Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Given the public acclaim for ‘Peasants’ – which augured well for the sale of Chekhov’s books – and the excuse of illness, Anton could at last live out an idea he had preached periodically, but never practised: that the prerequisite of personal happiness was idleness.

  Notes

  1. See LN68, 479–92; Leontiev-Shcheglov’s diary.

  2 See Sazonova’s diary, LN87, 309.

  3 Koumiss is fermented mares’ milk; it tastes like a mixture of champagne, chalk and rancid butter. It is easily digested and its bacteria are thought to be beneficial.

  4 According to her memoirs she elicited from Anton a confession of undying love; at the time, however, she told Leikin (see his diary LN68, 499–510) that Chekhov was forbidden to speak.

  5 See PSSP, 6, 616–7: Olga Shavrova’s account is hard to believe.

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

  7 See S. M. Chekhov, O semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 118.

  8 See PSSP, 6, 631–2.

  9 See Zapiski GBL VIII 1941, 49.

  10 See OR, 331 36 72: Emilie Bijon’s letters to Anton, 1896–1900.

  11 See OR, 331 33 51: Georgi Chekhov’s letters to Anton, 1897:13 Apr.

  12 See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova, Melikhovskii letopisets, 1995.

  13 See Sazonova’s diary, LN87, 310.

  14 Cut from Levitan: Pis’ma, 1956; see OR, 331 49 25

  SIXTY-ONE

  An Idle Summer

  May–August 1897

  PHOTOGRAPHS THAT Dr Korobov took of Anton at the end of April 1897 show a man whose body and morale are wrecked. Anton’s main symptom, apart from a morning cough, was an evil temper. A three year period of creativity, that had begun with Lika’s departure in March 1894, was over. Between April and November 1897 he published nothing and wrote only letters. He pruned roses and supervised tree planting. He gave up medicine and council business and only kept an eye on the school at Novosiolki. While Masha saw to it that plans were drawn, materials bought and workers hired, Anton pondered his future. He could not stand milk diets, and ruled out the barren steppes of Samara where consumptives spent months drinking koumiss. Taganrog’s winters and springs were as severe as Moscow’s. Yalta and the Crimea had frozen and bored him in 1894. The Caucasian spas were vulgar – Kislovodsk in the north, Borjomi in the south – even if the dry mountain air had Alpine qualities. The idea of Switzerland repelled him. Anton’s options were the French seaside, Biarritz on the Atlantic or Nice on the Mediterranean, both refuges for Russians, so he would not be lonely. He considered North Africa, whose climate had rallied so many, but could he afford to travel for eight months, after an idle summer?

  Elena Shavrova proposed summer and autumn in Kislovodsk. Kundasova, to judge by her conspiratorial visits, was also willing to travel to the Caucasus. Lika was ready to return to Paris and accompany Anton; so was Masha’s friend, the artist Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, who had discreetly fallen in love with Anton. Anton was, however, shedding women friends. A symptom he had hidden at the clinic, he told Suvorin on 1 April, was impotence. Elena Shavrova was put off. On 28 May Chekhov arranged to meet her in Moscow: the letter arrived too late. Anton had arrived with Lika. Elena sent telegrams and spent an evening at the station in Moscow to catch him on his way back. ‘Fate is unjust, the post incorrigible, and you elusive,’ she lamented, before leaving for the Caucasus and Crimea where she hoped to meet him.

  Anton asked Liudmila Ozerova to play her favourite part, little Hannele in Hauptmann’s Hannele’s Ascension, at the annual play staged on 4 June by Dr Iakovenko in his asylum. (The church had Hannele’s Ascension banned from Imperial theatres; it was now preformed only in private theatres.) Ozerova demanded her own music and props. Anton gave the part instead to Olia, Elena Shavrova’s younger sister. The ‘little Queen in exile’ had lost her lover and her part. On 3 May she hinted that she would take an engagement in Warsaw if Anton did not protect her career. On 14 May she was so shattered by what must have been Anton’s rejection of her as a woman and as an actress that she wrote: ‘Anton, I don’t know how I stayed alive after reading your letter. Now the last thread that held me in this world has been torn. Farewell.’1

  One old flame, Daria Musina-Pushkina, the ‘cicada’ whom Chekhov had squired five years ago, came to Melikhovo on 3 May. The next day she visited the monastery with the family. Her husband had been killed hunting, and she was now a rich Mrs Glebova. ‘A very nice interesting woman, she sang about thirty romances to me and then left,’ Chekhov told Suvorin.

