Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Notes

  1 See RGALI, 2540 1 43: Misha’s letters to his parents, 1888–1901.

  2 See OR, 331 31 1: Aleksandr’s letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1874–96. Another mourner held her grief back: in 1953 Tatiana Ivchenko aged 103, dying in Kharkov, insisted on being buried next to Kolia Chekhov. She had brought Kolia milk in his last weeks of life.

  3 See OR, 331 63 25b: Franz Schechtel’s letters to Anton, 1887–9.

  4 See RGALI, 189 1 19: Lazarev-Gruzinsky’s letters to Nikolai Ezhov, 1884–91: 24 June 1889.

  5 See OR, 331 81 21: Pavel Chekhov’s letters to Anton 1886–96.

  6 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 o Chekhove.

  7 See Pis’ma russkikh pisatelei k Suvorinu, Leningrad, 1927, 38 (misdated 1897).

  8 See OR, 331 81 32: written on the back of Pavel Chekhov’s letter to Anna Ipatieva-Golden.

  9 See OR, 331 58 27v: P. Svobodin’s letters to Anton 1889; partly in Zapiski OR, 16, 1954.

  10 See OR, 331 50 1zh: Leikin’s letters to Anton 1889: 26 Aug. 1889.

  11 The story eventually had an echo in the Chekhovs’ life: in 1917 Anton’s nephew Volodia shot himself.

  12 Professor Storozhenko avenged the insult in 1899: as theatre censor, he blocked Uncle Vania.

  IV

  Années de Pèlerinage

  I sometimes feel now it is just possible that, setting off on his journeys, he was not looking for something so much as running away from something …

  V. Nabokov, The Gift

  TWENTY-NINE

  Exorcizing the Demon

  October–December 1889

  IN MOSCOW Kleopatra Karatygina awaited Anton: she had left the Maly theatre and was looking for a new company. Her letter of 13 September sets the tone: ‘Hellishly elegant writer! … Dear man, for old time’s sake come and see me and don’t forget to bring the photo you promised.’1 In November a grateful Elena Shavrova arrived in Moscow: Suvorin had printed her story, ‘Sophie’. Her mother wrote to Anton ‘If you remember your Yalta friends, come and see us: the Slav Bazaar No. 94.’2 By December the Shavrovas were living on the Volkhonka, only twenty minutes from the Chekhovs. Anton deputed Misha to see Elena. Olga Kundasova frequented the Chekhov household: she was teaching Masha English; she later tried to teach Anton French. The house resounded with loud female voices: Olga Kundasova laid down the law, Natalia Lintvariova stayed three weeks in November, infecting Anton with her laughter. A piano teacher, Aleksandra Pokhlebina, nicknamed ‘Vermicelli’, was an inconspicuous visitor, nursing a passion for Anton that later exploded into paranoia.

  A new woman entered Anton’s life. She was, like Masha, a Guerrier student teaching at the Rzhevskaia girls’ school. She was Lidia Mizinova: the Chekhovs called her Lika, after the actress Lidia (Lika) Lenskaia. Only nineteen when Masha introduced her, Lika is best described by the writer and familiar of the Chekhovs, Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik, a connoisseur of female beauty:

  A real Swan Princess from the Russian fairy tale. Her ash-blonde flowing locks, her wonderful grey eyes and ‘sable’ eyebrows, her extraordinary softness and elusive charm, combined with total absence of affectation and an almost severe simplicity, made her spellbinding.

  Masha recalled:

  People could not take their eyes off her. My girl friends often stopped me and asked, ‘Chekhova, tell me, who is that beauty with you?’… Lika was always very shy. She huddled against the hat stand and half-covered her face in the collar of her fur coat. But Misha managed to get a look. He entered Anton’s study and said, ‘Listen, Anton, there’s a really pretty girl come to see Masha! She’s in the hall.’

  Lika was of genteel family: her mother was a concert pianist, Lidia Iurgeneva, but her father had deserted the family when she was only three. Lika was brought up by a great-aunt, Sofia Ioganson, ‘Granny’. She was not content to be a teacher. She wanted to be an actress, but inveterate stage fright frustrated her. Her charm and wit were undermined by an inability to protect her interests, which made her vulnerable to ruthless men. Eighteen months earlier, she had written Anton a heart-felt anonymous fan letter.

