Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  (26 December 1897) … I’ve found a way or two of gambling with chances of winning, true, not a lot, but still it’s more honourable than writing for God’s World … when I win, I’ll build a theatre in Petersburg and give Suvorin a run for his money.

  (5 February 1898) Dear Antonio, Don’t joke with me. I really am coming to Nice … You’re wrong to say one can’t win at roulette. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll prove amazing things. Wait for me with bated breath.

  On 2/14 March, Potapenko arrived. The next day, Sumbatov lost 7000 francs and Anton 30. Potapenko was winning. Later, he confessed:

  Monte Carlo had a depressing effect on Anton, but it would be wrong to say that he was immune to its toxins. Perhaps I did in part infect him with my confidence … that there was in gambling a simple secret which just has to be divined and then … Well, then, of course, the writer’s greatest dream emerged: to work freely … So he, sober, calculating, cautious, gave in to temptation. We bought a whole pile of form books, even a miniature roulette wheel and for hours sat, pencil in hand, covering paper, with figures. We were working out a system, looking for the secret.

  On the back of an old letter Anton scrawled five columns of figures. Five days later, Sumbatov, Potapenko and Chekhov were spotted in Monte Carlo. Sumbatov, 10,000 francs down, went back to Russia. Potapenko, dishevelled, with black bags under his eyes, was 400 up; a week later he won another 110 francs. As Queen Victoria arrived from England, Potapenko left Nice for Russia. Shortly afterwards, Grünberg, the accountant at The Cornfield, wrote to Anton saying that Potapenko had informed him that Chekhov needed an advance: he was therefore sending 2000 francs to Anton, assuming that a manuscript was imminent. Anton was tight-lipped; he had lent half this sum to Potapenko. At the end of April, Potapenko, unabashed, wrote: ‘I shall send you 1000 francs. About this money, by the way. I’ve told nobody here. To avoid unwanted exclamations and head-nodding, I innocently lied to everyone and said that you and I had each won 700.’

  Nice offered Anton no escape from penury and disease. The unfinished official portrait also caught up with him. Masha had returned to Braz the portrait he had begun at Melikhovo. Anton refused to risk his lungs by going to Paris to pose. Braz was promised by the Tretiakov gallery his expenses to go to Nice and start the portrait anew. On 14/26 March Braz started work in a studio in Nice. Anton was resigned, but severe: he would sit mornings only, and for only ten days. (He loathed the Jeremiah-like expression which Braz had captured so well, but for the time being managed to keep his dislike of the portrait to himself.)

  In mid April Anton began his return home. Escorted by Maxim Kovalevsky, with a large bag of sweets, he took the train to Paris to linger there until warm weather set in at Melikhovo, where even now it was freezing. The rooks and starlings had flown back. The frogs croaked. On 24 April a cuckoo called. Pavel pronounced it time for Anton to return.

  Anton had reasons to stay in Paris. Suvorin’s diary reads: ‘I meant to go to Paris, where Chekhov has arrived from Nice, but I fell ill and am staying at home.’ A week later, however, Suvorin raced to France on the Nord Express. Anton was giving Bernard Lazare, author of L’affaire Dreyfus, a two-hour interview in French.9 Anton met Matthieu Dreyfus (who was studying Russian), and Jacques Merpert, friend of Dreyfus, employee of Louis Dreyfus, the corn trader. (Merpert taught Russian: Anton was to send him one-act Russian plays for his pupils.)

  Anton moved from the dingy Hotel Dijon to the splendid Vendôme, to live a floor beneath Suvorin. Dreyfus tainted the air. Suvorin’s diary for 27 April/9 May 1898 brands all radicals as a mob:

  Chekhov is here. All the time with me. He told me that Korolenko had persuaded him to stand for election to the Union of Writers … these swine become judges of a remarkable writer! There it is, the mob from which contemptible mediocrities jump out and run things. ‘I was almost blackballed,’ Chekhov said … I asked [de Roberti, a philosopher] if he’d seen Zola? ‘Well, did he say anything about Dreyfus?’ ‘He said that he’s convinced of his innocence.’ ‘Well, the proof?’ ‘He hasn’t any.’10

  Nevertheless, Anton recalled the three weeks in Paris as his happiest abroad. Suvorin, a month ago too melancholy to speak, was animated. He and Anton bargained for exhibits for Taganrog museum. Anton and Pavlovsky spoke up for Dreyfus, and believed they had won Suvorin round. ‘What a guilty back he has,’ thought Anton as Suvorin turned away from them.

