There were violent winter storms. Neither the telegraph nor the mail boat could reach Yalta, and Olga’s letters petered out. Anton felt isolated. Some of the Antonovkas reappeared, including Nadia Ternovskaia, who had been previously out of favour: Evgenia approved of her as a bride for Anton, even if she had no dowry. News of Nadia reached Knipper: on 19 January 1900 she wrote: ‘Masha tells me that you’re marrying a priest’s daughter. I could come and admire your conjugal happiness and, while I’m there, disturb it a bit. We had an agreement – remember the Kök-Köz valley.’ A month later Knipper was still joking: ‘Tell your priest’s daughter that she can hold you in her embrace since “that nasty woman” won’t be coming until early spring.’
Exhausted by her roles in the Hauptmann play and in Uncle Vania, Olga bore her separation from Anton calmly. Anton was less calm about her liaison with Nemirovich-Danchenko. Masha hinted on the eve of his fortieth birthday: ‘I want you to marry quickly, to take a clever, sensible girl, even without a dowry … I saw Nemirovich … wearing a coat with moiré silk lapels.’ Anton’s next letter to Olga asked: ‘Have you been carried away by the moiré silk lapels? It’s all the fault of the moiré silk coat lapels.’ Nemirovich-Danchenko told Olga, when she urged him to show Anton the theatre in Yalta, ‘To the director you are valuable, to the author invaluable.’ Maria Drozdova, still Masha’s closest friend, met Olga, and a fortnight later wrote to Anton:
Olga Knipper loves Nemirovich very much and doesn’t love me at all … the great actress to judge by these photographs has put on weight and is better looking. I envy Nemirovich … You are seriously in love with Knipper and want to go abroad, I think that’s what you mustn’t do.
Anton joked that Olga’s photo made her look like ‘a Jewess … secretly studying dentistry, with a fiancé in Mogiliov’ and talked of summer abroad on his own. Olga rose to the bait on 5 February: ‘That’s unbelievably cruel … we shall be together in summer. Yes, yes, won’t we, won’t we?’ Masha saw through Anton’s stratagem: ‘You try to scare us with your departures … some people get desperate when they hear you mean to go away.’
The beauty and the ministrations of the Antonovkas left Anton unmoved. In February 1900 Masha took Lika to The Seagull. Masha told Anton: ‘She wept in the theatre, I suppose [in Pushkin’s words] “memories unrolled before her their long scroll”.’ At the Moscow Arts Theatre, Lika fell for Aleksandr Sanin-Schoenberg, an officer turned stage director. She and Anton never spoke or wrote to each other again, even though Lika continued to meet Masha, Vania and Misha.
Melikhovo would not fade away. Three quarrelsome women teachers used Anton as their arbiter; he implored Serpukhov to relieve him of all civic duties. When Misha wondered if Masha missed the estate, as Evgenia missed her chickens and calves, Masha responded:
The buyer came, I handed the lot to him and we left for Moscow … To this day I have been carefree and cheerful because I haven’t got Melikhovo and God grant I shouldn’t have, nor any unpleasant worries. I live surrounded by respect – thanks to our brother. I have lots of friends.
Masha reached Yalta on 20 December and ended Anton’s isolation. She took a cab to the house, for Anton was too ill to meet her, and forbade Evgenia to wait in the rain. After Masha came Levitan. Anton remarked how he missed Russian countryside, so Levitan asked Masha for cardboard and painted haystacks in the moonlight for Anton’s fireplace. Anton’s New Year festivities were muted. That Christmas Grigorovich died. Although they had drifted apart, Grigorovich still seemed to Anton to be the most influential of the Grand Old Men to have recognized his genius. Khudekov of The Petersburg Newspaper reported to Anton: ‘He talked a lot about you; how deeply he felt for the “involuntary exile” doomed to live far from friends in boring, boring Yalta.’ Anton had also drifted away from the Petersburg circles to which Grigorovich’s notice had first given him access. After signing his contract with Marx and receiving Suvorin’s last payments, Anton barely wrote to the Suvorin household, even though Emilie Bijon reproached him,1 and Nastia Suvorina, on the verge of engagement, sent outrageously flirting letters.2 Suvorin had lost Anton, but was gaining Misha, who, bored in Iaroslavl, on bad terms with his superiors, dreamed of writing for New Times. Suvorin tried to use the younger brother to lure the elder back. Misha wrote to Anton on 22 January 1900:
Both, he and she, greeted me like a relative, poured out their souls to me for two whole evenings … The old man with tears in his eyes, Anna with burning cheeks, assured me how upset they were that relations between you and them had broken down. They love you very much. ‘Misha, dear boy, I know why it’s happened. Antosha would not forgive my paper its policies, that’s it …’ They are deeply aggrieved that you sold your works to Marx, not Suvorin. Anna blames her husband entirely … ‘Aliosha, you know Anton. He’s a gifted, decisive, bold man. One day he’s here, the next he’s off to Sakhalin.’ … Suvorin has asked me to persuade you to buy your works back from Marx … Suvorin went on, ‘I loved Anton terribly much, and still do. You know, he made me younger. I have never been so frank to anyone in my life as I have with Anton … I’d gladly marry Nastia to him.’3
Anton refuted Suvorin’s version. ‘I write for your eyes alone,’ he replied to Misha, ‘since you’ve been bewitched.’ Suvorin’s efforts nevertheless won over Misha, who became, a year later, his employee.