  On 25 May Anton stopped injecting arsenic. He masked the smell of medicine with Vera Violetta. Any exertion, however, laid him low. After taking examinations at Talezh school on 17 May, he was shattered. He tried quiet pursuits. He studied French. He fished with Ivanenko, catching fifty-seven carp in one session. June was peaceful: Masha, Misha and his wife Olga, and Vania, without his wife, left on a three-week trip to the Crimea. Anton moved out of Masha’s room into the guest cottage, away from visitors and the rows between Pavel and the servants. ‘Antosha has moved to the hermitage. To acquire sanctity by fasting and labour, as a hermit,’ Pavel joked. After two weeks Anton left, via Moscow, to stay with Levitan on the estate of a rich Mæcenas, Sawa Morozov. Morozov bored him, and Anton ran back to Melikhovo, with Lika, three days later. Lika told Masha in the Crimea:

  21 May 1897: This is the second time in June that I have defiled your virgin bed with my sinful body. How nice to sleep on your bed knowing that it is forbidden fruit to be tasted only by stealth. I didn’t go to the Crimea only because I am stuck, penniless; Anton is all right … His mood is fine, he makes relatively little fuss at dinner … Have you started an affair with somebody?2

  Since the birth of Christina, and despite all her travails, Lika had put on weight, and in her new role her tone towards Anton softened. Now that she had become more Anton’s nurse than his mistress, Lika would even condone his affair with Elena Shavrova, though she could bring herself only to call her ‘the lady writer’. She tacitly acknowledged Dr Astrov’s dictum that a woman can be a man’s friend only after being first an acquaintance and then a mistress. Lika felt bitter, however, that Masha now preferred her painter friends, Drozdova and Khotiaintseva, to her. She stayed with Anton at Melikhovo for seven periods of three to eight days from May to August. They also met when Anton ventured to Moscow. She became once again chief aspirant:

  13 June 1897 … I know that if my letter is to interest you it has to breathe civic grief or lament on the unwashed Russian peasant. What can I do if I’m not as intellectual as Mme Glebova? By the way, here is an indispensable novelty for you: there is a new face paint which neither water nor kisses can wash off! Pass it on to the appropriate person.

  17 June. Do I have to keep looking for you? If you want I can come and see you this evening, at Levitan’s [in Moscow].

  24 June. Divine Anton, you stop me sleeping. I couldn’t get away from you all night. Keep calm, you were cold and proper as ever.3

  Lika realized that Anton really would go into exile when summer ended. She had no money, and retreated to her family’s estate. On 5 July she offered a meeting; a week later, from Moscow, she invited herself to Melikhovo: ‘You see how I love you, why don’t you stay?’ When Anton finally risked a journey to see Suvorin in Petersburg at the end of July, Lika saw him off. The finality of the coming separation sank in. On 1 August Lika sent the longest letter she had written to him:

  You frightened me by telling me at the station that you would leave soon. Is it true or not? I must see you before your departure. I must sate my eyes and ears on you for a whole year. What will become of me if you’ve gone before I get back? … It is as though the last few years of my life had not existed and the old Reinheit [purity] you so prize in women, or rather in girls!, had come back … I’m hors concours. If I had two or three thousands, I’d go abroad with you and I’m sure I wouldn’t get in your way at all … Really I deserve a little more consideration from you than that jo
king-ironic attitude I get. If you knew how little I feel like joking sometimes. Well, goodbye. Tear this letter up and don’t show it to Masha.

  The letter was filed by Masha. Anton’s tone, however, turned tactful and tender.

  The Suvorins had gone on holiday to Franzensbad. From there they urged Anton to move abroad. Anna Suvorina opened Anton’s letter to her husband. ‘But I didn’t find out what I most wanted to know, when you’re coming to see us.’4 She wrote again, on paper with a picture of a man eyeing a streetwalker. ‘I seem to have a premonition that you will come! and so you and I shall go wild once a month. Don’t fear the doctors, they lie.’ She proposed a journey to Lake Como with her children: Boria would teach him to bicycle, and Nastia would flirt. Suvorin was heading back to Petersburg: the only fun he had in Franzensbad was talking to Potapenko’s daughter. He wished Potapenko’s articles were as interesting as the chatter of his seven-year-old child ‘who hates people and loves animals’. Anna begged Anton to lure Suvorin out of the city. On 12 July 1897 Sazonova’s diary notes: ‘Suvorin is stuck in town, waiting for Burenin and Chekhov. Burenin is to take his place in the newspaper, and Chekhov he wants to go abroad with.’

