In Petersburg there were women who disliked Anton: Zinaida Gippius, already a literary lioness, baited Chekhov: listening wide-eyed, she disingenuously asked: ‘Does your mongoose eat people?’
For his Moscow womenfolk Anton found answers. He told Masha: ‘I’ve been talking to Suvorin about you: you will not be working for him – I’ve decided. He is terribly fond of you, but in love with Kundasova.’ Elena Shavrova rejected Anton’s advice to change her pseudonym, and abandon her drama course. ‘I’ll make my breakthrough anywhere,’ she asserted. The more she was opposed, the tougher the sixteen-year-old Elena got.6 She persuaded Anton to make Suvorin pay her 8 instead of 7 kopecks a line for the stories she was feeding New Times after Chekhov had revised them.
Lika Mizinova, however, wanted Anton, body and soul. She resumed the romance and set the tone for the coming nine years in her first letter to Anton in Petersburg:
Today in the Council I wrote you a long letter and I’m glad I couldn’t send it, I’ve just read it and am horrified – sheer weeping … I’ve been coughing blood (the very day after you left). Granny is angry with me for going out and not looking after myself, she prophesies consumption – I can just imagine you laughing about that … When you get back don’t forget to go to Vagankovo cemetery to say hello to my remains … In the morning I could write such a gloomy letter, now I think it’s all rubbish I shall enjoy upsetting you … write a letter without the usual little sarcasms … surely I deserve something other than irony?7
Anton’s response was remorselessly teasing:
As for your coughing … stop smoking and don’t chatter in the street. If you die, Trofim will shoot himself and Spotty-face will get puerperal convulsions. I’ll be the only one glad of your death. I hate you so much that just the memory of you is enough to make me utter sounds like your granny ‘Eh … Eh … Eh’. I’d gladly scald you with boiling water … My lady writer, Misha’s friend [Elena Shavrova], writes to tell me ‘Things are bad – I am seriously thinking of leaving for Australia.’ You to the Aleutian islands, she to Australia! Where am I to go? You’ve grabbed the better half of the earth. Farewell, villainess of my heart. Your Well-known Writer.
A few days later, sending him birthday greetings, Lika tried a different tack: ‘I’ve just got back from your family … I’m writing in the dark and what’s more after Levitan saw me home! And whom are you seeing home?’ Anton relented a little. His reply ended: ‘Bibikov [a consumptive poet whom Anton knew] … saw you and my sister and wrote to Petersburg “at Chekhov’s I saw a girl of amazing beauty.” There’s a pretext for you and Masha to have a quarrel, even a fight.’
Lika’s next letter, on 21 January 1891, was the first (and almost the last) that she wrote to Anton in the intimate ty form:
Knowing your meanness, my dear Antosha, and wishing to hang on to a chance to write to you, I am sending you a stamp which I had much need of. Will you come back soon? I’m bored and I dream of meeting you as the sterlets in the Strelna [park] pool dream of a pure transparent river. I don’t know how to be tactful and when I try to be it doesn’t work out. But all the same come on the 26th and you will see that I can be tactful not just verbally … So I expect you, I hope, that you will give me at least ½ an hour! She can’t have it all! For my love I deserve ½ an hour. Goodbye, I kiss you and wait. Yours for ever, Lika Mizinova.
Olga Kundasova, scolding the great men of Moscow and Petersburg in their dens, or Elena Shavrova, cajoling and wheedling, left Anton in total command of himself. Lika got under his skin, as no other woman had done. His responses to her are always ironic, never passionate or jealous, but their frequency, length and extravagance betray the disturbing effect Lika had on him.
Anton called on his brother Aleksandr. He told Masha: ‘His kids made a very good impression on me … Aleksandr’s spouse is a kind woman, but the same stories happen every day as at Luka.’ Anton’s sober days in Petersburg were spent lobbying for Sakhalin’s children. Through Koni, the radical lawyer, he contacted Princess Naryshkina who ran the Imperial children’s charities: orphanages were set up for 120 of Sakhalin’s child beggars and prostitutes. Through Vania and Suvorin, Anton had thousands of books sent to Sakhalin: the authorities paid. Chekhov, loth to meet aristocrats, made Suvorin and Koni talk to influential courtiers.
