by William Boyd
S. Aleksei Suvorin
A vastly wealthy, right-wing publisher and newspaper magnate and probably Chekhov’s closest male friend. Chekhov achieved a bond with Suvorin which is hard to explain, given the latter’s rebarbative politics. It’s rather as if George Orwell’s best friend had been, say, Julius Streicher. I suspect Suvorin functioned as something of a surrogate father for Chekhov (he was twenty years older)—also he paid him well and Chekhov’s fame largely came about through his stories appearing in Su-vorin’s publications. Suvorin had no illusions about Chekhov: “… a man of flint and a cruel talent with his harsh objectivity. He’s spoilt, his amour propre is enormous.” They fell out, finally, irrevocably, over the Dreyfus affair. Chekhov was an ardent Dreyfusard; Suvorin unashamedly anti-Semitic. There was no rapprochement and Suvorin bitterly regretted the rift. Asked about his politics once, Chekhov declared that he wanted only to be a “free artist.” Like Vladimir Nabokov, he was deeply distrustful of fiction that openly proselytized for any political ideology. Chekhov’s view of the human condition, given his own terminal illness, was bleakly clear-eyed. “After youth comes old age; after happiness, un-happiness, 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 as you can.”
T. Theatre
Chekhov was both drawn to and exasperated by the theatre. He wrote his first plays purely as a way of making quick money. One always feels that he was somewhat amazed at the acclaim his later plays achieved. Seen in the light of the mature stories, the plays are clearly heavily indebted to the fiction in their mood, themes and settings—which is what made them so revolutionary and, later on, so influential. But the plays lack the seamless authority of the fiction: there are great characters, wonderful scenes, tremendous passages, moments of acute melancholy and sagacity but the parts appear greater than the whole. Perhaps only in The Cherry Orchard does everything fuse and the drama takes on an autonomy of its own. Days before his death he conceived the idea for a play about passengers stranded on an ice-bound ship. Perhaps his premature death makes the plays that Chekhov never wrote the real loss. The stories are fully achieved: a genuine apotheosis.
U. Uncle Vanya
Tolstoy went to see Uncle Vanya and loathed it. Chekhov was backstage and asked what Tolstoy’s opinion was. A kindly interlocutor said that the great man hadn’t “really understood” the play. Chekhov saw through that one. But then he was told that even though Tolstoy hadn’t enjoyed Uncle Vanya, that he thought Chekhov was an appalling playwright, he was not as bad as Shakespeare. Chekhov found this delightfully, hilariously amusing.
V. Vanity
Chekhov was six foot one inch tall—a very tall man for the end of the nineteenth century. He was handsome: in early photos he looks burly and strangely Asiatic. The familiar images of his last decade, goateed, with pince-nez, slimmed by his illness, carefully dressed, testify to a man who was proud of his appearance and knew he was attractive to women. He had a terror of going bald.
W. Writers
Chekhov wrote in a letter to Suvorin, “Remember, that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind, but your whole being, that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.” He also said: “Writers must be as objective as a chemist.”
X. X-rays
An X-ray of Chekhov’s lungs early in his life (had such a thing been available) would have shown the shadowy traces of the “tubercules”: latent walled-in lesions of the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Chekhov probably caught the disease in childhood. And he saw his brother Kolia die of it in 1889. Moreover, Chekhov was a doctor: he knew exactly what was in store for him. The bacilli lie dormant in the body, kept at bay by the immune system. At moments when the immune system is under stress or weakened the bacilli break out of the tubercules and begin to spread extensively in the lungs. The lung tissue is then effectively eaten by the bacilli — consumed —hence the nineteenth-century name for the disease: “consumption.” In Chekhov’s time—the pre-antibiotic era—the only cure was isolation, rest and good nutrition. In the last years of his life Chekhov’s lungs became increasingly devastated. The amount of lung tissue available for the exchange of gases in the breathing process radically decreased. Chekhov died of breathing failure, exhaustion and general toxaemia (the tuberculosis had also spread to the spine).
