The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  The following year, Lev too came to Moscow to attend a new school. Aunt Olya made sure that she saw her favourite nephew frequently and she encouraged him in every way. The school, which was progressive for the times, put on a performance of Aleksandr Blok’s play The Rose and the Cross, for which Lev was allowed to select and adapt the music. Lev had mixed feelings about the move to Moscow. He had fallen in love with the beauty of St Petersburg a year or so before leaving it, yet the city in its wartime guise of Petrograd was starting to change. There was a new, ugly mood. The Knipper parents had discussed the political unrest quite openly at table. They were extremely concerned at the strikes and the ossified reaction of the Tsar and his entourage to an increasingly dangerous situation.

  4. Misha and Olga

  Along with Aleksandr Chekhov’s alcoholism, Misha had also inherited a compulsion to seduce, although mercifully in a rather more romantic fashion than his father. ‘From my earliest youth,’ he wrote later, ‘I found myself in a constant state of falling in love.’

  Misha must have first met Olga Knipper when he was still at the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg. Just before the First World War, two or three of the Chekhov cousins went out to the Knipper house at Tsarskoe Selo to play tennis, swim and dance. Misha presumably did not pay much attention to her then, for she was almost six years younger than him. But when Olga came to Moscow in 1914 to study art she was seventeen and enchantingly beautiful. She had not yet emerged from an innocent naïvety and a tendency to day-dream, even though she had already demonstrated on occasion a streak of determination.

  Her own account of these early years is heavily romanticized. She claimed that as a child she used to play with the little Grand Duchesses at Tsarskoe Selo and that she had encountered Rasputin in alarming circumstances. She even recounted that she had been accepted at the Moscow Academy of Art at the age of twelve and later studied under Bakst and Rodin. But this compulsive mythologizing may well have been provoked by the patronizing attitude of a family which refused to take her seriously because of her beauty.

  Misha and Volodya met her at the apartment of Aunt Olya Knipper-Chekhova and at Aunt Masha’s Sunday night supper parties. In one after-dinner charade, Misha, wearing a white coat, played an unskilled medical assistant in a clinic. He rushed back and forth to a patient, played by young Olga, carrying medical implements and water, which he spilled in his clumsiness, all the time being shouted at by the doctor. Misha and Volodya became increasingly competitive in their acting and their joking. They had both fallen for their fair cousin-in-law.

  Perhaps inevitably in such a story of tangled love, none of the accounts agree. According to Sergei Chekhov, Volodya followed Misha to St Petersburg for the Moscow Art Theatre’s 1914 spring season. Misha came across Volodya carrying a tennis racket and dressed in check trousers, white shoes and a boater. Volodya was apparently intent on proposing to Olga during a moonlit walk, but then Misha, his best friend and hero, insisted that, since he was three years older, he had priority. Volodya answered that there was no priority in love. Misha retorted that he already had some standing in society, while Volodya was still a student and his future was uncertain. Volodya replied that he would make Olga promise to wait for him until he graduated from the university.

  ‘Your father is not going to let you marry her!’ Misha almost shouted.

  At this Volodya just grinned.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ Misha asked more calmly.

  ‘Let’s toss a coin,’ Volodya replied. ‘The one who gets tails will leave Olya for ever and keep no place for bitterness in his heart.’

  He tossed the coin and it came down tails. The cousins embraced without a word.

  Volodya recounted all this to Aunt Masha in 1917, when he was staying with her down in the Crimea. Misha never really gave his side, except in the most offhand way. The only other version of events is that written by Olga herself She was utterly besotted with Misha, her cousin by marriage, who appeared to be as brilliant an actor as his uncle had been a playwright. Olga, then studying at the Moscow Academy of Art, went to as many of his performances in the Studio of the Art Theatre as she could. She helped paint the scenery for The Cricket on the Hearth, in which he had the lead part. But carried away with the story, she claimed in her memoirs that the key moment in their romance took place after she played Ophelia to his Hamlet in the Moscow Art Theatre for a charity performance. Her version includes everyone, including Stanislavsky and Aunt Olya, congratulating her on her performance after the curtain. An emotional Misha then pulls her into the wings and kisses her passionately. Although the circumstances are unlikely, she was so innocent of the facts of life that she may well have thought, as she claims, that she would have a child if such a man kissed her.

