Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Liudmila Ozerova had only seen The Seagull. The next day she read the play and was bowled over: she had found her role, and foolishly addressed Anton by Arkadina’s extravagant phrase – ‘My only one’:

  Anton, my only one, to fall at your feet, meekly to caress and kiss your hands, to look endlessly into your eyes. To reincarnate in myself all your great soul!!! Words, looks, thoughts cannot convey the impression that our Seagull made on me.

  Almost by the same post a more interesting actress approached Anton. Chekhov had sent Vera Komissarzhevskaia his Plays. The actress still had Avilova’s silver medallion which Anton gave her as a prop. (It interested its owner no more than the stuffed seagull in the play interested Trigorin.) Komissarzhevskaia felt she personified the Seagull and wrote to Anton as if he were Trigorin: ‘You will visit me, won’t you? Potapenko tells me that you’re expected by 1 March. Are you? I doubt if I’ll go away for Lent, although I’ve completely collapsed. Come, Anton, I terribly want to see you.’4

  Chekhov found this invitation to Petersburg irresistible, and the forthcoming Congress of Theatre Workers in Moscow for the first three weeks of March was a pretext to leave Melikhovo. He wanted to deliver ‘Peasants’ to Goltsev and Lavrov in Moscow, even if no censor could pass the text as it was.

  In ‘Peasants’ he had beaten the ‘realists’ at their own genre, drawing on his deep knowledge and understanding of the villages around Melikhovo and the peasants who worked in Moscow hotels as waiters. His plot was minimal: the narrator is a camera. A sick waiter, Nikolai, loses his job and goes back to his village with his wife Olga and their daughter Sasha. Shocked by the squalor of his relatives, he dies, while Olga and Sasha are forced to wander off and beg. (Chekhov intended to take the story further with the girl’s entry into prostitution in the city but the censor made it clear that this would be too sensitive and sordid a theme.) Chekhov contrasts a beautiful valley with imagery of smashed crockery, beaten children, in a series of tableaux that cover autumn, a savage winter, and spring – six months which bring tax arrears, the rape of an errant wife, the beating of another wife by her drunken husband, fire, and the death of Nikolai. ‘Peasants’ shows the gentry as hateful creatures from an alien world. The good that is left is a strange residue of ideals, as the peasants listen to Olga reading the Bible, words unintelligible, but consolatory to them. From ‘My Life’ Chekhov takes the spectacle of the drunken thieving peasants who are more human than their masters, for they recognize the truth and justice that they have lost. This uncompromising picture was to anger Tolstoy and other self-appointed spokesmen of the peasantry. The school of protest writing welcomed Chekhov to its camp.

  Notes

  1 See OR, 331 54 50: Liudmila Groupillon-Ozerova’s eight letters to Anton, 1896–7.

  2 Meanwhile Nikolai Ezhov was enrolled as census taker for the dosshouses of Moscow.

  3 See OR, 331 63 4d: Elena Shavrova’s letters to Anton, 1897.

  4 See OR, 331 48 7: Vera Komissarzhevskaia’s letters to Anton, 1897–1903.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Cutting the Gordian Knot

  March 1897

  LIUDMILA OZEROVA, Elena Shavrova, Vera Komissarzhevskaia and Lidia Avilova all called for Anton. So did Levitan. He wanted Anton to examine him, and to be painted for the Moscow’s leading gallery-owner, Tretiakov, by the Petersburg artist Braz. Anton alerted Elena Shavrova, about to leave for Petersburg:

  Dear Colleague. The intrigant will arrive in Moscow 4 March at noon on train No. 14 – in all probability. If you haven’t left yet, telegraph me just one word: ‘home’ … But if you also agree to have lunch with me at the Slav Bazaar (at 1 p.m.) then instead of ‘home’ write ‘agree’. The telegraph operator may think that I’ve offered you my hand and heart, but what do we care what they think!! I shall come for one day, in a rush.

  Elena received the letter on 4 March – too late to respond. She searched the Great Moscow and Slav Bazaar, and left notes at Russian Thought, but he was ‘as elusive as a meteor.’ One note ‘in deep despair’ begged him to see her in Petersburg. But that evening Anton took his stethoscope to Levitan. He calmed the patient, but wrote to Schechtel: ‘Things are bad. His heart doesn’t beat, it gasps. Instead of a tick-tock you hear “fff-tock”. In medicine we call that a systolic murmur.’

