The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  Misha had not accompanied them. ‘I hope you aren’t angry with me for not having written for a long time,’ he wrote from Moscow to Aunt Masha that summer. ‘It is so nice not to be doing anything, although we are all three in town, but we are still in a very peaceful mood. My Kapsulka [my little capsule, i.e. Olga, who was now pregnant] isn’t particularly happy to be stuck in the city with Mama. She was dreaming of sketching somewhere in fields and forests. But what can I do? She shouldn’t have married me. She could have married Volodya, for example. But she preferred to share my fame with me than to be the wife of a provincial judge.’

  For the heavily pregnant Olga, relations with Misha’s possessive mother in the shared apartment had become unbearable. To make matters far worse, Misha was drinking again. He poured vodka into his beer for what he called ‘deep effect’, claiming that he was ‘a true Russian’, and drank constantly until he collapsed. At night he would wake suddenly and cry out: ‘Paper! Pen! Write, Olinka! Write! Great thoughts have come to me.’

  As the earlier letter suggested, Misha had fallen out with his cousin, Volodya, who resented the way he was treating Olga. ‘My dear Masha,’ he wrote to his aunt, ‘I love you but please keep that harmful parasite Volodka away from you. I know that he is sitting in your house in Yalta, writing letters to girls in Moscow, saying that you are going to give him a marriage settlement. He can write whatever he wants, but I am sorry for the girls, and your honour also means something to me.’ This letter also contained three drawings, a self-portrait signed ‘me’, a sun with big rays, labelled ‘you’, and the third, a heap of rubbish with flies buzzing round it, entitled ‘Volodka’.

  Olga claimed later that she had tried to terminate the pregnancy with hot baths. When she had told Misha that she was expecting a child, he had avoided her gaze, shrugged his shoulders and left the apartment. The marriage was a farce, she realized. One day she returned to the apartment and found their bedroom door closed. She heard a giggle. Misha had brought one of his girlfriends home.

  Moscow in the summer was unbearable, so finally Misha rented a dacha. Olga described it as a ‘small, utterly primitive little place, which one would only take for the shortest possible time’. She distracted herself painting while Misha, when reasonably sober, played tennis at a nearby court with a succession of girlfriends, one of whom would become his second wife. In August, when the birth approached, she returned to Moscow. Olga was just over eighteen years old when their child, a baby girl, was born on 9 September 1916. They christened her Olga, but she was always known as Ada in this family of confusing names.

  Olga suffered a nervous collapse soon after the birth, presumably a form of post-natal depression, exacerbated by the state of her marriage. Another source states that she went down with meningitis. Her romantic illusions were finally, crushed by her experiences during the course of that year and the next. Misha showed no interest in their daughter and began drinking even more heavily. Olga had long been treated like a little girl, but now she found that the man she had worshipped was nothing more than a mother-dominated little boy, whatever his undoubted theatrical talents. She found herself forced to reassess everything. Married to a self-destructive drunk, she was trapped by responsibility for a baby daughter. Yet it was not just her own marriage that was collapsing. The whole of Russia and the secure existence that she had known since childhood were starting to disintegrate as fronts collapsed and talk of revolution spread in the streets.

  The winter of 1916, the third of the war, was the harshest of them all. Food supplies became increasingly scarce in the rear, while at the front soldiers froze in their makeshift trenches. Their officers did not share their suffering. They lived in requisitioned houses behind the lines. Meanwhile, in Petrograd, the large garrison was becoming increasingly unreliable. Only a few of the officers were regulars. The majority now were recently commissioned civilians, many of whom began to sympathize with the demands of the soldiers to put an end to the war. Even the Tsar’s regiments offoot-guards were affected.

  The greater the crisis, the more obdurate Tsar Nicholas II became. No politician could persuade him to make changes to save his throne. Once again the deep cultural split in the Russian nation emerged. The mass of the people, especially the rural population, became conscious of their own Russian identity, in contrast to their perception of foreign contamination within the court. And yet that hapless Tsar, crippled by an obsessive wife and his own obstinacy born of weakness, was the most austere, uxorious and Slavophile member of the Romanov dynasty in living memory. He had never liked the imported neo-classical style of Peter the Great’s capital. He longed instead for onion domes and massive Muscovite brick walls.