Y. Yalta
A popular resort much favoured by tubercular patients. Positioned in the Crimea on the Black Sea it had a congenial climate. Chekhov moved there in 1899 and built a house, only returning to Moscow in the summer. The fact that he had taken up residence made the resort instantly chic—other invalids suddenly wanted to convalesce there rather than anywhere else—something that he doubtless found wryly amusing. His famous story “The Lady with the Dog” is set in the town. Many of Yalta’s transient lady visitors fancied themselves as the model for Anna, the eponymous heroine. Chekhov’s Yalta house is now a museum, its furnishings and decor theoretically unchanged since Chekhov lived there.
Z. Zoo
About a month before he died, the desperately ill Chekhov visited Moscow zoo. Chekhov loved animals. Apart from his dachshunds and the livestock on his estate he also had as pets two mongooses and, in Yalta, a tame crane. Conceivably, during that visit to Moscow zoo, Chekhov might have seen a cheetah in its cage. Donald Rayfield, Chekhov’s best and definitive biographer, speculates that Chekhov’s sexuality was like that of the cheetah. The male cheetah can only mate with a stranger. When the male cheetah mates with a female cheetah familiar to him he is—bizarrely—impotent. It’s a fanciful image but one worth contemplating: the dying Chekhov staring at a cheetah in its cage. Perhaps this explains this rare man’s extraordinary life and the view of the human condition that he refined in his incomparable stories. Perhaps it explains his enigmatic, beguiling personality: his convivial aloofness; his love of idleness; his immense generosity; his hard heart. For this artist to avoid impotence only strangers would do; it only worked with strangers. Anton Chekhov was a cheetah.
2004
Anton Chekhov (2)
Anton Chekhov and Lika Mizinova
Consider this situation. You are a handsome, celebrated writer in your thirties—male and unmarried. You have been having a passionate affair for some years with a beautiful young woman (a decade younger than you) that has reached such a pitch that the next logical step is marriage. She wants desperately to marry you, but, however much you are attracted to this young woman, you inevitably draw back: you cannot commit and so the affair effectively ends. But the young woman, spurned in this way, hugely frustrated, embarks on a fresh affair—but this time with one of your close friends (who also happens to be married) and who is also your business partner. These new lovers decamp to Paris where the young woman becomes pregnant and duly has a child. Whereupon her faithless lover abandons her and returns to his long-suffering wife.
What does one do, embroiled in such a soap opera? Cuckolded in this way by a real friend, how does one feel or respond? Do you laugh it off, chalk it up to experience, move on? Or are there deeper wounds, more profound regrets, moments of poignant self-analysis, of possible self-loathing? Or do you write it all up and put it in a play?
Exactly this situation happened to Anton Chekhov in 1894. Chekhov had a prolonged affair with a young teacher and apprentice opera singer called Lydia (“Lika”) Mizinova. When marriage was ruled out by Chekhov she began an affair with his friend Ignati Potapenko. This ménage moved to Paris, Lika had a child, Potapenko returned to his wife and Lika returned to Russia. Chekhov affected to be unconcerned.
I have been reading a great deal and writing a fair amount about Chekhov recently (this year sees the centenary of his death) and have become very familiar with his various biographies. Chekhov had a rare and complex personality. He was much loved, but remained a closed and so
metimes cool acquaintance. He was incredibly generous but was often ruthlessly hard-hearted. He loved the company of women but he was terrified of marriage. When he did marry towards the end of his short life it was only because ill health (he was dying of tuberculosis) would ensure that husband and wife were more apart than together. Reading Russian, French, American and British commentaries and accounts of his life, I have found that there is one consensus that emerges in the face of these conundrums. Namely that Chekhov was constitutionally incapable of falling in love and giving himself fully to a woman; that something in his nature always drew him up short; that he was always destined to be a loner.
And yet, and yet… The nature of his relationship with Lika Mizinova struck me as something of an exception to his usual amours (Chekhov was promiscuous with his affections). As I read about Chekhov, the story of his affair with Lika nagged at me: it seemed different from his other romantic entanglements. I began to wonder if Lika was the one that got away.
