOVi: AND Ø'ËÒÍ Meanwhile Anton's main source of income was under threat, for deep splits rent the Moscow Arts Theatre. The theatre could survive Vsevo-lod Meyerhold, too magnetic a rival for Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, going to Kherson on the Black Sea,48 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.49 On 9 December Olga wrote to tell him: Unwanted visitors [menstruation] have arrived and hopes for a litde 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.50 Anton immediately consoled her:

568

OCTOBER I902-APRIL I903

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 premiere 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 Sawa 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 look 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:

569

l.OVI AND I) I. A III 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, haemorrhage 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 ÒÂ 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 i ã 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,

OCTOBER I902-APRIL I903

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.'51 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.'52 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

570

571

I.OVI: AND m ë) è was ill. I asked Georgi to write that Anton was well, but thank God he is now.'53 At the end of January Altshullcr 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, to°k a Óåàã ø I0°3» 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 fiance 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.54 He weighed each of its four female roles as a vehicle for Olga. She saw the play as hers

OCTOBER I902-APRIL I9O3

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: Sawa Morozov and Olga's bete 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'.55

572

573

I.OVi: AND DKAIII

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.'

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.56 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.'57 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

OCTOBER I002-APRIL I903

well as 2000 for performances in other cities and theatres. Uncle Vania received ovations. At the premiere 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.

574

575

EIGHTY ON Ê

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?'58

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

576

MAY I903-JANUARY I904

by ÒÂ. Íå 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 Kuchtik-Êáó 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'59 - 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.'60

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 SawaMorozov at New Jerusalem. Old friends, like Eduard Tyshko, were as crippled as Anton. No property suited Anton and

577

I.OV I, AND I»1 ATM

after a fortnight he was hack at Nam. He had not visited Babkino where he had spent three summers with the Kiseliovs, but memories merged with summer impressions into 1'he 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 undisturbed. 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.'61 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.62 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'.63 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.

578

MAY I9O3-JANUARY I9O4

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-sozur: 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.64 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

579

I.OVI, AND 1)1 Ë I 11

plan for The Cherry Orchard. 1 Ic 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.'65

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 i 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 Kon-shin. 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 GarinMAY I903-JANUARY I904 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?'66

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 widiout 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. Diarrhoea, 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 diarrhoea. Masha had left a diet sheet in Yalta and Anton had written instructions for Mariushka and the

580

581

I.OVK AND DliATII cook. One of them even jotted down an invalid's menu. They were to provide chicken and rice, cherry compote 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 Cesar with a heavy heart: Shakespeare was not their territory and Stanislavsky was a weak Brutus. When it opened, Julius C«esar 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 resume 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.

Nemirovich-Danchenko came round to The Cherry Orchard slowly: he felt it was 'more of a play' than Anton's previous drama, that it was 'harmonious and had new characters', but he found the tears excessive, which exasperated Anton, given that Varia was the only character who wept at all. Stanislavsky's own floods of tears at Act 4, and his claim 'This is not a comedy nor a farce, as you wrote: it's a tragedy,' dismayed Chekhov. Stanislavsky's wife hit the right note: 'Many cried, even the men; I thought it full of the joy of life and I find it fun just travelling to rehearsals… The Cherry Orchard somehow seemed not a play but a musical production, a symphony, to me.'67

MAY I903-JANUARY I904

Gorky was printing the play, but told his editor Piatnitsky, 'Read aloud, it doesn't impress one as a powerful piece. And what the [characters] are all moping about I don't know.'68

The day the play arrived in Moscow, Olga's period came. After five months together, she and Anton would still have no baby. Quarrels broke out. The whole family was in a crisis whose nature we can only guess at. Bunin, now frequenting Masha and Olga, may have been involved. Olga's close collaboration with Nemirovich-Danchenko undoubtedly unsettled Anton. Evgenia's letter from Yalta to Vania in Moscow suggests that Anton had had enough of his wife, his sister and his mother: Antosha told me that Masha had to find her own flat, while Olga could go and live with her mother… poor Masha does not want to leave mem, please don't talk to her about my letter I only ask you to let me come and live with you until we find somewhere… Olga has got her own way, she has persuaded Antosha to get rid of us, she can do as she wants, but he is sorry for us and never sees anything through. E. Chekhova.69 Olga seemed disturbed that her enemy Maria Andreeva (who was thirty-one) was favoured by Anton for the part of the seventeen-year-old ingenue, Ania. (Anton next proposed Andreeva for Ania's pious foster-sister Varia, but Olga was not appeased.) In a letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko Anton accused him of ignoring him for years: 'I've been asking you to get an actress for Ranevskaia.' On 5 November Nemirovich-Danchenko wired a cast list, letting Anton choose actresses for only the minor roles. Olga put forward Schnap, despite his snoring and farting, to be Charlotta's nut-eating dog: Anton said no - he specified a 'small, shaggy, sour-eyed dog'.

One of the pet cranes died. Anton moaned that Olga wrote either like Arkadina in The Seagull: 'Do you know you are a superman?' or like a nurse and courtesan: 'Are you spraying your throat? You're not making rude gestures in the morning? Would you like your Hungarian [i.e. herself] to come in at night with pillow and candle and then vanish grumbling?'70 She heeded neither his angry entreaties not to keep valuables at home, nor his demands for a parcel of lavatory paper. Instead she gave him instructions to buy a Bukhara quilt in Yalta.

582

583

I.OVK AND DKATH

By 9 November the play was copied and the actors began work. Anton strained at the leash but Olga would send for him only when dry frosty weather began. In the meantime she ordered a fur coat of young Arctic fox, warm enough for a Moscow winter, but light enough for a frail body. Anton stipulated that it had to have eiderdown padding, a fur collar and a matching hat.

The story of The Cherry Orchard took on a life of its own. After selling the timber from the Melikhovo plantations, Konshin declared himself insolvent, and the estate was put up for auction. Masha negotiated a sale to her Moscow neighbour Baron Stuart. Not a kopeck came of it. Baron Stuart took out a private mortgage, for five years and at 5 per cent, with Masha who at last now had funds.

Evgenia abandoned Anton to Mariushka's cooking and Arseni's caretaking and took Nastia the servant to Moscow on 18 November. She descended on Olga, who put her up in Anton's study. (Evgenia soon moved to Petersburg to spend Christmas with Misha, his children and Lika Mizinova.) Alone, Anton vented his bile. Stanislavsky was stopped from inserting spring noises - frogs and corncrakes - into a summer act. Nemirovich-Danchenko's questions revealed, Anton grumbled, that '[he] has not read my play. It began with misunderstandings and will end with them.' Anton feared that the premiere would be used as a pretext to mark his twenty-fifth year as a writer. In vain, for he hated the prospect of Jubilee celebrations, he protested that this would not be due until 1905. Olga hinted that she might soon call Anton to Moscow. 'Have you dreamt of your Hungarian? Will you be making rude signs in the morning? Although we shall sleep together here and I shan't be coming in the morning straight from the sea.' On 29 November she telegraphed: 'Frosts. Talk Altshuller and come.'

Many years had passed since Anton had last celebrated Christmas, New Year and his name day in Moscow. He experienced a surge of energy and attended rehearsals almost daily, disconcerting Stanislavsky: 'The author has come and confused us all. The flowers have fallen and now we only have new buds.' Anton was upset too. The censor had removed two of Trofimov's tirades and new words had to be spliced in, while Stanislavsky cut two magically evocative episodes from Act 2. Anton, only half in jest, offered the play outright to Nemirovich-Danchenko for 3000 roubles. At home, once he had his

MAY I903-JANUARY I9O4

breath back after climbing the stairs, he received friends. They were perturbed. Bunin often stayed with Anton until Olga returned: Usually she left for the theatre, sometimes a charity concert. Nemirovich-Danchenko would fetch her; he wore a dress coat and smelt of cigars and expensive eau-de-Cologne. She wore evening dress, was perfumed, beautiful and young, and went up to her husband saying: 'Don't be bored while I'm out, darling, anyway you always feel fine with Bouquichon…' Sometimes he would wash his hair. I tried to amuse him… About 4 a.m., sometimes at daylight, Olga would come back, smelling of wine and perfume. 'Why aren't you asleep, darling? It's bad for you.'71 Before Christmas Bunin went abroad, never to see Anton again. Lika did not venture from Petersburg, but her husband gave her a view of Anton's condition: Potapenko says that he is finished as a writer and a man. 'It is simply pitiful to read him, to see him now, in life or a photograph… No, I put a cross on Chekhov. The man has got in an impasse and is finished. Why did that Knipper marry him? I saw them in Moscow, saw Masha [who said] "What horror! What a misfortune!"'72 Olga knew that her behaviour towards Anton was attracting unflattering comment, and told Evgenia: I can't tell you how much Anton's illness has upset me all this time. You must tfiink very badly of me when you look at your life… It's awfully hard for me suddenly to abandon my vocation… I know you have different views and understand all too well if in your heart you condemn me.73

Consul Iurasov and Professor Korotniov invited Chekhov to winter once again in Nice, but The Cherry Orchard detained him. In any case, he was barely well enough to venture into the street, let alone cross Europe. Just before the New Year, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, and their lawyers drafted a letter to Adolf Marx, urging him to give Chekhov a new contract for his forthcoming twenty-fifth jubilee. Anton told them to desist.

In Petersburg Evgenia was forgetting her worries with Misha's family, but on 7 January Anton ordered her back: 'You've outstayed your welcome, it's time you came to Moscow. Firstly we all miss you,

584

585

LOVK AND DI.ATII

and secondly we need to discuss Yalta.' There appeared to be nothing to discuss, but a crucial day was approaching, 17 January, Anton's forty-fourth name day, the day set for The Cherry Orchard's first performance.

EIGHTY-TWO

Ô

Last Farewells January-July 1904 :? 'THINGS WERE RESTLESS, something ominous hung in the air. It was no time of joy, that evening of 17 January 1904,' Olga recalled in 1929. Few plays had been so well rehearsed as The Cherry Orchard. The theatre was packed, and behind many seats sickly looking spectators stood. These 'angels' were said to be consumptives from Yalta, a memento mori to the celebrities in the stalls and boxes: Rachmaninov, Andrei Bely, Gorky, Chaliapin and almost all Chekhov's Moscow friends. Anton was not in the theatre for the first three acts. He was recovering after a night at the opera, listening to Chaliapin sing. The Cherry Orchardwas having a muted reception. Nemirovich-Danchenko sent a carriage with a disingenuous message: 'Couldn't you come for the third interval, though you probably won't get curtain calls now?'

During the third interval Anton was duly brought on to the stage. Into the centre of a half-circle of distinguished academics, journalists and actors, to loud applause, walked a living corpse, hunched, pale and emaciated. Stanislavsky was aghast. A voice from the stalls cried out, 'Sit down!' There was no chair. Speeches began. Professor Vese-lovsky spoke: Anton recalled his hero Gaev addressing a bookcase on its 1 ooth anniversary. He muttered 'Bookcase!' and everyone sniggered. Speeches and telegrams were read until Anton, his eyes like a hunted animal's, was led off to lie on a dressing-room divan. Gorky chased out everyone except the young actor Kachalov who, made up as Trofimov, looked as moribund as Anton. Half an hour later, the play over, the audience too subdued by the third interval to applaud loudly, Anton went to sup with the actors. He was showered with speeches and given presents of antique furniture: he detested it. What he really wanted, he told Stanislavsky, was a new mouse trap. The police charged the theatre for holding an 'unauthorized public gathering'.

586

587

I.OVi: AND DIAIII

Tickets were readily available for the next performances of The Cherry Orchard. A black comedy was ill attuned to the public's mood of Jingoism on the eve of the Russo-Japanese war, which was declared on 24 January 1904. Three days later, the Japanese sank the Russian Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. In a mournful, even apocalyptic mood, reviewers tended to dismiss the play as a political allegory about gentry overthrown by commoners. In Petersburg by the end of Lent, The Cherry Orchard was playing to half-empty houses. Gorky set up the text, but his almanac Knowledge ran into the sands of censorship. Time was needed for Russia's mood to turn elegiac and for Nemirovich-Danchenko to find the necessary 'lace-like' touch to make the play a success in the even more turbulent year that was to come.