  ‘But now you must marry me,’ she told him.

  ‘What could be better?’ he laughed.

  Misha and Olga, whatever the exact details surrounding their decision to get married, undoubtedly acted on the spur of the moment without telling anyone. They knew that if they did ask for permission, it would be refused on the grounds of Olga’s age and Misha’s circumstances, and she would be taken home to Tsarskoe Selo immediately.

  So early one morning in September 1914, soon after the outbreak of war, Olga packed a small suitcase with her passport, wash-bag and a new nightdress and slipped out of Aunt Olya’s apartment on Prechistensky bulvar without being seen. It must have taken considerable courage, even when carried away by romantic fever. She took a drozhky to join Misha and together they drove to a small Orthodox church at the other end of Moscow. Misha, saying that they did not have much time, handed their passports to the priest, a very old man with a wrinkled face. The priest clearly did not want to be hurried and kept shaking his head in disapproval. The bride and groom each grasped a flickering candle, and two bystanders, engaged by Misha, held the crowns over their heads. The fact that Olga was a Lutheran does not appear to have been a problem. By Orthodox standards it certainly seems to have been a simple, short ceremony. Even so, Olga claimed later that Misha was constantly looking at his pocket watch, afraid of being late for that afternoon’s performance.

  For Olga, the enormity of what they had just done sank in only after they had returned to Misha’s apartment. They sat down to drink some tea from the samovar in his bedroom. The bed was so small that she wondered where she was supposed to sleep. Although the apartment had appeared large to Sergei Chekhov, it must have seemed very small to Olga, brought up in the houses at Tiflis and Tsarskoe Selo. And they had to share it with Misha’s old wet nurse as well as her mother-in-law. The atmosphere must have been unbearably oppressive. Next door, Natalya lay prostrate in her darkened bedroom. She had collapsed in shock and grief at discovering that her beloved son had married without telling her. That afternoon, even the egocentric Misha must have realized ‘that he could not go to work at the theatre on the day of his wedding, leaving together these two irreconcilable women in his life.

  Aunt Olya found out a few hours later. One of the actors at the Moscow Art Theatre came up and congratulated her. She asked why.

  ‘Oh, but your nephew has got married,’ he said to her.

  ‘Which nephew?’ she asked.

  ‘Mikhail Aleksandrovich.’

  ‘Who’s he married?’

  ‘Your niece, Olga Konstantinovna.’

  Distraught, she went straight home to Prechistensky bulvar. Olga wasn’t there, so she rushed round to Misha’s apartment. Olga herself opened the door. Aunt Olya fainted on the landing and Misha had to carry her into the apartment. Volodya, the defeated rival who turned up soon afterwards, described the situation in a letter to his mother: ‘You can’t imagine what a scene it was. [Aunt Olya] wanted to give Mishka a beating, then she changed her mind. She started to faint, she sobbed. In another room [Olga] was in hysterics. In the third one Natalya Aleksandrovna was lying unconscious. The scandal was grandiose and is still going on. I can’t imagine how it is going to end. Aunt Olya sent a telegram to St P
etersburg and probably the parents are going to arrive tomorrow. How terrible it all is! Boris [his friend] and I have sworn never to get married.’

  Aunt Olya returned home in despair. She sent an emissary that evening to try to convince Olga to return to the apartment, and then in the early hours Uncle Vladimir, the opera singer, arrived to persuade the young bride to come back. Olga received little support from Misha, who was appalled by the scandal they had unleashed. The self-absorbed young actor clearly felt sorrier for himself than for his seventeen-year-old bride. ‘I said that [Olga] herself should make the decision,’ he wrote to Aunt Masha, ‘and she decided to go to see her aunt just to calm her down. I decided to allow [Olga] to go back to St Petersburg with her mother in order to prepare her father and tell him the news. Now a few words about myself. I am in such a state, that I cannot write coherently. I won’t say anything about the insults and worries that I have undergone. A lot more are still to come my way.’

