Notes
1 ‘I want sex, but “I’ve got a headache”, my penis stands, nobody comes, nobody gives.’ Cut in Pis’ma, 1939; see OR, 331 32 24: Aleksandr’s letters to Anton, 1898.
2 RGALI, 2316 2 35.
3 The journal was saved when Suvorin wheedled a subsidy from Vitte, the Minister of Finances.
4 Ertel to Vostriakov, quoted in N. Gitovich, Letopis’‚ 522–3.
5 See OR, 331 81 66: Evgenia’s letters to Masha, 1891–1914.
6 It was Vania whom Anton rewarded for his management of the catastrophe. He asked Anatoli Iakovlev, his former pupil, the son of a senior civil servant, to exchange favours. Anton would get Iakovlev’s stories published for securing Vania’s promotion to pensionable civil service rank.
7 See RGALI, 2540 1 49: Misha’s letters to Evgenia, 1888–1904, end Oct. 1898.
8 See PSSP, 7, 648 and S. M. Chekhov O semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 151.
9 See OR, 331 82 60: Misha’s letters to Masha, 1897–8: 25 Oct. 1898.
10 See PSSP, 7, 632: see VI. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Teatral’noe nasledie, 1954, II, 144.
IX
Three Triumphs
Actresses: The ruin of the son of the family. Of frightful lubriciousness, go in for orgies, get through millions of francs, end up in the workhouse. Though there are some who make good mothers of families.
Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas
SIXTY-SEVEN
‘The Seagull’ Resurrected
November–December 1898
IN YALTA ANTON MOVED from dacha to dacha, until Dr Isaak Altshuller took him in for a fortnight. Altshuller, though his surname suggested ‘old card-sharp’, inspired confidence, for he too had TB and would prescribe only what he took himself. Altshuller urged Anton to accept exile, and shun the fatal cold of Moscow. Then, until his own house was built, Anton settled in Au mur, a villa owned by Kapitolina Ilovaiskaia, a general’s widow and ardent fan.1
Masha never forgot being taken to see Anton’s building site at Autka:
I was upset and annoyed that he had bought a site so far from the sea. When we reached it, what I saw was hard to credit. An old Tatar vineyard, fenced with wattle, not a tree, not a bush, absolutely no buildings … beyond the wattle fence was a Tatar cemetery and, naturally, a corpse was being buried while we were watching. It was the most grim impression.
Only later did Masha appreciate the view of the Uchan-Su river tumbling down to the sea and of the steamboats far below arriving and departing. Her reaction upset Anton; back at Au mur, the villa where they were staying, she relented and sketched a plan of the house they would build.
At 4000 roubles, an acre of land was cheap. The promised railway was raising prices. Safe from casual visitors at Autka, Anton could receive ‘subversives’ and Jews, even though they were banned from Yalta. The Yalta Mutual Credit eagerly lent Chekhov money to build his house. Its director had the Autka mosque divert a pipe to give him the water for cement. Lev Shapovalov, hitherto an art teacher, only twenty-seven, made his name turning Masha’s sketches into plans for a house with a half-Moorish, half-German façade. While the architect drew, Anton hired a Tatar contractor, Babakai Kalfa, to dig foundations and cart materials. Babakai had chosen a name for this idiosyncratic house, Buyurnuz, ‘As you like it’. Friends – Tolstoy or Sergeenko – were perturbed at Anton’s enormous financial commitments, for he was not sure whether 5000 roubles that Suvorin had given him was an advance or overdue payment. The Moscow Arts Theatre raised Anton’s hopes of more money, and so did Suvorin with a proposal to publish all Chekhov in a uniform edition at a rouble a volume. Castles in Spain, however, did not pay for a castle in the Crimea; even at 30 kopecks a line, Chekhov, his strength waning, would now earn little from new work.
Yet Anton hung on to Melikhovo as a summer dacha. He reassured those who depended on Melikhovo: the postmaster, schoolteachers, district nurses, craftsmen, servants. He ran Melikhovo from afar: arbitrating between the female teachers at Talezh, who were feuding over firewood. He assured the bumbling Doctor Grigoriev, who had failed to save Pavel, that his reputation was unsullied. He defended the postmaster against anonymous accusations of abusing customers. Melikhovo, without either Pavel or Anton, nevertheless collapsed. While Masha was in Yalta, Evgenia, despite the company of a lady schoolteacher, trembled. ‘Grief has overwhelmed me, I cannot live in Melikhovo,’ she told Misha.2 When Masha got back she found her mother fraught: ‘whether the samovar hums, or the stove whistles or a dog howls, it all produces fear and worry about the future,’ she reported to Anton. Fire broke out nearby. Masha and Evgenia took servant girls to sleep in their rooms. The ground froze, but no snow fell, so that Melikhovo was virtually cut off from the railway.