Anton wanted to flee to the Riviera or the Crimea. The stairs to the Moscow apartment were 'real agony'. Jubilee celebrations for his writing career had brought many a past acquaintance out of the woodwork. Demands on his sympathy were unbearable. Olga's nephew, Liova, had tuberculosis of the spine: the prognosis was paralysis or death. The eldest Golden sister, Anastasia, married to the dramatist Pushkariov, her beauty, wealth and health all gone, begged for a pension. Lidia Avilova wanted advice on charity for wounded soldiers. The Gurzuf schoolteacher asked Anton to make the church remarry him to his late wife's sister. Kleopatra Karatygina wanted money to send her consumptive brother to a sanatorium.

Anton needed an undemanding occupation. Goltsev made him Russian Thought's literary editor and fed him manuscripts to sort out. Anton abandoned the brilliant opening pages of two stories he would never finish, 'The Cripple' and 'Disturbing the Balance', and set willingly to skimming over, and even annotating, beginners' prose. On 14 February 1904, as Evgenia headed for the Crimea, Olga took Anton to Tsaritsyno, fifteen miles south of Moscow, to look at a dacha. The area had an unhealthy reputation, but the house was built for winter living. At Tsaritsyno there had been a derailment and Anton had to return in a freezing cab. Altshuller was appalled when he heard that this had happened.

The next day Anton and Schnap took the Crimean express. At Sevastopol he was met by Evgenia's maid Nastia - Evgenia had gone ahead overland - and they sailed to Yalta. Playing with the yard dogs and sleeping with Evgenia, the dog settled back into Yalta life better

JANUARY-JULY I904

than his master. The house was so cold that visitors kept their fur coats on. Anton found undressing laborious; the bed was hard and cold; Nastia's soup was 'like dishwater, the pancakes as cold as ice'. He was too ill to travel abroad and it was too expensive to travel anyway - war had hit the Russian rouble. The solitary tame crane had belatedly migrated south. There was no congenial company: Bunin, now 'all parchment and sourness', as Anton described him, was in Moscow with Masha and Olga. The Cherry Orchard had followed Anton into the provinces: it was being performed in Rostov-on-Don, then in Taganrog (to frenzied acclaim) and on 10 April in Yalta, but so badly that Anton walked out.

Olga, with Vania's help, went on inspecting houses near Moscow, though winter was nearly over and she knew it was pointless. The local climate, the vendor's price, or the cost of installing a lavatory aborted every sale. Olga had more success in provoking Maria Andreeva to resign from the company. Stanislavsky accepted her resignation,74 much to Andreeva's distress and Olga's delight: She swore at everybody, including me… Nobody regrets her departure, in the management, that is, I don't know about the actors. What will come of it! I hope there is no split in the theatre. I still don't know what to do, Gorky is involved, there is no argument about that.75 Now Olga had only one enemy in the theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife, who, as Baroness Korf by birth, was unshakeable. Olga had, however, rivals outside. In Moscow Komissarzhevskaia was wildly acclaimed as Nora in The Doll's House at the Ermitage theatre. Olga declared that she ought to be ashamed of herself, her repertoire and her company. Worse, after Komissarzhevskaia's company came one led by Lidia Iavorskaia whose person, Olga claimed, 'gave everyone the horrors'. Olga was seriously frightened when her uncles, Karl the doctor, Sasha the captain, were despatched to the Manchurian front, and her brother Kostia was sent to extend the Trans-Siberian railway to the war zone. In Moscow, Dr Strauch died of a liver disease: Olga lost her gynaecologist and ally in her fight to keep Anton in Moscow. Anton was less affected by the war. His nephew Nikolai was conscripted and Lazarevsky, his most persistent visitor, was drafted to Vladivostok. Olga sent Anton soap, despite Altshuller's ban on wash

588

589

LOVK AND UK AT II

ing (for fear of Anton chilling his lungs). Although Altshuller visited frequently, offering company rather than treatment, Anton felt lonely, in need of something to do, but too weak to do much. He advised Olga's distraught sister-in-law Lulu about her son's tuberculosis, collected for the Yavuzlar sanatorium and posted manuscripts to Goltsev and even their authors. Aleksandr, who sensed a last chance, came to stay for March, with Natalia (whom Anton had not met for seven years), the twelve-year-old Misha and their dachshund. Anton told Olga: 'Aleksandr is sober, kind, interesting. Generally promising. And there is hope that he won't be a drunk again, though there is no guarantee.' Masha arrived on 19 March, followed by Vania at Easter, for a family reunion which they suspected might be their last. Only Misha was missing, opening station bookstalls for Suvorin in the Caucasus.

When her lease expired, Olga moved to a flat with an electric lift, electric light and two lavatories, one of them working. Again she tantalized Anton with her vagueness about the address. Anton doubted that the lift would work. He had plans for the summer: he would go to Manchuria as a doctor and war correspondent. Nobody believed him, but he repeated his plan. He wrote to Uncle Sasha at the front, and supplied him with pipe tobacco.76 Olga dismissed Anton's plans as a childish whim. 'Where will you put me? Let's do some fishing instead.' She still hoped for a child. If Moskvin, who played the clumsy Epikhodov, could beget a son, 'When are you and I going to?' On 27 March 1904, Easter Saturday, she asked, 'Do you want a baby? Darling, I do too. I shall do my best.'

Anton had been sent proofs of The Cherry Orchard to check for Adolf Marx's edition. He lingered as long as he could, waiting for Knowledge to clear the censorship. When he returned the proofs to Marx in April, Marx published so fast that the Knowledge almanac was unsaleable, and Anton was badly embarrassed.

The Cherry Orchard opened in Petersburg on 2 April. Suvorin unleashed his curs again. Burenin in New Times declared: 'Chekhov is not just a weak playwright, but an almost weird one, rather banal and monotonous.' The company was nervous and Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife, Olga reported, put on a white dress and a green hat and went to church to light candles for luck, but the Petersburg audience, despite the hostile reviews, was very responsive. Olga had,

JANUARY-JULY I904

however, uncomfortable encounters. Dr Jakobson, who had operated on her two years before, visited: 'he was a hellish bore'. She had already clashed with Lidia Iavorskaia: now was confronted with another Lesbian alliance between two of Anton's old loves: Maria Krestovskaia confessed to me, told me all her love for and disillusionment in Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, who by the way has married a barrister, Polynov. Krestovskaia's voice shakes when she says that this Tanichka is an infinitely vicious creature.77 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.'78 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

590

591

I.OVI. AND DEATH

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 diarrhoea; 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 haemorrhage. 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 2 2 May Olga bought railway tickets for 2 June to Berlin and Badenweiler, a spa in the Black Forest, where Taube's colleague, Dr Schworer, 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.

On 2 5 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

592

JANUARY-JULY IQO4

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.'80 Misha offered Masha cliches: '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 Romerbaden. 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 Schworer, who attended Anton, was married to a Russian, a

593

I.OVi; AND DKA'I'H 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, mere is notbing 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 bream 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 mat I have been writing to you, or that will torment him… I don't mink 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 mat 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 mat 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.'81 Once more 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:

JANUARY-JULY IOO4

Anton is sun-tanned, but feels bad. His temp, all time, today even in the morning it was 38.10. Nights are agony. He can't breathe or sleep… You can imagine his mood… He never complains.82 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.' Schworer 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 Schworer 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. Schworer 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 cham594

595

LOVE AND DEATH

pagne."(Schworer 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.

EIGHTY-THREE

Ô

July 1904

596

DR SCHWORER, 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 fiancee, staying by the Vierwaldstattersee, 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 deam Aleksandr Tschechoff Bury Anton Moscow Novodevichie convent Vania and Masha in Caucasus Msha with mother Mikhail Tschechoff.84

597

bOVF AND DEATH Repatriating a body required the services of a Leichenfuhrer 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 Obru-chiov, 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.85 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

598

JULY I904

flat.'86 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 diem 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.'87

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

599

EIGHTY-FOUR Ô

Epilogue 1904-1959

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the funeral Olga left with Evgenia, Masha, Misha and Vania for Yalta. Aleksandr in Petersburg wept alone. Suvo-rin sent him back to the Crimea in pursuit. After the distress of the funeral, whatever Suvorin felt privately, publicly he disowned Anton.88 On 22 July he told Ivan Shcheglov, 'Chekhov was the bard of the middle classes. He never was and never will be a great writer.' Suvorin transferred his protection and even his affection to a new figure, the fifty-year-old philosopher Vasili Rozanov.

At the forty-day requiem in Moscow on 10 August the church was crowded. By the graveside a choir of nuns sang. Olga Kundasova and the Chekhovs' old landlord, Dr Korneev, appeared. Korneev gave a communion loaf for Evgenia. On it were written the names of her dead: father-in-law, brother, husband, sister and two sons: 'For the peace of the souls of Georgi, Iakov, Pavel, Feodosia, Nikolai, Anton.' On 18 August Olga left Yalta. Her brother Kostia and Olga Kundasova came to stay with her in Moscow. She was beginning rehearsals for Ivanov in which her performance as the doomed wife, Anna, would be especially moving.89

Olga won Masha a few weeks' leave until the Chekhov inheritance could be clarified. Anton's 'will' of 1901, leaving everything to Masha, informally drawn up and improperly witnessed, was declared invalid, but Olga, to the family's relief and even gratitude, renounced all claim on the estate and gave to Masha the substantial sum in her and Anton's joint account. She would live on her earnings as an actress and shareholder in the theatre. All the survivors agreed that Anton's intentions should be honoured and that all his estate should pass to Masha, who would look after Evgenia and the Yalta house. The lawyers pondered the next step. As Anton had died effectively intestate, Russian law gave the inheritance to all his siblings. A year passed before Olga and

600

1904-1959

the Chekhov brothers had signed a legal deed, giving Masha 'all the income and profit as heirs from literary works, theatrical plays and estate'. The houses and money in the bank were worth 80,000 roubles. This and Chekhov's plays now made Masha a rich woman.90

Trusting only Masha to keep her in comfort, Evgenia was relieved. Her sister-in-law Liudmila, and Irinushka, who had nursed Anton as a baby, came from Taganrog to live with her in Yalta. Aleksandr visited her and wrote to Vania: Old Mariushka is alive, toothless, and has no intention of dying. Mother has got two worthless mongrels to replace Tuzik who was poisoned. She's very afraid, seriously, that her children may steal her inheritance and send her packing. She doesn't believe in her children's decency.91 To Misha, Aleksandr wrote: She fixedly thought I was the main crook, able to lead you astray into a conspiracy. When she heard I had written a renunciation at Vania's, she bowed down almost to my feet… She won't give me Suvorin's letters: 'Masha told me not to.' The old ladies are not that unhappy, they laugh loud all the time.92 Evgenia enjoyed the garden, prosperity, and rides in the automobiles that came to ply the route from Yalta to the railhead. She died aged 84 in 1919.

Masha gave up schoolteaching and assumed responsibility for the home at Yalta as a temple to her brother. Once memoirs and letters were published, it was her life's task to manage the enormous archive. Through revolution, civil war, Stalin's terror and German occupation she never relaxed her grip on the Chekhov heritage. Her private life was set aside.93 She bought a dacha, which she sold to a Yalta dentist for diamonds just before revolution made real estate and money valueless. She died, aged 94, in 1957.

Aleksandr plunged back into alcoholism. In 1908, Natalia forced him out, despite his pleas.94 He lived with a servant, a dog and his chickens outside town. In 1906 he published vivid recollections of his and Anton's childhood. Masha and Misha, indignant at what they saw as Aleksandr's slurs on their father, ostracized him.95 Aleksandr's obituary ran:

601

LOVE AND 1»ÅËÒÌ

For a whole year he endured [throat cancer], the knowledge that it was incurable oppressed him horribly and he had many hours of severe physical and moral torment. He found peace at 9 a.m. on 17 May 1913. Masha told Olga that none of the family would go to the funeral.96 Misha worked for Suvorin's agencies until revolution destroyed them. Until his death in 1936, he was, like Masha, his brother's biographer. His son Sergei gathered an archive of all his kin except Masha and Anton. Vania remained a teacher. In December 1917 Vania's son Volodia, who knew he was incurably ill, stole his cousin Mikhail's revolver from a desk drawer and shot himself. Broken by this tragedy and by hunger, Vania died in 1922, aged sixty-one.