In the New Year Anton was awarded the Order of Stanislav 3rd grade ‘for services to education’. (It was awarded to half the teachers in Taganrog gimnazia.) Anton was also elected to the writer’s section of the Academy. Honorary academicians had no salary, but they were exempt from arrest, censorship and customs inspections (and also from Academy prizes). Chekhov nominated a man he disliked, the critic Mikhailovsky, and a man he pitied, Kazimir Barantsevich, to be fellow academicians. Becoming Academicus made him the butt of his friends and the object of begging letters. His maid’s uncle called him ‘your excellency’.
Levitan, close to death, was struck by Anton’s gloom. ‘Your fever is a fever of self-infatuation – your chronic disease … your Achilles heel,’ he wrote on 7 February. When he saw Uncle Vania in December, he liked best the bit ‘where the doctor kisses Knipper’. On 16 February he revived old amorous rivalries: ‘I went to see Masha and saw my darling Knipper. I begin to fancy her more and more: I notice an inevitable cooling towards the honorary academician.’
‘In the Ravine’, published in Life, allied Chekhov with men whom Suvorin thought criminal: radical Marxists like Gorky and Posse, the editor of Life, who were often under arrest or police supervision. Karl Marx, as much as Adolf Marx, cut Anton off from Suvorin. Though their affection never died, Chekhov warned Misha, and others, against Suvorin as the owner of New Times. Posse had printed ‘In the Ravine’ ‘in an orgy of misprints’, but Anton joined the radicals nevertheless. The story’s originals were, Anton asserted, even worse than his characters, but in his view: ‘drunken syphilitic children are not material for art’.
Dr Altshuller examined Anton at the end of February 1900 and reported that his left lung was worse, though his right lung was clear. Spring came early in Yalta. Some mornings Anton did not cough. The old women, Evgenia and Mariushka, frightened of responsibility when Masha was away, forgot their giddiness and pains. Chekhov’s new prose, ending a year of silence, was widely lauded. Anton rested. Three Sisters was still only an idea.
In mid February the camellias blossomed after ten degrees of frost. Anton proudly announced: ‘I could have been a gardener’. He longed for the coming of the mountain to Mahomet, when Nemirovich-Danchenko, Olga and the theatre’s elite would arrive to perform in the Crimea. Ever since Christmas he had asked Masha to persuade Olga to spend the summer in Yalta. They had eaten pancakes together at Shrovetide, first at Masha’s and then at Vania’s, and were now on ty terms. Masha evidently felt equal to the sophisticated Olga and able to befriend and manage her, as she had done with Dunia Efros, Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizinova, on her brother’s behalf. Masha and Olga declared the
mselves inseparable. Anton could be sure that if one came to Yalta, the other would too.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 36 72: Emilie Bijon’s letters to Anton, 1896–1900.
