6 The Potapenkos were now non gratæ at the Suvorins, viz. Emilie Bijon (Dec. 1897); ‘M. Potapenko … s’est permis d’écrire un sale feuilleton concernant les malheureuses governantes, qu’ils méprisent et sa femme qu’était elle?’
7 See RGALI, 2450 1 59 [a fragment also used by Vania to write to Aleksandr].
8 Quoted in A. Fiodorov-Davydov, A. Ia. Shapiro Levitan: Dokumenty, 1966: letter 29 July 1897.
SIXTY-TWO
Promenades
September–October 1897
TWO OLD Taganrog boys met Anton at the Paris Gare du Nord on 4/16 September 1897: Ivan Pavlovsky, a former revolutionary, now Paris correspondent of New Times, and an engineer, Professor Beleliubsky. They took Anton to Suvorin’s hotel, the Vendôme. Suvorin was now in Biarritz, but his son Mikhail, Anna Suvorina and Emilie Bijon lingered in Paris. After sixty hours in a carriage, choked by the cigars of his German companions, Anton took the air. He had a hæmorrhage: Anna Suvorina found out and wrote to Aleksandr. After four days, Anton followed Suvorin’s tracks to Biarritz, but Suvorin had already left for his theatre in Petersburg. He promised to see Anton in France in October.
In Biarritz, too, Chekhov was met by friends (and wind and rain). Vasili Sobolevsky, editor of The Russian Gazette, his partner, Varvara Morozova, their three children and a governess, were on holiday there. Chekhov liked their ménage. They offered him a room, but he stayed in the Hotel Victoria. Biarritz, Russians complained, was crowded with Russians. Anton told Suvorin on 11/23 September:
The plage is interesting; the crowd is good when they are doing nothing on the sands. I stroll, listen to blind musicians; yesterday I went to Bayonne and saw La belle Hélène at the Casino … For 14 francs I have a room on the first floor, service and everything … Poliakov [the railway magnate] and his family are here. Help! There are very many Russians. The women are just about tolerable, but the old and young Russian men have little faces like ferrets and are all shorter than average. The old Russian men are pale, obviously exhausted at night by the cocottes; for anyone with impotence can only end up exhausted. The cocottes here are vile, greedy, all out in the open – and it is hard for a respectable family man who has come here to rest from his labours to restrain himself and not be naughty. Poliakov is pale.
The Atlantic gales limited Anton’s stay to a fortnight. He too fell for a Biarritz cocotte: Margot, aged nineteen, promised to follow when he moved.
Anton had advances from Suvorin, from Adolf Marx of The Cornfield, from Goltsev of Russian Thought and from Sobolevsky. Fiodor Batiushkov, the Russian editor of a new international magazine, Cosmopolis, had commissioned a story, but Anton did not feel like writing. The President of France had visited Russia in August 1897: a clause in the new Franco-Russian alliance forbade the French post to accept packages printed in Cyrillic, to protect Russia from seditious literature. Anything that Chekhov wrote or proof-read had to be a letter on thin paper. For months his creative outlet was a notebook in which fragments of dialogue, characterization and plot were mingled with addresses and lists of plants for the garden. On its blank pages Tania Shchepkina Kupernik had written ‘Darling Antosha, the Great Moscow Hotel is a haven of bliss’ and ‘Mio caro, io t’amo’.
Letters to Biarritz encouraged Chekhov to idle and rest. Masha wrote: ‘Just remember why you went to warm regions and don’t let town life tempt you too much, my girlfriends and yours have asked me to tell you. Levitan is, he says, very ill again, tomorrow I mean to see him.’ The Suvorins were returning to Russia. Emilie Bijon had gone to Brumath in Alsace to see her son Jean. She wrote to Anton after receiving his letter in French: ‘Votre photographie est sur ma table, tout en vous écrivant il me semble vous parler et que vous m’écoutiez attentivement, et parfois un petit sourire. Un mot de vous fera mon bonheur.’
Lika first wrote on 12 September:
I have been thinking recently about your affair with the lady writer and here is what I have come up with: a man has been eating and eating delicious refined dishes and he was fed up with everything and longed for a radish … I as usual am thinking about you, so everything is in the old rut. But there is some news: Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik has come back to Moscow, looking more beautiful and her face has even more of the Reinheit which you prize in women and which Mme Iust has so much of … Anyway I’m not envious of her, she’s very nice and interesting.