Aleksandr's son Kolia, discharged from the navy, appeared in Yalta, 'pathetic, ragged'. Masha gave him money to go to Siberia. In 1911 he reappeared: 'I wept, because I was sorry for him,' Masha told Olga. In the revolution Kolia returned to the Crimea, married a woman twenty-four years older, and ran a smallholding with chickens and even a cow. Always a sailor, he kept a logbook.97 He welcomed the Bolsheviks and may have been shot in 1921 by the White Army as it fled the Reds. Kolia's brother Anton, the typesetter, was conscripted in 1908 and was dead by 1921.98

Mikhail, Aleksandr's youngest son, suffered nervous breakdowns and alcoholism. He told friends that he had been seduced by his mother, Natalia. In 1919 she died: Mikhail forgot where he buried her. Mikhail's theatrical talent made him a star in the Moscow Arts Theatre. In 1915 he eloped with another Olga Knipper, the niece of Anton's widow. The marriage broke up, just after a child, Olga Chek-hova, was born. In the 1920s, Mikhail, his wife and daughter all ended up in Germany. Mikhail Chekhov eventually taught Stanislavskian acting to Hollywood. His ex-wife, now Olga Tschechowa, became an actress, was photographed with Adolf Hitler, and, allegedly, spied for Stalin. Thanks to her, the Nazis protected Chekhov's Yalta house.99

Olga Knipper-Chekhova, like Masha, died in her nineties. She was the linchpin of the Moscow Arts Theatre. Even when Stalin in 1935 made it his official theatre, Olga adapted.

Suvorin had power wrenched from him by the Dauphin, who was irascible to the point of madness. In 1912 he died of throat cancer,

I904-1959

with the same stoicism as Aleksandr Chekhov. The letters Suvorin had written to Anton have not been seen since 1919. Suvorin's sons fled Russia and lived in Yugoslavia and France, where in 1937 the Dauphin, following his mother's and younger brother's example, gassed himself.

Dunia Efros, Anton's first fiancee, left Russia for France. In 1943, aged eighty-two, she was seized by the Vichy police and gassed by the Germans. Olga Kundasova stayed in Russia, living until 1947: she burnt her archive. Lika Mizinova remained faithful to Sanin-Schoenberg: when he became psychotic, she nursed him to sanity. Lika died in Paris of cancer in 1937. Elena Shavrova-Iust, destitute after her husband was executed, sold her Chekhoviana to live. Lidia Iavorskaia divorced Prince Bariatinsky in 1915; in 1919 she escaped arrest in revolutionary Petrograd and fled to England, dying in 1921.10° Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik obliterated her Bohemian image and became a Soviet children's writer. Lidia Avilova, first abroad and then in Russia, persuaded herself that she had been Anton's only love. Just before dying in 1942, she met Aleksandr Smagin, Masha's faithful admirer. The two victims of unrequited passion commiserated. Lidia Avilova was just one of a scattered congregation who mourned Anton Chekhov all their lives.

602

603

NOTES

PART i Father to the Man i However, it is interesting how often Chekhov uses the name Egor (die native Russian form of George) for characters in his work who are associated, however ironically, with die warrior St George. 2?3000 at today's prices, a rouble being 2/3 ounce of silver. 3 Anton never mentioned Aleksandra, his last surviving aunt by blood. Among Pavel's papers (331 33 iv, 54a) is a scrap with die names of her children and sons-in-law. 4 Efrosinia was influential: in 1902 Chekhov claimed to have spoken Ukrainian in his infancy. 5 To Olga Knipper 2 Feb. 1903. 6 See OR, 331 81 1: Egor's letters to Pavel 1859-78. 7 Pavel Chekhov's first placement had been with the late Iakov Morozov, who would have been his father-in-law, in Rostov in 1841. The link between the Morozovs and Chekhovs was renewed in Rostov six years later: Ivan Morozov and Pavel Chekhov found they bodi had siblings in Taganrog. 8 See Zhizn' P. E. Chekbova in Krasnyi Arkbiv, 1939, 6. 9 Family letters to Mitrofan up to i860 were stitched togedier into a book: OR, 331 34 1. 10 His name day, St Antony's, was the 17th. 11 SeeLN68, 531-7. 12 See Aleksandr's letter to Anton 17 Jan. 1886 in Pis'ma, 1939, 131-2. 13 The Jewish boys called him 'Sashinkoch'. He acquired a smattering of Yiddish and never forgot the Jewish boys' panic call: Ferkatse di huzen, loifaheim, Roll up your trousers, run home. 14 See RGALI, 2540 531: Aleksandr's memoirs (extracts in Vokrug Chekhova, 1990). 15 See I. Bondarenko, Biografia eshchio ne okonchena in I. M. Sel'vaniuk, V. D. Sedegov, Sbornik statei i materialov 3, Rostov, 1963, 309-30. 16 See OR, 331 82 4: Aleksandr's letters to Masha, 1890-8. 17 Our main source for information about Chekhov's teachers is P. P. Filevskii, Ocherki iz prosblogo Taganrogskoi Gimnazii, Taganrog, 1906. 18 See RGALI, 540 1 382: Zelenenko, Vospominaniia 0 Taganrogskoi gimnazii, typescript. 19 Many teachers recalled Chekhov, but Aleksei Markevich, a history teacher, proudly proclaimed at die end of the century, 'I am not in the habit of reading stories like Chekhov's.' 20 A third boy, Misha Cheremis, remembered as the Pederast, also worked for a rime in the Chekhov shop: the children remembered only his phrase, 'Let's not be sensible.' 21 Chekhov drank Santurini most of his life, though he admitted it tasted like 'bad Marsala'. 2 2 As the knout was soaked in tar and fish oil, the effect on the boys' clothes was devastating. The one occasion when the knout struck him, Anton desperately soaked his trousers in chemicals, only to find

605

NOTES ANTON

that he had destroyed the fabric. A school friend's mother took pity and bought him a new pair, so that the damage was never discovered by Pavel. 23 See memoir by A. A. Dolzhenko (Anton's cousin) in Iz shkol'nykh let…, 1962, 14-19. 24 See M. Semanova, Teatral'nye vpecbatleniia… in Sbornik materialov, Rostov, i960, 157-84. 25 See OR, 331 31 1: Aleksandr's letters to his parents, 1874-96. 26 See her memoirs in LN68, 538-41. 27 To Pavel 10 Aug. 1875. See OR,

331 31 1.

28 See OR, 331 82 14; Nikolai Chekhov's letters to his parents,

1875-89.

29 See OR, 331 33 12a: Evgenia's letters to Aleksandr and Nikolai include this note (2 Jan. 1875). 30 See OR, 331 33 12a: Evgenia's letter to Aleksandr and Nikolai Chekhov. 31 Vrondy in his old age remembered Anton as an adept and favourite pupil with whom he would often play loto, a demure form of bingo, after class. 32 See OR, 331 81 11: Pavel's letters to his wife and children, 1876-90. 33 See OR, 331 33 125: Evgenia's letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1876-90. 34 See OR, 331 81 12: Pavel's letters to Evgenia, 1876, 1884 and 1891. 35 See OR, 331 81 38: Pavel Chekhov to G. P. Selivanov. 36 Mitrofan deferred to his 'spiritual adviser', the elderly Father Vasili Bandakov, whose volumes of 'Short Teachings for the Simple Folk' were used by the lazier priests of southern Russia. One of Bandakov's sermons is subtitled 'composed in the house of the Chekhovs'. In 1890, at Mitrofan's request, Anton wrote an obituary: 'He preached at :il 1. ê 11 î v every opportunity, never bothered about time or place… Bad harvests, epidemics, conscription… he was passionate, bold and often cutting.' 37 See RGALI, 860 1 576: M. I. H'kov typescript memoir. 38 See OR, 331 58 29: G. P. Selivanov's letters to Anton. 39 To Aleksei Suvorin junior. See 331 59 71a: A. A. Suvorin's letter to Anton 8 Nov. 1888. 40 Anton was to encounter old Taganrogians all his life: Drs Eremeev, Saveliev, Shamkovich, Tarabrin, Valter, Zembulatov; lawyers (Kolomnin, Konovitser, Kramariov, the Volkenshteins, one of whom Anton saved from expulsion from school after an anti-Semitic incident); performing artists (Vishnev[ets]ky); writers (Sergeenko); academics, civil servants, even revolutionaries. 41 To V. A. Tikhonov in February 1892. The brothel was run by N. Pototsky, who left Taganrog gimnazia with a silver medal in 1862. Years later Aleksandr Chekhov still asked after Pototsky. 42 See OR, 331 32 3, Aleksandr's letters to Anton, 1876: 27 Sept. 1876, printed in Pis'ma, 1939, 33-543 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia's 20 letters to Anton, 1876-1904. 44 In Russia this title has been reassigned to the Chekhov play once known as Platonov, but Platonov has nothing to do with 'fatherlessness' and has references that point to the 1880s. 45 Chekhov's books were plundered by family and 'friends', lost in peregrinations, or given away to school, prison and city libraries. See Balukhaty and Khanilo in bibliography.

46 See OR, 331 81 19: Pavel's letters to Anton, 1878. 47 See RGALI, 331 81 25: Pavel's letters to Mitrofan and Liudmila Chekhov, 1876-93: 2 Feb. 1878. 48 See OR, 331 82 15: Nikolai's letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1879-84. 49 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel's letters to Ivan Chekhov, 1879-98. 50 See OR, 331 81 20: Pavel's letters to Anton, 1879. PART è Doctor Chekhov 1 See M. P. Chekhov's memoirs in Vokrug Cbekhova, 184-5. 2 See OR, 331 58 29: Gavriil Parfentievich Selivanov's letters to Anton, 1879-80: 5 Sept. 1879. 3 The Dragonfly had chequered prospects; not until 1906, when Russian censorship collapsed, was it transformed into Satirikon, one of Europe's sharpest humorous weeklies. 4 See OR, 331 81 20: Pavel's letters to Anton, 1879-85: 18 June 1880. 5 See OR, 331 81 16: Pavel's letter to Nikolai, 23 Aug. 1880. 6 See OR, 331 35 9: O. and P. Agali's letters to Anton, 1880-1. 7 See OR, 331 55 21: Anisim [Onisim] Petrov's letters to Anton. Chekhov used the name Anisim once, for a corrupt, demented and semiliterate policeman in a story, 'In the Ravine' (1899). 8 See OR, 331 48 49: Solomon Kramariov's letters to Anton, 1881, 1904. 9 Anastasia's husband, Putiata shared the editorship of Chiaroscuro with Pushkariov. 10 Despite the marital links that bound the Goldens to the Chekhovs, Anton's younger brothers and his sister obliterated the Golden name from history. 11 Many an Anna Ivanovna pined for a Chekhov: we shall call her Anna Sokolnikova. 12 See OR, 331 82 12: A. I. Khrushchiova-Sokolnikova, nee Aleksandrova, documents. 13 Chekhov's opinions coincided with those of two men whom he venerated, Turgenev and his future publisher Aleksei Suvorin, but he would not know this until five years later. 14 The Unnecessary Victory has generated four screenplays this century. 15 'Slough' from Continual Dew (1937)16 The first page of Chekhov's case notes is given in I. Geizer, Chekhov i meditsina, 1960, 12. 17 Pelageia's entry each afternoon with the question, 'Isn't it time you had your beer?' was used much later by Chekhov for Dr Ragin's servant in 'Ward No. 6.' 18 See OR, 331 50 1 a-m, for Leikin's 205 letters to Anton, 1882-1900. 19 See RGALI, 2540 1 149: Aleksandr's letters to Ivan Chekhov, 1882-97. 20 Cut from Pis'ma, 1939: see OR, 331 328: Aleksandr's letters to Anton, 1882. 21 See OR, 331 81 16: Pavel's letter to Anton and Nikolai, 2 Jan. 1883. 22 A little of Anton's studies can be gleaned from E. Meve, Meditsina v tvorchestve… Kiev, 1989. 23 See OR, 331 81 13: Pavel's letters to Aleksandr Chekhov, 1874-94: 22 Mar. 1883. 24 This passage (13 May 1883) was cut from PSSP: see Kuranty, 8 Sept. 1993, 9. 25 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia's letter to Anton, 2 July 1883.

