Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Lika says that if there were anything serious about Masha’s illness you wouldn’t have written in such a playful tone. How did you lose the mongoose? What the devil is all this? It’s simply obscene to bring an animal from Ceylon only to lose it in Kaluga province!!! You are all phlegm – to write about Masha’s illness and the loss of the mongoose in cold blood as if they were only to be expected!

  Sofia Kuvshinnikova (like Zinaida Gippius, she loathed Chekhov as he loathed her) added reproaches:

  I don’t understand how you could let this little foreign mongoose go to his doom. I am beginning simply to think that you, Chekhov, were terribly envious of its popularity and so neglected your rival on purpose!

  Anton felt deserted: first by Lika, then by Sod, and now by his sister, for Masha soon recovered and left for Sumy to be with Natalia Lintvariova.

  Anton was discussing sex by letter with Suvorin. In mid May 1891 Petersburg buzzed with the delinquencies of a schoolgirl, daughter of a senior civil servant: her lover’s trial went into closed session. Suvorin knew the details. Anton reacted by saying that nymphomaniacs should be incarcerated, and that the schoolgirl, ‘if she doesn’t die of consumption, will be writing edifying tracts, plays and letters from Berlin or Vienna – she has an expressive and very literary style.’7 Suvorin responded with another letter on the depravity of modern schoolgirls. On 27 May Anton pointed out that they were no worse than Shakespeare’s fourteen-year-old Juliet. He added: ‘By the way, about little girls’ but the next fourteen lines are so heavily inked out, by Suvorin or Masha, that Anton’s views remain unfathomable. In him, as in Suvorin, prurience and prudishness alternated unpredictably. Anton, like Suvorin, appreciated female sexuality, but unlike Suvorin, feared sex as an addiction which, were he to surrender to it, would annul his freedom and stifle his creativity.

  *

  On 2 June hunters on the other side of the Oka found an animal hiding in a crack in a quarry. It came out to greet them and they recognized it as Chekhov’s mongoose. Sod was captured and taken to Bogimovo, where he enjoyed prancing with the children of the neighbouring families. When Anton spotted a snake in the grass, Sod was brought out to show his prowess.

  June 1891 was an exotic pastorale. Lika and Anton resumed their correspondence in mid-June, Anton teasing, Lika pretending to be evasive. She spent a few days in Moscow vainly looking for a better flat for the Chekhovs; back with Levitan, she stressed that Sofia Kuvshinnikova watched, that she was too unwell to go outdoors in the evening. Anton told his ‘enchanting, amazing Lika’ to come, despite ‘being carried away by the Circassian Levitan’ or ‘things will go badly’. He sent her a photograph of an officer on the Petersburg and signed it ‘Your Petia’. Lika did not come. Her assurances of her innocence were unconvincing:

  We have a splendid garden and what’s more Levitan, whom, anyway, I can only lick my lips at, since he doesn’t dare come near me, and we’re never left alone. Sofia is very nice; she is now very kind and utterly sincere with me. Clearly, she is now quite sure that I cannot be a danger to her.8

  Sofia Kuvshinnikova, everyone knew, had lasted so long because she put up with Levitan’s polygamy. At the height of summer, however, Sofia Kuvshinnikova left Zatishie. Levitan was untrammelled: Lika gave him her photograph. At the end of July 1891 Anton sent Lika one last letter, but signed it Masha (the handwriting is Anton’s), as if his sister had written it: ‘If you have decided to break off your touching triple alliance for a few days, then I’ll persuade my brother put off his departure [for Moscow] …’ Lika was silent. Suvorin returned briefly, advising Anton not to many Lika.9

  Anton’s reaction to what he regarded as Levitan’s seduction of Lika was vicious but hidden. His letters stopped. Instead, on 18 August, although work on The bland of Sakhalin was far from complete and his long story, ‘The Duel’, had only been despatched to Suvorin that day, he wrote to a Petersburg lawyer called Chervinsky. He asked him to find out from the editor of The Cornfield how much they would pay for ‘a suitable little story’. Chervinsky took the idea to Tikhonov, editor of The North. Chekhov’s revenge on Levitan, Kuvshinnikova and Lika now had an outlet in a story that would be known as ‘The Grasshopper’. (Anton’s host, Bylim-Kolosovsky, was to wait three years to be even more cruelly caricatured.)