  The nobility and the thoughtless rich, sensing that their privileged existence was sliding towards disaster, lost themselves in gambling parties and debauchery, drinking up their wine cellars, buying smoked sturgeon and caviar at wildly inflated prices on the black market and indulging in shamelessly open affairs. In Petrograd, following the Latin American footsteps of the tango, cocaine had also become fashionable in this danse macabre. French and British diplomats were shocked at the ‘hysterical hedonism’ and the careless, apocalyptic mood.

  This had spread beyond the idle rich. According to Stanislavsky, it had even affected the Moscow Art Theatre itself. ‘The ethical side of the theatre is at present very low,’ he had written to Nemirovich-Danchenko from Essentuki. ‘Nowhere is there more drinking, more drunkenness than in our theatre, nowhere is there such conceit and disdain for other people and such insulting outbursts.’

  6. The End of a Marriage

  Stanislavsky, on the urging of Aunt Olya, intervened yet again at the end of 1916 to save Misha Chekhov from conscription. This was no longer a case of unjustified privilege. Not long after the birth of his child, whom he refused to acknowledge, Misha began to suffer a nervous breakdown. Like his father, he was incapable of assuming responsibility for himself, let alone for a young family. He could not cope with the emotional demands of a jealous mother and a miserable young wife. It is hard to imagine that any young woman could have met the approval of this emotional vampire.

  ‘She had been brought up in an orderly German environment,’ wrote Sergei Chekhov, ‘and could not put up with the breadth of his soul and his indifference towards the conditions in which he lived. She was attuned only to the superficial tone of life and his philosophical mind was alien to her. I think that he never opened his spiritual world to her and apparently she thought him simply insane sometimes. Her relations with her mother-in-law became worse and worse.’ This explanation, while basically true, was unsympathetic and also misleading in one sense. Misha really was close to madness and to suicide, as he admitted himself much later. ‘In the drawer of my writing table,’ he wrote, ‘lay a loaded Browning, and I found it very hard to resist the temptation.’ Not many eighteen-year-olds, and especially from Olga’s sheltered background, could have been expected to cope with Misha and his semi-demented mother.

  One also wonders how they coped at a time of acute food shortages. Misha’s old wet nurse, Mariya, had to stand in queues for them while Olga looked after their little daughter and Natalya retired to her bedroom. Misha used black-market contacts to maintain his supplies of vodka, a commodity banned by the Tsar in a show of austere patriotism at the beginning of the war. In fact the bread riots of 1915 and 1916 were partly caused by peasants diverting grain supplies to the far more profitable exercise of making samogon, moonshine vodka. As the government took a tougher line with the rural population to secure food supplies, the peasants increasingly held back their grain or fed it to their cattle. Prices rose even more rapidly and food shops in the cities emptied. Queuing for bread now sometimes meant sleeping in the street outside a bakery. And bread queues seethed with rumours and political argument.

  Olga’s younger brother, Lev Knipper, was by now an officer cadet at an artillery school. He graduated as an ensign of artillery in the early spring of 1917 and, like so many, his fat
e in the coming civil war was largely dictated by his whereabouts at its outbreak.

  Lev and Olga’s parents, meanwhile, were fortunate to be living in Tsarskoe Selo rather than in Petrograd itself. Although the spontaneous chaos of the February revolution which overthrew the Romanovs was comparatively good-natured at first, an uglier side appeared within a few days. Gangs looted shops and middle-class houses, looking for alcohol. Women and girls were raped with impunity, since policemen who had escaped lynching were in hiding and trying to escape the city. Any respectably dressed citizen in a collar and tie was likely to be robbed in the street on the grounds that he was a bourgeois. The left-wing writer Maxim Gorky predicted that the revolution ‘would probably collapse in ruin worthy of our Asiatic savagery’. Many also remembered Pushkin’s phrase: ‘the Russian riot, senseless and without mercy’.