In Petersburg Anton began his monograph The Island of Sakhalin: he wanted it to be dry and impersonal. He would publish it only in its entirety to heighten the impact. The Siberian penal system and Sakhalin were in the news: an illegal Russian edition of the American George Kennan’s survey of Siberia’s prisons had been circulating. A work so anti-establishment as a survey of Sakhalin could not expect to be published by Suvorin. Anton’s unbroken association with New Times puzzled the radicals even more. One political exile (Ertel) told another (Vladimir Korolenko): ‘Pity that Chekhov is tied to that nest of robbers.’
At the end of January Anton returned to Moscow. He began a new story, ‘The Duel’: it grew as long as a novel. He nursed the mongoose which a Russian winter had made too ill to break crockery or leap on the table. He consoled Olga Kundasova, tantalized Lika Mizinova and flirted with Daria Musina-Pushkina (who had followed him back to Moscow). When the mongoose recovered its joie de vivre the flat seemed too small.
Anton endured two cramped weeks. Suvorin came to Moscow and took him to dinner and the theatre. Then Anton decided they should take the European tour that he had missed two years previously. On 5 March he wrote to Suvorin: ‘Let’s go!!! I agree, wherever and whenever you like.’ Accounts at New Times were chaotic: Anton believed he was still 2000 roubles in Suvorin’s debt, but he would not stay in Moscow working the debt off. He prevaricated: he assured his family that he would be back for Orthodox Easter. Elena Shavrova begged him to stay. Lika, snubbed, was proudly silent. Vania pleaded with him to come to Sudogda, where Vania’s only friends were his pet starlings and canaries.
On 11 March Anton left family, mongoose and friends for Petersburg. (Kundasova and Musina-Pushkina also made their way there.) At 1.30 p.m. on 17 March, Suvorin, the Dauphin, and Anton – Father, Son and Holy Ghost – took the Petersburg–Vienna express. Daria Musina-Pushkina spotted them on their way to the station: ‘I was riding down the Liteinaia and met you travelling in a cab, and you looked straight at me but for some reason didn’t greet me.’ Anton’s pince-nez was broken, so he had left it behind in Moscow. As a result, he had trouble recognizing friends, and no doubt a blurred view of Europe.
Neither did he understand all he heard. Anton had only schoolboy German. He was to tell Ezhov, ‘I speak all languages except foreign ones. Getting from one station to another in Paris is for me a game of blind man’s buff.’ The Suvorins bore the brunt of the expense, decided the itinerary and did the talking. On the one hand Anton liked being treated ‘like a kept woman’ – he called himself the ‘Nana of the Railways’ and enjoyed the physical comforts: the Pullman sleeping cars with mirrors, carpets and soft beds; the flushing lavatories. He was amazed, as he had been on the Amur, by free speech – frank conversations with strangers in Moscow could lead to trouble with the secret police. In Vienna, he told his family, ‘It is strange that you can read and talk about whatever you want.’ On the other hand, he was quickly soured: when he crossed the border into Austro-Hungary his only note was ‘A lot of Yids. The customs charged more than my tobacco cost.’ As he came over the Alps to Venice, he declared them inferior to the Caucasus or the mountains of Ceylon.
Venice, however, aroused his enthusiasm: Desdemona’s house and Canova’s tomb sent Anton into ecstasy. He told Vania: ‘For a Russian, poor and degraded, here in the world of beauty, wealth and freedom, it is not hard to go mad … when you stand in church listening to the organ you want to convert to catholicism.’ In Venice Zinaida Gippius turned up and pricked the bubble. Like many Petersburg snobs, she felt impelled to put provincial upstarts down, and wilfully misinformed Anton that the hotel charges were by the week, not the day. She noted in her diary that he was ‘A
normal provincial doctor. he had fine powers of observation within his limits, and rather coarse manners, which was also normal.’