The facts are relatively straightforward. Anton Chekhov met Lika Mizinova in 1889, she was nineteen and a friend of his sister, Masha, who taught at the same school. Chekhov was twenty-nine and on the verge of his great literary fame. Lika was very pretty: grey-eyed with dark eyebrows, buxom, with a mass of curly ash-blonde hair and a chain-smoker (somewhat daring for the 1880s). Chekhov fell for her and an affair began. It’s worth bearing in mind that, amongst artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary Russia, social and sexual behaviour seem remarkably “modern”—not far removed from the norms of today. The Moscow and St Petersburg intelligentsia led similar lives to fin de siècle Parisian artists and writers. Fun was had. Life was good.
The precise nature of Chekhov’s affair with Lika is best derived from their letters. Apart from his wife, Olga Knipper (whom he married towards the end of his life), and his sister, Masha, Lika is his most regular female correspondent. Ninety-eight letters survive from her to him, sixty-seven in the other direction, though it seems there were many more, now lost. The tone of these letters is fascinating: it is almost consistently one of bantering flirtation, of feigned identities (idiot lover, childish sweetheart and so on), of joking, of sexual innuendo. Chekhov is always speculating that Lika has other admirers, direly warning her off other men. There is, clearly, an erotic undercurrent to these letters and this persistent role playing, as if they were designed to stimulate. For example: “Ah, Lika, Lika, diabolically beautiful Lika! … Do not despair but come to us, and we will hurl ourselves upon you with might and main.”
A year later Chekhov alluded to a friend that he might marry Lika, then added, “I doubt if I’ll be happy with her—she’s too beautiful.” Maybe this was the problem: Lika’s beauty attracted constant admirers, she was the cynosure of all male eyes. A friend would walk down a Moscow street with her and count the number of male heads turning. She was evidently strikingly attractive. Chekhov tried not to be jealous as other men fell for her, but he still would not commit to matrimony. Then Lika had an affair with the painter Levitan, another of Chekhov’s friends. It was as if Lika was challenging him, but Chekhov responded only with more jokes and ironies. However, Chekhov was obviously wounded: he parodied Levitan and Lika with some cruelty in a story he wrote in 1891 called “The Grasshopper.” Levitan refused to speak to Chekhov for three years. Lika persisted. Like no other woman he knew—and he knew a lot—Lika got under his skin.
A year later, 1892, the affair was back on. Lika, wiser now, was aware that it was best for her to bide her time. Chekhov dallied with other admirers but he was always drawn back to Lika. The on-off affair continued: she visited him at his country estate, he came to her flat in Moscow—but Chekhov still kept her at bay. As long as Lika wanted him, Chekhov could maintain his ironic distance. The affair with Levitan had touched him to a degree, but he could not have imagined what she would do next to stimulate his jealousy.
Lika’s affair with Ignati Potapenko began at the end of 1893, four years after she and Chekhov first met. It was undisguised and Chekhov appeared to give the union his blessing, even allowing the lovers to stay together at Melikhovo, instituting an odd ménage à trois. Lika conceived her child here at this time. Chekhov’s sister, Masha, was disgusted by her brother’s supine behaviour. Yet, even now, Chekhov could still write to Lika: “Darling Lika, today at 6.30 pm I shall leave for Melikhovo, would you like to come with me?” He was playing a curious and dangerous game, both desiring her and letting her betray him—the immediate consequence of which was that Lika left Moscow for Paris to be with Potapenko.
But even in Paris Lika and Chekhov wrote regularly, tormenting each other with coy invitations and hard irony. Chekhov was beginning to block out the ideas for The Seagull, in which the central character of Nina was to be very close to Lika. Potapenko kept the fact of Lika’s pregnancy from Chekhov and the two men were still sufficiently firm friends to travel together on holiday in the summer of 1894. Lika, meanwhile, went to Switzerland to have her child. Chekhov couldn’t stop writing to her: “You refuse to answer my letters, dear Lika … I’m not very well. I have an almost continuous cough. I seem to have lost my health as I lost you.”