16

16

606

607

ANTON CHEKHOV

26 Sabaneev, brother of Chekhov's chemistry lecturer, edited Nature and Field Sports. He paid Chekhov nothing. 27 See PSSP, XVIII, 82-3. 28 See OR, 331 81 15: Pavel to Nikolai Chekhov, 2 Dec. 1883. 29 Unfortunately, Popudoglo's books were unusable and, except for an antiquarian compendium of naval terms which Chekhov found useful for comic purposes, were given to a junk dealer. 30 See OR, 331 55 8: Liodor Palmin's letters to Anton, 1883-6. 31 See RGALI, 549 1 10: Chekhov's case notes, with a commentary (c. 1920) by Dr Rossolimo. 32 See A. B. Derman, ed., A. P. Chekhov: Sbornik dokumentov…, 1947, 20-3. 33 Quote in PSSP, 2, 473. 34 See OR, 331 82 15: Nikolai's letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1879-87. 35 There was a much younger fourth Markova sister, Nina. See RGALI, 549 1352 and 549 3 1 for Elizaveta Markova-Sakharova's and Nina Markova's recollections of the Chekhov brothers. 36 See OR, 331 82 21: Nikolai's letters to Anton, 1883-9, a°d OR, 33i 47 45b: A. S. Kiseliov's letters to Anton, 1886. 37 See OR, 331 42 7: Liubov Dankovskaia's letters to Anton, 1884: October. 38 Pakosti for Novosti; News of the Day was delivered to the Chekhovs in the mid 1880s: Evgenia read it and, to Pavel's annoyance, then mislaid it. 39 In Chekhov's circles Plevako was notorious: with the editor of The Alarm Clock, the homicidal Kicheev, he once found a provincial theatre closed: Plevako paid the cashier 500 roubles - a full house takings - and had the actors brought from their hotel to perform, while he and Kicheev lurked invisible in the gallery. Plevako acted for the Chekhovs in 1905. 40 Dr Ilarion Dubrovo's death from diphtheria on 20 May 1883, after sucking out a child's infected membranes, inspired stories by both Leskov and Chekhov. 41 See OR, 331 42 54: M. M. Diukovsky's letters to Anton,

1884-93.

42 See OR, 331 64 46a: Maria Ianova's letters to Anton, 1885-6. 43 An organization set up in St Petersburg in 1859 to help writers and their families. 44 See OR, 331 50 iv, g: Leikin's letters to Anton, 1885 and 1886. 45 See OR, 331 62 27: Natalia to Anton, a sheet from a notebook, marked 1885 by Chekhov. 46 See OR, 331 73 10: Pavel's letter to Misha, 11 Aug. 1885. 47 See OR, 331 31 1: Anna's postscript to Aleksandr's letter to Pavel, 13 Aug. 1885. 48 See OR, 331 82 2: Aleksandr's letters to Maria Chekhova, 1883-7. 49 Chekhov was at a loss for a title: he talked to Leikin's second-incommand, Bilibin: they came up with Leikin-like titles: Cats and Carp, Flowers and Dogs. Leikin himself suggested In the Maelstrom or Dolls and Masks. Chekhov in despair pondered Buy the book or I smash your face. 50 See OR, 331 47 45b: A. S. Kiseliov's letters to Anton, 1886. 51 Mile Sirout [in Russian 'I shit'] is almost certainly, like Masha's girlfriend Josephina Pavlovna [pronounced colloquially Zhopa, 'arse'], Anton's invention. 52 See OR, 331 64 20: Evdokia Efros's

NO

three letters to Anton, 1886: 27 June. 53 See OR, 331 36 75b: Viktor Bilibin's letters to Anton, 1886. 54 This passage (28 Dec. 1885) was cut from the PSSP: see Kuranty, 8 Sept. 1993, 9. 55 See OR, 331 63 25a: Franz Schechtel's letters to Anton, 1885-6. The joint effort of hauling Kolia over the coals made Schechtel a family friend of die Chekhovs. Aunt Fenichka even urged him to convert from Cadiolicism to Orthodoxy. When Schechtel was late widi sketches for the cover for Motley Stories, Anton gave him, as punishment, a choice of 'Egyptian plagues'; Schechtel chose No. 10 'A pair of circus girls, alive and fresh, delivered to your house'. 'When,' Anton asked Schechtel diat Easter, 'are we going to screw die circus girls?' PART in My Brothers' Keeper 1 Anna Suvorina's memoir is in M. D. Beliaev, A. S. Dolinin, A. P. Chekhov. Zateriannye proizvedneiia, Neizdannye pis'ma, Novye vospominaiia. Leningrad: Atenei, 1925, 185-95. 2 See Pis'ma A. S. Suvorina kV.V. Rozanovu, Spb, 1913, 10; see also V. V. Rozanov, Mimoliotnoe 1994, 133-43 See OR, 331 63 25c: Franz Schechtel's two letters to Nikolai Chekhov, 1886. 4 Cut from Levitan: Pis'ma, 1956; see OR, 331 49 25a, Levitan's letters to Anton, 1885-6. 5 Cut from Pis'ma k A. P. Chekhova 1939: see OR, 331 32 12. 6 In fact die audior was Skabichevsky, a critic as scabious as his name.

7 See OR, 331 33 5b: Georgi Chekhov's letters to Anton, 1888: 30 Apr. 8 See OR, 331 47 45b: A. S. Kiseliov's twenty letters to Anton, 1886. 9 See Masha's account, Vokrug Chekhova, 231. 10 See OR, 331 58 31: A. L. Selivanova-Krause's letters to Anton, 1887-95. 11 See OR, 331 50 id: Leikin's letters to Anton, 1887. 12 See OR, 331 47 48: Maria Kiseliova's letters to Anton, 18861900. 13 Cut from A. S. Suvorin, Dnevnik: quoted in V. Lakshin, Proval in Teatr, 1987, 4, 83-91; more extensively in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1995, No. 15, 147-51. 14 See OR, 331 82 2: Aleksandr's letters to Masha, 1883-7: 28 Apr. 1887. 15 See OR, 331 82 17: Nikolai's letter to Masha, 1887. 16 In Taganrog cousin George was working for a diird Tchaikovsky brother, Ippolit (the fat, heterosexual Tchaikovsky who told jokes), director of die shipping company diere. 17 See N. M.?,zhov Aleksei Sergeevich Suvorin, Moi vospominaniia 0 niom, dumy i soobrazhenia in Istoricheskii vestnik, SPb, 1915, 1, 110-38. 18 Cut from PSSP: see OR, 331 22 14: Anton's letters to Schechtel, 1886-1902; 4 June 1887. The passage was inked out by Schechtel. 19 From a draft of a letter in 1904 to die writer Doroshevich, quoted in PSSP, 2,401-2. 20 From Suvorin's letter of die late 1880s to his leader-writer Diakov, quoted in PSSP, 2, 401. 21 See M. P. Chekhov's memoirs; also P. A. Sergeenko, 0. Chekhove, in Niva, 1904, 10, 217-18.

13

13

608

609

ANION CUKKIIOV

5 See RGALI, 640 1 189: Svobodin's letters to Lavrov: 11 Oct. 89. 6 See G. Shaliugin, 'Uchitel slovesnosti', in Chekhoviana 1990, 124-9. 7 See OR, 331 46 33: A. Ipatieva-Golden's letters to Anton, 1889-91. 8 This passage is to be found in VI. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Rozhdenie teatra, 1989, 60-1. 9 See OR, 331 47 13b: Kleopatra Karatygina's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1890. 10 See OR, 331 49 25b: this phrase is cut from Levitan, 1956. 11 Quoted from VI. Rynkevich, Puteshestvie k domu s mezoninom, Rostov, 1990, 54-7: the Ioganson diary is in GPB, SPb, and in MXaT. 12 Lieutenant Schmidt wrote his recollections in Nasha Gazeta, Tallinn, 1927, XI: see G. Shaliugin, 'la i moi voennye sputniki', Oktiabr',

1987, 5, 195-201.

13 See OR, 331 46 ia: Aleksandr Ivanenko's letters to Anton, 188991: 28 May 1890. 14 See RGALI, 2540 1 161: Masha's letters to Ivan Chekhov, 1890-1908: 8 May 1890. 15 This letter is cut from the PSSP: see A. P. Chudakov, ' "Neprilichnye slova" i oblik klassika' in Literatumoe Obozrenie, 1991, 11, 54. 16 P. Kononovich is recorded as a pupil of Taganrog gimnazia in die 1850s: if General Kononovich is a relative, this might explain his affability to Anton. 17 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia's letters to Anton, 1875-1904. 18 See LN87, 294-300: Plavanie A. P. Chekhova (from the log of the Petersburg). 19 See OR, 331 33 125: Evgenia's 22 See RGAL1, 189 1 2: Ezhov's draft Humorists of the 1880s; quoted in PSSP, XI, 412-13. 23 See Davydov's Koe-cbto 0 Cbekhove, quoted in PSSP, XI, 414. 24 See OR, 331 82 9: Anna Sokolnikova's letter to Evgenia Chekhova, 20 Jan. 1888. 25 The two writers had exchanged only a few words at an evening gathering a few days previously; Chekhov and Garshin's mother had taken to each other, when Chekhov visited die bookshop belonging to Evgeni Garshin, die writer's brother - a critic who became very hostile to Chekhov. 16 See OR, 331 49 42a: A. Lazarev-Gruzinsky's letters to Anton, 1887-8. 27 That same autumn the Dir was wrecked on the shores of the Crimea. 28 See OR, 331 48 27: Korneev's letters to Anton, 1886-94. 29 See OR, 331 33 14: Natalia Golden's letter to Anton, 18 NTov. 1888. 30 See OR, 331 59 71a: A. A. Suvorin's letters to Anton, 1888. 31 This letter (24 Nov. 1888) is cut in the PSSP: see A. P. Chudakov, ' "Neprilichnye slova" i oblik klassika' in Literatumoe Obozrenie 1991, 11, 54. 32 Pleshcheev notes 14 v 1891, see Pis'ma russkikh pisatelei k Suvorina, Leningrad 1927, 130. 33 Bowdlerized in the PSSP: see RGALI, 594 1 269. 34 She was still writing Anton from Kharkov, inviting him there to help her husband. 35 See S. I. Smirnova-Sazonova's diary, LN8j, 305. 36 Shcheglov reconstructed the play, a poor piece, in 1911 as The Power of Hypnotism.

610

37 See OR, 331 59 75: Anastasia Suvorina's letters to Anton, 18891900. 38 See Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko's letter to Anton in Ezhegodnik MKhaTa, 1944, 1,93. 39 See RGALI, 189 1 19: Lazarev-Gruzinsky to Ezhov, 1884-91: letters of 10 Dec. 1888, 21 Jan. 1889. 40 See N. M. Ezhov, A. P. Chekhov in Istoricheskii vestnik, 1909, 11, 595 - 607. 41 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina's letters to Anton, 1887-1901. 42 At Obock Ashinov was joined by Father Paisi, who had once dug Mitrofan Chekhov's cellar, and Dr Tsvetaev, whom Chekhov had met at Voskresensk. When the French fired on the Cossacks, some of the invaders crossed the Danikil desert to serve the Negus of Abyssinia. 43 See OR, 331 82 16: Kolia's postcard to Evgenia. 44 See OR, 331 82 25: Kolia's letter to an unidentified Aleksandr Viktorovich (May? 1889). 45 See OR, 331 32 15: this passage is cut from Pis'ma, 1939. 46 See OR, 331 82 25: Kolia's letter to an unidentified Aleksandr Viktorovich (May? 1889). 47 See RGALI, 459 1 4617: Aleksandr Chekhov's letters to A. S. Suvorin, 1888-96. 48 See OR, 331 31 1: Aleksandr's letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1874-96. 49 See RGALI, 2540 1 43: Misha's letters to his parents, 1888-1901. 50 See OR, 331 31 1: Aleksandr's letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1874-äá. Another mourner held her grief back: in 1953 Tatiana Ivchenko aged 103, dying in Kharkov, insisted on being buried next to Kolia Chekhov.

NO"

She had brought Kolia milk in his last weeks of life. 51 See OR, 331 63 25b: Franz Schechtel's letters to Anton, 1887952 See RGALI, 189 1 19: Lazarev-Gruzinsky's letters to Nikolai Ezhov, 1884-91: 24 June

1889.

53 See OR, 331 81 21: Pavel Chekhov's letters to Anton, 1886-96. 54 Kleopatra Karatygina had acquired by marriage the Karatygin surname which had a generation before belonged to one of the finest actors in the Russian theatre. See LN68, 575-86: Karatygina, Vospominaniia 0 Chekhove. 55 See Pis'ma russkikh pisatelei k Suvorinu, Leningrad, 1927, 38 (misdated 1897). 56 See OR, 331 81 32: written on the back of Pavel Chekhov's letter to Anna Ipatieva-Golden. 57 See OR, 331 58 27V: P. Svobodin's letters to Anton, 1889; pardy in Zapiski OR, 16, 1954. 58 See OR, 331 50 izh: Leikin's letters to Anton, 1889: 26 Aug. 1889. 59 The story eventually had an echo in the Chekhovs' life: in 1917 Anton's nephew Volodia shot himself. 60 Professor Storozhenko avenged the insult in 1899: as theatre censor, he blocked Uncle Vania. PART iv Annies de Pelerinage 1 See OR, 331 47 13a: K. A. Karatygina's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1889. 2 See OR, 331 63 3a: E. K. Shavrova's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1889. 3 See RGALI, 189 1 19: A. Lazarev-Gruzinsky's letters to Ezhov, 1884-91: 21 Oct. 1889. 4 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina's letters to Anton: 12 Nov. 1889.