  Aunt Olya, meanwhile, had sent a telegram to her sister-in-law, Lulu Knipper: ‘Come at once.’ On receiving it, Olga’s mother had taken the next train to Moscow and arrived the following evening. Her first question was evidently to find out whether Olga had married because she was pregnant. Olga assured her that was not the case.

  ‘Thank God for the lesser evil,’ replied her mother.

  The train journey by wagon-lit back to Petrograd took thirteen hours. Before they reached Tsarskoe Selo, her mother told her to go straight to bed and stay there. She would tell her father when he returned from the ministry that she was ill.

  Olga clearly needed little encouragement. She stayed in bed for two days, ‘crying her eyes out’.

  Her mother gave her a good talking-to, emphasizing that she and Misha were married and nothing could now be done about that, but she should not commit a second blunder by having a child with Misha before she had got to know him better. Olga was confined to her bedroom, but she had already seen how she could exploit her position. She threatened suicide if her parents refused to allow her to return to Misha. Even her father in all his anger had to face the fact that the marriage was lawful and could be annulled only by a Church consistory. Olga, no doubt to heighten the pathos, recounted in her memoirs how she was allowed finally to return to Moscow, taking with her no more than a single set of clothes and no jewellery, on her father’s insistence.

  Misha and his mother met her at the station in Moscow. Apparently, not a word was said in the drozhky on the way back to the apartment. It was a most unromantic homecoming. Things, however, must have improved that winter, both in their relationship and in Misha’s career. The next year, when Misha came back to Petrograd with the Moscow Art Theatre for the spring season, the young couple appear to have become completely accepted by the parents. ‘We’re already in Petrograd for a week,’ Olga wrote to Aunt Masha in Yalta. ‘Misha has given three performances. The success is unbelievable. However, you probably know that already from the newspapers. We’re staying with my parents. Papa is treating Misha very very well. There is complete peace.’

  ‘Beautiful Mashechka,’ wrote Misha at the same time to his aunt. ‘Let your genius nephew greet you and tell you that here in Olya’s family he is being received wonderfully ... Today [Olga’s] family are going to see The Cricket. I am longing to go home to Mama and if it wasn’t so wonderful with [Olga‘s] family, I would have long ago died from homesickness. Waiting for your honoured reply. Count Mikhail Chekhov.’

  Another member of the family recorded: ‘I was at the family dinner with [Olga’s] parents. I can remember being very surprised seeing Misha wearing a jacket and a collar although the collar was a soft one. [Olga] and he were sitting next to each other at the table, kissing every minute and putting the best bits of food on to each other’s plates.‘

  But the idyll did not last long when they returned to Moscow in the early summer. Misha told her that she would get used to the apartment, but having to share it with an insomniac mother-in-law who hated her made it hard to hide her unhappiness. Meals were a penance, and Olga would try to find an excuse to slip away as soon as possible to escape to their bedroom. Only Mariya, the clumsy old peasant wet nurse, who had ‘two left hands’, was kind to her. According to Olga, Mariya was treated ‘like a slave’, with Natalya screaming at her in the kitchen and summoning her in the night when she could not sleep.

  Misha, like almost everyone in Russian intellectual circles, wanted to avoid conscription. He later wrote how ‘waiting for one’s call-up medical examination was agony’. He admitted that he was in a state of total panic as he made his way towards the conscription centre in Moscow. He had confided his fears to an elderly member of the Moscow Art Theatre staff, who had then accompanied him to provide moral support. Misha almost froze when prodded and yelled at by corporals, who ordered these young male civilians to strip off in the filth and cold of the building. It seemed to go on for hours and with no purpose. Anxious relatives peered through the windows, trying to see what was going on. The conscripts stood in line naked for two hours or more as they queued for the doctors. Misha’s legs could hardly keep him upright. The exhausted doctor, who finally examined his heart and lungs with his stethoscope, called out: ‘Three months!’ Misha nearly collapsed in relief. There was some doubt about his state of health, so they would call him back for re-examination later. His sentence was suspended. It took him nearly another hour to recover his clothes, and when he emerged he was deeply touched to find that his confidant from the theatre was still there to ascertain his fate.

