Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Nemirovich-Danchenko came round to The Cherry Orchard slowly: he felt it was ‘more of a play’ than Anton’s previous drama, that it was ‘harmonious and had new characters’, but he found the tears excessive, which exasperated Anton, given that Varia was the only character who wept at all. Stanislavsky’s own floods of tears at Act 4, and his claim ‘This is not a comedy nor a farce, as you wrote: it’s a tragedy,’ dismayed Chekhov. Stanislavsky’s wife hit the right note: ‘Many cried, even the men; I thought it full of the joy of life and I find it fun just travelling to rehearsals … The Cherry Orchard somehow seemed not a play but a musical production, a symphony, to me.’10 Gorky was printing the play, but told his editor Piatnitsky, ‘Read aloud, it doesn’t impress one as a powerful piece. And what the [characters] are all moping about I don’t know.’11

  The day the play arrived in Moscow, Olga’s period came. After five months together, she and Anton would still have no baby. Quarrels broke out. The whole family was in a crisis whose nature we can only guess at. Bunin, now frequenting Masha and Olga, may have been involved. Olga’s close collaboration with Nemirovich-Danchenko undoubtedly unsettled Anton. Evgenia’s letter from Yalta to Vania in Moscow suggests that Anton had had enough of his wife, his sister and his mother:

  Antosha told me that Masha had to find her own flat, while Olga could go and live with her mother … poor Masha does not want to leave them, please don’t talk to her about my letter I only ask you to let me come and live with you until we find somewhere … Olga has got her own way, she has persuaded Antosha to get rid of us, she can do as she wants, but he is sorry for us and never sees anything through. E. Chekhova.12

  Olga seemed disturbed that her enemy Maria Andreeva (who was thirty-one) was favoured by Anton for the part of the seventeen-year-old ingénue, Ania. (Anton next proposed Andreeva for Ania’s pious foster-sister Varia, but Olga was not appeased.) In a letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko Anton accused him of ignoring him for years: ‘I’ve been asking you to get an actress for Ranevskaia.’ On 5 November Nemirovich-Danchenko wired a cast list, letting Anton choose actresses for only the minor roles. Olga put forward Schnap, despite his snoring and farting, to be Charlotta’s nut-eating dog: Anton said no – he specified a ‘small, shaggy, sour-eyed dog’.

  One of the pet cranes died. Anton moaned that Olga wrote either like Arkadina in The Seagull: ‘Do you know you are a superman?’ or like a nurse and courtesan: ‘Are you spraying your throat? You’re not making rude gestures in the morning? Would you like your Hungarian [i.e. herself] to come in at night with pillow and candle and then vanish grumbling?’13 She heeded neither his angry entreaties not to keep valuables at home, nor his demands for a parcel of lavatory paper. Instead she gave him instructions to buy a Bukhara quilt in Yalta.

  By 9 November the play was copied and the actors began work. Anton strained at the leash but Olga would send for him only when dry frosty weather began. In the meantime she ordered a fur coat of young Arctic fox, warm enough for a Moscow winter, but light enough for a frail body. Anton stipulated that it had to have eiderdown padding, a fur collar and a matching hat.

  The story of The Cherry Orchard took on a life of its own. After selling the timber from the Melikhovo plantations, Konshin declared himself insolvent, and the estate was put up for auction. Masha negotiated a sale to her Moscow neighbour Baron Stuart. Not a kopeck came of it. Baron Stuart took out a private mortgage, for five years and at 5 per cent, with Masha who at last now had funds.

  Evgenia abandoned Anton to Mariushka’s cooking and Arseni’s caretaking and took Nastia the servant to Moscow on 18 November. She descended on Olga, who put her up in Anton’s study. (Evgenia soon moved to Petersburg to spend Christmas with Misha, his children and Lika Mizinova.) Alone, Anton vented his bile. Stanislavsky was stopped from inserting spring noises – frogs and corncrakes – into a summer act. Nemirovich-Danchenko’s questions revealed, Anton grumbled, that ‘[he] has not read my play. It began with misunderstandings and will end with them.’ Anton feared that the première would be used as a pretext to mark his twenty-fifth year as a writer. In vain, for he hated the prospect of Jubilee celebrations, he protested that this would not be due until 1905. Olga hinted that she might soon call Anton to Moscow. ‘Have you dreamt of your Hungarian? Will you be making rude signs in the morning? Although we shall sleep together here and I shan’t be coming in the morning straight from the sea.’ On 29 November she telegraphed: ‘Frosts. Talk Altshuller and come.’