6l

ANION CHEXHOV

letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1875-90. 20 See RGALI, 2540 1 160: Evgenia's letters to Ivan, 1888-1905. 21 See OR, 331 31 1: the letter to Masha 8 Oct. 1890 is filed with Aleksandr's letters to his parents. 22 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha's letters to Mikhail Chekhov, 1884-1904: 15 Oct. 1890. A year later Suvorin offered Vania a career in his Moscow bookshop, see RGALI, 2540 1 143. 23 See LN68, 496. 24 See N. M. Ezhov, A. P. Chekhov in Istoricheskii veslnik 1909, 11, 595-607. 25 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel's letters to Ivan, 1879-98: 29 Nov. 1890. 26 See Vokrug Chekhova, 278-80; OR, 331 83 25: Misha's Chekhov i mangusy. 2 7 May die gods serve you, die nymphs love you and the doctors not treat you. Yours A. See OR, 331 59 7 ib: A. A. Suvorin's letters to Anton, 1889-92. 28 See OR, 331 43 nb: N. Ezhov's letters to Anton, 1890-1: 20 Oct. 1890. 29 See OR, 331 46 ia: Ivanenko's letters to Anton, 1889-91. 30 See LN68, 479-92: Leontiev-Shcheglov's diary. 31 See OR, 331 52 46: Daria Musina-Pushkina's letters to Anton, 1891, 1896-8. 32 See OR, 331 63 4a: Elena Shavrova's letters to Anton, 1889-91: 14 Jan. 1891. 33 See OR, 331 52 2a: Lib Mizinova's letters to Anton, 1891-2; in Perepiska 1984, II, 16-59. 34 See Novoe vremia, No. 1017, 4 July 1904. 35 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel's letters to Ivan, 1879-98: 7 Apr. 1891.

612

36 Hoth Misha and Masha in their memoirs imply that the palmcat was given to Moscow Zoo; the Zoo's records do not mention it. 37 See OR, 331 81 8: Pavel's notebooks, 1880-97. 38 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel's letters to Ivan, 1879-98: 3 May 1891. 39 Grillparzer's play Sappho was performed in Moscow that year; the nicknames were topical. 40 See Chaleeva's memoirs (in Soligalich local museum), quoted in A. V. Kandidov, A. P. Chekhov v Bogimove, Kaluga, 1991, 32. 41 See OR, 331 36 38: Bezdetnov's letter to Anton Chekhov. 42 Cut in PSSP: see A. P. Chudakov, ' "Neprilichnye slova" i oblik klassika' in Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1991, 11, 54. 43 See OR, 331 52 2a: Lika Mizinova's letters to Anton, 1891-2; in Perepiska, 1984, II, 16-59. 44 See Sazonova's diary, 15 Mar. 1895, LN87, 307. 45 See OR, 331 81 83: Fenichka Dolzhenko's letter to Evgenia, 9 July 1891. 46 Quoted by Aleksandr in Pis'ma, 1939, 246. Anton used Pavel's prayer in 'The Duel'. 47 See OR, 331 46 33: Anna Ipatieva-Golden's letter to Anton, 25 Sept. 1891. 48 See OR, 331 81 25: Pavel's letters to Mitrofan and Liudmila, 1876-93: 27 Oct. 1891. 49 See OR, 331 63 4a: Elena Shavrova's letters to Anton, 1889-91: 17 Nov. 1891. 50 See MXaT, (Sanin) 5323/ 1933-73: L. S. Mizinova's letters to Sofia Ioganson, 1877-99. 51 See OR, 331 46 ia: Ivanenko's letters to Anton, 1889-91. 52 See OR, 331 49 12b:

NOT

Lazarev-Gruzinsky's letters to Anton, 1889-92: 4 Nov. 1891. 53 See OR, 331 39 25: Volter's letter to Anton, 15 Jan. 1892. 54 See OR, 331 58 2 7g: P. Svobodin's letters to Anton, 1891; pardy printed in Zapiski OR GBL, 16, 195455 See OR, 331 43 9: Lt Evgraf Egorov's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1882-92. 56 This story, the first Chekhov set in western Europe, is told by a terrorist who, assigned to spy on a minister, elopes with die mistress of die minister's son. Revised, it was published in 1893. 57 Chekhov had also written 'A Great Man', now known as 'The Grasshopper', showing a saindy doctor destroyed by his wife's treachery: this bombshell (for the main characters were recognizable as die Levitan menage) exploded in spring 1892. 58 See OR, 331 96 37: Aleksandr Smagin's diirty-four letters to Masha, 1888-92. 59 See E. M. Shavrova-Iust's memoirs in I. M. Sel'vaniuk, V. D. Sedegov, Sbornik statei i materialov pi, Rostov, 1963, 267-308. 60 See OR, 331 81 21: Pavel's letters to Anton, 1886-96: 3Jan. 1892. PART v Cincinnatus 1 Nikolai Ezhov teased Anton in a skit, Certified Authentic: a Mr Mongoose buys 600 acres, but the forest is not his and the piano is unplayable. 2 See OR, 331 96 37: Aleksandr Smagin's letters to Masha, 1888-May 1892. 3 See OR, 331 96 38: Aleksandr Smagin's 34 letters to Masha, June 1892-1929.

6.

4 See 0 semie, 1970, 203. 5 Cockroaches were believed to leave a house only before a fire. 6 See MXaT, (Sanin) 5323/ 1933-1973: L. S. Mizinova's letters to Sofia Ioganson, 1877-99. 7 See OR, 331 52 2a: Lika's letters to Anton, 1891-2; some in Perepiska, 1984, II, 16-59. 8 Leskov had written 'The Unmercenary Engineers': an officer resists corruption and is committed to a psychiatrist, who declares deadi the ultimate medicine. Leskov's late 'Hare Park' pays homage to 'Ward No. 6': a secret policeman, nursed by the radical he persecuted, dies in a madhouse. 9 See OR, 331 63 25V: Franz Schechtel's letters to Anton, 1891-3. 10 See OR, 331 48 79a: O. P. Kundasova's letters to Anton, 1892 -1904: 25 May 1892. 11 In remoter areas peasants believed that doctors were deliberately spreading cholera: in Samara, on the Volga, they killed one doctor and drove the others out. 12 Petrov was a shop assistant in Muir and Mirrielees, the Moscow store where the Chekhovs ordered everything from crockery to rifles. Sixteen years earlier, at Petrov's wedding in Kaluga, Aleksandr, Kolia and Masha had been poor relatives: now the scales had tipped the odier way. 13 See OR, 331 93 78: Lika Mizinova's letters to Masha Chekhova, 1891314 Pavel began a diary on arrival in Melikhovo: it records comings and goings, the weather, and incidents, odd and banal. See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova Melikhovskii letopisets, 1995.

ANTON CIIKKIIOV

15 See OR, 331 56 38: A. A. Pokhlebina's letters to Anton, 1892-8: 10 July 1892. 16 See OR, 331 51 12: Klara Mamuna's letter to Anton. 17 SeeLN68, 855-870: E. Z. Balabanovich, Chekhov v pis'makh brata…: letter of 26 June 1892. 18 See OR, 331 81 21: Pavel Chekhov's letters to Anton, 1886-96. 19 See RGALI, 459 1 4617: Aleksandr's letters to A. S. Suvorin, 1888-96: 13 July 1892. 20 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina's letters to Anton: undated, filed as sheets 36-7. 21 Dr Obolonsky, a 'vulture' for a lucrative patient, showed his concern: 'I've heard… your stay depends on the degree of Suvorin's illness. They say he's seriously ill… he believes you and in you unconditionally. Arrange for him to invite me to examine him.' See OR, 331 54 7: N. N. Obolonsky's letters to Anton, 1889-1901. 22 Anton also examined Leskov, who feared his doctors were lying about his terminal heart condition. He reassured Leskov, but told others that the novelist had at most a year to live. 23 See Zankovetskaia's memoirs, LN68, 592-3. 24 See LN68, 493-510 for V. A. Tikhonov's and Leikin's diaries. 25 See OR, 331 81 13: Pavel's letters to Aleksandr, 1874-94. 26 See OR, 331, 52 2b: Lika's letters to Anton, 1893-4. 27 See LN68, 570-2. 28 See LN68, 484. 29 The same journalist also attacked Chekhov as 'a writer without support or goal' and hoped 'he gets closer to human sufferings…', but now Chekhov overlooked abuse from Russian Thought.

30 The Suvorins and Chekhov were all relieved they had not gone: the Russian contribution was just a party of bureaucrats, who were the butt of the American President's sarcasm. 31 Anton's letter to Gorbunov-Posadov, Chertkov's editor, 26 Apr. 1893. 32 Potapenko's memoirs are in V vospominaniiakh. 3 3 Suvorin was not intentionally cheating Anton, but New Times had notoriously bad bookkeeping. 34 See RGALI, 459 1 2161: O. P. Kundasova's letters to A. S. Suvorin, 1891-1908. 35 See OR, 331 43 ug: N. Ezhov's letters to Anton, 1893: 16 Apr. 36 That Athenian night was beautiful. The beautiful is unforgettable. Dear poet, if you only knew what a headache…/I await the supreme vice and send you your dowry./My little Sappho. Come at once, urgent. See RGALI, 571 1 1204: Lidia Iavorskaia's fifty-one letters to Shchepkina-Kupernik, 1893. 37 See OR, 331 64 2: T. L. Shchepkina-Kupernik's letters to Anton, 1893-1900. 38 See OR, 331 64 34: Lidia Iavorskaia's letters to Anton, 1893-6. 39 See PSSP, 5, 506: see RGALI, 459 3 I240 See LN68, 479-92; Leontiev-Shcheglov's diary. 41 See OR, 331 56 36a: Potapenko's letters to Anton, 1893-5. See Perepiska II, 1984, 62-76. 42 See OR, 331 46 ib: Ivanenko's letters to Anton, 1892-4. 43 See OR, 331 93 79: Lika Mizinova's letters to Masha, 1894. NO PART vi Lika disparue 1 See OR, 331 52 zb: Lika's letters to Anton 1893-4; some in Perepiska II, 1984, 16-59. 2 Miroliubov was soon to leave the opera and become Chekhov's last editor. 3 See OR, 331 93 79: Lika Mizinova's letters to Masha Chekhova, 1894. 4 See OR, 331 64 34: Lidia Iavorskaia's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1893-6. 5 See OR, 331 56 36a: Potapenko's letters to Anton, 1893-5. See Perepiska II, 1984, 62-76. 6 See OR, 331 95 2: Potapenko's letters to Masha, 1894-5. 7 See OR, 331 64 2: T. L. Shchepkina-Kupernik's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1893-1900. 8 Quoted in PSSP, 5, 611. 9 See OR, 331 50 11: Aleksandra Liosova's three letters to Anton, 1894. 10 Quoted from E. M. Sakharova, A. I. Ivanenko - vechnyi drug in Chekhoviana: Melikhovskie trudy i dni, 1995, 327-33411 See OR, 331 46 lb: Ivanenko's letters to Anton, 1892-4. 12 See LN68, 479-92; Leontiev-Shcheglov's diary. 13 See OR, 331 81 13: Pavel's letters to Aleksandr Chekhov, 1874-94: Aug. 1894. 14 See MXaT, (Sanin), 5323: L. S. Mizinova-Sanina's letters to Lidia Iurgeneva. 15 See MXaT, (Sanin), 5323/ 1933-1973: L. S. Mizinova's letters to Sofia Ioganson, 1877-99. 16 SeelRLI, fond 285, S. I. Smirnova-Sazonova papers. 17 Sablin's brother, a tax inspector (died in 1895), protected Misha; Mikhail Sablin, a theatre manager, edited The Russian Gazette. The Sablins and Misha made Masha a monthly allowance, which Anton pretended not to know about. 18 Chekhov's library had two books on syphilis, and none on ÒÂ, yet Potapenko remembers him telling a consumptive passenger on a train to abandon work and family and live in Algiers. 19 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha's letters to Misha, 1884-1904: 7 Aug. 1894. 20 See OR, 331 81 21: Pavel's letters to Anton, 1886-96. 21 See OR, 331 33 iv: Pavel Chekhov, various documents. 22 See 0 semie, 1970, 179. 23 See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova, Melikhovskii letopisets, 1995. 24 See RGALI, $JI 1 1137: Masha's letters to Shchepkina-Kupernik, 1894-1951. 25 See OR, 331 33 14: Natalia Golden-Chekhova's letters to Anton, 1888, 1894. 26 See L. Z. Abramenkova, 'Sosed Chekhovykh V. N. Semenkovich' in Chekhoviana: Melikhovskie trudy i dni, 1995, 264-72. 27 Mikhailov became Medvedenko in The Seagull. In 1895 the peasants called for his dismissal. 28 Quoted in PSSP, 5, 587. 29 See OR, 331 43 nd: Nikolai Ezhov's letters to Anton, 1894-7. 30 See OR, 331 93 80: Lika's letters to Masha Chekhova, 1895. 31 See A. la. Al'tshuUer, A. P. Chekhov i L. B. Iavorskaia, in Chekhoviana, 1990, 140-51. 32 See OR, 331 64 34: Lidia Iavorskaia's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1893-6. 33 See OR, 331 52 2v: Lika's letters to Anton, 1895 -6; some in Perepiska II, 1984, 16-59. 34 See OR, 331 48 79a: O. P. Kundasova's letters to Anton, 1892 -1904.