Anton offered to go to Paris to meet Lika’s train if she came. As for insisting on Reinheit in women, he protested that he also valued kindness, her virtue. Anton told her that Margot in Biarritz was providing him with French lessons. Lika was seeking money to ‘throw herself on Anton’s neck’ by mortgaging her share of the family land. Olga Kundasova and Lika now strolled the streets of Moscow together. As Olga counted the men who turned to look at them, she, with her six years’ extra experience, helped Lika to reach a conclusion on 5 October:
I hope Margot stirs you up properly and wakes up the qualities which have been dormant so long. Suppose you came back to Russia not a sour-puss but a live human being, a man! What will happen then! Masha’s poor girlfriends! … you know nothing about cheese and even when you’re hungry you like just to look at it from a safe distance, not to eat it … If you keep on like this with Margot, then I am very sorry for her, then tell her that her colleague in misfortune sends her regards! I once stupidly played the part of the cheese which you refused to eat.
Once again, Anton was without his pince-nez in Europe. He asked Masha to send Dr Radzwicki’s prescription on his desk; she sent the first Latin writing she saw, a chemist’s prescription. Anton strolled the beaches, formally dressed, charming Sobolevsky’s little girls, while their father, looking like Petronius, bathed. Myopia made it hard to avoid encounters. On Anton’s last three days in Biarritz he bumped into Leikin, whose diary for 20 September/2 October notes: ‘I see Chekhov coming up to me … he is not bathing here, just enjoying the sea air. I think he is completely recovered. He climbed up the steep cliff from the sea with us and there was no sign of his being out of breath.’
On 22 September/4 October Anton and Sobolevsky left together for Nice via Toulouse. On the Côte d’Azur they settled into a hotel Leikin had recommended, La Pension Russe on the Rue Gounod, then a stinking alley that ran from the station to the Promenade des Anglais. Its attraction, apart from cheapness, was its Russian owner (a Mme Vera Kruglopoleva). The Russian cook was a former serf who had stayed in France thirty years ago when her owners returned to Russia, and now occasionally made the borshch or shchi her guests pined for. She lent the pension mystery: she was married to a negro sailor and had a mulatto daughter, Sonia, who was seen at night as she plied her trade on Nice’s streets. Anton had told his family that he would spend only October in Nice, but the autumn weather was too fine to leave. The Russian company was much to his liking: the dead as well as the living. At Les Cascades, in the west of Nice, lay the cemeteries, the Orthodox graveyard being at the very top of the hill, closest to heaven, with the best view of the sea. Here lay exiled revolutionaries, wounded officers, consumptive aristocrats, doctors and priests who had ministered to expatriate Russians, surrounded by hibiscus, palms and bougainvillaea. For the living, there were two churches, a reading room, and Russian lawyers and doctors.
By October, when Sobolevsky left, Anton had been befriended by two men. One was Professor Maxim Kovalevsky, biologist and revolutionary, who lectured at the Sorbonne, but whose base was the marine biology station at Villefranche. Kovalevsky was the widower of the mathematician and dramatist Sofia Kovalevskaia, who had perished of TB six years earlier. Kovalevsky, a life-enhancing companion, was very afraid of further endangering Anton’s health. Anton was also looked after by Nikolai Iurasov, the Russian vice-consul at Menton, who lived in Nice: his son worked at the Crédit Lyonnais. (This eased Anton’s transfers of money from Moscow to Nice and back.) Iurasov, a man ‘of exemplary kindness and inexhaustible energy’, so bald that the seams of his skull were visible, offered teas, suppers, New Year and Ea
ster parties to his countrymen. Iurasov, Kovalevsky and Anton were often joined by a decrepit professor of art, Valerian Iakobi, and by Doctor Aleksei Liubimov, dying of lung cancer.
Warmed by male companionship, Anton got over Margot’s desertion. She had followed him but vanished, perhaps to a healthier protector. Margot’s replacement, to judge by Anton’s letters to Masha, was, apart from her physique, a good teacher of French, adept at correcting the mistakes that Russians make in the language. Thanks to her, he read and spoke French far better. She did not visit La Pension Russe, however, and Anton found climbing her stairs too tiring.