By 30 March the party was in Rome. Anton was wan. He asked the hotel porter, Suvorin claimed, for the address of Rome’s most luxurious brothel. He reported to Uncle Mitrofan that the Vatican had 11,000 rooms; later he said that Rome was just like Kharkov. Letters home ask only after the mongoose. About Lika and her cough, or the convalescent Vania and his dormitories full of workers’ children, he did not enquire. On 3 April the Suvorins and Anton went to Naples; on the 6th they toured Pompeii. Years later Suvorin recalled:
He was little interested in art, statues, pictures, churches, but as soon as we got to Rome he wanted to get out of town, to lie on the green grass. In Venice it was the originality, most of all the life, serenades, not its Doges’ palace and so on, that held him. In Pompeii he wandered bored over the open city – it is boring in fact – but immediately he took pleasure in riding a horse to Vesuvius over a very difficult route and kept edging towards the crater. Abroad, cemeteries interested him everywhere – cemeteries and circuses with clowns, which he saw as real comedians.8
The party then took the coastal railway to Nice, a city Anton little suspected was to become a second home (it was a resort for Russians, rich and sick, and the Russian navy). Lika did not write. Pavel reported: ‘The mongoose is well, its behaviour is incorrigible but deserves leniency.’ To Vania Pavel was franker: ‘The mongoose gives us no peace, it bit off a piece of mama’s nose in the night, she was frightened when she saw the blood. Now it has healed.’9 Anton wrote back. He confessed that he would miss Easter. He and the Dauphin discovered Monte Carlo. For several days they took the train there to play roulette. In two days Anton lost 800 francs.
Three days later the party took the express to Paris. Anton celebrated Easter in the Russian Orthodox church, amazed that French and Greek Christians should be singing the Bortniansky anthems he had sung as a boy in Taganrog. May Day in Paris gave Anton food for thought. He mingled with a crowd of rioting Paris workers and was himself manhandled by the police. Three days later he sat in the public gallery of the French parliament and listened to something unimaginable in Russia – deputies calling on the Minister for the Interior to account for the deaths of seven workers. Paris, as much as Sakhalin, developed Anton’s political consciousness. Meanwhile Suvorin decided to commission a bronze bust of himself (which he was later to present to Chekhov), and while the sculptor carved, Anton and the Dauphin toured the nightclubs and watched naked women. On 2/14 May Anton was back in Moscow.
Notes
1 May the gods serve you, the nymphs love you and the doctors not treat you. Yours A. See OR, 331 59 71b: A. A. Suvorin’s letters to Anton, 1889–92.
2 See OR, 331 43 11b: N. Ezhov’s letters to Anton, 1890–1: 20 Oct. 1890.
3 See OR, 331 46 1a: Ivanenko’s letters to Anton, 1889–91.
4 See LN68, 479–92: Leontiev-Shcheglov’s diary.
5 See OR, 331 52 46: Daria Musina-Pushkina’s letters to Anton, 1891, 1896–8.
6 See OR, 331 63 4a: Elena Shavrova’s letters to Anton, 1889–91: 14 Jan. 1891.
7 See OR, 331 52 2a: Lika Mizinova’s letters to Anton, 1891–2; in Perepiska 1984, II, 16–59.
8 See Novoe vremia, No. 1017, 4 July 1904.
9 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel’s letters to Ivan, 1879–98: 7 Apr. 1891.
THIRTY-FOUR
Summer at Bogimovo
May–July 1891
ANTON STAYED ONE DAY on the Malaia Dmitrovka. (Of the twenty months that the family rented Firgang’s house, Anton lived there fewer than five.) The day after his arrival Evgenia, Masha, Anton and Sod the mongoose left for a dacha that Misha had found them near Aleksin on the river Oka, a beautiful region of wooded hills that was somewhat fancifully called the ‘Russian Switzerland’. Probably the palm cat came to a sticky end that spring. Floor-polishers came to the Firgang house while Pavel was in charge and flushed it from its lair beneath the wash-stand: one workman, his little finger badly bitten, reacted violently.1
Pavel retired on 30 April 1891. With his sons in Petersburg, Sudogda, Aleksin and Nice, he portrayed his future as bleak. His employer of the last fourteen years, Gavrilov’s parting remark was, ‘Your children are bastards’.2
Cousin Aliosha Dolzhenko also left Gavrilov – for a more generous employer. As his family left for the country Pavel told Vania:
I remain in Moscow to put the flat in order. Antosha had brought you remarkable gifts: a purse with two French gold coins, paper and envelopes from the Louvre shop … I can choose my life and my locality. I think it best for me to spend my days among my own family, rather than in coarse and rude society. All this time I have been living for the family and have laboured for it, I have left the Slough of Gavrilov without a penny, I hope that my family will not leave me penniless … I shall be well fed, clothed and not want for anything.3
The dacha, surrounded by woods, was just across the river Oka from Aleksin. There were no latrines – Anton was constantly running to a gully – the house was cramped and trains noisily crossed the Oka on a rickety bridge. When Pavel arrived three days later, conditions were intolerable. The mongoose was breaking crockery and uncorking bottles. Chekhov could not work: ‘Writing, I’m like a crayfish sitting in a trap with other crayfish.’