  As ‘The Duel’ neared completion, Anton was inspired by a tenant of Bylim-Kolosovsky. An entomologist, Dr Vagner, whom the locals called ‘Spider’, was embroiled in a polemic between biologist Professor Timiriazev and Moscow Zoo, where amateurish ‘experiments’ were carried out on the animals by a Professor Bogdanov. From Vagner, a vehement Darwinist, Anton borrowed many features and arguments for the protagonist, von Koren, of ‘The Duel’. Chekhov also edited and extended Vagner’s own diatribe against Moscow Zoo into a sketch called ‘The Tricksters’.

  Bogimovo turned cold as August ended. Chekhov had to face the autumn. Aunt Fenichka, camping in the Firgang house, wrote to her sister for the last time:

  Dearest sister don’t send any more, I cannot cook at all, we simply weep … on the Feast of the Holy Apostles I made soup and on Sunday I was very ill, now I want Ukrainian cherry pie I have no strength … don’t invite me, take me to a small flat, here I can’t cope … everything is bitter in my throat and I’ve been miserable so long.10

  Anton wrote back to her son, briskly telling him to feed her olives, baked fish and cough powders, asking why he had not called a doctor. A month passed before Anton visited his dying aunt. In August he travelled to Moscow for a day, not to treat Aunt Fenichka, but to inspect the zoo for his article.

  On 28 August Pavel arrived in Moscow: he moved Aunt Fenichka and Aliosha out of the house and swept it clean, grateful at least that Fenichka’s dog Kartuzik had exterminated the rats which Sod had spared. Pavel too was moving out, for, thanks to Suvorin, Vania had a job in a Moscow school with magnificent accommodation. Anton’s heart was with the Suvorins. He consoled Suvorin over the sudden death of his manservant from a ‘twisted gut’ (in today’s terminology, intestinal gangrene); he reassured him over the Dauphin who, fearful that he had TB, had gone to the Volga to drink fermented mares’ milk; he congratulated both Suvorins on their womenfolk, who left them to holiday as they wished, and concluded, in accord with the Suvorin philosophy:

  In women I love above all beauty, in the history of mankind culture … in the form of carpets, sprung carriages and witty thinking.

  Notes

  1 Both Misha and Masha in their memoirs imply that the palmcat was given to Moscow Zoo; the Zoo’s records do not mention it.

  2 See OR, 331 81 8: Pavel’s notebooks, 1880–97.

  3 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel’s letters to Ivan, 1879–98: 3 May 1891.

  4 Grillparzer’s play Sappho was performed in Moscow that year; the nicknames were topical.

  5 See Chaleeva’s memoirs (in Soligalich local museum), quoted in A. V. Kandidov, A. P. Chekhov v Bogimove, Kaluga, 1991, 32.

  6 See OR, 331 36 38: Bezdetnov’s letter to Anton Chekhov.

  7 Cut in PSSP: see A. P. Chudakov, ‘“Neprilichnye slova” i oblik klassika’ in Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1991, 11, 54.

  8 See OR, 331 52 2a: Lika Mizinova’s letters to Anton, 1891–2; in Perepiska, 1984, II, 16–59.

  9 See Sazonova’s diary, 15 Mar. 1895, LN87, 307.

  10 See OR, 331 81 83: Fenichka Dolzhenko’s letter to Evgenia, 9 July 1891.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ‘The Duel’ and The Famine

  August 1891–February 1892

  ON 16 AUGUST 1891, her thirty-sixth birthday, Aleksandr’s wife Natalia had given birth to a boy, Mikhail. Pavel exalted in his first legitimate grandchild:

  The Chekhov surname has expanded in the North and the South ‘Magnify, o Lord, and visit this vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted.’ I arrived here early as the Baptist to make ready the way and clear the Mansions, in which we shall live like herrings in a barrel.1

  Aleksandr cherished his baby son: he paid for a designated cow to provide
milk of proven origin, but the Chekhov-Golden family was not happy for long. Anastasia Golden, the eldest and once most prosperous sister, was destitute. Pushkariov, her consort, had lost all his money. Anastasia and her children moved in with Anna Ipatieva-Golden, who begged Anton:

  If 30 roubles doesn’t come, we’ll all be out on the street. Anton, for the sake of everything holy, help us, I expect we will pay it back, though not soon, and it’s hard to ask others, you’re different, nobody will know and neither Pushkariov’s nor our pride will suffer.2

  Anton appears to have sent money, but the Goldens’ mother went to live with Aleksandr and Natalia. Called ‘Gagara’ she spent eight years, as Aleksandr put it, ‘applying for admission to the Elysian fields’.