  No woman yet affected Anton as much as another visitor, Piotr Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky had loved Chekhov’s prose (and Chekhov his music) for two years. He called on 14 October 1889: they agreed to collaborate on an opera, Bela, about the abduction of a Circassian princess by a Russian officer, based on part of Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time. Anton gave Tchaikovsky his books, inscribing his latest collection, entitled simply Stories, ‘from your future librettist’. Tchaikovsky responded with a photograph ‘from your ardent admirer.’ When the composer left, he forgot his cigarette case: Semashko the cellist, Ivanenko the flautist and Vania the schoolteacher each took a cigarette and solemnly smoked it before letting Anton post the case back. Tchaikovsky responded by sending a season ticket to the Russian Musical Society’s symphonic concerts in Moscow, a ticket which Masha used. Anton dedicated his new collection of stories Sullen People to Tchaikovsky. Literary friends were bemused. Gruzinsky grumbled to Ezhov: ‘Why should Chekhov dedicate a book to Tchaikovsky? He ought to dedicate it to Suvorin, oughtn’t he?’3

  Suvorin had forgiven Anton his failure to meet in Vienna. Others had not. Grigorovich was telling the Suvorins that there were now better writers, and that Anton had libelled the Suvorins in The Wood Demon. Anton blustered:

  You’re not in the play and can’t be, although Grigorovich with his usual insight sees the opposite. The play is about a bore, egotistical, wooden, lecturing on art for 25 years … For God’s sake don’t believe these gentlemen who … ascribe to others their personal foxy and badgery features. Oh how glad that Grigorovich is! And how pleased they’d be if I’d put arsenic in your tea or turned out to be a secret police spy.

  Grigorovich never quite forgave Anton for all the trains he had met in vain. Anna Suvorina, however, on 12 November 1889 accepted Anton’s apology: ‘I know, and they say, you’re in love again. Is it true or not? That was the only explanation I had for your botched journey abroad and the only reason I forgave your bad manners. O how furious I was with you!’4 Anna, unlike Suvorin, was amused to see her family in the play.

  In November 1889 The Northern Herald saved itself from extinction by printing Chekhov’s ‘A Dreary Story’. The work made a tremendous impact. Chekhov had found a voice and a viewpoint in his disillusioned professor of medicine: the existentialism of a man dying in a world from which he is totally alienated seemed a generation ahead of Tolstoy. The Petersburg Professor of Medicine, Botkin, died of liver cancer that winter, and Chekhov’s work seemed prophetic. Even Leikin conceded: ‘Charming. It is your best piece.’ Anton proudly inscribed a copy to the playwright Prince Sumbatov:

  From a successful author who’s

  Managed to combine and fuse

  A soul at peace, a mind on fire,

  The enema tube and poet’s lyre.

  The Wood Demon was, however, to be widely deplored. All autumn Pavel Svobodin pestered Anton to complete it by the end of October for his benefit performance in Petersburg. His letters to Anton that autumn are frantic:

  I’m superstitious and afraid of November every year, that’s the month for disasters in my life (I was married on 12 November 1873) and therefore … in November – it’s better to have no play at all …

  I hope you were lying when you said you’d thrown two acts of The Wood Demon into the Psiol … God forbid!!!

  We really have to spend two weeks living together, or at least see each other every day – and the Wood Demon would sprout. You would go fully armed after him into the forest and I would part the thorny branches in your path, clear the trail and the two of us would find him and drag him out … for the sake of God who created the Psiol, write, Antoine!

  Svobodin set his benefit night for 31 October. In mid October Svobodin took a train to Mosc
ow, grabbed the script and went back; his family copied out the play to submit to the Theatrical-Literary Committee of the Aleksandrinsky Theatre.