  Anton had business in Petersburg. The monopoly on ‘My Life’ expired in summer 1897; Suvorin could profitably reprint the story with ‘Peasants’ as one volume. The book, being over ten printer’s sheets, was exempt from precensorship: cuts imposed on Russian Thought could be restored. ‘Peasants’ had received a burst of applause, and a backlash of condemnation. The right wing liked the idea that the worst enemy of the Russian peasant was the Russian peasant himself; the Marxists agreed that capitalism had degraded the peasantry further. An evangelical anarchist like Tolstoy, however, thought this work ‘a sin before the people’, a view shared by adherents of the underground revolutionary movement ‘People’s Will’, for whom the peasantry was the standard-bearer of revolt.

  In Petersburg Chekhov was to have sat for a portrait by Iosif Braz. Braz now arrived, with luggage and two nieces, to paint Chekhov at Melikhovo. Braz used Masha’s room, with its north-facing windows, and piled her furniture in Anton’s study.

  Braz’s arrival signalled to others that they too could descend on Anton. Kundasova and Lika visited. When Masha came back, Misha and his wife settled for July. Volodia, the Taganrog cousin, also came. On 29 June, on his way to Kiev, Aleksandr dumped Kolia and Toska at Melikhovo, with no linen and no time limit. They ran wild. Pavel had them sent back to their stepmother in Petersburg on the 17th. Semenkovich dropped in from Vaskino to rant and chat, bringing with him holidaymakers and their French governess for Volodia’s delectation. Local schoolteachers, doctors, postmaster and priest called on business or recreation: they all depended on Chekhov and Melikhovo for a living or for entertainment. Anton, when Braz was not asking him to pose, hid, reading Maeterlinck’s The Blind. He wryly commented that he would not be surprised if some relative asked to board a menagerie at Melikhovo.

  Braz worked slowly, exasperating himself and his sitter, and after seventeen days the portrait was still unfinished. Few liked Braz’s harrowing picture, but Masha fell in love with the painter. When, on 22 July, Braz and his nieces left, Anton and Lika accompanied them as far as Moscow. After an unhappy farewell to Lika in Moscow, Anton went to Petersburg for two nights with Suvorin. They discussed Anton’s accounts, which showed that Anton could afford eight months abroad. Before falling asleep. Suvorin wrote in his diary:

  On Saturday, 26 July 1897 I am leaving for Paris. I could not induce Chekhov to come. His excuse is that he will have to leave in autumn to spend the winter abroad; he wants to go to Corfu, Malta, but if he went now, he would have to return. He said he would translate Maupassant. He likes Maupassant a lot. He has learnt French fairly well.5

  Petersburg, Anton found, ‘expected a consumptive, emaciated man barely breathing.’ (Doctors were aghast that he had gone there even for two days.) Anton avoided Aleksandr and Potapenko.6 Leikin wired an invitation to his country estate on the river Tosna and met the first steamboat on Sunday 27 July. He was amazed: ‘Chekhov looks cheerful and his complexion is not bad. He has even put on weight.’ Anton chose a pair of white Vogul laika puppies from Leikin’s kennels, but stayed a mere three hours, sampling milk (which he detested) from Leikin’s three cows. The laikas were to be fetched by Suvorin’s valet, Vasili Iulov, and delivered by train to Vania in Moscow. In his hurry to get away – Anton claimed an appointment with a professor of medicine in Moscow – he lost the pince-nez with the expensive lenses which Dr Radzwicki had prescribed. In Moscow he spent all day looking round premises for Suvorin’s new bookshop, and then had a satisfying night: ‘after sinning I always have rising spirits and inspiration,’ he told Suvorin. Anton hid from his public, but reporters claimed to have spotted him everywhere from Bad Nauheim to Odessa or Kislovodsk.