  Taganrog, relatives reminded Anton, needed his help. Anton was anxious to support the museum, hotels and sanatoria, to counteract the new foundries which choked the city and crippled its workmen. Scouring Paris for trophies for his native city, Anton enlisted sculptors, Antokolsky and Bernshtam, to carve a twenty-foot statue of Peter the Great for Taganrog’s 200th anniversary. Anton bought a boater for Pavel, an umbrella for Evgenia, nightshirts for himself, and strolled the streets in a top hat. He thought of seeing Zola, but did not trust his French: Russia’s and France’s Dreyfusards exchanged just salutations.

  May promised to be hot and dry at Melikhovo. The trees were in leaf; Pavel opened all the windows and doors. Laden with gifts, Anton boarded the Nord Express for Petersburg. Suvorin, believing Anton’s health had recovered in Paris, saw him off. He had given Anton 1000 francs, a cushion and a pair of gold cuff links. (Anton left the money with Pavlovsky to give back.) Anton wanted to return unnoticed. He wired Aleksandr in Petersburg: ‘Meet me no fuss’. Masha was to come to the station in Moscow the next day. Only she and Potapenko were to know of his arrival.

  Notes

  1 Tolstoy wavered; Alphonse Daudet believed that twelve officers could not be wrong. Lidia Iavorskaia was, however, a fiery Dreyfusarde.

  2 Quoted in PSSP, 7, 516.

  3 Suvorin had won his own Dreyfus affair. In 1892 New Times exposed fraud by the Odessa branch of Parisian grain traders, Louis Dreyfus & Co., who sued Suvorin for libel and lost. Moreover, Suvorin was convinced that Zola had abused him and his wife by calling the anarchist in Germinal Souvarine and his partner Anna.

  4 Quoted in PSSP, 7, 528.

  5 Kovalevsky’s memoirs of Anton Chekhov are in Vokrug Chekhova, 361–6.

  6 See OR, 331 73 10: Pavel’s letters to Misha, 1885–98: 8 Jan. 1898.

  7 Quoted in S. M. Chekhov O semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 135–7.

  8 Cut in Pis’ma, 1939; see OR, 331 32 24: Aleksandr’s letters to Anton 1898.

  9 The interview was so heavily edited that Chekhov refused permission to publish.

  10 See N. A. Roskina, ‘Ob odnoi staroi publikatsii’ in Voprosy literatury, 1968, 6, 250–3.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  The Birth of a Theatre

  May–September 1898

  SUVORIN HAD warned his wife to send out the carriage for Anton.1 Anna brought Anton to the Suvorin house. Nastia reported to her father that she found Anton ‘awfully unimproved, and his voice struck me as somehow weakened.’2 Anton’s desk was piled with letters when he reached Melikhovo on the evening of 5 May 1898. Nobody congratulated him on his recovery: Evgenia wrote to Misha that he had lost even more weight.3

  The important letter was from Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose elder brother, the novelist Vasili, Anton had kept company at the roulette tables. Since 1890 Anton had trusted Vladimir and respected him for having abandoned a career as a playwright in order to teach and direct actors properly. Nemirovich-Danchenko now dominated the Moscow Philharmonic School, a respected music and drama college. In 1898 Nemirovich had merged his best six actors – one being Olga Knipper4 – with Konstantin Stanislavsky and his best four actors from the Society for Art and Literature into the Moscow Arts Theatre. This was to be the first private theatre able to rival Russia’s officially subsidized state theatres in its repertoire and its acting; it had the advantage of rich patrons and of freedom from the restrictions that the Imperial Theatre Committee placed on the repertoire of the state theatres. Nemirovich-Danchenko’s enthusiasm and Stanislavsky’s genius – two bears in one den, they admitted – was a heady brew. With the wealth o
f Stanislavsky (director of a cotton mill) and of Levitan’s patron, Savva Morozov, a militant theatre was formed, needing only a new repertoire. The stimulus to relaunch The Seagull had come from Vasili Nemirovich-Danchenko. In November 1896 he had written to his brother Vladimir, disparaging The Seagull. The brothers’ rivalry was such that Vladimir was bound to defend whatever Vasili attacked. Moscow’s theatre was born of Petersburg’s spite:

  Dear Volodia! You ask about Chekhov’s play. I love Anton with all my heart and value him. I don’t consider him in the least great or even of major importance … This is a boring, drawn-out thing that embitters the listener. Where have you seen a 40-year-old woman renouncing a lover of her own free will. This isn’t a play. There is nothing theatrical in it. I think Chekhov is dead for the stage. The first performance was so horrible that when Suvorin told me about it tears welled in my eyes. The audience was right, too. The auditorium expected something great and got a bad, boring piece … You have to be infatuated with yourself to stage such a thing. I’ll say more, Chekhov is no playwright. The sooner he forgets the stage, the better … I nearly left before the end.5

  Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s letter to Chekhov on 25 April 1898 changed Anton’s life:

  Of contemporary Russian authors I have decided to cultivate only the most talented and still poorly understood … The Seagull … enthrals me and I will stake anything you like that these hidden dramas and tragedies in every character of the play, given a skilful, extremely conscientious production without banalities can enthral the auditorium too. Perhaps the play won’t arouse explosions of applause, but a real production with fresh talents, free of routine, will be a triumph of art, I vouch for that. All we need is your decision … I guarantee you will never find greater reverence in a director or worshippers in the cast.

  I am too poor to pay you a lot. But believe me, I’ll do everything to see you are satisfied in this respect. Our theatre is beginning to arouse the strong indignation of the Imperial theatres. They understand we are making war on routine, clichés, recognized geniuses and so on.6

  Anton had sworn he was finished with the theatre. He merely sent word through Masha that he had read this letter. Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote again on 12 May:

  I need to know right now whether you are letting us have The Seagull … If you don’t, you cut my throat, since The Seagull is the only contemporary play that enthrals me as a director, and you are the only modern writer of great interest to a theatre with a model repertoire … I shall come down to see you and discuss The Seagull and my stage plan.

  After Nemirovich-Danchenko posted this letter, he received Anton’s refusal. He wrote again:

  But The Seagull is on everywhere. Why not put it on in Moscow? … There were unprecedented reviews in the Kharkov and Odessa papers. What’s worrying you? Stay away from first performances, that’s all. Can you forbid the play ever to be put on in Moscow, when it can be acted anywhere without your permission? Even in Petersburg … Send me a note to say you have no objection to my staging The Seagull … unless you are hiding the simplest one, that you don’t believe I can stage the play well.

  Anton answered evasively, and warned Nemirovich-Danchenko he would have to hire his own horses from the station. Vladimir did not go to Melikhovo that summer, but assumed, rightly, that Anton had given in to his logic. On 18 June Anton went to see him in Moscow: the new Moscow Arts Theatre had the play for its first season in autumn 1898.

  Anton did not foresee how close he would become to the Moscow Arts Theatre. He enjoyed the warm summer and the rich blossom and fruits it brought, but his spirits were low. Tychinkin, Suvorin’s typesetter, reported to his master that Chekhov was ‘as sad’ as ever.7 Now that Anton was back, Masha could rest after eight months’ slavery. She went first to the Crimea and then with Maria Drozdova to Zvenigorod to paint. Anton lay low, going to Moscow only once. Old guests, ‘the Siamese twins of mediocrity’, Gruzinsky and Ezhov, visited. Ivanenko again settled into Melikhovo. Anton was more resolute in staving off women guests. Elena Shavrova, denied even a stone when she asked for bread, pleaded for a rendezvous. Lidia Avilova could get out of Anton only a signature ‘with a big tail underneath like a hanged rat’s.’ Lika was now in Paris training to be an opera singer, while Olga Kundasova was in the Crimea. Aleksandra Khotiaintseva was the only girlfriend to arrive in May.

  Later, the women flocked. Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik announced her return ‘flying to you on wings of love, with starch and olive oil’. Olga Kundasova beat her to it, but Tania arrived on 5 July for three days. After four years’ exile she took over the household diary: ‘Here I found everything as before, people, flowers and animals. God grant it goes on. A clear day and fragrant air. [And in Pavel’s hand] At supper we laughed loud.’

  Anton now threatened to marry Tania off to Ezhov, and called her Tatiana Ezhova. Tania reappeared only once, six weeks later, that summer. A fragment of paper that Kundasova passed to Anton, probably while he stayed overnight in Serpukhov on 23 July, hints at an assignation: ‘Si vous êtes visible, sortez de votre chambre; je vous attends. Kundasova.’8 Anton’s eighteen-year-old cousin from Taganrog, Elena, came and scandalized Melikhovo by staying up till midnight with the neighbours’ French tutor. Two days later Tania reappeared together with Dunia Konovitser. A day later, Natalia Lintvariova left her water mills and came for a week.