2 See OR, 331 59 75: Anastasia Suvorina-Miasoedova’s letters to Anton, 1889–1900.
3 See S. M. Chekhov O semie, Iaroslavl, 1970, 179–82.
SEVENTY-TWO
Olga in Yalta
March–July 1900
FOR ANTON, Andrei Vishnevsky was the first herald of spring in Yalta. He arrived to check the ramshackle theatre and the electric lighting that would be its undoing. Vishnevsky maddened Anton by harking back to school days and by making him read the cues for his Dr Dorn and Uncle Vania. Chekhov’s revenge was gentle: he created the good-natured fool in Three Sisters, Kulygin, not just for, but out of, Vishnevsky himself. All five performances (a Hauptmann play, as well as their Chekhov repertoire) planned by the Moscow Arts theatre for Yalta were sold out: even the Crimean Karaims (an indigenous Judaic sect) were coming. At Anton’s request, there would be no cast list and no individual curtain calls. Rarely had he anticipated so intensely a public event, but all he had to do in practical terms was to meet the government electrician at the theatre and persuade the Yalta magistrate that Hauptmann’s Lonely People had been passed by the censor.
The Chekhovs had money, for the Society of Dramatists and Composers sent royalties of 1159 roubles for the quarter. A migration to the Crimea began. Cousin Georgi was coming from Taganrog. Gorky bought thirty tickets for the Yalta performances. Masha was to come in the sixth week of Lent and bring Olga: she sent ahead pillows, crockery and bedsteads. Evgenia expected a flood of visitors. On 12 March Georgi arrived to stay with Anton; Gorky (followed by a police spy) came to Yalta on the 16th; on the 25th a party of Moscow doctors arrived to witness their colleague’s apotheosis.
Anton put his foot down. He asked Olga not to bring Vishnevsky when she came: ‘or he’ll always be under our feet and won’t let us say a word, and he’ll give us no peace, since he’ll be reciting Uncle Vania all the time.’ Anton told Sergeenko that he could not have him to stay, and recommended a distant resort. At the end of March an express train reached Sevastopol with three wagons full of theatre sets. This cost 1300 roubles, to be defrayed, as Nemirovich-Danchenko reminded Anton, by putting on, with Anton’s permission, Uncle Vania in Petersburg. On 2 April Masha and Knipper arrived.1 Olga had a room next to Masha’s, downstairs. Anton slept upstairs. The stairs creaked loudly and Evgenia slept lightly, so night-time visits between Olga and Anton were difficult. Sheltering an actress, let alone one who visited her son’s bedroom, was enough to stretch Evgenia’s tolerance.
On 7 April the theatre company arrived in Sevastopol for the start of their Crimean tour. They brought a new Nina for The Seagull: Maria Andreeva. The next day Anton’s hæmorrhoids bled: he and Olga put off joining the actors until Easter Sunday, the 9th. In Sevastopol Anton, for the first time, saw Uncle Vania performed and endured the roar when the audience spotted the author. He walked next day over the ruins of ancient Chersonesus and then returned to see Olga as a high-minded seductress in Hauptmann’s Lonely People. Not Olga’s best role, it moved Lazarevsky, a young poet who had begun to pester Anton, to behave very tactlessly: ‘I found the actress Knipper so loathsome that if I’d met her in real life she’d have been just as loathsome. I shared this opinion with Chekhov.’2
On 13 April, a day ahead of the theatre, Olga and Chekhov left Vitzel’s hotel in Sevastopol for Yalta. When Stanislavsky arrived there, he found Anton warming himself in the sun, watching the sets being unloaded. For ten days the Chekhovs were besieged by actors and writers. Anton saw both his plays performed, a medley from his stories, and scenes from other productions. He withstood ovations. Gorky’s Song of the Hawk also roused the audience. Anton bore fame politely, and gave Nemirovich-Danchenko a gold medallion shaped like a book. It was inscribed ‘You gave my Seagull life’. On 24 April there was a farewell lunch, and the company, with Olga, sailed over rough seas back to Sevastopol, leaving behind in Anton’s study three palm branches wrapped in red moiré ribbon ‘to A. P. Chekhov, the profound interpreter of Russian reality’, and in Anton’s garden the swing and the bench on which Olga had lounged as Elena in Act 1 of Uncle Vania. Despite her commitment at Mrs Rzhevskaia’s school, Masha stayed on a week in Yalta. She went back to Moscow for the school examinations, but promised to return by mid May.