  Anton was preoccupied by death. Leonid Tretiakov, the Chekhov brothers’ student friend, had died of TB. That autumn Kurepin, the editor of The Alarm Clock, who had nurtured Anton’s early work, was dying of cancer of the neck; Aunt Fenichka’s days, Anton told Suvorin, ‘are numbered. She was a glorious woman. A saint.’ On 25 October Fenichka died.3

  Suvorin and the Dauphin had come to stay in the Slav Bazaar in Moscow, only to catch flu and infect Anton. Anton felt so ill that he gave up vodka for good. Suvorin and Anton were both depressed by bereavement. Suvorin had lost his man-servant; Anton had been to three funerals that autumn; Zinaida Lintvariova had died at last and Anton had written her obituary. Anton expressed his despair so vehemently to Aleksandr, that his brother destroyed the letter. Aleksandr, who had won respect for two articles on dosshouses and lunatic asylums, responded sympathetically:

  I deeply and sincerely want to warm you with affection. Poor man, you really have a lot on your shoulders. Your last letter (sealed) created such an impression that my wife burst out howling, and my spectacles clouded over. My dear Antosha, there’s nobody to take pity on you. You lack the affection that is given to anyone who loves a woman.

  Anton, however, shut out women’s affection. Elena Pleshcheeva was lost, betrothed to a Baron von Staël. Kundasova had gone to Batum on the Black Sea (hoping he might join her). Lika was ostracized for fickleness. Anton would not see Elena Shavrova. On 16 September 1891 he told her off for her story ‘Dead People’, where ‘gynæcologists were cynics’ and ‘old bachelors smelt like dogs’:

  Gynæcologists have to deal with a frenzy of tedium that you couldn’t even dream of and which … you would find smelt worse than dog … All gynæcologists are idealists … I dare to remind you of justice, which an objective writer needs more than air.

  When Elena called, Anton announced that he was ‘not at home’.4 Lika, feeling drawn to Anton again, was made to feel unwanted, and complained to Granny: ‘I see the Chekhovs, and Sofia Kuvshinnikova too, rather seldom … I repent not staying for the winter in Pokrovskoe [the family country estate]. Sometimes I want so much to see you and get out of here.’5 Lika left the city council; she had seven pupils in the Rzhevskaia school and a few private lessons. Her father had surfaced and was promising her money. She had hopes of studying to be a singer, but, ignored by Anton, she lapsed into hypochondria. All winter she complained to Granny of consumptive symptoms.

  Anton’s male friends needed him too. Ivanenko the flautist sought work: ‘If you reject my request, please send the revolver which we bought together and if you don’t, then I’ll still borrow one.’6 Anton asked Tchaikovsky to find Semashko the cellist a place in the Bolshoi opera orchestra. Others appealed in vain. In early November 1891 Gruzinsky wrote: ‘I sit and grieve, Anton! My wife has caught a chill looking after her sick sister. The sister is better, my wife has collapsed and something serious has begun … Not visiting the healthy, perhaps you call on the sick?’7

  Anton gave all his attention to the novel-length story he had sent Suvorin. Suvorin wanted to call it not ‘The Duel’ but ‘The Lies’. Anton stuck by his title. Here was a story far more traditionally Russian than his preceding fiction: two heroes – one with a faintly Polish name, Laevsky, the other distinctly Germanic, von Koren – each preach a set of ideas, one lazily Slavonic, the other manically Germanic, and fight a duel. The novelty of the story is that the author’s sympathies lie with neither set of ideas, even though he loves both his characters. Nobody would know from ‘The Duel’ that Chekhov had been in Sakhalin: the setting resembles Sukhum or Batum on the Caucasian Black Sea coast, and recalls Chekhov’s tour with the Dauphin in 1888. The story opens and closes with the sea drowning out the hero’s words. The positive figures are the natives who gather in harmony while the Russian colonists quarrel, the naïve deacon who interrupts the duel, and the forbearing doctor who mediates between Laevsky and von Koren. Sakhalin’s indigenous Ainu and the Buriat Father Irakli contribute only a few touches to ‘The Duel’.