  Many years had passed since Anton had last celebrated Christmas, New Year and his name day in Moscow. He experienced a surge of energy and attended rehearsals almost daily, disconcerting Stanislavsky: ‘The author has come and confused us all. The flowers have fallen and now we only have new buds.’ Anton was upset too. The censor had removed two of Trofimov’s tirades and new words had to be spliced in, while Stanislavsky cut two magically evocative episodes from Act 2. Anton, only half in jest, offered the play outright to Nemirovich-Danchenko for 3000 roubles. At home, once he had his breath back after climbing the stairs, he received friends. They were perturbed. Bunin often stayed with Anton until Olga returned:

  Usually she left for the theatre, sometimes a charity concert. Nemirovich-Danchenko would fetch her; he wore a dress coat and smelt of cigars and expensive eau-de-Cologne. She wore evening dress, was perfumed, beautiful and young, and went up to her husband saying: ‘Don’t be bored while I’m out, darling, anyway you always feel fine with Bouquichon …’ Sometimes he would wash his hair. I tried to amuse him … About 4 a.m., sometimes at daylight, Olga would come back, smelling of wine and perfume. ‘Why aren’t you asleep, darling? It’s bad for you.’14

  Before Christmas Bunin went abroad, never to see Anton again. Lika did not venture from Petersburg, but her husband gave her a view of Anton’s condition:

  Potapenko says that he is finished as a writer and a man. ‘It is simply pitiful to read him, to see him now, in life or a photograph … No, I put a cross on Chekhov. The man has got in an impasse and is finished. Why did that Knipper marry him? I saw them in Moscow, saw Masha [who said] “What horror! What a misfortune!”’15

  Olga knew that her behaviour towards Anton was attracting unflattering comment, and told Evgenia:

  I can’t tell you how much Anton’s illness has upset me all this time. You must think very badly of me when you look at your life … It’s awfully hard for me suddenly to abandon my vocation … I know you have different views and understand all too well if in your heart you condemn me.16

  Consul Iurasov and Professor Korotniov invited Chekhov to winter once again in Nice, but The Cherry Orchard detained him. In any case, he was barely well enough to venture into the street, let alone cross Europe. Just before the New Year, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, and their lawyers drafted a letter to Adolf Marx, urging him to give Chekhov a new contract for his forthcoming twenty-fifth jubilee. Anton told them to desist.

  In Petersburg Evgenia was forgetting her worries with Misha’s family, but on 7 January Anton ordered her back: ‘You’ve outstayed your welcome, it’s time you came to Moscow. Firstly we all miss you, and secondly we need to discuss Yalta.’ There appeared to be nothing to discuss, but a crucial day was approaching, 17 January, Anton’s forty-fourth name day, the day set for The Cherry Orchard’s first performance.

  Notes

  1 See MXaT, 5323/44–62: Sanin’s letters to Lika, 1903: 16 May.

  2 See OR, 331 82 62: Misha’s letters to Masha, 1902–4: 6 June 1903.

  3 See OR, 331 82 62: Misha’s letters to Masha, 1902–4: 8 June 1903.

  4 See PSSP, 11, 542, and Gitovich, Letopis’, 758.

  5 See Gitovich, Letopis’, 758–9.

  6 See LN87, 319–56.

  7 Cut from Pis’ma, 1939: see OR, 331 32 27: Aleksandr’s letters to Anton, 1903.

  8 See PSSP, 11, 562.

  9 See V vospominaniiakh, 597–9.

  10 See PSSP, XIII, 497.

  11 See PSSP, 11, 598.

  12 See RGALI,
2540 1 160: Evgenia’s letters to Vania 1888–1905: 27 Oct. 1903.

  13 Cut from Knipper-Chekhova, 1972: see OR, 331 77 4: Olga’s letters to Anton, 1–16 Nov. 1903.

  14 Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik’s memoirs record an almost identical scene.