Reading Maupassant had prepared Anton for the Riviera: Maupassant’s travel book Sur l’eau, written when the writer was cruising the Côte d’Azur on his yacht Bel-Ami, had provided quotations for The Seagull and an appreciation of this ‘flowering cemetery of Europe’ where so many hoped to elude death. The flowers and trees left Chekhov unmoved, but he valued the politeness and the cleanliness of the French. He played safe: as autumn approached he forbade himself excursions after sunset, so that a fellow guest, N. Maksheev, tempted him in vain to gamble at the casino: ‘Dear Doctor! Being of sound mind, I assert that I possess a method of turning 2000 francs into a large sum of money at roulette. If you still have a desire to take part, then we must come to terms and act …’1 Vasili Nemirovich-Danchenko (the elder brother of Vladimir) spent his time in Monte Carlo; Anton merely watched him gamble. Ignati Potapenko was, however, more Mephistophelean: ‘Antonio! … I’ll soon find a reliable system of winning in Monte Carlo and then I’ll come and enrich you and myself.’2
The inmates of La Pension Russe interested Anton little: they used him as a doctor. One Russian resident in Nice prompted Anton to take his first political stand: Rozanov, a Jew who rented apartments, sold Russian journals and published Le Messager franco-russe, fervently stood up for Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer convicted of treason. Anton knew Rozanov not through buying newspapers, but by treating Rozanov’s wife. Rozanov’s ‘enchanting smile’ and ‘very delicate and sensitive soul’ began to turn Anton into a Dreyfusard. Despite this radical transformation, Anton still hoped to see Suvorin. Suvorin recorded that his doctor advised him to go to Nice: ‘Chekhov is also calling me. I want to go but I fear the theatre will be even worse in my absence.’ Then Aleksandr told Anton that he had seen Suvorin and his servant Vasili on a tram, off to buy a ticket abroad. On 15 October, with his son Mikhail, Suvorin set off for Paris again.
One hundred roubles a month went a long way. Anton bought all the newspapers,3 had his shirts laundered and drank all the wine and coffee he wanted. He enjoyed piquet with Kovalevsky and going to concerts, when not confined indoors. The Mæcenas Morozov tactfully offered 2000 roubles; Barskov, the children’s magazine editor, at Kundasova’s prompting, proffered 500 roubles a month. Anton spurned the money and berated Levitan and Kundasova for embarrassing him. Levitan cursed the touchy Anton as ‘a striped hyena, pagan crocodile, spineless wood-demon’. Anton had published nothing for six months: his money came from Suvorin’s editions and from stagings of Ivanov in Petersburg, and from The Seagull and Uncle Vania which were being staged only in the provinces.
Only news of Melikhovo distressed Anton. Masha’s letters showed that she detested the irksome responsibility. She forgot how to collect the monthly payments from Petersburg that Anton had arranged for her. Anton belittled her worries: ‘If it’s hard, put up with it – what can you do? I shall be sending you rewards for your labours,’ he wrote on 6 October. An estate made no sense if the owner was away eight months of the year. Pavel became unbridled, as he told Misha: ‘Mama and I will sit alone like recluses in the house, worried, and then arguing to exhaustion about trifles, and we each stick to our opinion.’4 In the same letter Evgenia complained: ‘The authorities [Pavel] are pretty unkind to me … Masha is pestered for money, she hasn’t got any, she is vexed, I have nothing but woe.’
The servants suffered. Aniuta Naryshkina, married off by her relatives in exchange for vodka, and Masha Tsyplakova, pregnant by Aleksandr Kretov, were in hospital. Infected by the midwives, Aniuta died of puerperal fever. When Masha Tsyplakova gave birth, Pavel made her leave the baby in an orphanage. Anton insisted that the baby be taken into the household, ordered the mother to receive seven roubles a month, and paid for her foundling foster-brother, who had no fingers on one hand, to go to school. Until Tsyplakova was back at work, Pavel, Evgenia and Masha were left with the elderly Mariushka and the indefatigable Aniuta Chufarova. Worse nearly happened: Mariushka and Tsyplakova, overcome by fumes in the bathhouse, had to be revived by Masha. Roman still ran the stables, but his wife Olimpiada, in Pavel’s view, infected the estate with genteel idleness. The village elder retired. The peasants and authorities could not find a new elder, to settle disputes and govern the village. One had his finger bitten off by a horse, and was barred by the authorities. Another had, like many Melikhovo peasants, typhoid.
The family tried to refurbish the guest cottage so that Anton could live in it all year: again, stove-makers were called to Melikhovo, but, Evgenia reported, ‘The stove in the cottage is still unfinished. The stove-maker fell and smashed himself in the stable.’ Masha complained: ‘All the Melikhovo inhabitants complain of your absence … build up your health, if not for yourself, then for others, for very many of these others need you. Forgive me for moralizing, but it’s true.’ After the stove was finished, the Talezh schoolteacher Mikhailov papered the cottage (as well as the drawing room); Semenkovich, who was an engineer, supervised the insulation of the walls with Swedish board and of the doors with double felt and heavy curtains. Now the temperature was much higher inside the cottage than out, which presented a predicament, as Pavel explained to Misha on 5 December 1897:
God alone knows how much his health has improved, … to come here when it is cold is to endanger himself. The cottage is his favourite summer residence, he likes solitude and quiet, but things are not suited for winter, firstly to leave +18 for minus25 degrees and reach our house, you have to wrap up against the cold, breathe and swallow whatever God sends. Secondly: he has to come in the morning for coffee, at 11 for lunch, at 3 for tea, at 7 for supper and above all to go and sit on the throne.
