Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Anton received a wry note from Natalia:

  Dear Anton, I know that this letter will astound you greatly, but I’m just as astounded. The things that happen! I would love to know your opinion about all that has happened. Sincerely devoted to you, N. Golden.2

  Anton answered nothing, until he had another death to announce in Latin, that of Korbo the whippet. The decrepit dog’s death in early November took the brothers back to their early days in Moscow in 1877 and brought them together more than the transfer of Natashevu’s affections. Aleksandr confessed to purloining money from Anton’s earnings from New Times. He appended condolences in Latin from his dog, Gershka-Penchuk, who had outlived Korbo.

  Within a week Natalia, who, like the other Golden sisters, had a gargantuan appetite for food and sex, was more than Aleksandr could cope with:

  I could put under her portrait the inscription I saw in childhood in an inn on a picture which showed gorillas grabbing and gnawing at negro women while Englishmen in bowler hats fired guns at them. The inscription is simple but expressive: ‘This passionate and sensual beast …’

  All autumn 1888 Anton received letters from ‘the Dauphin’. The Dauphin, an apologist of pogroms, sent anti-Semitic ravings.3 The only effect was to confirm Anton’s own respect for Jews and to sow doubts about the whole Suvorin empire’s noxiousness. On his other favourite topic the Dauphin found a more sympathetic ear: ‘Never marry, Anton, for longer than three months, and if you do, leave your wife before she is thirty, for after thirty a woman, even the most selfless, sees her husband primarily as a convenience.’

  Suvorin senior, who had over the past year done little more than tinker with his villa and organize the publication of two books of Chekhov’s stories, shook off his torpor at the end of September. He spent a day with Anton in Moscow before going to Petersburg to take control. Suvorin confirmed what Anton already knew: the Russian Academy’s 1888 prize for literature was half his. Even before ‘Steppe’ was published, the committee – run by Grigorovich – had ensured the outcome in Anton’s favour. The 500 roubles, added to the income from increased sales of Anton’s books, In the Twilight of 1887, and, now, Stories, pulled the Chekhovs out of debt. Suvorin came to congratulate him, followed by Anna Suvorina. Visits from the Suvorins were prestigious, but made Anton a target for Moscow’s radicals who fell upon any intimate of New Times.

  Suvorin found a distraction after his two sons’ deaths: he started a theatre. For the next two decades he surrounded himself with pretty actresses and more or less talented playwrights, while New Times slid into the hands of the Dauphin. Now Suvorin had a play of his own to produce in Moscow, Tatiana Repina. Suvorin and Chekhov agreed to produce each other’s plays in their respective cities. Chekhov was to see Tatiana Repina through rehearsal at Korsh’s theatre, while Suvorin would have Ivanov performed in Petersburg, a crucial début for Chekhov. Anton overhauled his play again.

  Anton’s letters to Suvorin became longer, and more frequent; the relationship was closer than ever. On 14 October 1888 he revealed his secret, but pretended that he was not seriously ill:

  Every winter, autumn, spring and every wet summer’s day I cough. But all this frightens me only when I see blood: in blood that flows from your mouth there is something ominous like a red sunset … consumption or any serious lung illness is recognized only by a syndrome and I happen not to have that syndrome; blood sometimes pours from a lung all day, it gushes, the household and patient are horrified and it ends with the patient not dying – more often than not.

  Only four days before Anton had had another hæmorrhage.

  Rather than TB Chekhov preferred to discuss sex with Suvorin. He had written a story, ‘An Attack’, after some pressure, to commemorate Garshin. Chekhov chose a controversial topic: the brothels of Sobolev Lane. The story has a simple ‘three friends’ plot: three students trawl the brothels; one is so convinced that prostitution is evil that he preaches on the streets. His friends take him to a psychiatrist who tells him it is he, not society, which is sick. The two ‘healthy’ students resemble Schechtel and Levitan; the rebel resembles Kolia. The narrator sides with the rebel, who is very much in ‘the Garshin spirit’, pure, ardent and on the verge of insanity. It is the first Chekhov story where we ask if the sane are the real madmen. Anton found his own experience of prostitution as a medical student a cause for ambiguous feelings. To Suvorin he wrote, on 11 November 1888: ‘I talk a lot about prostitution, but decide nothing. Why isn’t anything written about prostitution in your paper? It’s the most terrible evil.’ To Plesh cheev (whose views were as broad-minded as Kiseliov’s) Chekhov wrote the next day in a different tone: ‘As a medic I think that I described the mental pain correctly, following all the rules of psychiatry. As for the girls, I used to be a great specialist in that department in days of yore.’ To Shcheglov in late December Chekhov showed complete tolerance: ‘Why do you so dislike talking about Sobolev Lane? I love people who go there, although I go as rarely as you do. One mustn’t disdain life.’