On 13 November 1898 Anton gave his mother short shrift: ‘After youth comes old age; after happiness, unhappiness, and vice versa; nobody can be healthy and cheerful all their lives … you have to be ready for anything. You just have to do your duty as best you can.’ A week later snow fell. Masha locked up Melikhovo. Roman drove her by sledge, with linen and crockery, to the station. Evgenia and a servant, Masha Shakina, followed two days later. They stayed until spring in Masha’s Moscow flat, in four small rooms, with borrowed furniture. Masha went back once a month, if blizzards allowed, to pay old Mariushka, Roman and the maid Pelageia. Melikhovo was doomed. The dachshunds were left to the servants and the yard dogs. Thieves dug up Varenikov’s apple trees. Roman guarded Melikhovo, ringing bells through the night. Varenikov caught two lads and thrashed them.3 Varenikov then had the teacher Terentieva in tears by telling her he would now close Melikhovo school.
By December Masha wanted to join Anton in the Crimea, for she believed that she too was ill:’ I cough badly in the mornings, I have constant pain in the left chest. ‘The doctor prescribed quinine, codeine and stout. Anton told her that she had the family’s bad lungs. Masha took a lively interest in the new house. Could Anton enlarge the rooms? Would Melikhovo have to go, to pay for this palazzo? ‘No, and no,’ replied Anton, but he prepared Masha and Evgenia for life in the Crimea. As governor of Yalta’s girls’ school and friend of its headmistress, Varvara Kharkeevich, Anton offered Masha a post as geography mistress there: the present geography teacher ‘volunteered’ his resignation. Anton told Evgenia that he was installing an American kitchen, a flushing lavatory, electric bells and a telephone; he was planting roses and cypresses; coffee and halva were cheap; stone houses did not catch fire; rheumatism would not trouble her; her Taganrog in-laws, Marfa and Liudmila, were a day’s boat ride away; she could bring Mariushka to live with her; Autka church was a minute away. Anton then bought the Tatar house he had seen two months before at Küchük-Köy. Here Evgenia could keep a cow and a kitchen garden, while Masha, if she faced the rock climb, could bathe in the sea. Anton’s boldness was astute. Soon he was offered four times the 2000 roubles he had paid.
Anton did not worry about Evgenia. Kundasova told him on 28 November: ‘As for her mental condition, it is not gloomy, let alone depressed. In my view, Pavel’s death has not affected her too much because she is a loving mother; her children are dearer than a husband to her.’ Anton received more consolation for his own state of health than he could absorb. The provincial press alarmed everyone. All Simferopol was told: ‘Ominous symptoms inspire serious concern for his life.’ Anton sent angry telegrams; the papers retracted, but nobody was misled about his health. One school friend, Vladimir Sirotin, wrote of his own terminal condition. Another, Lev Volkenshtein, offered to do the conveyancing on Anton’s property. Kleopatra Karatygina wrote in such distress that Anton telegraphed: ‘Perfectly well safe sound respects thanks.’ Aleksandra Pokhlebina, now a landowner at daggers drawn with her peasants, had seen her old love with Masha in the Tretiakov gallery by his portrait, but had hung back. She broke four years’ silence that November 1898: ‘My heart is torn to pieces when I think what is happening to you. How happy I would be if I knew you were well … I feared the news of the loss of your father
would finally undermine your health.’4 Dunia Konovitser sent chocolate. Natalia Lintvariova came to Yalta: she dithered and roared with laughter about the possibility of buying a plot of land herself.
Elena Shavrova was pregnant in Petersburg, while her ailing sister, Anna, kept Anton company in Yalta. He paid more attention, however, to the eighteen-year old Nadia Ternovskaia, a protégée of his landlady, Ilovaiskaia. Nadia’s father, a bullying archpriest, turned a blind eye to his daughter’s excursions with Anton. Nadia was singled out, she later told her children, because she never talked of literature.5 She loved music passionately and played the piano for Anton, and she was very pretty. Yalta gossiped and Nadia’s father made enquiries. Another Nadia – Suvorin’s granddaughter, Nadia Kolomnina – flirted with Anton, but soon went back to Petersburg. She warned Anton that Ilovaiskaia’s villa, which Nadia Ternovskaia frequented, ‘is very damp, everyone knows that. Abandon it as quick as you can, take all your furniture and move to another palazzo.’6 Another woman tempted Anton: Olga Soloviova, a Valkyrian wealthy widow who owned the estate of Soǧuk-Su, next to Anton’s Küchük-Köy.