  On 9 October Svobodin read the play to the committee, which included one man disillusioned with Anton, Grigorovich. The committee rejected The Wood Demon, not simply because Grigorovich was hostile. They were unhappy on many counts: a university professor was vilified, in a country where professors had the rank of general (within living memory a student had been flogged to death for assaulting a Moscow professor). They also wanted a ‘safe’ play, for the heir to the throne was to attend Svobodin’s benefit performance, and The Wood Demon was unorthodox, undramatic, and obscure.

  Svobodin cancelled his benefit night, telling the editor Vukol Lavrov that The Wood Demon might be ‘boring, drawn-out, strange’, but was worth double the hackneyed vulgarities the Aleksandrinsky audiences preferred.5 He begged Anton:

  Dear friend, go to your 22-rouble wash-stand, have a wash and a think, couldn’t something be done with The Wood Demon so that it appeals not just to me and Suvorin … but to those who advised you to burn it?

  Svobodin dared to be frank. Suvorin’s comments are not on record. The actor Lensky was brutal:

  I’ll say one thing: write stories. Your attitude to the stage and to dramatic form is too contemptuous, you respect them too little to write drama …

  Pleshcheev, the following spring, delivered judgement:

  This is the first piece by you that has left no impression on me … As for Voinitsky, strike me dead, I can’t understand why he shot himself.

  Anton felt he might as well take 500 roubles advance from the Abramova troupe in Moscow. They hurriedly rehearsed. The male actors did not know their parts, the women couldn’t act. At the première on 27 November 1889 the audience booed. A claque from Korsh’s theatre wolf-whistled to punish the breakaway author and actors. The reviewers were scathing: ‘boring’, ‘pointless’, ‘clumsily constructed’. Chekhov withdrew his play and refused to print it, though 110 lithographed copies were circulating in the provinces. Seven years would pass before, by a mixture of alchemy and surgery, he transmuted The Wood Demon into Uncle Vania.

  Anton had expected to live for three to four months off The Wood Demon, and was now in financial straits. He had only one other publication of any significance that autumn: ‘Ordinary People’, later the first half of ‘The Literature Teacher’. A schoolteacher in a dead provincial town, seduced by the prospects of wealth, decides to marry one of his ex-pupils. Allusions to real figures link the story to Chekhov’s stay with the Suvorins and their children in the Crimea in summer 1888, and to the offer of little Nastia as a bride: the story is a coded ‘no, thanks’ to Suvorin6 (who without comment printed it in New Times). The Northern Herald took time to pay for ‘A Dreary Story’. The sales of three books of stories, constantly reissued by Suvorin, and the ‘pension’ from Ivanov and the farces Anton had written, kept the Chekhovs solvent.

  Family life seemed to settle: Aleksandr in Petersburg was married and sober; Vania lived in his schoolhouse with Pavel; Misha was with the Suvorins in Petersburg and soon to leave home. Aunt Fenichka was meekly dying. Of Kolia only debts remained: his paintings vanished into his creditors’ hands. Anton and his brothers agreed to pay off the monetary debts. There were other liabilities: Anna Ipatieva-Golden, as Kolia’s common-law widow, wrote on 30 November 1889:

  There’s not a soul in Moscow I could turn to, I can’t ask my family, they’re all (except for Natasha) virtually dying of hunger. The fact is I am stuck even now in the country at Razumovskoe with no firewood, no fur coat and so I appeal to you, for Christ’s sake, send me 15 roubles.7

  Anton gave her money, and asked Suvorin to give her work. The Suvorins, however, demanded a hefty deposit from those employed in their bookshops: Anna was unemployable. After another hand-out she resumed her old job as companion to unmarried mothers and landlady to students. Anna’s gratitude was effusive: ‘I wept with gratitude, that is from feeling your kindness to the point of tears. And I’d never thought you were like that.’

  Anton began an affair with Kleopatra Karatygina. He took her, at her request, to see Les Huguenots, and prescribed her laxatives. Never did he bring her home or mention her. He also saw Glafira Panova, sometimes at the same address and time as Karatygina. She was clearly in his mind when he wrote to his editor, Evreinova, at The Northern Herald and mused about settling down ‘with a nice little actress’, or to Suvorin, for whom he drew Glafira’s foot: ‘I have known actresses who used to be ballerinas. Yesterday, before a stag night, I visited one such actress. She now despises ballet and looks down on it, but she can’t get rid of her ballet body movements.’

