The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  When Lev joined them in Zagreb, his gratitude to his saviour was so great that Kachalov called Olga Knipper Chekhova ‘the aunt who gave birth to her nephew’. Lev adopted the remark and it became a catch-phrase in their relationship. He continued on with the group and became friends with young Vadim Shverubovich, whose life was also to take some strange and dangerous turns. The two young men and their likely fate at the hands of the Cheka if they returned home greatly complicated the return to Moscow for which Aunt Olya so yearned.

  While Aunt Olya dreamed of returning to Moscow, her niece Olga had abandoned it. If one leaves aside the questions of date and her relationship with the Hungarian cavalry captain, Ferenc Jaroszi, the basis of Olga’s version may still have elements of truth. She claims to have been the only young woman on a train full of German, Austrian and Hungarian prisoners of war. The journey from Moscow in that January of 1921 via Riga to Berlin was long and exasperatingly slow. At the Schlesischer Bahnhof, a schoolfriend from Petersburg came to meet her.

  The schoolfriend utterly failed to recognize the figure bundled in overcoat and boots until Olga took off her headscarf. With words of sympathy for the exhausted and famished traveller, she insisted on taking her to a nearby Café-Konditorei for coffee and cakes with whipped cream.

  ‘Are you staying for good?’ the schoolfriend asked.

  ‘No, six weeks.’

  The coffee and cakes were too much for a stomach reduced by the hunger years in Moscow. She was violently sick and remained unwell for several days.

  Olga’s schoolfriend found her a room in a dilapidated house in Gross-Beeren-Strasse. The place, run as a pension, belonged to the widow of an officer killed in the war. Olga, despite her claims that the family had spoken German at meals on alternate days, hardly spoke the language at all. Her friend told the maid to keep bringing her camomile tea. After a few days, Olga recovered and the two young women went to a jeweller to sell the ring supposedly smuggled under her tongue. (In another version of her own story it was sewn into her overcoat.) The jeweller named a price which made her friend go pale. Olga, who did not understand his exact words, realized that he was offering far less than it was worth. The two of them rose to leave. Finally, he improved his offer with a lot of protestations about the difficult times. Olga accepted and went straight to buy some proper shoes to replace her felt boots.

  On the other hand, one wonders about her short-lived relationship with Jaroszi. One account indicates that she abandoned him almost as soon as she reached Berlin and that he became a doctor. To survive in Berlin, Olga again claimed that she carved and sold chess pieces. She also did any odd jobs that she could find and tried to sell her drawings and small sculptures. No doubt helped by the Chekhov name, she quickly made friends in Berlin’s large Russian community. She soon met people in films and, through them, the producer Erich Pommer, who became the leading figure at the UFA (Universum-Film AG) movie studios at Babelsberg, just outside Berlin, next to Potsdam.

  Pommer had brought Fritz Lang from Vienna, but Olga Chekhova’s first director was to be Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Murnau had not found anyone for the part of ‘the young chatelaine’ in his silent movie Schloβ Vogelöd. Olga’s account of meeting Murnau has, as usual, novelettish touches which may well be a complete invention. She claims that a Russian Grand Duke who had commissioned her to do some sculpture told her ’that she had the quintessential face for the cinema‘. He apparently dabbled on the fringes of the movie business and invited her to lunch at the Hotel Bristol, arranging for them to sit at the table next to Pommer and Murnau. The producer and the director began to look at her. Knowing her host slightly, they joined him and Olga at their table. The Grand Duke told them she was an actress.

  ‘Have you ever done any filmwork?’ Pommer asked her.

  ‘Unfortunately not in Germany,’ she answered. ‘Only in Russia.’

  It was one of the very few times when she acknowledged her small Russian film parts. In future, they would be written out of her life. Pommer invited her to come to their studio at Babelsberg the next morning for some test shots.

  Olga spent the rest of the day borrowing clothes and polishing herself up. Murnau obviously liked what he saw and she was given the part. Over the next few days, acutely aware that she had hardly ever seen a movie, she tried to catch up by visiting just about every cinema she could.