19

19

614

615

ANION ÑÈ!• Ê NOV NOTES

35 See OR, 331 48 83a: Dr P. I. Kurkin's letters to Anton, 1892-5. 36 Quoted in PSSP, 6, 381. 37 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina's letters to Anton, 1889-1901. 38 See LN68, 484. 39 See LN68, 502. 40 Misha said that the story was based on the laroslavl tax inspector Sablin's unhappy marriage. 41 See OR, 331 82 59: Misha's letters to Masha, 1890-6: 12 Jan. 1895. 42 See MXaT, 5323/19: S. M. Ioganson's diary, book 5, 1895-7. 43 See M. A. Sheikina, 'Iz pisem I. V. Chekhova ê S. V. Chekhovoi' in Chekhoviana: Melikbovskie trudy i dni, 1995, 315-27; RGALI, 2540 1 238-43. 44 See RGALI, 289 1 16: N. Ezhov's letters to Leikin, 1894-1903. 45 In August 1895 Ezhov asked Leikin for an advance of 200 roubles for the marriage. Leikin replied that he was glad Ezhov had found the love of his life, and sent him 50. 46 Chekhov asked Korobov to translate a passage from Nietzsche for his new play. 47 Glukhovskoi, the vet, had, as an insurance agent too, a double interest in the Chekhov cows. 48 See OR, 331 60 62: Anna Turchaninova's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1895, 1900. 49 See OR, 331 63 4V: Elena Shavrova-Iust's letters to Anton Chekhov, 1895. 50 See Ilia Sats, Iz zapisnoi knizhki, Moscow-Petrograd, 1923, 53-4. 51 See OR, 331 81 24: Pavel's letters to Maria Chekhova, 1885-98: 15 Dec. 1895. 52 See RGALI, 2540 1 149: Aleksandr's letters to Ivan Chekhov, 1882-97: 31 July 1895. 53 Menshikov's articles upset all Serpukhov district, proving that Prince Viazcmsky was not a precursor of Tolstoy, emancipating peasants and giving away property, but a dissolute drunkard. The meeting with Tolstoy was marred for Anton by neuralgia which struck the whole of his right face. He took painkillers, quinine, ointment, and had a tooth pulled, but the pain persisted for two weeks; a year later an optician would diagnose the cause. PART VII The Flight of the Seagull 1 See Kleopatra Karatygina's memoirs, LN68, 575-86. 2 See Sazonova's diary, LN8j, 307-8. 3 See OR, 331 52 29: Marfa Ivanovna Loboda's letters to Anton, 1881-1902; 4 Jan. 1896. 4 See OR, 331 56 36b: Potapenko's letters to Anton 1896. See Perepiska II, 1984, 62-76. 5 A flirtatious conversation is reconstructed in unChekhovian detail in Avilova's memoirs (V vospominaniiakh 121-208), but her account is pardy corroborated by other records. She recalls being surprised by Anton's visit to Petersburg, first catching sight of him that year in a theatre box: 'How ridiculous and weird it was: papa Suvorin and maman Suvorin and Chekhov, their baby, in die middle.' 6 See OR 331 73 10: Pavel Chekhov's letters to Misha, 1885-98: 5 Feb. 1896. 7 See OR, 331 47 13V: Kleopatra Karatygina's letters to Anton, 1892 -1904. 8 This view is VI. Rynkevich's, in Putesbestvie k domu s mezoninom, Rostov, 1990. See OR, 331 52 2v: Lika's letters to Anton, 1895-6; some printed in Perepiska II, 1984, 16-59. 9 See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova, Melikhovskii letopisets, 1995. 10 In the printed versions of Suvorin's diary Gei is misread as Chekhov (Suvorin's hand was appalling) and it was therefore thought that Chekhov had fled Melikhovo at Easter 1896 to be with Suvorin. A close reading of Suvorin's manuscript confirms, however, that he strolled the cemetery with Gei, not Chekhov. n See OR, 331 73 11: Evgenia's letters to Mikhail Chekhov, 1885-1903. 12 See T. L. Sukhotina-Tolstaia, Dnevniki, 1979, 372. 13 See Menshikov's letter to Chekhov, 20 Aug. 1896, quoted in PSSP, 500-1. 14 Lugovoi was Aleksei Tikhonov, the brother of V. A. Tikhonov, editor of The North. 15 Iakovenko refused beds to the insane whom Chekhov wanted interned; relatives had to apply for a council grant of 5 roubles a montli to pay for a chain, a guard and sedatives. Tolokonnikov gave Anton a violin as a mark of his gratitude for the bromide he prescribed. 16 See MXaT, 5323/19: S. M. Ioganson's diary, book 5, 1895-7. 17 This is not the view in Rynkevich's Putesbestvie k domu s mezoninom, Rostov, 1990. 18 Volkenshtein was the Jewish boy Chekhov had saved from expulsion in 1877; Chuprov taught Chekhov statistics at Moscow University; Professor Veselovsky was an academician. 19 See Grigori Moskvich, Putevoditel' po Kavkazu, SPb, 1911, 83.

20 See LN68, 479-92; Leontiev-Shcheglov's diary. 21 See PSSP, XIII, 364-5. 22 The revision was done after The Seagull had been completed. Firstly, Uncle Vania, like The Seagull, has no scene divisions. Secondly, August and September 1896 are the only months between two works ('My Life', 'Peasants') when Anton could have found time to rewrite tie play. Thirdly, details added to Uncle Vania reflect Melikhovo in summer 1896: Mariushka, the cook's tame chicks (the Konovitsers refused to eat them), and Marina's speckled hen on-stage in Uncle Vania; in June Chekhov's visit to Mal'tsy for dysentery, and Dr Astrov's to 'Malitskoe' for typhus; on 15 August a visitor Menshikov 'in dry weather wears galoshes, carries an umbrella, so as not to perish of sunstroke', and Vania mocks Serebriakov: 'An oppressively hot day, and our great scholar goes out with an umbrella, in his overcoat, gloves and galoshes.' 23 Bychkov's memoirs, told to V. E. Ermilov, are in Kavkazskii krai Krasnodar?, 1913, No. 145. 24 Sazonova wrote: 'We were all at Sodom's End. We saw Chekhov. He came to see our actors.' 25 See Vvospominaniiakh…, 350-5. 26 See LN68, 499-510 for Leikin's diary. 27 Karpov's memoirs (dubious) are in V. F. Komissarzhevskaia… Materialy, 1964, 214-5. 28 Anna Suvorina's memoir, in M. D. Beliaev, A. S. Dolinin, A. P. Chekhov. Zateriannye proizvedneiia, Neizdannye pis'ma, Novye vospominaiia… Leningrad: Atenei, 1925, 185-95. 29 I have not been able to trace this line in Avilova's printed works.

23

23

616

617

ANTON CHEKHOV NOTES 30 PSSP, 6, 523.

31 See OR, 331 63 4g: Elena Shavrova's letters to Anton, 1896. 32 Kugel bad not met Lika, who drank, or her friend Varia Eberle, who took snuff. 33 Quoted in PSSP, 6, 532; written 21 Oct. 1896. 34 See E. M. Shavrova-Iust's memoirs in I. M. Sel'vaniuk, V. D. Sedegov, Sbornik statei i materialov pi, Rostov, 1963, 267-308. 35 See Perepiska, 1984, II, 150-1. 36 See K. A. Chaikovskaia, 'Melikhovskie pozhary' in Chekhoviana, 1995, 272-7. 37 Russian dramatists usually received two per cent of the gross takings for each act of their play. 38 See OR, 331 63 25g: Franz Schechtel's letters to Anton, 1894-1900: 17 Dec. 1896. 39 See OR, 331 36 72: Emilie Bijon's letters to Anton, 1896-1900. 40 See OR, 331 54 50: Liudmila Groupillon-Ozerova's eight letters to Anton, 1896-7. 41 Meanwhile Nikolai Ezhov was enrolled as census taker for the dosshouses of Moscow. 42 See OR, 331 63 4d: Elena Shavrova's letters to Anton, 1897. 43 See OR, 331 48 7: Vera Komissarzhevskaia's letters to Anton, 1897-1903. 44 See Pis'ma, 1939, 331-3. PART VIII Flowering Cemeteries 1. See LN68, 479-92; Leontiev-Shcheglov's diary. 2 See Sazonova's diary, LN87, 309. 3 Koumiss is fermented mares' milk; it tastes like a mixture of champagne, chalk and rancid butter. It is easily digested and its bacteria are thought to be beneficial.

6i8

4 According to her memoirs she elicited from Anton a confession of undying love; at the time, however, she told Leikin (see his diary LN68, 499-510) diat Chekhov was forbidden to speak. 5 See PSSP, 6, 616-7: Olga Shavrova's account is hard to believe. 6 See OR, 331, 63 4d: Elena Shavrova's letters to Anton, 1897. 7 See S. M. Chekhov, Î semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 118. 8 See PSSP, 6, 631-2.

9 See Zapiski GBL VIII 1941, 49. 10 See OR, 331 36 72: Emilie Bijon's letters to Anton, 1896-1900. n See OR, 331 33 51: Georgi Chekhov's letters to Anton, 1897: 13 Apr. 12 See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova, Melikhovskii letopisets,

1995.

13 See Sazonova's diary, LN8-], 310. 14 Cut from Levitan: Pis'ma, 1956; see

OR, 331 49 25.

15 See OR, 331 54 50: Liudmila Groupillon-Ozerova's eight letters to Anton Chekhov, 1896-7. Anton's letters to her are lost. 16 See OR, 331 93 80: Lika's letters to Masha, 1895-7. 17 See OR, 331 52 2g: Lika's letters to Anton, 1897; some printed in Perepiska II, 1984, 16-59. 18 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina's letters to Anton, 1889-1901. 19 Dnevnik, 1923/1992: this passage is followed in published versions by a series of morbid reflections attributed to Chekhov. A closer look at Suvorin's manuscript suggests they are Suvorin's own thoughts. Roskina's transcription of Suvorin's diaries (in RGALI) may soon be published by the author of this book. 20 The Potapenkos were now ïîï grata at the Suvorins, viz. Emilie Bijon (Dec. 1897); 'M. Potapenko… s'est permis d'ecrire un sale feuilleton concernant les malheureuses governantes, qu'ils meprisent et sa femme qu'etait elle?' 21 See RGALI, 2450 1 59 [a fragment also used by Vania to write to Aleksandr]. 22 Quoted in A. Fiodorov-Davydov, A. la. Shapiro Levitan: Dokumenty, 1966: letter 29 July 1897. 23 See OR, 331 51 18: N. Maksheev's letters to Anton, 1897-8. 24 See OR, 331 56 36V: Potapenko's letters to Anton, 1897-9. 25 He refolded JVra Times for the Russian reading room in Menton; he resold World Echoes to State Counsellor Kulakov, a resident of the pension, for 2 francs a month. 26 See OR, 331 73 10: Pavel's letters to Misha, 1885-98: 17 Sept. 1897. 27 See OR, 331 73 11: Evgenia's letters to Misha, 1888-1903: 3 Nov. 1897. 28 Russia had refused to sign the international convention on copyright, so Russian authors had no right to be paid for foreign editions of their work. 29 Grigorovich still hoped: he wrote to Suvorin (29 Oct. 1898): 'As for your Nastenka, I've always dreamt of Chekhov… he is himself so nice and talented that nothing better can be desired. But how does Nastenka feel?' See Pis'ma russklkh plsatelei k Suvorinu, 1927, 42-3. 30 18 Dec. 1897: quoted in PSSP, 7, 51731 See OR, 331 59 25: Vasili Sobolevsky's letters to Anton, 1892-1904. 32 See OR, 331 73 11: Masha's postscript to Evgenia's letter to Misha, 3 Nov. 1897. 33 See OR, 331 81 23: Pavel's letter to Vania, 22 Dec. 1897.