  August was hot enough to ignite the forests around Melikhovo. It was 45°, the leaves went yellow; there was no grazing. Anton was too exhausted to save forests. He told Tikhonov in Petersburg, ‘I am completely out of sorts. I just want to lie down.’ As he rested, Khotiaintseva painted him. The new puppies, Nansen and Laika, arrived on 3 August, driving Brom the dachshund to fury. The last relatives left. Volodia was prised from Madeleine the governess and given the fare back to Taganrog. At the Feast of the Dormition, Pavel recorded: ‘No guests staying, just the Semenkoviches, the French woman, the priest and the teacher from Talezh … doctor Sventsitsky from Moscow and Zinaida Chesnokova staying the night.’ The latter two were treating Mariushka, who was sent to a Moscow clinic. Exhausted by the estate, everyone felt ill: Masha took bromide, Pavel drops. Tiresome guests stayed: the flautist Ivanenko had fallen for Maria Drozdova. (‘Ivanenko talks without stopping … Ivanenko has come again,’ Pavel’s diary complains in June.) As Anton was too sick to maintain domestic harmony, Roman rebelled against Pavel, who recorded on 15 June: ‘Began mowing hay 7.30 a.m. 24 peasants. Roman got 3 roubles. He spent them on vodka for the men and women. They didn’t finish mowing.’ After the death of their baby, Roman had quarrelled with his wife. All the servants seemed in turmoil. Masha the maid was pregnant by Aleksandr Kretov. Anton promised a dowry if the ex-soldier married her, but Kretov was evasive.

  Only Anton would, had he been well, have been sufficiently unflustered to run Melikhovo smoothly, and Pavel, Evgenia and Masha would have to face autumn and winter without him. Evgenia’s letters do not mention Anton’s health or departure, though she fussed about everything else: buying cloth, harvesting potatoes, Mariushka’s cataract. On 22 August Pavel wrote to Vania: ‘Anton will go soon. His health is much better, he is more cheerful, he has stopped coughing … It is lonely for us to be on our own, I and your mother, to live in the country. Masha will go to Moscow each week.’7 Nobody detained Anton. Aleksandr was absorbed in two new-found missions, bicycling and temperance. He and his doctor, the psychiatrist Olderogge, had chosen an island in the lands as a colony for alcoholics. Anton had talked to Suvorin, who spoke to the Finance Minister, Sergei Vitte: a 100,000 rouble grant was in the offing. In Iaroslavl Misha and Olga, expecting their first child, asked little of Anton beyond a loan. Only Masha was unhappy. With Braz’s and Maria Drozdova’s encouragement, she had decided to train professionally as an artist, but, despite Levitan’s protection, she was rejected by the Moscow College of Art. Iosif Braz had left Melikhovo, and Masha, at thirty-four, faced spinsterhood with all the duties and few of the benefits of a wife.

  Lika thought of following Anton to France; the painter Aleksandra Khotiaintseva actually arranged to do so. Friends urged him to depart. Levitan kept up a barrage. Loathing all Germans, Levitan still took Bad Nauheim’s baths and gymnastics: ‘I occasionally copulate (with the muse, of course),’ he wrote. For Levitan the Riviera scenery was ‘cloying’. He himself was drawn, despite the fatal damp, to the woodlands north and west of Moscow which inspired his paintings, but advised Anton: ‘Everyone agrees that the climate of Algiers does wonders for lung diseases. Go there and
don’t let anything bother you. Stay until summer and if you like it, longer. Very probably I shall come and join you.’ To Masha Levitan confided: ‘My dear, glorious girl. I terribly want to see you, but am so bad that I am just afraid of the journey, and in this heat as well. I recovered a bit abroad, but I am still horribly weak … I must have sung my song.’8

  Anton had pleaded poverty. Levitan and Kundasova believed him. Levitan spoke to Morozov, Kundasova to Barskov, editor of Children’s Leisure. They told the tycoons their duty: each to advance Chekhov 2000 roubles. Accepting only Suvorin’s money, Anton left Melikhovo at 8.00 a.m. on Sunday 31 August. Olga Kundasova saw him off. Masha followed him to Moscow, where Lika intercepted him with a note: ‘I’ll fetch you by cab between 9 and 9.30 – not too late for supper, I think. I badly want and need to see you. Where are you going? Abroad?’ The next day Anton left Moscow for Biarritz, after a last meeting with Lika, to which neither of them ever later referred.

  Notes

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

  2 See OR, 331 93 80: Lika’s letters to Masha, 1895–7.

  3 See OR, 331 52 2g: Lika’s letters to Anton, 1897; some printed in Perepiska II, 1984, 16–59.

  4 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina’s letters to Anton, 1889–1901.

  5 Dnevnik, 1923/1992: this passage is followed in published versions by a series of morbid reflections attributed to Chekhov. A closer look at Suvorin’s manuscript suggests they are Suvorin’s own thoughts. Roskina’s transcription of Suvorin’s diaries (in RGALI) may soon be published by the author of this book.