  In the morning he was back in Melikhovo. Pavel had brought in the priest; to shrive the family and the servants in preparation for Easter. Dung was being tipped onto the greenhouse beds. Anton was short of money because the censor had held up ‘Peasants’ and Suvorin still had not found the contract for The Seagull. Aleksandr broached Suvorin on Anton’s behalf and wrote up his adventures as a farce, celebrating a salmon that Natalia had just cooked. It began:

  The Missing Contract or the Salmon Tail

  A Play in 5 Acts

  by Mr Goose

  Cast: Suvorin’s Porter; Suvorin’s footman, Vasili; A. S. Suvorin; Mr Goose; Mrs Goose

  Act 1. The spreader of enlightenment and builder of schools.

  Goose (entering Mr Suvorin’s hall, reading a letter). ‘Put on your trousers and go and see Suvorin: ask where the contract and stamps are and why he persists in not answering my letters. I need the money desperately, since I’m building another school …’ (aside) Bare-arsed educators! No money but building schools like water. Burdening me with things to do. Won’t bother even to send me a pound of country butter or a piglet for the New Year … Governors, indeed, dog turds.1

  Aleksandr came to stay for a few days with his two elder sons. (It was to be his last visit to Melikhovo.) They stayed in the cottage. Aleksandr was hoping for help: Kolia, expelled from grammar school, seemed doomed by the genes he had inherited, according to Aleksandr, from his mother’s ‘decaying landowner’s family’. All evening the priest and Aleksandr drank beer. (Aleksandr had lapsed again.) In the cold morning sun, Aleksandr was sobered by a talk with Anton:

  My brother was hunched, warming himself in the sun looking mournfully at his surroundings. ‘I don’t feel like sowing or planting, or like looking into the future,’ he broke the silence.’ – ‘Stop, that’s nonsense. You’re just depressed,’ I reassured him, aware I was being banal. – ‘Now,’ he said firmly, turning his face towards me. ‘After my death I leave such-and-such to our sister and mother, and such-and-such for education.’

  On 9 March 1897 Aleksandr and his sons left. Kundasova came for two days. Nursing Brom, who had been mauled by a hound, and Quinine, whose puppy had died, Anton was withdrawn. The coming of spring, the ice breaking on the river and the prospect of a hæmorrhage, Levitan’s terminal illness, the commission for his portrait, all turned his thoughts to death. At tea his father sickened him: ‘going on about the uneducated being better than the educated. I came in and he shut up.’ Anton replied to neither Ozerova nor Shavrova. At last, the theatre contract for The Seagull had been replaced, and he had 582 roubles, enough to visit Suvorin and the actors in Moscow, and Komissarzhevskaia and Avilova in Petersburg.

  On 19 March, as the first starlings flew into Lopasnia, Anton was spitting blood. The next day Suvorin came to Moscow and settled in the Slav Bazaar. On 22 March Anton took his room in the Great Moscow, and in the evening he went to dine with Suvorin at the Ermitage. Before they had begun to eat, Anton clutched his napkin to his mouth and pointed at the ice bucket. Blood was gushing up uncontrollably from a lung.

  Notes

  1 See Pis’ma, 1939, 331–3.

  VIII

  Flowering Cemeteries

  Oh this South! Oh this Nice!

  Oh, how their radiance disturbs me!

  Life, like a wounded bird,

  Tries to arise – and cannot …

  Fiodor Tiutcher

  SIXTY

  The Doctor is Sick

  March–April 1897

  STILL CLUTCHING ice to his blood-stained shirt, Anton Chekhov was taken by cab to Suvorin’s suite, No. 40, at the Slav Bazaar. He fell on to a bed, telling Suvorin ‘Blood’s coming from my right lung; it did w
ith my brother and my mother’s sister.’ They summoned Dr Obolonsky, but he could not persuade Anton to go to hospital. Anton scrawled a note to Bychkov, his devoted footman at the Great Moscow, to send the proofs of ‘Peasants’ on his windowsill to the Slav Bazaar. The hæmorrhage did not abate until morning. Anton was calm, though afraid, but his friends panicked. Lidia Avilova, invited to call, could not find him. Bychkov had been ordered to tell only Vania where Anton was.

  All day Chekhov and Suvorin stayed indoors. Anton asked Vania to call, as he was ‘unwell’. Shcheglov came to see Suvorin. Thrilled to find his two idols together, he left without noticing Anton’s perilous state.1 Anton too seemed to ignore it. Early next morning he told Suvorin that he had letters to answer and people to see back in the Great Moscow. Suvorin remonstrated, but Anton spent Monday there: he sent a touchy teenager a critique of her novel about fairies; he apologized to Avilova. He wrote, talked, and spat blood into the wash basin.