  From Nice Olga Vasilieva sent money for Anton’s new school: she was to appear in Moscow in October to gaze on Braz’s portrait of Chekhov in the Tretiakov gallery. Anton’s first trip to Moscow was 18–20 June. He stayed with Vania, went to the operetta, where trained apes were performing, and discussed with Nemirovich-Danchenko the revival of The Seagull. Only on 1 August did Anton venture far from home, to see Sobolevsky and Varvara Morozova 200 miles away near Tver. By the 5th he was back. Autumn was in the air: he would have to leave Melikhovo. He had now resigned himself to spending the eight cold months of the year in the Crimea: even though it was no cheaper than living in Nice, he could at least feel he was still in his motherland, and medical opinion approved. Anton told almost nobody, so that in September Lika was meeting trains in Paris, assuming that he was returning to Nice. On 9 September Anton left Melikhovo to spend six days in Moscow before taking the train south.

  Melikhovo was falling apart. The garden and woodland were neglected. Labour and enthusiasm were short. Vania and Misha came without their family, for only a few days at a time. Evgenia travelled to Taganrog, for the first time in fourteen years. Her two sisters-in-law, Aunt Marfa and Aunt Liudmila, and Evgenia were, Cousin Georgi wrote to Anton,

  all three very glad to see each other, they chat until midnight. Today we are setting off together to the town park to listen to the music … Tomorrow we are off to the Greek monastery, where there is a bishop from Jerusalem, Auntie [Evgenia] wants to have a look at him.

  In mid August Pavel went to Iaroslavl for a fortnight to see his granddaughter.

  The men of Melikhovo also sensed that the village had lost its centre of gravity. The priest Father Nikolai stirred the peasantry up against the Talezh schoolteacher Mikhailov, and the battle ended, despite Anton’s conciliation attempts, in Father Nikolai being sent away. The household lost its best servant when Aniuta Chufarova, so expert with a horse, a mop or a whalebone corset, left to marry. Then Roman, the man of all work, took to drink again: Olimpiada, the wife he had banished a year before, had died. Anton persisted in his efforts, cajoling funds from neighbours and authorities to buy desks, slates and bricks and mortar for a new building, his third school, for the Melikhovo children, who were taught in a leased cottage.

  Confined to home, his interest in the estate waning, cut off from close friends, Anton tried to write, even though the process felt, he told Lidia Avilova, like ‘eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach has just been removed’. Advances from The Cornfield and from Russian Thought had to be paid off. In summer 1898 Anton developed ideas born in Nice. Despite his grim mood, the stories of that summer are
among his finest work. He offered The Cornfield the longest, ‘Ionych’. It concerns a provincial doctor who, from humble origins, becomes as proud, sterile and heartless as his bourgeois patients. The narrative has the familiar Chekhovian scene of a nonproposal in a garden. Particularly powerful is the evocation of Anton’s boyhood world, Taganrog’s moonlit cemetery and steppe landscape. Anton’s other work was a trilogy of short stories, published in Russian Thought in July and August 1898. Friends roaming the countryside each narrate a life ruined by moral cowardice. ‘Gooseberries’ is about a man’s ruthless determination to acquire an estate on which he can grow his own gooseberries, however sour. ‘The Man in the Case’ is about a schoolteacher of Gogolian grotesquerie. The last story, ‘About Love’, is the most moving: a miller tells of his hopeless love for his best friend’s wife. The first two stories became classics instantly, for their morality is unambiguous. ‘Gooseberries’ is against avarice, ‘The Man in the Case’ is against false witness. ‘About Love’, however, was problematical to critics and the public, for it implies that moral sacrifice can be sloth or cowardice.9

  Anton referred to this burst of creativity as visits to the ‘muddy spring’. Pavel had heard a sermon which contrasted the ‘muddy spring’ of vice that foolish travellers prefer to the ‘clear spring’ of Christ, and irritated Anton at table by constantly harping on the two springs. The ‘muddy spring’ of inspiration, however, dried up, as the prospect of exile to the Crimea loomed. Anton had his first hæmorrhage of the autumn.

  Anton arrived in Moscow on 9 September 1898 for the first rehearsal of The Seagull. The rehearsal, although only of two acts, was a revelation. Weeks of hard work had gone into discussions with the cast, most of whom were unknown names. Stanislavsky had spent the summer on his brother’s estate near Kharkov working on a mise-en-scène. Anton found himself a longed-for oracle, not a nuisance, and his interest in theatre revived once again.