Constant war raged between the farm dogs, the laikas and the dachshunds: the human inhabitants of Melikhovo were kept awake, robbed of food, even bitten, and the flower beds were ravaged. As Pavel put it, the dogs behaved like mongooses. Anna Petrovna, the old mare the Chekhovs had bought with the estate, died ten weeks after she had her last foal. Pavel was pitiless – ‘the highest authority was strict today’, Evgenia lamented to Misha.5 He searched high and low for someone to flay the horse and buy the skin for 3 roubles.
Anton’s brothers were content. Misha told Masha that Olga had ‘arranged his life so that every desire was anticipated’. In September, for 50 roubles a month, Aleksandr persuaded Vania and Sonia to take his son Kolia. Kolia spent a few days’ holiday in Melikhovo and then took to Moscow a note from his father:
The bearer of this letter is the swine that you, Vania and kind Sofia, are so generously taking under your wing … If annoyed or angered he begins to whisper something unintelligible (probably threats) … He detests books … he likes hammering nails, washing up … he loves money and getting sweets … He can’t tell the time … he gets into fights.
Anton did not ask after his dachshunds or his nephews. He had settled into La Pension Russe so well that, on the dank evenings which kept him to his room, he began to write again.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 51 18: N. Maksheev’s letters to Anton, 1897–8.
2 See OR, 331 56 36v: Potapenko’s letters to Anton, 1897–9.
3 He refolded New Times for the Russian reading room in Menton; he resold World Echoes to State Counsellor Kulakov, a resident of the pension, for 2 francs a month.
4 See OR, 331 73 10: Pavel’s letters to Misha, 1885–98: 17 Sept. 1897.
5 See OR, 331 73 11: Evgenia’s letters to Misha,
1888–1903: 3 Nov. 1897.
SIXTY-THREE
Dreaming of Algiers
November–December 1897
THE PROSPECT of losing his self-respect and his Reinheit by living on Morozov’s charity, made Anton write. His works that autumn are small scale: they recall boyhood landscapes: stories like ‘The Pecheneg’ and ‘Home’ evoke the horror of a visitor stumbling onto a barbarous estate on the Don steppes. Chekhov’s block was broken: that autumn ‘On the Cart’, a picture of a village schoolteacher’s despair, owes much to the complaints relayed from Melikhovo. He began ‘A Visit to Friends’, a story for Cosmopolis: the plot anticipates his final play The Cherry Orchard. He asked Masha to send the draft of an early story to work on: Masha worked with scissors to make the papers look like a letter rather than a contraband manuscript.
Chekhov’s fame was now international. At the end of September, in the Wiener Rundschau, Rudolf Strauss proclaimed:
… we have before us a mighty, mysterious miracle of Strindberg content in Maupassant form; we see exalted union which seemed almost impossible, which nobody has managed before: we love Strindberg, we love Maupassant, therefore we must love Chekhov and love him twice as much. His fame will soon fill the whole world.
Masha and Potapenko sent Anton cuttings. Translators (some inept, all enthusiastic) pestered Anton to let them put his works into French, Czech, Swedish, German and English. One, Denis Roche, stood out: he paid Chekhov 111 francs, half the fee he received for the French version of ‘Peasants.’1 Anton was learning a daily quota of French phrases, sending hundreds of French classics for Taganrog library, and even confidently correcting Masha’s French. He asked for a journalist’s card from Sobolevsky to get the best seats to listen to Patti and Sarah Bernhardt and to attend the Algiers festival. He now frequented Monte Carlo, and won, cautiously betting on low numbers and on red and black. Anton was now able to focus on the roulette wheel: the pioneer of Russian ophthalmology, Dr Leonard-Leopold Girshman, lived in Nice with his tubercular son. Anton treated the son; the father prescribed a new pince-nez for Anton. In November Chekhov weighed himself (with his hat, autumn coat and stick) and found 72 kilos adequate for a man of his height, six foot one.
Anton Chekhov Page 52