  That autumn the disparity between sex in real life and sex in literature irritated Anton. When Suvorin praised Zola’s expertise, Chekhov responded angrily:

  I have seen quite a few wayward women and have sinned many times personally, but I don’t believe Zola or that lady who told you, ‘Wham-bam, and it’s done.’ Dissipated people and writers like to make out they are gourmets and fine connoisseurs of fornication; they are daring, decisive, inventive, they have sex 33 different ways, on virtually everything but a knife edge, but all that is just talk, in fact they have sex with their cooks and go to one-rouble brothels … I have never seen a single decent apartment where circumstances would allow you to topple a woman dressed in a corset, skirts and a proper dress onto a chest or a divan or the floor and have sex with her without the servants noticing. All these terms for doing it ‘standing up’, ‘sitting down’ and so on are nonsense. The easiest way is on a bed, and the other 33 are difficult and feasible only in a hotel room or a shed … If Zola himself had sex on tables, under tables, on fences, in dog kennels, in mail coaches or saw with his own eyes others doing so, then trust his novels, but if he wrote on the basis of rumours and friends’ stories, then he was hasty and careless.4

  Rather than discuss such matters on paper, the Suvorins invited Anton and Masha to Petersburg. The Dauphin expected Chekhov to come home drunk: ‘Let your sister have your rooms, you take the library … the one near the hall. I recommend the divan there. A separate entrance. When you come in at night, try to fall to the left and you’ll hit the door.’ By early December Anton and Masha were installed at the Suvorins’. Anton talked all night with Pleshcheev, Modest Tchaikovsky, Davydov and George Lintvariov. On 11 December Anton went with Suvorin to the first night of Tatiana Repina. The next day he read his story ‘An Attack’ to the Literary Society. He avoided public readings, not just out of shyness but because he would lose his voice after only a few minutes: an ominous symptom of TB. Fortunately Davydov took over. Anton tried to explain Ivanov to uncomprehending professionals. In that fortnight in Petersburg the crucial meeting was with the composer Piotr Tchaikovsky: like Levitan and, in the future Rachmaninov and the painter Repin, Tchaikovsky proved that musicians and painters best understood Anton’s art.

  Anton spent time interceding for others: introducing George Lintvariov to Tchaikovsky (‘nice, not at all like a demigod’, Anton asserted), persuading editors to pay Maria Kiseliova more for her children’s stories. He found no time for Grigorovich, and hurt his feelings. His most traumatic experience was a visit, without Masha, to see Aleksandr. He was not jealous: over the years Natalia Golden’s serpentine figure had filled out and now her black tresses were hidden under a headscarf. Nevertheless, although Anton had never protested at his brother’s abuse of Anna Sokolnikova, Aleksandr’s drunken, obscene bullying of his old love Natashevu outraged him. He left the house after a row and got drunk. Suvorin had to guide him to bed.

  Back in Moscow, Anton, on Aleksei Suvorin’
s behalf, cast Tatiana Repina at the Maly theatre. He decided that ‘actresses are cows who fancy they are goddesses … Machiavellis in skirts’. Suvorin was producing Ivanov at the Aleksandrinsky theatre in Petersburg. Anton became as ruthless as any producer. ‘The women are devious. Don’t reply to their telegrams and letters, if you get any, without my say-so,’ he ordered Suvorin. The stress of fighting theatrical egos made his hæmorrhoids painful. He was fighting for Suvorin, and, through Suvorin, fighting Petersburg actors’ incomprehension of even the revised version of Ivanov. Anton sent Suvorin medical graphs of Ivanov’s depression. He felt he would never win unstinted praise: Petersburg loathed psychological drama.

