Anton Chekhov Read online

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  A LIFE

  DONALD RAYFIELD

  For Alia, Galia, Maia and Tolia

  One may be awestruck by Tolstoy’s mind.

  Delighted by Pushkin’s elegance. Appreciate Dostoevsky’s moral quest, Gogol’s humour. And so on.

  Chekhov, however, is the only man one would like to resemble.

  Sergei Dovlatov, Notebooks

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Abbreviations and References

  A Note on Transliteration

  The Chekhov Family Tree

  Maps

  PART I

  Father to the Man:

  1860–79

  1 Forefathers

  2 Taganrog

  3 Shop, Church and School

  4 The Theatres of Life and Art

  5 Disintegration

  6 Destitution

  7 Brothers Abandoned

  8 Alone

  PART II

  Doctor Chekhov:

  1879–86

  9 Initiation

  10 The Wedding Season

  11 The Spectator

  12 Fragmentation

  13 The Death of Mosia

  14 The Qualified Practitioner

  15 Babkino

  16 Petersburg Calls

  17 Getting Engaged

  18 Acclaim

  PART III

  My Brothers’ Keeper:

  1886–9

  19 The Suvorins

  20 Life in a Chest of Drawers

  21 Taganrog Revisited

  22 Ivanov in Moscow

  23 The Death of Anna

  24 Travel and Travails

  25 The Prize

  26 The Petersburg Ivanov

  27 A Death at Luka

  28 Shaking the Dust

  PART IV

  Années de Pèlerinage:

  1889–92

  29 Exorcizing the Demon

  30 Arming for the Crusade

  31 Crossing Siberia

  32 Sakhalin

  33 The Flight to Europe

  34 Summer at Bogimovo

  35 ‘The Duel’ and The Famine

  PART V

  Cincinnatus:

  1892–4

  36 Sowing and Ploughing

  37 Cholera

  38 Summoned by Suvorin

  39 Sickbay

  40 Dachshund Summer

  41 Happy Avelan

  42 The Women Scatter

  PART VI

  Lika Disparue:

  1894–6

  43 Abishag cherishes David

  44 Potapenko the Bounder

  45 The Birth of Christina

  46 O Charudatta!

  47 A Misogynist’s Spring

  48 Incubating The Seagull

  49 The Fugitive Returns

  PART VII

  The Flight of the Seagull:

  1896–7

  50 Two Diversions in Petersburg

  51 Lika Rediscovered

  52 The Khodynka Spring

  53 The Consecration of the School

  54 Night on a Bare Mountain

  55 Fiasco

  56 The Death of Christina

  57 Cold Comfort

  58 A Little Queen in Exile

  59 Cutting the Gordian Knot

  PART VIII

  Flowering Cemeteries:

  1897–8

  60 The Doctor is Sick

  61 An Idle Summer

  62 Promenades

  63 Dreaming of Algiers

  64 Chekhov Dreyfusard

  65 The Birth of a Theatre

  66 The Broken Cog

  PART IX

  Three Triumphs:

  1898–1901

  67 The Seagull Resurrected

  68 ‘I am a Marxist’

  69 Last Season in Melikhovo

  70 Uncle Vania Triumphant

  71 ‘In the Ravine’

  72 Olga in Yalta

  73 Three Sisters

  74 Nice Revisited

  75 The Secret Marriage

  PART X

  Love and Death:

  1901–4

  76 Honeymoon

  77 When Doctors Disagree

  78 Conjugal Ills

  79 Liubimovka

  80 ‘The Bride’