  The final downfall of the Romanov dynasty came on 3March, with the renunciation of the throne by the Grand Duke Mikhail, who had been nominated as the Tsar’s successor. The news produced scenes of wild rejoicing in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. Red flags were brandished and hung from windows. Crowds sang a Russian version of the Marseillaise, railwaymen sounded the whistles on locomotives at main-line railway stations, while industrial workers sounded the steam whistles of their factories. No owner or foreman dared object. In many places, enthusiasts broadcast the message of freedom by ringing church bells, whether or not the priest agreed. In Moscow, the monstrous statue of Tsar Alexander III was brought down with dynamite and crowds hauling on ropes, as if the Lilliputians were finally victorious. Red flags were raised at the front and on warships, to the horror of Tsarist officers, and parades were held, with military brass bands booming out the Marseillaise.

  The sudden collapse of the autocracy took professional revolutionaries, such as Lenin and Trotsky, completely by surprise. They were exasperated to find themselves so far from the centre of events. But as things turned out, they had not missed their opportunity. The leaders of the Provisional Government, acting out of high-minded liberal naïvety in the case of Prince Lvov, and theatrical vanity in the case of his successor, Aleksandr Kerensky, proved easy to outmanoeuvre. The neck of the new freedom was exposed to the unscrupulous Leninists.

  Kerensky was a lawyer. He was small and his starting eyes and curved nose made him look like a very intelligent frog, yet with ringing rhetoric and bursts of emotional energy he could dominate huge crowds. (Olga Chekhova later observed that whenever she saw Dr Goebbels speak, she could not help thinking of Kerensky.) Kerensky managed to convince many highly educated people - Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko among them - that he was a political genius, the Napoleon who would bring revolutionary excesses back under control and produce human justice. But historical parallels, especially in times of revolution and war, are often dangerously misleading. The balancing act which he had to undertake between reassuring the bourgeoisie and Russia’s Western allies on one hand, while at the same time appeasing the impatience of workers and peasants to take over factories and farmland, would have undermined the credibility of even the greatest leader.

  Stanislavsky’s family business, the Alekseiev factories, were seized by the workers, and his house, as he admitted to a friend, had been ‘done over’. Respect for private property had collapsed with the elastic notion of ‘revolutionary expropriation’. Stanislavsky now had nothing more than a salary from the Moscow Art Theatre. He could no longer subsidize it as in the past. Yet his enthusiasm for this new world of freedom did not diminish. He was certain it would lead not only to a fairer world, but to a more beautiful one. On the other hand, he also admitted that he was politically illiterate.

  Kerensky was certainly no Napoleon, yet there were, nevertheless, a number of echoes of the French Revolution. Scurrilous, often pornographic pamphlets circulated depicting sexual excesses at court in lurid detail. It was an interesting example of supposedly patriotic prurience. The Tsarina - ‘the German woman’ - was accused of extraordinary sexual antics with Rasputin, rather as Marie Antoinette—’the Austrian woman’ - had been with her favourite, the Princesse de Lamballe.

  A far more important resemblance to 1789, and every other revolution to come, was the abrupt collapse of law and order. Suspects, especially if well-to-do, were lynched, not tried. Citizen militias sprang up everywhere, especially the Red Guards, young workers with captured rifles ready to defend their factories against ‘sabotage’ by the proprietors. They formed a prototype for the Bolshevik militia later that year.

  On 18 June, 400,000 people marched through Petrograd with banners proclaiming ‘All Power to the Soviets!’, a Bolshevik slogan, even though many did not yet know it. The strikes were endless as the demands of workers mounted and so many political meetings took place that production was continually interrupted anyway. This new attitude spread rapidly to the front, where soldiers refused to be on duty for more than eight hours a day, in line with the demands of the industrial workers. More ominously, the number of mutinies grew as well as the increasingly brutal murder of officers. The military authorities did not dare institute court-martial proceedings.

  The more technical side of the civil administration was less threatened. Olga’s father, Konstantin Knipper, was fortunate to be a railway engineer as well as an official. His skills were still needed. But if he had been one of the Tsar’s ministers, as Olga later claimed in her memoirs, he would not have survived as he did.