  The other members of the cast were German and Austrian stage actors. She kept quiet about her three little film parts in Moscow, but more than made up for it by claiming to have been a member of the Moscow Art Theatre and to have been trained in person by the great Stanislavsky. This, of course, was totally untrue. A few years later, when she obtained her first theatre part, Olga admitted that it was her very first stage role in a letter to Aunt Olya in Moscow, who knew that she had never had anything to do with the Art Theatre. ‘I could not imagine what I would feel before I stepped on the stage, because I never had any acting training except for studying with Misha. There was just the influence from his studio where we used to spend days and nights.’

  She was also safe from close inquiry about her acting experience because her German was so bad. In fact she had to work from a script translated into Russian for her. Olga described the filmset as a madhouse. In those days of German silent film, there was a piano player trying to put the actors in the right mood as they mimed their lines. Not understanding what anyone was saying and with working conditions totally confusing, Olga found it very hard to concentrate.

  Schloβ Vogelöd opened in a cinema on the Kurfürstendamm called the Marmorhaus, or Marble House, an extravagant mixture of ancient Egyptian and Greek architecture. The premiere took place on 7 April 1921. The date alone is enough to cast the most serious doubts on Olga Chekhova’s story that she had left Moscow in January 1921. Clearly she must have left the previous summer, as Aunt Olya indicated in her letter from Tiflis.

  Olga hated her performance when she saw the final cut, but the press liked it - one critic even compared her to the great Eleanora Duse - and she found herself being promoted as ‘Die Tschechowa’. The demand for interviews and her very limited capacity to speak German forced her to start learning the language properly. But even as a supposed ‘star’, everything was so terrifyingly expensive in this time of hyper-inflation that she had scarcely enough money for the rent.

  In September 1921, the Kachalov group had still not yet heard from Moscow, so they began a season in Prague after a summer break in the mountains. The group was rehearsing Hamlet to broaden their repertoire, with Kachalov in the title role. ‘We will be playing Hamlet in a week’s time. God help us!’ Aunt Olya wrote to an old friend. ‘Kachalov was looking beautiful,’ she wrote to Stanislavsky. ‘He was looking younger and more supple than before.’

  Vadim Shverubovich, who became Lev’s friend during this émigré year, described how a banker from Prague, ‘with a family name like either Rosenkrantz or Guildenstern’, took them up and gave parties for them. ‘We spent a lot of time with him and drank a lot. Soon we started addressing our host as Herr Rosenkrantz or Herr Guildenstern.’ But despite such levity, his father began to suffer from serious depressions. They had heard from a young Polish actor who had been with the Moscow Art Theatre that it was faring badly in their absence. Aunt Olya too was still suffering from acute homesickness. ‘I have been ill recently,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I had a temperature of about 40and was delirious. I saw a Valkyrie flying to Moscow and how I suffered not being able to fly with it. I saw little lamps on the graves of the Novodeviche monastery. I felt that the Last Judgement was drawing close, and saw an archangel blowing a trumpet!’

  ‘You mustn’t think that we don’t want a reunion,’ she wrote to Stanislavsky that September. ‘It is my dream that Stanislavsky will spread his wings and create the kind of theatre that is needed now, and that it will be in Russia!’ However heartfelt, perhaps she chose her words knowing that they might be seen by other eyes. After Prague, the group travelled on to Germany that win
ter. Following a short season in Leipzig, they reached Berlin at the beginning of February 1922.

  On 14 February, Kachalov received a letter from Nemirovich-Danchenko. At last it looked as if they were to be recalled to Moscow. Aunt Olya sat down to write to him as soon as she heard the news. Yet there is a hint of repressed anger at the start of this letter to her old lover. The fact that Nemirovich-Danchenko had not written during all their time abroad had clearly hurt her. ‘I have just come back from playing in The Cherry Orchard and read your letter to Vasily Ivanovich [Kachalov] and for the first time I felt the desire to write to you.’ But the thought of Moscow was too exhilarating to permit such resentments to fester. ‘Your letter has finally told me what I have been dreaming secretly about all the time. That our return is needed.’ Perhaps her heart had softened towards him, influenced by the fact that she had just been playing Ranyevskaya, who could not resist forgiving her heartless lover in Paris. ‘Maybe when we are close and we are looking into each other’s eyes, we will understand without saying anything how dear we still are to each other... what I am looking forward to most of all is to see you again, you and no one else.’ On the other hand, Aunt Olya, who was so generous and kind towards her own family, had a reputation for scheming within the Moscow Art Theatre. She knew she needed help at this moment, and she was certainly prepared to exploit any lingering loyalty from an old flame.