Male company was all memento mori. Dr Vitte, from Serpukhov hospital, was in Yalta recuperating from a heart attack. He looked as if he had been ‘run over by a train’. Anton himself was often too weak to walk uphill, sometimes even to leave his room, but Anton rejected radical measures. On 9 October the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaia had begged him: ‘There is a Doctor Vasiliev in Rostov. You must go and let him treat you: he will cure you. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, I don’t know how to ask you … It’s awful if you won’t, you’ll just cause me pain. Do it. Yes?’7 Anton promised – if ever he was in Rostov – to contact this electrotherapist. His ‘catarrh of the intestines’ gave him constant diarrhoea. In late November a lung hæmorrhage began. On the third day he summoned Altshuller: ‘Je garde le lit. Young colleague, bring your stethoscope and laryngoscope.’ Once the blood had been staunched, he asked Masha for his stethoscope, percussion hammer and ice-pack. He ordered comforts – a karakol hat, a cassowary blanket, a samovar – from Muir and Mirrielees. Evgenia sewed him nightshirts. Vania sent him the pince-nez which he always forgot on his travels, and a new cork pad to stop it sliding off his nose. Anton wrote to Suvorin: ‘Tell nobody, my blood frightens others more than me, so I try to spit it out furtively.’
His spiritual suffering in Yalta was greater – ‘I’d like to talk to somebody about literature … but here [there is only] irritating swinishness’. Newspapers came late. ‘Without papers one would fall into gloomy melancholy and even get married,’ he told Sobolevsky on Christmas Eve. Anton befriended the editor of The Crimean Courier, but, unable to improve the paper, gave up. He loved his future house, but hated Yalta’s wintry filth. All Yalta was ashamed when the newspapers printed Anton’s telegram to Moscow, saying that he felt like Dreyfus on Devil’s Island.
He missed Suvorin, despite the fact that New Times was ‘splashing about in filth’. The paper had outraged even the government, which banned it for ten days. The poet Balmont declared New Times ‘a brothel by appointment to the crown’. Pavlovsky, Suvorin’s Paris correspondent, sought Anton’s help to switch to a liberal Moscow newspaper. Potapenko abandoned Suvorin. Suvorin was like Zeus the Bolt-thrower and the Dauphin like an angry bull, Aleksandr reported. New Times was printing the specious Le Dessous de l’affaire Dreyfus by the real traitor Esterhazy. Anton told Suvorin that rehabilitating Dreyfus was the ‘great cultural victory of the age’. Suvorin replied that pro-Germans were whitewashing Dreyfus.
The taciturn Vania gave Anton brotherly support; on 19 December he came for a fortnight with supplies. Misha was voluble, but unhelpful. He offered his mother asylum, but she suspected he really wanted her as a nurse to his baby daughter. He did not pay for burying Pavel, and held back Masha’s allowance. In Petersburg Aleksandr was even less help. He was supporting his sister-in-law Anastasia: her husband Pushkariov had lost his last penny on a bingo machine he had invented. Aleksandr’s eldest son Kolia, meanwhile, had been caught robbing passengers at the railway station. Natalia feared that he would corrupt his brothers, in particular her own son, the seven-year-old Misha, so Aleksandr enrolled the fourteen-year-old boy in the merchant navy. Little Anton, now twelve and ineducable, was working for Suvorin as a bookbinder’s apprentice. As New Times sank, Aleksandr himself was searching for a new career. On 24 November he told Anton: ‘I am thinking of opening a new sort of brothel, like a touring theatre. If my planned institution arrives in Yalta “to enliven the season” you of course will be the first free customer.’ To this letter Potapenko added a greeting, and Emilie Bijon ‘un gros baiser’.
Anton was now a citizen of Yalta, his movements monitored by the press. He sat on committees for schools, the Red Cross and famine relief. As Babakai’s men dug foundations, Anton wrote: two months at Au mur produced four stories. Three – ‘An Incident in Practice’ for Russian Thought, ‘The New Dacha’ for Sobolevsky’s The Russian Gazette, and ‘On Official Business’ for Menshikov’s The Week – use Melikhovo material, a Satanic factory, or hostile, thieving peasants. ‘On Official Business’ is the most powerful of this trio: a magistrate and a doctor are called in a blizzard to a remote village to investigate a suicide, and the magistrate is haunted by nightmares of misery. The radical protest in ‘Peasants’ and ‘My Life’ strengthens: the oppressed now become threatening to their oppressors. In Yalta, as Anton told Masha, ‘there are neither nobles nor commoners, all are equal before the bacilli.’ In a brighter tone he wrote ‘The Darling’ for a weekly called The Family. It portrays a woman utterly absorbed by any man – impresario, timber merchant or schoolboy – on whom she dotes. ‘The Darling’ startled radicals. It enchanted Tolstoy who saw an ideal, not irony, and called it, to Anton’s face, the ‘work of virgin lace-makers’.