61

34 See OR, 331 52 2d: Lika's letters to Anton 1898; some printed in Perepiska II, 1984, 16-59. 35 Quoted in PSSP, 7, 493. 36 Tolstoy wavered; Alphonse Daudet believed that twelve officers could not be wrong. Lidia Iavorskaia was, however, a fiery Dreyfusarde. 37 Quoted in PSSP, 7, 516. 38 Suvorin had won his own Dreyfus affair. In 1892 New Times exposed fraud by the Odessa branch of Parisian grain traders, Louis Dreyfus Co., who sued Suvorin for libel and lost. Moreover, Suvorin was convinced that Zola had abused him and his wife by calling the anarchist in Germinal Souvarine and his partner Anna. 39 Quoted in PSSP, 7, 528. 40 Kovalevsky's memoirs of Anton Chekhov are in Vokrug Chekhova, 361-6. 41 See OR, 331 73 10: Pavel's letters to Misha, 1885-98: 8 Jan. 1898. 42 Quoted in S. M. Chekhov, Î semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 135 - 7. 43 Cut in Pis'ma, 1939; see OR, 331 32 24: Aleksandr's letters to Anton, 1898. 44 The interview was so heavily edited that Chekhov refused permission to publish. 45 See N. A. Rosldna, 'Ob odnoi staroi publikatsii' in Voprosy literatury, 1968, 6, 250-3. 46 See RGALI, 459 2 14: A. S. Suvorin's letters to Anna Suvorina; quoted PSSP, 7, 567. 47 See RGALI, 459 1 4172, May 1898: Nastia Suvorina seldom mentioned Chekhov in her letters. 48 See OR, 331 73 11: Evgenia's letters to Misha, 1888-1903: 8 May 1898. 49 Married to Ekaterina ('Kitten', formerly Baroness Korf), Nemirovich-Danchenko was both teacher and lover of the twenry-eight-year-old Olga

34

ANION CHEKHOV NOTES

Knipper. (Anton's familiarity with Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife 'Kitten' once aroused Lika Mizinova's jealousy.) Knipper, after an affair with a student Dmitri Goncharov (an aristocrat with a hereditary disease), forced" her mother, a singer, to let her study for the stage. 50 Quoted in V. Lakshin, Proval in Teatr, 1987, 4, 86. 51 See Perepiska, 1984, II, 153-4. 52 Tychinkin set type by night and taught in school by day; reputed to be Petersburg's most absent-minded man, he was the only employee of New Times widely trusted by the writers whom Suvorin published. 53 See OR, 331 48 79a: Olga Kundasova's letters to Anton,

1892-1904.

54 Lidia Avilova was convinced that 'About Love' told of Chekhov's renunciation of love for her. She angered Anton, by accusing him of exploiting intimate secrets for literary gain. 55 See Olga Knipper's memoirs in Vokrug Chekbova, 381-2. 56 See Perepiska, 1984, II, 82; OR, 331 64 2; T. Shchepkina-Kupernik's letters to Anton, 1893-1900: minuscule script on mauve and white card, 8 Sept. 1898. 57 'I want sex, but "I've got a headache", my penis stands, nobody comes, nobody gives.' Cut in Pis'ma, 1939; see OR, 331 32 24: Aleksandr's letters to Anton,

1898.

58 RGALI, 2316 2 35.

59 The journal was saved when Suvorin wheedled a subsidy from Vitte, the Minister of Finances. 60 Ertel to Vostriakov, quoted in N. Gitovich, Letopis', 522-3. 61 See OR, 331 81 66: Evgenia's letters to Masha, 1891-1914. 62 It was Vania whom Anton rewarded for his management of the catastrophe. He asked Anatoli Iakovlev, his former pupil, the son of a senior civil servant, to exchange favours. Anton would get Iakovlev's stories published for securing Vania's promotion to pensionable civil service rank. 63 See RGALI, 2540 1 49: Misha's letters to Evgenia, 1888-1904, end Oct. 1898. 64 See PSSP, 7, 648 and S. M. Chekhov, Î semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 151. 65 See OR, 331 82 60: Misha's letters to Masha, 1897-8: 25 Oct. 1898. 66 See PSSP, 7, 632: see VI. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Teatral'noe nasledie, 1954, II, 144. PART ix Three Triumphs 1 Anton had met the Ilovaiskys in Voronezh in the famine of 1892. 2 See OR, 331 73 n: Evgenia's letters to Mikhail Chekhov, 1888-1903: 7 Nov. 1898. 3 For this Varenikov was summoned by the magistrates, but the authorities dropped the case. 4 See OR, 331 56 38: Aleksandra Pokhlebina's letters to Anton, 1893-8. 5 See E. A. Polotskaia, 'Ialrinskaia redaktsia "Shutochki"' in Chekhoviana, 1993, 101-16. 6 See OR, 331 48 4: Nadia Kolomnina's letters to Anton, 1896-1900. 7 See OR, 331 48 7: Vera Komissarzhevskaia's letters to Anton, 1896-1900. 8 Many of Gorky's letters to Chekhov are printed in Perepiska, 1984,11, 297-365. 9 See OR, 331 37 64: Semi on Bychkov's letters to Anton, 1898-9: 3 Jan. 1899.

10 Sergeenko's letters and diaries are quoted in PSSP, 9, 282. 11 See LN8-J, 261. 12 In 1900 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to Chekhov (331 57 24): 'J'ai l'intention de traduire aussi Oncle Vania… toutes mes demarches pour me procurer l'edition imprimee de vos ceuvres dramatiques ont ete en vain.' Unable to find Chekhov's Plays, Rilke turned back to lyrical poetry. 13 See OR, 331 82 61: Misha's letters to Masha, 1899-1901: 24Jan. 1899. 14 The jest had its serious side. Adolf Marx was a very bourgeois publisher, but Karl-Marxists now acclaimed Chekhov as a champion of the working classes against their exploiters, and Chekhov promised his next major story to Life, a staunchly left-wing journal. 15 See OR, 331 61 52: Gavriil Kharchenko's letters to Anton, 1899-1901. 16 See A. M. Melkova, Novye materialy…, in Chekhovskie chteniia v lake, 1987, 110-22. 17 The Russian institution of'court of honour' is thought to have hounded Tchaikovsky to suicide. Suvorin was eventually condemned, but 'sentenced' merely to a reprimand. Anton then told a Taganrog journalist: 'When hounds can't catch game, they torture cats.' 18 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina's letters to Anton, 1889-1901; quoted in PSSP, 9, 282. 19 See OR, 331 60 64: Konstantin Tychinkin's forty-six letters to Anton, 1896-1902. 20 See OR, 331 52 2e: Lika's letters to Anton 1899; some are in Perepiska, II, 1984, 16-59. 21 See OR, 331 60 43: T. Sukhotina-Tolstaia's letters to Anton, 1896-9. 2 2 The banter hid some mysteries: a letter from Nina Korsh (the daughter of the Moscow theatre owner) had, in a male hand, a note, perhaps not a joke: 'Listen, Chekhov, I must talk seriously. If you invited me only to hear a humiliating refusal, and one transmitted to a girl who has been intriguing against me, then that is vile.' Around 1899 Nina Korsh conceived a child: the father is unknown. In the 1950s Nina Korsh's daughter told the scholar Iu. K. Avdeev that she believed Chekhov was her father, but I have found no written corroboration and Anton's casual references to Nina Korsh and her daughter belie the claim. 23 Levi tan had wished him (8 Feb. 1899, OR, 331 49 2 5g): 'The Lord send you everything except sluts with gonorrhoea.' 24 See PSSP, 8, 472. 25 See the memoirs of Anatoli Iakovlev, whom Anton had tutored as a boy, LN68, 597-604. 26 See OR, 331 60 24: Nadezhda Ternovskaia's letters to Anton, 1899; E. A. Polotskaia, 'Ialrinskaia redaktsia "Shutochki"' in Chekhoviana, 1993, 101-16. 27 Given Anton's absorption in Olga Knipper, it is unlikely that he came to this brief encounter laden with the erotic angst in which Avilova's memoirs steep this meeting. 28 Quoted in PSSP, 8, 517. 29 See OR, 331 105 i: Masha's letters to Olga, 1899. Some are in Knipper-Chekhova, 1972, II. 30 See RGALI, 549 1 408: Masha's letters to Maria Drozdova, 1898-1905; see PSSP, 8, 516. 31 Marx would break the agreement and print just Chekhov's texts, without the Stanislavsky mis-en-scene, which have only

24

24

620

621

ANTON CHEKHOV

recently been published - as though Brahms's symphonies were printed without dynamics. 32 See Smirnova-Sazonova's diary, LN87, 310. 33 See RGALI, 2540 I 483: Masha's letters toMisha, 1884-1904: 3 Sept. 1899. 34 See OR, 331 63 4Z: Elena Shavrova-Iust's letters to Anton, 1899. Anton left unanswered Shavrova's next letter on 13 Dec. 1899: 'There is in the world a person who has some points of contact with your soul, who loves you hopelessly, from afar, and wants nothing.' 35 See Perepiska, 1934, and OR, 331 76 1: Olga Knipper's letters to Anton, June-Sept. 1899. 36 Cut from Perepiska, 1934. See OR, 331 76 i: Olga Knipper's letters to Anton, June-Sept. 1899. 37 Forty years late, Olga Knipper the grande dame was heard, in a penetrating sotto voce, saying to Nemirovich-Danchenko, 'Volodia, do you remember when you used to call me your vaulting horse?' 38 Masha wrote to Anton 31 Oct. 1899: 'I completely share your liking for Katichka Nemirovich.' 39 See OR, 331 36 72: Emilie Bijon's letters to Anton, 1896-1900. 40 See OR, 331 59 75: Anastasia Suvorina-Miasoedova's letters to Anton, 1889-1900. 41 See S. M. Chekhov, Î semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 179-82. 42 That day, Anton told Sobolevsky, he wanted to be in Monte Carlo, betting on quatre premiers. 43 See Lazarevsky's diary, LN8y, 319-56. 44 See OR, 331 60 62: Anna Turchaninova's letters to Anton, 1895, 1900: 20 May 1900.

NOTES

45 See OR, 331 77 14: Olga's letters to Masha, 1900: 7 June. 46 See OR, 331 64 28: Nikolai Iurasov's letters to Anton, 18981904. 47 See OR, 331 38 14: Olga Vasilieva's ninety-seven letters to Anton,

1898-1904.

48 See OR, 331 92 56: Adolf Levitan's letter, enclosing the request, to Masha. 49 See OR, 331 48 7: Vera Komissarzhevskaia's letters to Anton, 1896-1904: 1 Aug. 1900. 50 See OR, 331 77 14: Olga Knipper's letters to Masha, 1900: 9 Aug. 51 See PSSP, 9, 365. 52 See PSSP, 9, 381: Nemirovich-Danchenko, after Olga's mother, was in the second week of August 1900, the first to be told. 53 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia's letters to Anton, 1875-1904: 26 Sept. 1900. 54 Cut from Perepiska, 1934: see OR, 331 76 5: Olga's letters to Anton, Sept. 1900. 55 See LN68, 621-8, memoirs of Sergeenko's son. 56 Two months later the department store Muir and Mirrielees burnt down in Moscow. (Anton remarked to Tania Shcheplrina-Kupernik in 1899 that to get rid of women playwrights one should invite them to Muir and Mirrielees and burn it down.) Fires in Yalta and Moscow inspired the fire in Three Sisters. 57 See S. M. Chekhov, Î semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 196-8. 58 See Vokrug Chekhova, 357 (Maria Chekhova's memoirs). 59 See OR, 331 105 3: Masha's letters to Olga Knipper, 1901: 3 Jan. 60 Kovalevsky's memoirs of Anton Chekhov are in Vokrug Chekhova, 361-6. 61 See RGALI, 459 2 1233: Nikolai Ezhov's four letters to Suvorin,

1897-1901.