  The prize and the play overshadowed new trends in Chekhov’s prose. ‘The Attack’ was not his only puritanical Tolstoyan indictment of society. In another story, ‘The Princess’, an ascetic doctor accuses a princess of masking her hypocrisy as charity. A very substantial story ‘The Name-Day Party’, like Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, gets at the private falsity which underlies a public celebration; ‘The Name-Day Party’ ends dramatically, with a thunderstorm to wash away the party and a miscarriage to shock the heroine out of her pretences. All three stories are studies of lies and the way in which physiology reveals the lie. The techniques are Tolstoy’s: the author monitors the character’s body language and makes the simpleton soothsayer to the sophisticate. Nobody foresaw that Chekhov, after weighing Tolstoyanism, would reject it. The liberal and hedonistic elements in Chekhov’s make-up rebelled against Tolstoy’s puritanism, just as Chekhov’s expressive understatement was ill suited to Tolstoy’s lapidary edifying style.

  One short article said more than anything else about Chekhov’s intentions and aspirations. In October 1888 the explorer of China and Tibet, Nikolai Przhevalsky, now known as the discoverer of Przewalski’s horse, died by a remote lake on the border of Kirgizia and China. He died as Tchaikovsky would, sick with homosexual love, after drinking infected water. Chekhov wrote an unsigned obituary for Przhevalsky in New Times, praising his heroism, saying that one Przhevalsky was worth a dozen educational institutions and a hundred good books. Chekhov had not read Przhevalsky’s last book in which the explorer recommends exterminating the inhabitants of Mongolia and Tibet, replacing them with Cossacks, and starting a war with China. What aroused Chekhov’s enthusiasm was the image of the lone traveller deserting family and friends, trekking to the ends of the earth to die.

  Notes

  1 See OR, 331 48 27: Korneev’s letters to Anton, 1886–94.

  2 See OR, 331 33 14: Natalia Golden’s letter to Anton, 18 Nov. 1888.

  3 See OR, 331 59 71a: A. A. Suvorin’s letters to Anton, 1888.

  4 This letter (24 Nov. 1888) is cut in the PSSP: see A. P. Chudakov, ‘“Neprilichnye slova” i oblik klassika’ in Literaturnoe Obozrenie 1991, 11, 54.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Petersburg Ivanov

  January–February 1889

  IN THE NEW YEAR OF 1889 Suvorin and Chekhov were like twins: they produced each other’s plays; they planned to write together The Wood Demon, a country comedy, dividing between themselves the characters and the acts. Suvorin would come to Moscow for Tatiana Repina; then Anton would see Ivanov performed in Petersburg. All Petersburg was gossiping about their relationship. ‘Suvorin the Father, Suvorin the Son and Chekhov the Holy Ghost‚’ they quipped when the two friends appeared with the Dauphin.1 Rumour had it that Suvorin paid Anton 6000 roubles a year; that either the eleven-year-old Nastia Suvorina or Pleshcheev’s daughter Elena was to be Anton’s bride. No Chekhov brother was yet married, unlike all Anton’s doctor friends, and nearly all his acolytes, Bilibin, Shcheglov, Gruzinsky, Ezhov. Anton pleaded poverty. Evreinova’s joke at The Northern Herald became a rumour: Chekhov was betrothed to Sibiriakova, a millionaire widow.

  Anton prepared for Suvorin’s arrival, searching the Moscow hotels for a suite with central heating. He could not shake off his horror at Aleksandr’s treatment of Natalia. On 2 January 1889, as he had done with Kolia two years before, he spared his eldest brother nothing:

  I was driven from you by your horrible, completely unjustified treatment of Natalia and the cook … Constant foul language of the lowest sort, raising your voice, reproaches, rows at lunch and dinner, constant complaints at your hard labour and cursed life – isn’t that an expression of coarse tyranny? However pathetic and guilty the woman, however intimate she is with you, you have no right to sit in her presence with no trousers on, to be drunk in her presence, to use language that not even factory workers use when they see women around … No decent husband or lover would let himself talk coarsely to a woman about pissing, about lavatory paper, to make an ironic joke of their relations in bed, to poke about verbally in her sexual organs. This debauches a woman and distances her from God in whom she believes. A man who respects a woman, who is well-bred and loving, will not appear in front of the chambermaid without his trousers, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Katka, bring the piss-pot!’ … Between the woman who sleeps on clean sheets and the woman who dosses down on dirty sheets and roars with laughter when her lover farts is the same distance as between a drawing room and a pub … You can’t get away with obscenities in front of the children, insulting the servants or spitefully telling Natalia ‘Clear off and go to hell! I’m not keeping you.’2

  After this salvo, Natalia got the upper hand in her marriage: Aleksandr drank, the flat was sordid and the children unhappy, but he never abused her again. Anton was, in Natalia’s eyes, her rescuer.