  15 See MXaT, 5323/44–62: Sanin’s letters to Lika, 1903: 14 Dec.

  16 See OR, 331 77 11: Olga’s letters to Evgenia, 1903–4: 29 Dec. 1903.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  Last Farewells

  January–July 1904

  ‘THINGS WERE RESTLESS, something ominous hung in the air. It was no time of joy, that evening of 17 January 1904,’ Olga recalled in 1929. Few plays had been so well rehearsed as The Cherry Orchard. The theatre was packed, and behind many seats sickly looking spectators stood. These ‘angels’ were said to be consumptives from Yalta, a memento mori to the celebrities in the stalls and boxes: Rachmaninov, Andrei Bely, Gorky, Chaliapin and almost all Chekhov’s Moscow friends. Anton was not in the theatre for the first three acts. He was recovering after a night at the opera, listening to Chaliapin sing. The Cherry Orchard was having a muted reception. Nemirovich-Danchenko sent a carriage with a disingenuous message: ‘Couldn’t you come for the third interval, though you probably won’t get curtain calls now?’

  During the third interval Anton was duly brought on to the stage. Into the centre of a half-circle of distinguished academics, journalists and actors, to loud applause, walked a living corpse, hunched, pale and emaciated. Stanislavsky was aghast. A voice from the stalls cried out, ‘Sit down!’ There was no chair. Speeches began. Professor Veselovsky spoke: Anton recalled his hero Gaev addressing a bookcase on its 100th anniversary. He muttered ‘Bookcase!’ and everyone sniggered. Speeches and telegrams were read until Anton, his eyes like a hunted animal’s, was led off to lie on a dressing-room divan. Gorky chased out everyone except the young actor Kachalov who, made up as Trofimov, looked as moribund as Anton. Half an hour later, the play over, the audience too subdued by the third interval to applaud loudly, Anton went to sup with the actors. He was showered with speeches and given presents of antique furniture: he detested it. What he really wanted, he told Stanislavsky, was a new mouse trap. The police charged the theatre for holding an ‘unauthorized public gathering’.

  Tickets were readily available for the next performances of The Cherry Orchard. A black comedy was ill attuned to the public’s mood of Jingoism on the eve of the Russo-Japanese war, which was declared on 24 January 1904. Three days later, the Japanese sank the Russian Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. In a mournful, even apocalyptic mood, reviewers tended to dismiss the play as a political allegory about gentry overthrown by commoners. In Petersburg by the end of Lent, The Cherry Orchard was playing to half-empty houses. Gorky set up the text, but his almanac Knowledge ran into the sands of censorship. Time was needed for Russia’s mood to turn elegiac and for Nemirovich-Danchenko to find the necessary ‘lace-like’ touch to make the play a success in the even more turbulent year that was to come.

  Anton wanted to flee to the Riviera or the Crimea. The stairs to the Moscow apartment were ‘real agony’. Jubilee celebrations for his writing career had brought many a past acquaintance out of the woodwork. Demands on his sympathy were unbearable. Olga’s nephew, Liova, had tuberculosis of the spine: the prognosis was paralysis or death. The eldest Golden sister, Anastasia, married to the dramatist Pushkariov, her beauty, wealth and health all gone, begged for a pension. Lidia Avilova wanted advice on charity for wounded soldiers. The Gurzuf schoolteacher asked Anton to make the church remarry him to his late wife’s sister. Kleopatra Karatygina wanted money to send her consumptive brother to a sanatorium.

  Anton needed an undemanding occupation. Goltsev made him Russian Thought’s literary editor and fed him manuscripts to sort out. Anton abandoned the brilliant opening pages of two stories he would never finish, ‘The Cripple’ and ‘Disturbing the Balance’, and set willingly to skimming over, and even annotating, beginners’ prose. On 14 February 1904, as Evgenia headed for the Crimea, Olga took Anton to Tsaritsyno, fifteen miles south of Moscow, to look at a dacha. The area had an unhealthy reputation, but the house was built for winter living. At Tsaritsyno there had been a derailment and Anton had to return in a freezing cab. Altshuller was appalled when he heard that this had happened.

  The next day Anton and Schnap took the Crimean express. At Sevastopol he was met by Evgenia’s maid Nastia – Evgenia had gone ahead overland – and they sailed to Yalta. Playing with the yard dogs and sleeping with Evgenia, the dog settled back into Yalta life better than his master. The house was so cold that visitors kept their fur coats on. Anton found undressing laborious; the bed was hard and cold; Nastia’s soup was ‘like dishwater, the pancakes as cold as ice’. He was too ill to travel abroad and it was too expensive to travel anyway – war had hit the Russian rouble. The solitary tame crane had belatedly migrated south. There was no congenial company: Bunin, now ‘all parchment and sourness’, as Anton described him, was in Moscow with Masha and Olga. The Cherry Orchard had followed Anton into the provinces: it was being performed in Rostov-on-Don, then in Taganrog (to frenzied acclaim) and on 10 April in Yalta, but so badly that Anton walked out.