  11. The Early 1920s in Moscow and Berlin

  The Moscow Art Theatre was indeed in a sorry state during the absence of the Kachalov group. Despite the appreciation ofLenin, it felt embattled under the new regime. Proletkult had been calling for the abolition of all pre-revolutionary theatre, and the most influential new critic, Vladimir Blum, referred to the Moscow Art Theatre as the ‘standard-bearer of the bourgeoisie’. Even Stanislavsky himself had very mixed feelings about Chekhov’s work after the horrors of the civil war. ‘When we play the farewell to Masha in The Three Sisters I am embarrassed,’ he wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko. ‘After all that we have lived through it is impossible to weep over the fact that an officer is going away and leaving his lady behind.’

  The only new production during the years of revolution and civil war had been a disastrous attempt by Stanislavsky to stage Byron’s Cain. Meyerhold, the most avant-garde director of all, came to Stanislavsky’s defence, praising his courage to stage such an ambitious work, but he was a lone voice.

  The Art Theatre’s artistic fortunes only started to improve in the early spring of 1921. Since their leading actor, Kachalov, was still abroad, the decision was made to give the lead in Strindberg’s Erik XIV to Mikhail Chekhov. The play opened on 29 March to a storm of controversy. The most obsessive opponent of the Moscow Art Theatre attacked Misha’s performance as ‘the same old snub-nosed little idiot Petrushka’. But most reviews were adulatory. Misha had risen to the challenge with a performance of genius.

  That autumn Stanislavsky gave Misha the lead role in Gogol’s Government Inspector, and another opportunity to develop the theatre of the grotesque—what Stanislavsky defined as ‘the vivid, external, audacious justification of enormous inner content, which is so all-embracing as to verge on exaggeration’. Misha had found his forte. His Hamlet, which followed, was a truly original interpretation and produced an even greater success.

  Misha’s cousin Sergei Chekhov found his performance ‘unforgettable’. He later described how he met up again with him. ‘As the play finished, I stood up to applaud with everyone else. When [Misha] was taking his bow, he saw and recognized me and smiled through Hamlet’s make-up with that sweet Misha smile. He invited me afterwards to come and see him.’ Sergei was happy to find that, in marked contrast to the last time he had seen his cousin, at Volodya’s funeral, he was ‘well-groomed, nicely dressed and looking well’.

  Backstage, Misha discovered that Sergei had just arrived back in Moscow from the Chekhov home town of Taganrog and had nowhere to live. Longing to talk about members of the family, such as Aunt Masha, and to reminisce about their youth before the revolution, Misha immediately invited him to stay with him and his wife, Xenia, in their large apartment off the Arbat. Apart from the bedrooms, it had a dining room, where Sergei slept on a sofa behind a screen, and a round sitting room, where there was a small stage with a canvas curtain. Here the Chekhov Studio had held lessons and now it served as a workspace for the young actors who gravitated towards Misha. There was even a housekeeper-cum-cook to look after them, which was typical of Misha at such a time of anti-bourgeois agitation.

  ‘I am staying with Misha, whose hospitality exceeds all limits,’ Sergei wrote to his parents in March 1922. ‘His wife is very sweet and kind. Apart from us, another six young people are living here as a commune. I became part of the family at once. I am already much less thin.’

  Sergei had reached Moscow half-starved. The region of Taganrog had suffered cruelly during the Red Terror that followed the collapse of Denikin’s armies. Sergei, compulsively hungry all the time, simply stared at butter or anything sweet on the table. Misha and Xenia noticed this and pushed them closer, but the biggest treat, he found, was black bread. The bread was kept in a stove near where he slept in the dining room and at night he could smell it. He could not resist his craving and broke off pieces to eat, riddled with guilt even though he knew he would be forgiven. Misha, with his own addiction to alcohol still unconquered, was no doubt the first to understand.