Olga also promised to return, if Anton did not run away to Paris. She smoothed her path with Evgenia: ‘We brought such disorder into your home that we really are ashamed to think of it. You are probably resting now and getting back to normal after our invasion. Thank you for everything, everything.’ Olga and Anton were open about their intimacy. In Iaroslavl Misha sounded out Masha: ‘Here there are rumours are that Anton is getting married. I nearly believed them. Especially when there was talk of a young lady with a German surname. I remembered you once mentioning a Knipper.’ Masha accepted Knipper as a friend and as Anton’s mistress, but the prospect of a sister-in-law, of a power in the household, disturbed her profoundly. In her letters to Olga ‘darling Olechka’ alternates with ‘vile German’ and ‘how piggish of you’. (Half jocular abuse was part of Masha’s epistolary style – a tone which Lika also adopted but which Olga, either frankly angry or unequivocally intimate, could never catch or get used to.)
Despite Evgenia’s horror of being alone, Anton left for Moscow four days after his sister. He would not stay in his sister’s apartment, but chose the Hotel Dresden which had a lift and a room by a W.C. In that hotel room he and Olga met, unobserved by anyone who mattered. On arriving Anton wired Suvorin, who with the Dauphin took the night train to Moscow. On 13 May, Masha left Moscow to be with her mother. Chekhov told Suvorin how Stanislavsky bored him. Suvorin added:
I talked about the sale of his works to Marx. He had only 25,000 roubles left. ‘Isn’t it bad for you to have sold your works?’ – ‘Of course it is. I don’t feel like writing.’ – ‘You ought to buy them back,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got to wait two years or so,’ he said, ‘I don’t care much about property.’ We took a cab to the cemetery. We went to see his father’s grave. We searched for a long time. In the end I found it … He saw me off to the train. He is better. He had just one bleed, a small one, in winter … I feel fine with Chekhov. I am 26 years older than him. We met in 1886. ‘I was young then,’ I said. ‘But you were still 26 years older.’
Anton called on the dying Levitan. Again, despite his affair with her daughters, Levitan was being nursed by Anna Turchaninova. His temperature climbed to 41°C. Turchaninova wrote: ‘Horror is creeping in. I can’t believe I shan’t get him through.’3 When Anton left for Yalta after just nine days in Moscow, Olga asked in her next letter: ‘You left yesterday horribly upset, dear writer. Why?’ Anton told her that he had been tormented by a headache and fever which had forced him to leave Moscow.
In his absence Evgenia had grumbled: her teeth needed attention; Anton had not left enough money; she was afraid. For Misha his abandoned mother was reason enough to come to Yalta. Within a week Anton, despite ill health, was travelling again. On 29 May Masha explained to Olga, with a touch of Schadenfreude towards the latter:
Gather your things and come and see us and don’t argue! … yesterday we saw Antosha off to the Caucasus. He went off in the company of Dr Sredin, Gorky. Dr Aleksin and Vasnetsov [an artist]. They devised this journey quickly and got moving quickly. Their route is: Novorossiisk, Vladikavkaz, the Georgian Military Highway, Tiflis, Batum and back to Yalta. The main reason Anton left was because relatives – Misha, his wife, the child and a nanny – descended, quite unexpectedly, without warning. Noisy and boring. Any day Vania is coming, also with family … The writer is back on 8 June. You probably won’t meet.
Gorky had got together this party: two doctors, three consumptives and a painter. Perhaps Anton and Olga nevertheless intended to meet on this tour of the Caucasus, for, as Anton’s party set out, Olga and her mo
ther were in Vladikavkaz and meant to cross the Caucasus over the Military Highway before they rested in the mountain resort of Borjomi. Rain washed the roads away and made a rendezvous at this point impossible. At Tiflis a newspaper reported that Chekhov, Gorky and Vasnetsov were staying a week in the Northern Furnished Rooms. Anton did not know that Olga was also in Tiflis, but Olga’s sister-in-law read the papers and telephoned Anton, who at first snubbed her as an intrusive fan.4 Anton and Olga met when his party and hers left Tiflis across central Georgia by train, separating after a few hours; Olga and her mother took the branch line up to Borjomi.
Masha knew nothing of this: on 12 June she was writing to Knipper: ‘If you don’t come in four days then everything is finished between us and we don’t know each other any more. Today we are seeing off Misha and his family. It was sad, I had got used to them.’ Anton contrived to miss his brother and niece by one day. Gorky and his family left a few days later. Olga arrived on 23 June.
Six happy weeks followed, though little is known of them. Chekhov did little but work slowly at Three Sisters. There were a few clouds: Maria Andreeva had arrived before Olga, and was staying in a Yalta hotel. Anton had not yet shaken off the poet Lazarevsky, who spotted Anton having tea with Masha and Olga:
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