  In a letter that January, Anton told Suvorin he was glad he had not written a novel – perhaps the novel which has been lost – when he still lacked ‘a feeling of personal freedom’, although, looking back at his life so far, he saw it as a victory:

  What writers of the gentry had free from birth, we the underclass have to pay for with our youth. Why don’t you write the story of a young man, the son of a serf, a former shop boy, chorister, schoolboy and student, brought up on deferring to rank, on kissing priests’ hands, submitting to others’ ideas, thankful for every crust, thrashed many times, who tormented animals, who loved having dinner with rich relatives, who was quite needlessly hypocritical before God and people, just because he knew he was a nonentity – write about this young man squeezing drop by drop the slave out of himself and waking one fine morning feeling that real human blood, not a slave’s, is flowing in his veins.

  Slave’s blood still ran in his brothers’ veins. Aleksandr was bonded to Suvorin’s New Times, Vania to the inspector of primary schools, Misha, shortly to graduate, to the Tax Inspectorate, Kolia to drink and drugs. Anton alone seemed free.

  Anton extended his charity to other derelicts. Despite Palmin’s drunken slanders – he had spread rumours to Leikin that Anton was mad and suicidal – Anton rode out to treat him for a cut, and was touched by Palmin’s gift of a bottle of Ylang-Ylang perfume. Anton visited the dying Putiata, and discreetly placed an envelope of banknotes under Putiata’s pillow. Putiata was more embarrassed than relieved: ‘as a poor man with a family you ought not to have done this.’

  On 10 January 1889 Suvorin came to Moscow to watch rehearsals of Tatiana Repina. It had mixed success, but one critic, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was in the next decade to be cofounder of the Moscow Arts Theatre and a close associate of Chekhov, did protest at Suvorin’s provocative prejudices: ‘Why did the author have to put two Jews as the most antipathetic figures on stage? … Why did the author have to deal so inappropriately with the women’s question?’ For the time being Suvorin’s anti-Semitism and sexual chauvinism did not impair his friendship with Anton. They celebrated Tatiana’s day so thoroughly that Anton’s hand still shook when, the next day, he wrote to Lily Markova, now Sakharova.3 The following week Suvorin and Chekhov set off together for Petersburg. Chekhov had a contract with the Aleksandrinsky theatre for 10 per cent of the gross from Ivanov, and sold them the rights to The Bear. Ivanov had been passed, after further revision, by the censo
r for the Imperial Theatres, but the play’s defenders were faint-hearted. One Petersburg theatregoer, the playwright Sazonova, records: ‘Davydov and Sazonov are both unwilling to act in the play, all its absurdities and inconsistencies are even more striking.’4 Anton spent evenings arguing with Davydov that the new version, where the doctor taunts Ivanov into suicide, was plausible. Despite the difficulties with Ivanov, made worse by the author attending the rehearsals, Anton thought about future plays. He contemplated joint authorship of a farce with Shcheglov: they improvised a plot.5 Suvorin and Anton did the literary rounds: a surreptitious sketch by Repin shows Chekhov bored to tears and Suvorin smouldering with anger at a meeting of the Society of Russian Writers.

  Anton went to see Khudekov, the editor of The Petersburg Gazette: Khudekov’s wife attracted Anton, but it was Khudekov’s sister-in-law who responded. Lidia Avilova, mother of two and writer of children’s stories, was infatuated. She had little encouragement – Anton avoided affairs with married women with children – but saw herself as the love of Chekhov’s life, encrypted into Chekhov’s fiction. Other female company was uncomplicated. Pleshcheev and Shcheglov left Anton free tickets to go out with George Lintvariov to the Prikazchik club: ‘If you’re going there for “erotic” purposes, we are superfluous.’ With Nastia Suvorina Anton established a joking avuncular relationship.6 Only Grigorovich still hoped to see them married. Anna Suvorina recalled: ‘My daughter was interested in anything but famous writers. Anton often told her that he wouldn’t mind doing what Grigorovich wanted but on condition “Nastia, your daddy has to give us a dowry: his publishing firm as my property and his monthly magazine …”’