  Writing to Elena Lintvariova, Anton laughed at commitment: he signed himself ‘A. Panov’, to make fun of the rumours that he was to marry Glafira Panova. Kleopatra had agreed to humiliating conditions from her ‘hellishly elegant writer’: she was not to talk about the relationship in case Anton’s mother and sister found out. Glafira had more pride, Kleopatra wrote:

  Glafira is with me … She asks me to tell you that if you grudge 20 kopecks, she takes on the travel costs … everything she would like to throw at our bosses will be thrown at you. Although, as she says, you will get what you deserve. In a world, you are going to be bawled out, she doesn’t care that you’re a fashionable writer and hellishly elegant. So if you wish to make up for your negligence towards her come and fetch me (if you’re not embarrassed to drive down the street with an actress nobody wants) … You are ordered to come on Monday from 12 to 2. You are to have your hair curled and to put on a pink tie.

  Glafira left for Petersburg. Karatygina followed, clutching letters of recommendation and a copy of ‘A Dreary Story’ (a work she loathed for its portrayal of acting as moral perdition) inscribed ‘For the famous actress K. K’s bloody nerves, from her doctor’. About this time Anton confided in Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he had seduced a married woman and found her to be a virgin. (He also told the playwright that none of his affairs had lasted more than a year.)8

  Anton hated being a ‘fashionable writer’: when an admirer in a restaurant started to recite a page by heart, he hissed at his companion, ‘Take her away, I have a knuckle-duster in my pocket.’ He felt ill all autumn: he told Dr Obolonsky that he had ‘flu, Mesopotamian plague, sap, hydrophobia, impotence and all sorts of typhoids’. At his desk Anton was as paralysed as his professor of medicine. Instead of picking up the discarded novel, he encouraged Suvorin to send him unsolicited manuscripts to sift. Some of the beneficiaries were the young men and women who had accosted him in the Crimea. Ilia Gurliand had his story of a civil servant ‘Gorshkov’ polished and published. Anton took Elena Shavrova’s next story, ‘The Chorus Girl’, about a girl seduced and abandoned by an actor who has another mistress. Anton recognized the protagonists. He told Suvorin:

  I’ve made the middle of ‘The Chorus Girl’ the beginning, the beginning the middle, and I’ve put on a totally new ending. When the girl reads it she’ll be horrified. And mummy will give her a thrashing for an immoral ending … The girl is trying to portray an operetta troupe that was singing this summer in Yalta … I used to know chorus girls. I remember a 19-year-old whom I treated and who flirted splendidly with her legs. For the first time I noted their skill at demonstrating the beauty of thighs without undressing or kicking up their legs … Chorus girls felt awful; they went hungry, whored out of poverty, it was hot, stifling, people smelt of sweat, like horses. If even an innocent girl had noticed and described that, then you can judge their position …

  On literature Chekhov sounded as embittered as his dying professor in ‘A Dreary Story’ or his neurotic The Wood Demon. On 27 December 1889 he berated the intelligentsia to Suvorin:

  The best modern writers, whom I love, serve evil, since they destroy. Some of them, like Tolstoy, say ‘Don’t have sex with women, because they have mucous discharges; woman is revolting because her breath smells.’ … these writers … hel
p the devil multiply the slugs and woodlice we call intellectuals. Jaded, apathetic, idly philosophizing, a cold intelligentsia, which … is unpatriotic, miserable, colourless, which gets drunk on one glass and visits 50-kopeck brothels.

  Anton defended only medical science:

  A society that doesn’t believe in God but is afraid of omens and the devil, which denies all doctors and then hypocritically mourns Botkin and bows down to [Professor of Medicine] Zakharin, should not dare hint that it knows what justice is.

  Suvorin realized what was coming: Anton was abandoning Literature his mistress for Medicine his wife.

  Notes

  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.