After a breach of three months in their relationship, Lika brought Anton salvation. She arrived with Levitan by river-boat; she flaunted the painter all summer to flush Anton out. Anton reacted only with more irony: he openly referred to Levitan as Phaon, to Levitan’s mistress Sofia Kuvshinnikova as Sappho, and to Lika as Sappho’s young rival Melitta.4 On the boat Lika and Levitan were accosted by a local landowner Evgenii Bylim-Kolosovsky, a tiresome idealist with a large estate at Bogimovo, ten miles from Aleksin. Bylim-Kolosovsky needed sympathetic ears and a supplementary income: when he heard that the Chekhovs were dissatisfied with their quarters he sent two troikas to fetch them to Bogimovo, where he offered them the upper storey of the manor house for the summer. Masha recalls: ‘We saw a large neglected estate with an enormous two-storey house, two or three cottages and a splendid old park with avenues and ponds.’
Amenaisa Chaleeva, a toothless red-head (‘dim and vicious’, decided Anton) was Bylim-Kolosovsky’s mistress and ran his model dairy. She recalled Chekhov:
A man who looked about thirty, pale, thin, seemingly very pleasant. A home-made sailcloth jacket, a broad grey hat. I thought, he can’t afford our dacha – 160 roubles for the summer … We enter the drawing room, a long room with windows looking out on a lime avenue, columns in the middle, a parquet floor, long leather divans along the walls, a big round table, a few ancient armchairs. The man saw all this and even cried out with pleasure: ‘Oh I’ve been looking for something like this! And the parquet squeaks with age, the divans are antediluvian … What happiness. This will be my room and I’ll work here.’5
In the move from Aleksin to Bogimovo the mongoose vanished into the woods. Anton stirred up neighbouring landowners. The one reply was distraught:
Dear Mr Chekhov, I inform you of the terrible grief that has struck me today: at 6 this morning my father died of acute pneumonia. I have asked many people in Seianovo about the mongoose, but it hasn’t turned up.6
Lika and Levitan had left. Anton, his affections revived, invited Lika back to Bogimovo; he also invited Suvorin, Vania and Aliosha Dolzhenko. Bogimovo, which still stands, was magnificently placed near the top of a steep hill. Great windows to the west overlooked a stream; the morning light came through equally large windows and the park on the east. Anton established an arduous regime. He rose at 4.00 a.m., made coffee and worked while the household slept until eleven. Then they walked, played, lunched, gathered mushrooms, caught fish and rested. Anton sat down to work again at three and worked until dark, at 9.00 p.m., after which came supper, cards, bonfires, charades, arguments, personal and philosophical, and visits to neighbours. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesda
ys he wrote The Island of Sakhalin; on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays ‘The Duel’; on Sundays he composed bread-and-butter fiction, such as ‘Peasant Women’, a story of indignant women listening to a traveller telling them how he drove a neighbour’s wife to her death. He kept up a furious rhythm, with only two or three hours’ sleep a night, for three months, despite toothache, stomach upsets and coughing.
As well as Sod, Anton had mislaid Lika. His invocations lost their power. Signing himself as a laxative mineral water, Hunyadi Janos, he appealed:
Golden, mother-of-pearl, fil d’Écosse Lika! The mongoose ran away the day before yesterday and will never ever return. He’s kicked it. … Come and sniff flowers, catch fish, go for walks and howl. O, fair Lika! When you watered my right shoulder with your howling tears (I’ve removed the stains with benzene) and ate our bread in big slices and our beef, we were greedily devouring your face and the back of your neck.
It was Levitan who answered, not altogether in jest:
Everything, beginning with the air and ending, God forbid me, with the most insignificant bug on earth, is imbued with the divine Lika! She isn’t here yet but she will be, for she doesn’t love you, the tow-haired, but me, the volcanic dark-haired man, and she will only go where I am. It hurts you to read this but love of truth prevents me from hiding the fact. We have settled in Tver province near the estate of Panafidin, [Lika’s uncle] … I’m a sheer psychopath! You’ll find it interesting if you come – wonderful fishing and our rather nice company, consisting of Sofia [Kuvshinnikova], me, the Friend and the Vestal Virgin.
Suvorin came for a few days and contemplated buying a neighbouring estate, a house with a mezzanine, where he might spend summers next to Chekhov. Masha fell ill with symptoms of typhoid. This concerned Levitan, who wrote again:
Anton Chekhov Page 30