  Olga, with Vania’s help, went on inspecting houses near Moscow, though winter was nearly over and she knew it was pointless. The local climate, the vendor’s price, or the cost of installing a lavatory aborted every sale. Olga had more success in provoking Maria Andreeva to resign from the company. Stanislavsky accepted her resignation,1 much to Andreeva’s distress and Olga’s delight:

  She swore at everybody, including me … Nobody regrets her departure, in the management, that is, I don’t know about the actors. What will come of it! I hope there is no split in the theatre. I still don’t know what to do, Gorky is involved, there is no argument about that.2

  Now Olga had only one enemy in the theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko’s wife, who, as Baroness Korf by birth, was unshakeable. Olga had, however, rivals outside. In Moscow Komissarzhevskaia was wildly acclaimed as Nora in The Doll’s House at the Ermitage theatre. Olga declared that she ought to be ashamed of herself, her repertoire and her company. Worse, after Komissarzhevskaia’s company came one led by Lidia Iavorskaia whose person, Olga claimed, ‘gave everyone the horrors’. Olga was seriously frightened when her uncles, Karl the doctor, Sasha the captain, were despatched to the Manchurian front, and her brother Kostia was sent to extend the Trans-Siberian railway to the war zone. In Moscow, Dr Strauch died of a liver disease: Olga lost her gynæcologist and ally in her fight to keep Anton in Moscow.

  Anton was less affected by the war. His nephew Nikolai was conscripted and Lazarevsky, his most persistent visitor, was drafted to Vladivostok. Olga sent Anton soap, despite Altshuller’s ban on washing (for fear of Anton chilling his lungs). Although Altshuller visited frequently, offering company rather than treatment, Anton felt lonely, in need of something to do, but too weak to do much. He advised Olga’s distraught sister-in-law Lulu about her son’s tuberculosis, collected for the Yavuzlar sanatorium and posted manuscripts to Goltsev and even their authors. Aleksandr, who sensed a last chance, came to stay for March, with Natalia (whom Anton had not met for seven years), the twelve-year-old Misha and their dachshund. Anton told Olga: ‘Aleksandr is sober, kind, interesting. Generally promising. And there is hope that he won’t be a drunk again, though there is no guarantee.’ Masha arrived on 19 March, followed by Vania at Easter, for a family reunion which they suspected might be their last. Only Misha was missing, opening station bookstalls for Suvorin in the Caucasus.

  When her lease expired, Olga moved to a flat with an electric lift, electric light and two lavatories, one of them working. Again she tantalized Anton with her vagueness about the address. Anton doubted that the lift would work. He had plans for the summer: he would go to Manchuria as a doctor and war correspondent. Nobody believed him, but he repeated his plan. He wrote to Uncle Sasha at the front, and supplied him with pipe tobacco.3 Olga dismissed Anton’s plans as a
childish whim. ‘Where will you put me? Let’s do some fishing instead.’ She still hoped for a child. If Moskvin, who played the clumsy Epikhodov, could beget a son, ‘When are you and I going to?’ On 27 March 1904, Easter Saturday, she asked, ‘Do you want a baby? Darling, I do too. I shall do my best.’

  Anton had been sent proofs of The Cherry Orchard to check for Adolf Marx’s edition. He lingered as long as he could, waiting for Knowledge to clear the censorship. When he returned the proofs to Marx in April, Marx published so fast that the Knowledge almanac was unsaleable, and Anton was badly embarrassed.

  The Cherry Orchard opened in Petersburg on 2 April. Suvorin unleashed his curs again. Burenin in New Times declared: ‘Chekhov is not just a weak playwright, but an almost weird one, rather banal and monotonous.’ The company was nervous and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s wife, Olga reported, put on a white dress and a green hat and went to church to light candles for luck, but the Petersburg audience, despite the hostile reviews, was very responsive. Olga had, however, uncomfortable encounters. Dr Jakobson, who had operated on her two years before, visited: ‘he was a hellish bore’. She had already clashed with Lidia Iavorskaia: now was confronted with another Lesbian alliance between two of Anton’s old loves:

  Maria Krestovskaia confessed to me, told me all her love for and disillusionment in Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, who by the way has married a barrister, Polynov. Krestovskaia’s voice shakes when she says that this Tanichka is an infinitely vicious creature.4