  At daybreak on Tuesday 25 March Doctor Obolonsky was handed a note: ‘Bleeding, Great Moscow No. 5, Chekhov’. Obolonsky took Anton straight to Professor Ostroumov’s clinic by the Novodevichie cemetery, then went to the Slav Bazaar and woke up Suvorin. At 1.00 p.m. Suvorin saw Anton:

  Chekhov is in Ward No. 16, 10 above his ‘Ward No. 6’, as Obolonsky remarked. The patient is laughing and joking as usual, clearing his throat of blood in a big tumbler. But when I said I watched the ice moving on the Moscow river, his face changed and he said, ‘Has the river thawed?’

  Suvorin telegraphed Vania, revisited Anton and took the night train to Petersburg, where he tried to allay fears. Sazonova wrote in her diary: ‘I’m told it’s just hæmorrhoidal blood, but they still put him in a clinic.’2 Aleksandr was alarmed by Suvorin’s vagueness.

  Professor Ostroumov, who had taught Chekhov, was at Sukhum on the Black Sea. His juniors mapped Chekhov’s lungs, showing the top of both, particularly the left, badly damaged by tuberculosis. Wheezing exhalations came from both lungs. Ostroumov was no believer in the curative power of Robert Koch’s ‘tuberculin’. Treatment was conservative: ice packs, peace and nutrition, until the threat of a fatal hæmorrhage had receded; convalescence with subcutaneous arsenic, exile to a dry climate and a diet of koumiss.3 Anton was carefully watched – doctors are unruly patients. Visitors were admitted by pass, in twos, and forbidden to ask questions.

  Anton wanted his parents kept in the dark. When Masha arrived at the Kursk station on Tuesday morning to start teaching, Vania silently handed her a pass to the Ostroumov clinic. Only next day was she calm enough to visit. Lidia Avilova came twice, once bearing flowers.4 Dr Korobov, who had known Anton for sixteen years, was turned away. Anton was fed cold broth. He asked Masha for tea and some eau de Cologne; Viktor Goltsev for caviar, four ounces of black, eight of red; Shavrova for a roast turkey. She sent a grouse, which Anton washed down with fine red wine from Franz Schechtel and Dr Radzwicki, Anton’s optician. Sablin of The Russian Gazette sent a roast chicken and, when this gave Anton erotic dreams, a woodcock. Flowers and letters also poured in, as did unsolicited manuscripts and solicited books. Anton wrote passes for the visitors he wanted. Goltsev and Liudmila Ozerova called. Elena Shavrova, confined in Petersburg with a chill, wired her sister Olia on 29 March for news:

  I found him up properly dressed as always, in a big white, very bright room with a white bed, a big white table, a little cupboard and some chairs. He seems to have lost a little weight and his bones are showing, but he was awfully nice, as always, and bantered cheerfully with me … What do you think I found him doing? He was choosing lenses for a pince-nez.5

  A more important visitor had come the previous day. On Wednesday 26 March Lidia Avilova left the clinic in distress and walked round the Novodevichie cemetery, where she met Tolstoy. Tolstoy needed no pass: on Friday he appeared at Chekhov’s bedside. Weeks later Anton recalled the visit to Mikhail Menshikov:

  We talked about immortality. Tolstoy recognizes it in a Kantian sense; he supposes that we shall all (people and animals) live in a principle (reason, love), whose essence and aims are a mystery to us. But I see this principle or force as something like a shapeless mass of aspic; my ego – my individuality and mind – will merge with this mass. I don’t want this immortality.

  At four the next morning Anton suffered a severe hæmorrhage. The doctors forbade all pleasure except letter-writing. Anton, wanting to be discharged home, declared Melikhovo healthy, on a watershed and free of fevers, but the doctors exiled him south, to the Mediterranean or the Black Sea, from September to May.

  On 3 April the bleeding stopped. Visitors came again, except from 1.00 to 3.00 p.m. when, as Chekhov put it, ‘the sick animals are fed and exercised’. A week later he was discharged. His health was a matter of public bulletins. On 7 April, appeasing the censor by hastily replacing page 193, which blamed the state for the peasants’ misery, Russian Thought published ‘Peasants’. Never was Chekhov so fêted by the intelligentsia. A wave of sympathy forced even Burenin to acclaim him. Late in April Sazonova observed: ‘It sounds like a funeral knell. He must be very bad and they’re holding a requiem. Really, they say that his days are numbered.’ The literary world commiserated.