  81 The Cherry Orchard

  82 Last Farewells

  83 Aftermath

  Epilogue

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Family portrait, end 1860s

  2. 1874 family portrait

  3. Taganrog in the 1870s

  4. Anton, on leaving school, 15 June 1879

  5. ‘The Wedding Season’, a caricature of Taganrog relatives

  6. A portrait of a medical student, perhaps Anton by Kolia Chekhov, c. 1882

  7. Students and professors celebrating Tatiana’s Day, 12 January 1882

  8. Anton with Kolia

  9. Anton Chekhov, 1883

  10. Evgenia, Pavel, Aleksandr, Vania, Masha and Misha in the early 1880s

  11. Masha, Anna Golden, Natalia Golden and Kolia, c. 1883

  12. Franz Schechtel with Kolia Chekhov in the early 1880s

  13. Future Doctors, autumn 1883

  14. Nikolai Leikin, c. 1883

  15. Natalia Golden as ‘Poverty’, painted by Kolia Chekhov

  16. Anton Chekhov painted by Kolia, 1884

  17. The Kiseliovs’ house

  18. The Moscow house painted by Misha

  19. Photograph of Anton given to Tchaikovsky

  20. At the Lintvariovs’ cottage, May 1889

  21. Kleopatra Karatygina

  22. Olga Kundasova

  23. Pavel Svobodin and Vladimir Davydov with Anton and Suvorin, January 1889

  24. Repin’s drawing ‘Literary Society’ in St Petersburg, 1889

  25. Anton Chekhov, January, 1890

  26. Lika Mizinova in the early 1890s

  27. At the Korneev house before setting off for Sakhalin, April 1890

  28. Convicts being fettered on Sakhalin

  29. A picnic with Japanese consular officials on Sakhalin, October 1890

  30. Levitan with gun-dog, early 1890s

  31. The house at Melikhovo by Simov

  32. Masha, Anton, Vania, Aleksandra Liosova, Misha, Aleksandr Smagin, 25 March 1892

  33. At Melikhovo, Easter 1892

  34. With Pavel Svobodin at Milikhovo, June 1892

  35. Aleksandr and Vania at Melikhovo, July 1892

  36. Aleksandr’s sons Kolia and Tosia by the stables at Melikhovo, July 1892

  37. Pavel and Evgenia at Melikhovo, July 1892

  38. Anton with neighbours and colleagues, summer 1893

  39. Natalia Golden-Chkhova with son Misha, 1893

  40. Tatania Shchepkina-Kupernik, Lidia Iavorskaia and Anton, late 1893

  41. Elena Shavrova, c. 1894

  42. Masha and Natalia Lintvariova painting watched by artist Sakharov at Luka, c. 1894

  43. Masha in the garden at Melikhovo, c. 1894

  44. Anton, Mamin-Sibiriak and Ignati Potapenko, 9 January 1896

  45. Sonia and Vania Chekhov with their son Volodia, 1896

  46. Anton with the Suvorin family at Feodosia, September 1896

  47. The schoolteachers at Talezh and Melikhovo

  48. Lidia Iavorskaia

  49. The Seagull being shot down

  50. Back from the clinic, April 1897

  51. With Quinine the dachshund, May 1897

  52. Lika Mizinova with Anton, May 1897

  53. Vera Komiss
arzhevskaia

  54. Daria Musina-Pushkina with Anton, 31 May 1897

  55. Aleksandra Khotdaintseva, c. 1898

  56. With Moscow Arts Theatre members, Spring 1899

  57. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

  58. Olga Knipper

  59. The Yalta house nearing completion, mid 1899

  60. Dr Altshuller

  61. Anton in his study at Yalta, 1900

  62. Anton and Gorky, 5 May 1900

  63. Anton and Olga on honeymoon, June 1901

  64. Anton with the Tolstoys, 12 September 1901

  65. Evgenia, Masha, Olga and Anton at Yalta, February 1902

  66. In the garden at Yalta with a tame crane, March 1904

  PREFACE

  Anton once told me, ‘In time all my things must see the light of day and I have no reason to be ashamed of them.’

  Bykov to Maria Chekhova, 7 April 1910 (LN87, 356)

  We recognize Anton Chekhov today as a founding father of the modern theatre, where the author, not the actor, is king. We acknowledge him as the author who gave Europe’s narrative fiction a new ambiguity, density and subtle poetry. Of all the Russian ‘classics’ he is, to non-Russians especially, the most approachable and the least alien, whether on the stage or the printed page. He lets his reader and spectator react as they wish, draw their own conclusions. He imposes no philosophy. Chekhov’s approachability is inseparable from his elusiveness. It is very hard to say what he ‘meant’, when he so rarely judges or expounds. From Tolstoy’s or Dostoevsky’s fiction we can reconstruct a philosophy and a life. From Chekhov’s work, and from his many letters, we get only fleeting and contradictory glimpses of his inner world and experience. His many biographers have tried to build out of the evidence a consensual life of a saint – a man who in a life shortened by chronic illness pulled himself from poverty to gentility, became a doctor and tended to the oppressed, won fame as the leading prose-writer and dramatist of his time in Europe, was supported all his life by an adoring sister and, though too late, found happiness in marriage with the actress who interpreted him best.