  The very last performance of the Moscow Art Theatre before the Bolshevik takeover in Moscow was a special guest performance of The Cherry Orchard at the Theatre of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Stanislavsky remembered ‘gray-clad mobs’ outside on the street, and ’mysterious preparations’ with soldiers ‘gathering around the Kremlin’. The atmosphere in the auditorium was feverish and the actors stood behind the curtain listening to the buzz. They wondered what this working-class audience would make of The Cherry Orchard at such a moment. ‘We won’t be able to finish the performance,’ Stanislavsky records them saying to each other. ‘Either they’ll drive us from the stage or they’ll attack us.’

  In a not entirely convincing account of the evening, Stanislavsky attributed the play’s success to ‘the lyricism of Chekhov, the eternal beauty of Russian poetry, [and] the life-mood of country gentility in old Russia ... It seemed to us that all of them wanted to wrap themselves in the atmosphere of poetry and to rest there and bid peaceful farewell forever to the old and beautiful life that now demanded its purifying sacrifices.’ Yet the final sound-effect of the axe chopping down a cherry tree was rapidly followed by the distant sound of gunfire. When the audience emerged into the street, wounded revolutionaries and bystanders were already being taken away in trucks. The Moscow Art Theatre soon sent a message to the Moscow Soviet, asking how it could best serve the people. The reply came back telling them to reopen as soon as possible.

  The Bolshevik coup was resisted more effectively in Moscow than in Petrograd and the centre of the city suffered during ten days of heavy fighting. St Basil’s Cathedral was damaged in the artillery exchanges. This upheaval sent Misha into a hysterical state, but other members of the extended family ran greater risks. Vladimir Knipper, living at 5 I Arbat, was seized by officers resisting the Bolshevik takeover after an unbalanced inhabitant on the top floor of their building started lighting different lamps in different rooms. This had provoked suspicions that he was signalling to the enemy. A drunk staff captain put a Nagan pistol to Vladimir’s head: ‘The Bolsheviks are ruining our capital and you’re helping them, you bastards. I’ll kill you.’ Another officer whispered to him that he was Olga Knipper-Chekhova’s brother and he relented.

  A real tragedy befell the family less than a month later, on 13 December 1917. Volodya Chekhov, Misha’s cousin and former rival in love, somehow managed to take Misha’s Browning pistol from the drawer of his writing table and shoot himself.

  Just before the funeral, Misha caught sight of his uncle, Ivan Chekhov, Volodya’s father. He looked emaci
ated as well as crushed. Misha never forgot his prominent nose, the suit hanging off him and the crumpled trousers. He looked ‘like a carved wooden figure nailed to the floor’. Volodya’s mother gently nudged Misha, who was staring at the corpse of their son in its coffin. ‘Go to him,’ she whispered, ‘but I beg you, my dear, don’t cry.’ Misha gazed at his cousin’s face, remembering it with make-up and burnt cork from the charades after Aunt Masha’s Sunday night supper parties.

  We cannot tell whether Volodya shot himself because he was still in love with Olga, as she suggested later, or because his father was so determined that he should be a lawyer. Perhaps the destruction of their world also played a part in his decision to kill himself. In any case, the effect on Misha was profound. He collapsed completely and was granted a six-month leave of absence from the Moscow Art Theatre. Photographs show that he aged dramatically during this period.

  Another member of the family to suffer at this time was Aunt Masha, who came to Moscow from Yalta for Volodya’s funeral and contracted typhoid. As was standard practice in this lice-borne disease, her head was shaved immediately. She took that in good heart, but Volodya’s death had hit her hard. Aunt Masha, like almost everyone, was so impoverished that she found food very hard to obtain. She had inherited the rights to her brother Anton’s plays, but the Moscow Art Theatre could no longer pay royalties. Their mother, Evgenia Chekhova, who was still alive and living with her in Yalta, was too senile to understand that things had changed and that economies were necessary. Aunt Masha was reduced to taking in sewing.