  ‘The Duel’ has a satisfying plot. Laevsky has come to the Black Sea with another man’s wife, Nadezhda. When he finds her husband has died and he will have to marry her, he tries to borrow money to flee. The marine biologist Von Koren has come to prepare for an expedition. Laevsky parodies Tolstoy’s ideas on the wickedness of women to justify his cowardice. Von Koren argues that love of humanity requires helping natural selection by killing off the weak. To justify his scientific outlook he proposes to kill Laevsky in a duel. The climax is as conventional as the conflict. Nadezhda is physically and morally sickened, and when Laevsky finds that she has been prostituting herself to pay the shopkeeper’s bill, he too is profoundly shaken. The shock of the duel alters everyone: Laevsky and Nadezhda are reformed, Von Koren is chastened into admitting that ‘nobody knows the real truth.’ The instinctive faith of Dr Samoilenko, the deacon and the natives survives the wreck of intellectual structures. The upbeat ending is not very cogent; the story is shackled to fashionable ideas of the time – Tolstoy’s asceticism and Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’. Laevsky’s hysterical, good-natured delinquency recalls Aleksandr Chekhov; von Koren has the megalomania of Przhevalsky, the logic of Dr Vagner and even Anton’s own toughness. Yet we can sense the protagonists, von Koren and Laevsky, activist and quietist, as two sides of Chekhov, against a background of indifferent nature. From now on he would write works which argue ideas, not until the authorial mouthpiece is victorious, but until the reader senses that all ideas are futile.

  Suvorin liked ‘The Duel’ so much that he allowed it to fill the literary supplement of New Times for most of October and November, and although Chekhov made enemies in Petersburg – there was after all no room for other contributors – his reputation as Russia’s greatest living storyteller was now established. His second publication that autumn, the anonymous polemic ‘The Tricksters’ appeared in New Times on 9 October 1891. It created a scandal which persuaded the Imperial Society for Acclimatizing Plants and Animals to rebuild Moscow zoo along the lines of Hagenbeck’s Hamburg zoo, and buy new, healthy animals.

  When Anton had described Fenichka dying, he had mentioned, with mounting irritation, the mongoose leaping. ‘I’m auctioning the mongoose,’ he wrote to Natasha Lintvariova. Anton now showed two faces. In ‘The Tricksters’ he raged:

  The Moscow public calls the Zoo ‘the animals’ graveyard’. It stinks, the animals die of hunger, the management hands its wolves over for wolf-baiting, it’s cold in winter … there are drunken rowdies and animals which are not yet dead of hunger can’t sleep.

  Anton’s letter to the Zoo director on 14 January 1892, however, ingratiates:

  Last year I brought from Ceylon a male mongoose (mungo in Brehm). The animal is utterly healthy and in good spirits. As I am leaving Moscow for some time and cannot take it with me, I humbly ask the Management to accept this animal from me and to fetch it today or tomorrow. The best way of carrying it is a small basket with a lid and a blanket. The animal is tame. I have been feeding it on meat, fish and eggs.

  Thanks to Suvorin’s indiscretion, it was widely known that Chekhov was the author of ‘The Tricksters’, but Dr Volter of the zoo did not question why the zoo’s most articulate enemy should offer them a free mongoose. He
sent for it, and reported: ‘The mongoose has arrived safely and does not seem to have frozen. I hasten to carry out my promise about a free ticket to the zoo.’8 Poor Sod was visited by Masha, using the free ticket. Sod put his paws through the bars and removed her hair-combs. He survived two years in this ‘animals’ graveyard’. No mongoose is listed among the fallen and sick for 1892, but there is no mongoose in the zoo’s inventory for 1895. Sod, like Lika, could reflect on the fate of those who loved Anton, but whose demands for a response were too insistent.

  Living in a crowded flat with a mongoose meant to Chekhov remoteness from reality and ‘the people’. The revealing remark, to Suvorin in October, is: ‘There is nothing I love so much as personal freedom.’ Freedom from being crowded by others made the dream of a country estate an obsession. Anton had a substantial income, not just from ‘The Duel’ but from editions of collected stories and from farces, and Suvorin was eager to advance or underwrite money. Anton could spend 5000 roubles and mortgage a property for much more. Aleksandra Lintvariova and the Smagin brothers were put on alert, Anton relying on Aleksandr Smagin’s love for Masha as an incentive to drive him around the farms of Mirgorod. All through December 1891 Smagin bargained with Ukrainian landowners. Just before Christmas, Anton sent Masha down to inspect a short list, make decisions and exchange contracts. Masha was flustered by the responsibility, yet seized the reins of power. Ukrainian farmers, however, did not like dealing with a woman. By New Year’s Eve Masha was exhausted and begged Anton to come in person. She went back to Moscow empty-handed.