  Lika neither wrote nor visited. Elena Shavrova showered her cher maître and intrigant with letters. She offered him the health of ‘the stupid, indifferent and dim’; she promised to kiss Professor Ostroumov all over; she told him of a French play, L’évasion, about a married woman’s happy adultery, a play where it was said ‘doctors have no right to be ill’. He could still be her intrigant: ‘What do we risk? As long as Tolstoy doesn’t find out.’ All she requested was that Anton should: ‘Tear my letters into little pieces (jealous men are dangerous), I don’t want someone else to do it’;6 he never did. On 11 April, Shavrova shook off her husband and came, but Anton had been discharged the night before. Olga Kundasova was running round Moscow for Anton, returning to their owners all the books he had borrowed.

  Vania ran messages, while Aleksandr worried. Misha and Olga went to Melikhovo on 6 April to make ready for Anton’s return. Anton had left Masha penniless and the cupboards bare; Vania was to bring beer, best beef and to see that Anton brought money. Misha wrote to Vania: ‘Desperate famine here, brother … we have thin gruel instead of soup. Be a pal and bring parsley (roots), carrots and celery. If you have the money, some onions too. We have to feed Anton up now.’7 Masha’s sinking spirits were restored by Maria Drozdova. Pavel and Evgenia seemed not to know what was happening. They sheared the sheep, and mucked out the cattle. Only Misha’s arrival on the 6th alerted them that something had happened to Anton.

  On Good Friday, emaciated and weak, Anton was brought by Vania and laid on Masha’s divan. Here he injected arsenic into his abdomen, read and wrote letters. The comfort was cold. Dr Sredin, who treated himself and others for TB in Yalta, urged Anton to go to Davos. The radical novelist Aleksandr Ertel revealed that 16 years ago he had been given a month to live, but wondered if Anton’s will to live matched his own.8 Menshikov said that he had wept as he read ‘Peasants’ and that Petersburg was awash with rumours of Chekhov’s illness; he wrote again, advocating a diet of oats and milk and a stay in Algiers, which had done wonders for Alphonse Daudet (who was to die in eight months).9

  Emilie Bijon sent two touching messages in French.10 Cousin Georgi in Taganrog urged Chekhov: ‘the south is warmer and the ladies are passionate’.11 Warm comfort came with Lika Mizinova on 12 April, the eve of Easter. She left on the 18th (Vania’s birthday), with Sasha Selivanova, who had arrived three days before. Pavel was glad: ‘At 9.45, glory to the All Highest, the two fat ladies left.’12

  On Sunday 13 April forty male and twenty-three female peasants lined up for Easter gifts of money from the Chekhovs. Pavel’s diary sounds vigilant:

  14 April: … Antosha liked the roast beef. Ants got into the house …

  23 April: … The cherries are in leaf. Antosha is busy in the garden.

  Importunate visitors – ‘the loud-
mouth Semenkovich’, Shcheglov and the vet – annoyed Pavel. Two students turned up, to be fed and housed. On 19 April, seeing his brothers off, Anton risked a three-mile journey to survey the second school he was building. Dr Korobov, who had come to photograph Anton, not to heal him, then took Anton to Moscow for two days. (The other doctor to visit in April was Dr Radzwicki with a case of Bessarabian wine and lenses to correct Anton’s astigmatism.)

  Anton was glad to see his visitors go. Shcheglov had pestered him with a play, which, Anton told Suvorin, read as if it had been written by a cat whose tail the author had trodden on. Suvorin was the only man Anton longed to see. He telegraphed that he would be in Petersburg by the end of May. Anton joked ‘I’ll marry a handsome rich widow. I take 400,000, two steamboats and an iron foundry.’ Suvorin replied by wire, ‘We consider dowry too small. Ask for bathhouse and two shops more.’13

  Illness freed Anton’s conscience, and he felt free to travel. No woman would, he told Suvorin, ‘be stupid enough to marry a man who’d been in a clinic’. From Courmajeur, a tuberculosis resort, Levitan exhorted Anton on 5 May:

  Is this really a lung disease?! Do everything possible, go and drink koumiss, summer is fine in Russia, then let’s go south for the winter, even as far as Nervi, together we shan’t be bored. Do you need money?

  and then from Bad Nauheim, where he was having hydrotherapy, on 29 May:

  No more blood? Don’t copulate so often. How good to teach yourself to do without women. Just dreaming of them is far more satisfying … If Lika is with you, kiss her sugar-sweet lips, but not a whit more.14