In fact more had changed. The tone of their letters seems to signal that some sort of watershed had been reached. Chekhov by now could not ignore the fact that Lika was pregnant and expecting Potapenko’s child: nothing could ever be the same. Lika gave birth to a girl, Christina. Potapenko, under enormous pressure from his wife (she threatened to kill herself and her children), told Lika he could never see her again.
Lika’s life was in disarray: abandoned and impoverished (and noticeably plumper) she returned to Moscow. The birth of Christina seemed to have made Chekhov resolve to see her no more. Yet in early 1896 Lika was once again at Melikhovo, as Masha’s guest. Old feelings stirred in Chekhov. Despite everything, the love affair resumed. The next few months seem to have been the happiest the two of them shared. But as the year moved on the old pattern re-established itself. Mutual happiness provoked Chekhovian insecurity. Chekhov seems to have promised marriage and then reneged. Meetings were arranged and cancelled—Lika began to grow angry again. She was unaware that her character was about to be exposed on the Moscow stage in The Seagull.
Chekhov was understandably worried about the opening of the play (in October 1896). Both Potapenko and his wife—and Lika—were all naturally most eager to see the first performances and Chekhov had genuine reason to think that Potapenko’s wife might attack Lika. In the event he contrived to keep the parties separate. The first night was one of the most epic flops in the history of Moscow theatre, but, despite the huge controversy, Lika did not take against the portrayal of her character. A few days later she was back at Melikhovo and once again there was talk of marriage. And once again, Chekhov balked—he asked her to wait “two or three years.” Lika had had enough—and she still had other suitors of her own. She ruefully conceded that marriage—or “bliss” as they termed it—was unlikely to come about. She signed herself, “Goodbye. Your twice rejected L. Mizinova.”
And that really should have been the end of the affair. It had lasted seven years, but life was about to calamitously imitate art. Just as in The Seagull Chekhov had Nina’s child die, so too, now, Lika’s child sickened and died. Lika came to Melikhovo for comfort and to grieve, playing patience at a desk in Chekhov’s study as he worked. There seemed a kind of inevitability that she should seek him out in her darkest hour.
But Lika wound up the affair herself shortly after a final meeting: Chekhov’s prevarications eventually convincing her that nothing would come of it. Lika went back to Paris to pursue her career as an opera singer. She wrote to Chekhov: “To dear Anton Pavlovich, in kindly memory of eight years’ good relations.” Then she quoted some lines of poetry:
Whether my days are clear or mournful,
Whether I perish, destroying my life,
I only know this: to the grave
Thoughts, feelings, songs, strength
All for you!
> “I could have written this eight years ago,” she added, “and I write it now and I shall write it in ten years’ time.”
They still corresponded with each other but Chekhov, now terminally ill, had met the actress Olga Knipper who was ultimately to become his wife (in 1901, much to the shock and initial outrage of his family). Lika remained close to Masha and to Chekhov’s younger brother and found some sort of domestic happiness with the theatre director Aleksandr Sanin-Schoenberg. Chekhov died in 1904. Lika outlived him by thirty-three years, dying in Paris in 1937.
What is one to make of such a relationship, as passionate and as stormy as they come, it would seem? Donald Rayfield, Chekhov’s best biographer (and to whom this chronology is much indebted) speculates that Chekhov’s sexuality was stimulated by newness, by strangeness—lovers who became familiars lost their appeal. My own feeling is that Chekhov genuinely loved Lika—his sister Masha felt the same—but that something to do with his own impending mortality (he knew he had tuberculosis from an early age) and the need—like the writer Trigorin in The Seagull—not to be distracted from his work in the years he had left to live made him pull away from any romantic commitment that would be all-encompassing. His eventual marriage was full of love and affection but it was one of long separations and it misses the sturm und drang of the Lika years.