  Olga’s brother, Lev, on the other hand, ran away from his high school at the age of seventeen to volunteer for the army. He later called it a ‘surge of false patriotism’. Although frustrated at the time, he was most fortunate. The authorities sent him back to his school to finish his studies. He progressed to the Moscow Higher Technical College, where he was allotted to a reserve unit. Then, almost as soon as he reached the front, he was sent back as an officer candidate at the school of horse artillery at Orel. He would graduate just as the Russian Revolution was about to destroy the world in which they had all grown up.

  5. The Beginning of a Revolution

  The ability of the theatrical community to exist apart from the terrible reality of the First World War seems slightly bewildering in retrospect. Their letters and personal accounts make few references to the events which were shaking Russia to pieces. They had despised the ‘patriotic plays’ of ’theatrical pasteboard’ put on in the early days of the war and concentrated on their own work.

  Stanislavsky later acknowledged that ‘art showed that it had nothing in common with tendencies, politics and the topics of the day’. The collapse of the Russian armies in central and southern Poland during the summer of 1915 could have happened on another continent. Among the Knippers, that most Germanic and musical of families, there appears to have been no mention of the anti-German riots of June 1915 in Moscow, when Bechstein pianos were hauled into the street and set on fire.

  These disorders were largely inspired by hatred for the Tsarina—‘the German woman’. She was seen, along with ministers bearing Germanic-sounding names, as proof of the enemy within. Rumour-mongers assured everyone that she had a direct telephone line to Berlin to give away the plans of the Russian high command. Her treachery, they claimed, was the reason why so many Russian soldiers were suffering in vain. This growing belief that the incompetence of the Tsarist regime was in fact a smokescreen for corruption and treason did not disturb Misha and his friends in the theatre. Their bohemian world despised politics and politicians as much as military patriotism and futile sacrifice. Some of them, such as Meyerhold, passionately supported the cause of revolution. And even Konstantin Stanislavsky, a patrician merchant as well as actor, looked forward to ‘the miraculous liberation of Russia’. He was convinced that it would bring a new era of artistic freedom and enlightenment. He also failed to foresee that his family business, which subsidized the Moscow Art Theatre, would be expropriated.

&nb
sp; Apart from officers of the old school, the greatest believers in the war against Germany had been their relatives: the young women of the nobility and upper middle class who had volunteered to roll bandages and serve as nurses for the tragic mass of suffering soldiers - the amputees, the blind, the gangrenous and the shell-shocked. Many of these well-brought-up young ladies regarded this service as much more than a duty. They saw it as a spiritual experience, a homage to Christ washing the feet of the poor. The Tsarina set up her own little hospital, with the young Grand Duchesses suitably attired, but their patients do not appear to have been chosen for the seriousness of their wounds, which suggests something akin to a Petit Trianon version of medicine.

  The mainly peasant soldiers, patronized by these earnest women, had never shared the middle class’s enthusiasm for the war on its outbreak. They had known that once again the peasantry would be treated as ‘meat for the cannon’. Their villages had mourned their departure with the traditional lamentations of a funeral, never expecting to see these sons again. And the fact that they were commanded by young barins, members of the landowning class, who in recent years had taken back their land to profit from rising corn prices, had not improved relations between officers and men who felt that they were still treated as little better than serfs.

  The war did not stop a group from the Moscow Art Theatre, including Stanislavsky, Olya Knipper-Chekhova and the great actor Vasily Kachalov, from touring southern Russia in the late spring of 1916. When it was over, the cast relaxed at the Caucasian spa of Essentuki, which Stanislavsky knew well from previous visits. They enjoyed trips out into the steppe and other diversions, but Stanislavsky himself found it hard to relax. He was in the middle of a row with Nemirovich-Danchenko over the management of the theatre.