62 See Smirnova-Sazonova's diary,

LN8-J, 311-12.

63 Partially cut from Perepiska 1934; see OR, 331 76 9: Olga's letters to Anton, Feb. 1901. 64 Cut from Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 10: Olga's letters to Anton, Mar. 1901. 65 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina's letters to Anton, 1889-1901: Apr.

1901.

66 See S. M. Chekhov, Î semie, 1970,

212-13.

67 See OR, 429 3 12: Masha's letters to Bunin, 1901-3: 8 Mar. 1901. 68 When this poor little rich girl is mentioned in Anton's correspondence with Olga Knipper, his tone is so casual that it would seem that Vasilieva was not the shadow between them. Had Marusia been Anton's child - and I believe she was not - it would be unlikely for a man of Anton's circle not to acknowledge the fact. 69 Olga's account conflicts with what Nemirovich-Danchenko told Stanislavsky, see fn. 52. 70 See RG/ILI, 549 1 49: Shchurovsky's scribbled notes, a mix of abbreviated Russian, Latin and German, on two sides of a sheet of paper, will need further deciphering. 71 Not in Knipper-Chekhova, 1972, II; see OR, 331 77 15: Olga's letters to Masha, 1901: 18 May. 72 See OR, 331 79 25: Masha's letters to Anton, 1901: the Pis'ma, 1954 text is almost complete. 73 Maria Sergeenko claimed that before the wedding Anton, drinking with friends, deplored men who married actresses, and left saying that he had 'a little business to attend to'. (See LN87, 348.) On that day Anton had a demented plea for a meeting from a teenager Olga L. (See OR, 3 31 49

3-)

74 Olga, as a Lutheran marrying an Orthodox, risked expulsion from her community. 'At Mama's concert our Ober-pastor twice told me off for marrying, so that I was quite frightened. He said that their church cannot leave the matter unpunished… I shall threaten to convert to Orthodoxy.' Cut from Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 15: Olga's letters to Anton, Nov. 1901: 30 Nov. 75 Cut in Knipper-Chekhova, 1972, II, 20-4: see OR, 331 77 15: Olga's letters to Masha, 1901. PART x Love and Death 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.

622

623

ANTON CHEKHOV NOTES

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. 14 Maria Andreeva complained to Stanislavsky of Nemirovich-Danchenko and Knipper's 'close relationship'. 15 She and Evgenia each had a secret monthly 35 roubles from Suvorin, paid via Misha. 16 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha's letters to Misha, 1884-1904: 6 Oct.

1901.

17 See A. Goldenveizer, Vstrecha s Chekhovym in Teatral'naia zhizn', i960, 2, 18. 18 Illness was all around. Anton was a governor of Yalta's sanatorium, gruesomely named Yavuzlar {The Inexorable Ones) for indigent consumptives. 19 See V vospominaniiakh, 698. 20 See PSSP, 10, 452. 21 Cut from Perepiska, 1934: see OR, 331 76 16-18: Olga's letters to Anton, Dec. 1901-Jan. 1902. 22 See PSSP, 10, 447, 459. 23 Cut from Perepiska, 1934: see OR, 331 76 17: Olga's letters to Anton, 1-16 Jan. 1902. 24 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha's letters to Misha, 1884-1904: 21 Jan. 1902. 25 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. 26 See PSSP, 10, 454, 462. 27 He distrusted radicals, too, after placing in the Yavuzlar sanatorium a 'medical student' called Grinevich, who had died of a twisted gut before the inmates could lynch him as a police spy. 28 Cut from Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 20: Olga's letters to Anton, 1 -15 Mar. 1902: 8 Mar. 29 See OR, 331 105 4: Masha's letters to Olga, 1902. 30 See OR, 331 82 62: Misha's letters to Masha, 1902: 30 Mar. 1902. 31 In contrast, Lika Mizinova visited Misha's family and they had a 'most amusing excellent evening'. Misha ended this letter by asking Masha to extract 5 or 6000 roubles from Anton to build a dacha, where Anton could spend the summer fishing and Misha eventually retire. 32 Cut from Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 21: Olga's letters to Anton, 16-31 Mar. 1902: 31 Mar. 33 Cut from Perepiska, 1934; see OR, 331 76 22: Olga's letters to Anton, Apr. 1902: 4 Apr. 34 See OR, 331 77 16: Olga's letters to Masha, 1902: 6 Apr. 1902. 35 For this tentative diagnosis I am grateful to Dr Pavel Houris of Corfu and Sister Jane Kondou. 36 Franzensbad was the Suvorins' favourite watering hole. 37 See PSSP, 10, 522. 38 See PSSP, 11, 361. 39 See OR, 331 48 79a: Olga Kundasova's letters to Anton 1892-1904. 40 See V vospominaniakb, 583-96. 41 See OR, 331 77 10: Olga's letters to Evgenia Chekhova, 1900-2: 24 June 1902. 42 See Harvey Pitcher, Lily: An Anglo-Russian Romance, Cromer, 1987; see OR, 331 59 2: Lily Glassby's letters to Anton, 1902. 43 See OR, 429 3 12: Masha's letters to Bunin, 1901-3: 5 Aug. 1902. 44 See OR, 331 105 4: Masha's letters to Olga, 1902: 17 Aug. 45 See OR, 331 77 16: Olga's letters to Masha, 1902: 24 Aug. 1902. 46 See Perepiska, 1936, 369-71. 47 Only Chekhov, Korolenko and a mathematician, Markov, resigned over Gorky. 48 Meyerhold blamed Knipper for alienating him from Chekhov. 49 Suvorin did not come, but began sending Chekhov copies of the forbidden revolutionary newspaper Liberation, which Suvorin coded as 'works of Ezhov'. 50 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972; see OR, 331 76 27: Olga's letters to Anton, Dec. 1902. 51 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972; see OR, 331 76 31: Olga's letters to Anton ii 1903. 52 See PSSP, 11, 442. 53 See OR, 331 81 66: Evgenia's letters to Masha, 1891-1914: 20 Jan. 1903. 54 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. 55 See OR, 331 59 80: Aleksandr Sumbatov's letters to Anton, 1889-1903: 12 Feb. 1903. 56 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. 57 See PSSP, 11, 470. 58 See MXaT, 5323/44-62: Sanin's letters to Lika, 1903: 16 May. 59 See OR, 331 82 62: Misha's letters to Masha, 1902-4: 6 June 1903. 60 See OR, 331 82 62: Misha's letters to Masha, 1902-4: 8 June 1903. 61 See PSSP, 11, 542, and Gitovich, Letopis', 758. 62 See Gitovich, Letopis', 758-9. 63 See LN87, 319-56. 64 Cut from Pis'ma, 1939: see OR, 331 3227: Aleksandr's letters to Anton,

1903.

65 See PSSP, 11,562. 66 See Vvospominaniiakh, 597-9. 67 See PSSP, XIII, 497. 68 See PSSP, 11, 598. 69 See RGALI, 2540 1 160: Evgenia's letters to Vania, 1888-1905: 27 Oct. 1903. 70 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972: see OR, 331 77 4: Olga's letters to Anton, 1-16 Nov. 1903. 71 Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik's memoirs record an almost identical scene. 72 See MXaT, 5323/44-62: Sanin's letters to Lika, 1903: 14 Dec. 73 See OR, 331 77 11: Olga's letters to Evgenia, 1903-4: 29 Dec. 1903. 74 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 ÒÂ); Andreeva's husband was accused of embezzling. (In 1905 Andreeva was reinstated. Her career as a Bolshevik and as Gorky's consort was assured.) 75 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972: see OR, 331 77 6: Olga's letters to Anton, 15-29 Feb. 1904. 76 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

75

75

624

625

ANTON CHEKHOV

wanted to act with her in the Moscow Arts Theatre. 77 Cut from Knipper-Chekova, igjz: 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. 78 See OR, 331 79 31: Masha's letters to Evgenia, 1903-14: 9 May 1904. 79 See OR, 331 77 18: Olga's letters to Masha, 1904: 22 May. 80 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha's letters to Misha, 1884-1904: 27 May 1904. 81 See PSSP, 12, 353. 82 SeePSSP, 367, 374, 377. 83 I am grateful to M. A. Sheikina for this information. 84 See OR, 331 66 78-124: telegrams to Olga Knipper-Chekhova, July

1904.

85 See Pis'ma A. S. Suvorina kV.V. Rozanovu, SPb, 1913, 10. For a fuller account of that morning, see A. Rostovtsev, 'Pamiati Chekhova' in Obozrenie teatra, 2-7 July 1914. 86 See RGALI, 2540 1 478: Aleksandr's letters to Misha, 1883 -1904: 4 July 1904. 87 SeeLN68, 618-9. 88 In 1909 Suvorin's Istoricheskii vestnik published a scandalous and venomous expose by Ezhov which portrayed Chekhov as a conceited mediocrity. 89 See Shcheglov's diary, which, however, found her Cherry Orchard 'could have been more entertaining' (LN68, 486). 90 See OR, 331 79 13: documents on the Chekhov inheritance. 91 See RGALI, 2540 1 150: Aleksandr's letters to Vania, 1898-1905: 9 Sept. 1904.

626

92 See RGALI, 2540 1 478: Aleksandr's letters to Misha, 1883-1904: 9 Sept. 1904. 93 After Bunin left, Masha had a flirtation, which ended in 1912, with Baron Stuart, the purchaser of Melikhovo; Aleksandr Smagin pined all his life for her. 94 See RGALI, 5459 1 402: Aleksandr's letters to Natalia, 1908: 5 Nov. 95 In 1939, with uncharacteristic liberalism, the Soviet state published Aleksandr's letters to Anton, and his wayward genius was recognized. See his son's memoirs in M. A. Chekhov, 1986. 96 See OR, 331 77 18+ and 331 105 7+: Masha's and Olga's fifty-year correspondence after Anton's death is a little known mine of biographical and historical material. 97 See OR, 331 84 38: Nikolai Aleksandrovich Chekhov's notebooks. 98 In die mid 1930s a woman, apparendy his wife, wrote to Masha from a prison camp. Masha hid the letter behind a stove; in the 1940s, when it was found by a secretary, Masha destroyed it. 99 See Vladimir Knipper, Pora galliutsinatsii, 1995. Olga Tschechowa's daughter 'proved' her Aryan blood by sending to Sumy, under German occupation, for her grandmother, Natalia Golden's, wedding certificate, where Jewishness was not mentioned. 100 Her obituary, as Princess Bariatinsky, is in The Times, 5 Sept. 1921.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works I have found particularly useful are asterisked. All quotations are translated from the standard edition of complete works and letters. Place of publication is Moscow unless indicated. Chekhov V writings

IN RUSSIAN

*A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (PSSP): 1-18, works [referred to as I-XVIII]; 1 -12 (+ indices), letters [referred toasi-12], 1973-83. Some items missing from PSSP can be found in: A. B. Derman, ed., A. P. Chekhov Sbornik dokumentov…, 1947 [inc. student post-mortem report]. A. P. Chudakov, ' "Neprilichnye slova" i oblik klassika' in Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1991, 11, 54. 'Podtsenzurnyi Chekhov' in Kuranty, 8 Sept., 1993, 9 [lists some cuts in

PSSP 1-4.

L. Shcheglov [allegedly after Chekhov], Sila gipnotizma in Zhizn' vverkh nogami, SPb, 1911.

IN ENGLISH

Michael Frayn (tr.), Chekhov: Plays, London, 1993 [actable versions of the mature plays]. Constance Garnett (tr.), (revised D. Rayfield) The Chekhov Omnibus, London, 1994 [classic selection of prose fiction]. Ronald Hingley (tr.), The Oxford Chekhov (complete mature works) 9 vols, T972Gordon McVay (tr.), Chekhov: A Life in Letters, Folio Society, London, 1974 [best selection]. Donald Rayfield, 'Sanitising the Classics' in Comparative Criticism 16, Cambridge, 1994, 19-32. Brian Reeves (tr.), The Island of Sakhalin, London, 1993.

627

V»

P

Thu, Aug 16th, 2012, via SendToReader