  All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts. This life of Chekhov tries to encompass rather more than has been documented before. The picture of Chekhov is now more complex. If, however, the man that emerges is less of a saint, less in command of his fate than we have hitherto seen him, he is as much a genius and no less admirable. His life should not be seen as an adjunct to his writing: it was a source of experience that fed his fiction. It is, above all, a life enthralling for its own sake. Anton Chekhov suffered the irreconcilable demands of an artist with responsibilities to his art as well as to his family and friends. His life has many meanings: we read into it the story of a disease, a modern version of the Biblical ‘Joseph and his Brothers’, or even the tragedy of Don Juan. Chekhov’s life could be a novel by Thomas Mann about the unbridgeable gap between being an artist and a citizen. It also exemplifies the predicaments of a sensitive and talented Russian intellectual at the end of the nineteenth century – one of the richest and most contradictory periods in Russia’s political and cultural history.

  Few writers guarded their privacy from the public eye as assiduously as Chekhov. Yet no writer so carefully preserved and filed every scrap of paper – letters, bills, certificates – connected with him and his family. Nor did his proclaimed ‘autobiographophobia’ prevent him from sorting out the year’s letters into cartons every Christmas.

  There are many biographies available – some comprehensive, such as E. J. Simmons’s or Ronald Hingley’s, some flamboyant, such as Henri Troyat’s, some finely judged, such as Mikhail Gromov’s or V. S. Pritchett’s. Russian or not, they all use the same range of printed sources. Nearly five thousand letters written by Anton Chekhov have been published, but several have been severely bowdlerized. (The import of another fifteen hundred letters, now lost, can be inferred from the replies.) These sources, notably the complete works and letters in thirty-one volumes published in Moscow between 1973 and 1983, have a remarkably full and intelligent scholarly apparatus, all of which provides biographers with an enormous range and quantity of material.

  The untapped sources are just as vast. In the archives, principally the Manuscript Department of the Russian State Library (once the Rumiantsev Museum, then the Lenin Library), there are some seven thousand letters addressed to Anton Chekhov. Perhaps half of the letters in the archive have never been referred to in print, primarily letters that reflect Chekhov’s private life. Moreover, in various archives (notably the Russian (formerly Central) State Archives for Literature and Art, the theatrical museum archives in Petersburg and Moscow, the Chekhov museums in Taganrog, Melikhovo and Sumy) there is a mass of documentary and pictorial material, letters of contemporaries which shed light on Chekhov’s life as a writer and a man. Archival records show that a small circle of Russian scholars have over the last thirty years combed these sources thoroughly, yet their published work, detailed in the bibliography of this book, uses only a fraction of these sources. A Russian and Soviet tradition of not ‘discrediting or vulgarizing’ (the phrase comes from a 1968 Central Committee resolution forbidding publication of certain passages) has even today made Russian scholars hesitant about bringing the full range and depth of the Chekhov archives into the public domain. Three years’ work systematically searching, transcribing and mulling over the documentation has convinced me that nothing in these archives either discredits or vulgarizes Chekhov. Quite the opposite: the complexity, selflessness and depth of the man become even clearer when we fully account for his human strengths and failings.