  ‘Xenia Karlovna simply adored Misha,’ wrote Sergei. ‘Once Misha took a bath. I heard him go to his bedroom afterwards. Several minutes later the door to my room opened and Xenia Karlovna summoned me. “Sergei,” she said, “just come and see this charming picture.” Misha was lying in bed covered by a quilt. His dark hair was very distinct against the white pillow. He was smiling in an arch way and Xenia Karlovna stood by the bed, her hands folded almost as if in prayer, marvelling at her husband.’

  Misha enjoyed teasing his wife. He would sometimes bring out a picture of Olga and show it to her. ‘Xenia,’ he would say, making succulent noises, ‘just look what a beauty my first wife was.’ An embarrassed Xenia would then try to snatch the photo from Misha’s hands, and kept saying: ‘Mishka, don’t you dare. Mishka, give it to me.’

  On a beautiful spring day in Moscow, Misha and Xenia decided to go for a walk. They invited Sergei to come with them. He remembered how passers-by turned to look at Misha, with a smile of recognition. ‘Well, it’s not surprising,’ Xenia said, so happy for him. ‘You are now the most famous actor of all.’

  Misha may have become famous in Moscow, but his first wife, Olga, was unlikely to have kept a photograph of him. Her main preoccupation, apart from her career, was how to get her mother and her daughter out of the newly constituted Soviet Union. In the meantime, she concentrated on learning German and on her work at the UFA studios at Babelsberg.

  Universum-Film AG had been conceived in 1917 under military auspices to provide propaganda films, both newsreel and feature, for German army Feldkinos set up behind the front line for resting troops. Field Marshal Ludendorff had greatly encouraged the project, which would depend on private capital from major industrialists. Even defeat in 1918 did little more than interrupt a studio production line that started with Ernst Lubitsch’s films starring Pola Negri. Madame Dubarry, made in 1919, was such a success abroad as well as in Germany that Pola Negri was enticed over to the United States by Hollywood.

  For Olga Chekhova to have been taken up by Pommer and to have had a success in her first film with Murnau just as the UFA studios were in full expansion was a remarkable stroke of fortune. Pommer soon built the largest studio complex in Europe, employing at its height some 4,000people. And with directors like Lubitsch, Murnau and Fritz Lang, who made Metropolis there in 1925 and 1926, German cinema attracted the interest of the world. Both stars and directors were sought by Hollywood, and the American cinema of the time was greatly influenced by what Pommer had started.

  Aunt Olya and Lev returned finally to Moscow via Scandinavia with
the Kachalov group in May 1922. There is no mention in any of their letters that they had met Olga in Berlin, yet they did make contact. The Russian émigré grapevine was far too effective for Olga not to have known of her aunt’s arrival. It also appears that Sergei Bertensson, the Moscow Art Theatre stage manager on the tour, met her and fell hopelessly in love.

  In Moscow, on the other hand, the slightest whisper of the word émigré put people on their guard. The Kachalov group, to their dismay, found that nobody had come to the Belorussky station to welcome them back. And when the two parts of the Moscow Art Theatre met up again, there appears to have been a good deal of unease on both sides. Lenin, on the other hand, could afford to ignore such political squeamishness. ‘At last!’ he is said to have exclaimed on hearing of the Kachalov group’s return. ‘It will be very interesting to discover their reaction to the new Russia, to the new Moscow. They are a sensitive lot. In any case, our audiences will be very happy to see them again.’ Lenin certainly spoke for himself. He far preferred the old productions of the Moscow Art Theatre to the hectoring Proletkult worthiness espoused by Lunacharsky. It was an interesting paradox that Lenin, who wanted to exterminate the bourgeoisie, should have been so fond of Anton Chekhov’s plays. And less than a decade later, Stalin adored Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Days of the Turbins, which was condemned as reactionary, if not counter-revolutionary, by his culture commissars. The Soviet leader went to see it no fewer than fifteen times at the Moscow Art Theatre.