Anton was tense, as Altshuller realized, because of The Seagull. His lungs and intestines suffered. The Petersburg première had sickened him; another fiasco could kill him. The Seagull and Uncle Vania had been performed everywhere but the capital – the latter play had earned Anton 1000 roubles and held the provinces spellbound. In November 1898, from Nizhni Novgorod, Chekhov heard from Maxim Gorky, a thirty-year-old herald of revolution, Russia’s first ‘proletarian’ writer. He said he had wept like a woman when he first saw Uncle Vania; it was ‘a blunt saw through my heart,’ Act 4 ‘a hammer on the audience’s head’: the effect was ‘a childhood garden dug up by a giant pig’. Gorky’s postscript ran: ‘I am a very absurd and crude person, but I have an incurably sick soul.’ Anton responded warmly. Gorky initiated an unlikely friendship, disarming in January 1899 all Anton’s defences: ‘I am as stupid as a locomotive … but I have no rails under me.’8
Enough people had seen a Moscow rehearsal or provincial performance for The Seagull to acquire an awesome reputation. Masha was fêted as Anton’s plenipotentiary. She began to relish life. She dined with actors and actresses and became self-confident, an amusing guest. She made friends with Anton’s school friend Vishnevsky, who played the part of Dr Dorn, and with Olga Knipper, who, though fifteen years too young, played Arkadina. Anton’s friends clustered round Masha. Sasha Selivanova vaccinated her against smallpox; Dunia Konovitser (Efros), Anton’s fiancée in 1886, was as close as twelve years ago; Elena Shavrova and Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik visited. Masha was invited to Mrs Shavrova’s house and, though she disliked the Shavrova girls’ monocled cavalieri, she found Elena Shavrova beautiful and interesting. Olga Shavrova even invited her to become an actress. Levitan, near death, was too ill to court her – ‘I lie breathing heavily like a fish out of water,’ he told Anton – yet Masha felt she might still find ‘personal happiness’. She did not want to teach geography in Yalta. She meant to enjoy the Moscow season and study art.
On 17 December 1898, with carriages jamming the streets, The Seagull opened to a full house. Nemirovich-Danchenko telegraphed ‘colossal success mad with happiness’. Anton wired back ‘Your telegram has made me h
ealthy and happy’. Nemirovich-Danchenko requested Uncle Vania exclusively for the Moscow Arts. Anton’s school friend Vishnevsky telegraphed, ‘Seagull will be our theatre’s battleship.’ The Seagull, Nina, was badly interpreted by Roksanova (soon to be ousted), and Stanislavsky acted Trigorin like ‘an impotent recovering from typhoid’, but the audience was ecstatic. Olga Knipper won special praise. Nemirovich-Danchenko told Anton: ‘She is so involved in her part that you can’t tell her apart from [Arkadina’s] elegant actress’s get-up and vulgar charm, meanness and jealousy.’ Masha encouraged her brother’s instincts: ‘A very, very nice actress, Knipper, was playing; she is amazingly talented, it was pure enjoyment to see and hear her.’ Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik wrote to Anton: ‘for the first time in three years I have had enjoyment in the theatre … Everything was new, unexpected, enthralling … Knipper was very good.’
Many old friends made contact. Levitan got off his sick bed, paid double for a ticket and said that he now understood the play; torn between older and younger women, he felt for Trigorin. Even the actor Lensky, a sworn enemy since he had been caricatured in ‘The Grasshopper’, was enchanted by The Seagull. By January 1899 Sergei Bychkov, the footman at the Great Moscow Hotel, had seen The Seagull four times: he reminded Chekhov ‘how passionately Liudmila Ozerova wanted to act your Seagull’.9 Women clamoured to be Seagulls. Kundasova informed Anton that her sister Zoia was widowed and free: Nemirovich-Danchenko must give her the part.
Knipper fell ill and two performances of The Seagull were postponed, a loss for Anton, who was to receive 10 per cent of the gross takings. Yet he now equated his bond with the Moscow Arts theatre with marriage to an actress. To Elena Shavrova and to Dunia and Efim Konovitser he used the same image: ‘I have no luck with the theatre, such awful luck that if I married an actress we would probably beget an orang utan or a porcupine.’ Anton was paying for a Moscow flat, an estate and school at Melikhovo, buildings in Autka and a farmhouse at Küchük-Köy. He had indigent relatives and not long to live. Rather than beg, as Levitan advised, from rich patrons, he took decisive action.
Anton Chekhov Page 56