  Chekhov’s life was short, but neither sweet nor simple. He had an extraordinary number of acquaintances and liaisons (though few true friends and lovers). He moved in many orbits – he had dealings with teachers, doctors, tycoons, merchants, peasants, bohemians, hacks, intellectuals, artists, academics, landowners, officials, actresses and actors, priests, monks, with officers, convicts, whores, foreigners and landowners. He got on well with people of every class and condition, except the nobility and court. He lived for virtually all his life with his parents and sister, and much of the time with one or more of his brothers as well, not to mention a network of aunts and cousins. He was restless: he had countless addresses and travelled widely from Hong Kong to Biarritz, from Sakhalin to Odessa. To write a full biography would take a lifetime longer than Chekhov’s own. I have concentrated on his relationships with family and friends, but there is a sense in which his life is also a historia morbi. Tuberculosis shapes it and ends it: his efforts to ignore and to cope with disease form the weft of any biography. There are many works in English offering a critical study of his work. If we read about Chekhov, it is primarily because he is a writer of very great importance. Any good bookshop or library offers a number of critical studies to enrich the reader’s understanding of Chekhov’s work. In this biography, however, his stories and plays are discussed inasmuch as they emerge from his life and as they affect it, but less as material for critical analysis. Biography is not criticism.

  Not all the mysteries in Chekhov’s life can be solved, and much evidence is missing: Chekhov’s letters to his fiancée Dunia Efros, to Elena Pleshcheeva, to Emilie Bijon almost certainly exist in private hands in the west. It is equally possible that the hundreds of letters that Suvorin wrote to Chekhov are mouldering in an archive in Belgrade: their discovery would force Chekhov’s life, and (because of what Suvorin knew and confided to Anton) Russian history, to be rewritten. A few archival items have also proved difficult to trace, for example most of Chekhov’s student exercises in medicine. Nevertheless, the material that is now available enables a much fuller portrait of Chekhov and his times than ever before.

  D. R.

  Queen Mary & Westfield College, London

  February 1997

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My warmest thanks go to Alevtina Kuzicheva. Without her assistance my work in the Otdel rukopisei (The Manuscript Depar
tment) of the Russian State Library and RGALI (Russian State Archives for Literature and Art) would have been more trammelled, and through her I had introductions to every major Chekhovian scholar and museum in Russia and the Ukraine. I want to thank the staff at the Russian State Library and the Manuscript Department who, despite the demoralizing conditions, a dilapidated building and grim prospects, managed to deliver most of what I sought; the same applies to the staff at RGALI. I am grateful to Galina Shchiobeleva of the Moscow Chekhov Museum, and to Igor Skobelev of the Sumy Chekhov Museum for allowing me so much access. To Liza Shapochka and her husband Vladimir Protasov of Taganrog I owe a special debt for their hospitality and consultations. Olga Makarova of Voronezh University Press has been very helpful in providing local material. Among my Western colleagues, Professor Rolf-Dieter Kluge, the energetic organizer of the Badenweiler conferences of 1985 and 1995, has been a great stimulus. I want to thank Dmitri Konovalov of Ufa for lending me his manuscript notes on the Andreev sanatorium, as well as for his hospitality. (None of these experts, or anybody else I have consulted, bears any responsibility for my judgments or approach.)

  I also thank the doctor in charge of the hospital that was once Bogimovo and the staff at the Andreev sanatorium at Aksionovo. Apart from Siberia, Sakhalin and Hong Kong, I feel I have stood and sat, and have been a minor or major nuisance, in almost every place that bears Chekhov’s imprint. Descendants of Chekhov’s friends, for instance M. Patrice Bijon, have been most tolerant of my search for material. Countless people will be grateful that the work is finished. Thanks and acknowledgements for illustrations to the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum (Moscow), to the Chekhov Museums in Melikhovo, Moscow, Sumy, Taganrog and Yalta, to the Pushkinski Dom (St Petersburg), and to the Russian State Library.

  This book owes much to British Academy support: notably a three-month humanities research fellowship, which extended my sabbatical leave long enough to make headway. To my colleagues at Queen Mary and Westfield College, who had to put up with frequent dereliction of duty, I proffer my apologies.

  ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES

  This book is meant for the general reader, but, for specialists I have given sources for quotations and new information. References are given to archive sources and less accessible publications: Chekhov’s letters and the best-known memoirs (see Select Bibliography) are well indexed, and the reader can check these sources without additional reference. All translations into English are my own. In footnotes I have used a few abbreviations (the place of publication is Moscow, unless otherwise indicated):