Part-Time Resident
Chekhov never really settled back into Moscow life after he returned from Siberia in December 1890. Unable to afford the rent, his family had left the house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya soon after he departed for Sakhalin that spr ng, and he returned to live Ш the smaller flat they had rented on Malaya Dmitrovka Street instead. Malaya Dmitrovka was located more centrally than the house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya; and Chekhov 'oked that he had now become an aristocrat and so was obliged to live on an aristocratic street. After the endless open space of Siberia, living conditions seemed very cramped, and he was soon itching to leave again. Misha was now working in the town of Aleksin and had moved out, but Pav el Egorovich had moved in, having retired from his job, and the population of the Malaya Dmitrovka flat was further swelled by the animals Chekhov brought back with him from his travels: mongooses, one of which turned out to be a ferocious palm civet. The animals had predictably caused mayhem in the small flat, jumping up on tables and breaking china; the one that survived was donated a year later to the Moscow Zoo, Chekhov avoided having to spend too much time in the flat by first going on a long trip abroad with Suvorn, and then mmediately departing for the family dacha. At the end of the summer, he began a serious search for a house in the countryside outsrde Moscow and the family moved to Melikhovo the following spring. However, he would later return to stay in the Malaya Dmitrovka area of Moscow when he was based in Yalta.
As soon as Chekhov was no longer living in Moscow, freed from
Chekhov photographed in St Petersburg after meeting Adolf Marx in 1899
worry about rent and the constant need to buy firewood during the cold winter months, he began to enjoy the time he spent there. During the Melikhovo years he only ever made visits to Moscow and preferred to stay at the Grand Moscow Hotel, which was located at the foot of Tverskaya, the city's central thoroughfare, a stone's throw from Red Square. He particularly enjoyed waking up in his favourite room, number five, when the bells were ringing in the churches on feast days. On 6 December 1895 - St N cholas's Day - he wrote to Suvorin that he had woken up early, lit candles and started working, enjoying what he called the 'raspberry' sound of the bells outside.1 In some respects the visits that Chekhov made during the six years that he was based at Melikhovo were his happiest dines in the city: he had no ties or responsibilities now that his home and his main place of work were elsewhere, and so he was free to enjoy the bachelor lifestyle that had been denied him during the earlier years of penury when he had his parents to look after. There were numerous adoring women ready to throw themselves at his feet.
Although Chekhov's literary career had first taken off in St Petersburg, the pendulum swung back to Moscow in the 1890s. Starting with 'Ward No. 6', he began publishing many of his most important stories in the Moscow-based Russian Thought, while shorter stories were siphoned off to the main Moscow newspaper the Russian Gazette. Both had reputations for having a pronounced liberal bias. Chekhov's ab lity to form an alliance with these publications, while at the same time maintaining a close relationship with Suvorin, the proprietor of Russia's most right-wing newspaper, was a tribute to his ability to maintain independence and freedom in a suffocatingly small world don inated by narrow factions, but it did not go down well with New Times. The Russian Gazette, founded in 1863, was selling at least as many copies as New Times in the 1890s, and Chekhov enjoyed an easygoing friendship with its publisher, Vasily Sobolevsky; he liked the paper very much. By the time that 'Ward No. 6' was pub.Ushed n Russian Thought, Chekhov had patched up his differences with that journal's wealthy merchant owner, Vukol Lavrov, to whom he had fired off his impassioned refutation of the journal's allegation that he lacked principles, and he became particularly close at the end of his life to Viktor Goltsev, the journal's editor. Indeed, relations were to become so cordial that Chekhov later became part of the editorial team. His nostalgia for Moscow and the Russian winters grew acute when he was surrounded by Yalta's evergreen foliage during his final years of exile, and it was Russian Thought which published his most famous story, 'The Lady with the Little Dog', in 1899. In his description of Gurov's return to Moscow from his autumn trip to Yalta, Chekhov's prose was as autobiographical as it would ever be:
When the first snow falls, and when you climb back into a sleigh for the first time, how wonderful it is to see the ground and the rooftops all white; the air is all soft and lovely, and it makes you start remembering the time when you were young. When they are clothed in white rime, old lindens and birches have a good-natured sort of appearance; they seem far more endearing than cypresses and palms, and being near them dispels any desire to think of sea and mountains. Gurov was a Muscovite and he arrived back in Moscow on a wonderful frosty day; when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves and walked down Petrovka, and when
he heard the church bells ringing on Saturday evening, his recent trip and the places he had visited completely lost their charm for him .. .2
'Petrovka', or Petrovskaya, was one of Moscow's most fashionable shopp ng streets, and very close to Malaya Dmitrovka, where Chekhov rented a flat in the summer of 1899.
If Chekhov pined for Moscow above all when he was in Yaita, it was because only in Moscow did he fire on all cylinders. It was where he had family and where most of his friends lived; it was where he
Y s
received his medical training and subsequently practised; it was where his literary career started and was increasingly based in the 1890s, and it was where he had close ties with the theatre. Starting in 1898, when the Moscow Art Theatre first staged The Seagull, Chekhov even had a cheatre that more or less understood what he was try'ng to achieve as a dramatist. Typically, this was just when he had to leave Moscow and relocate to the Crimea for the sake of his health. When he returned for the first time since moving to Yalta the following summer, a private command performance of The Seagull was put on specially for him on 1 May. A week later a photographer preserved for posterity the image of Chekhov reading Uncle Vanya to the assemoled cast before it went into rehearsal. Seated close by the author was Olga Knipper, with whom he was about to embark on a romance.
II
The Art Theatre
A few months after Suvorin had brought his gravely ill friend back to his suite at the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel after their abortive attempt to dine at the Herimtage in March 1897, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko sat down in one of its private dining rooms to have the famous lunch which launched the Moscow Art Theatre. Tiie lunch turned into d mer and Stanislavsky suggested they leave the smoke-filled room and repair to 'his dacha just outside the city to continue the conversation. What resulted was a decision to found a new kind of theatre. The amateur actor and director, scion of one of the great merchant families in Moscow, made a good team with the drama teacher and playwright. The company they created in October 1898 finally injected the life into Russian theatre that it so badly needed Picking up on the new approach to the stage that had begun with Wagner, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko elevated drama to high art, nvesting it with the capacity not only to uplift, but to transform and enlighten, its audiences.
Initially, the educational aspect of their activ. js was emphasized in the word 'accessible' being part of the company's original title, but the Moscow police objected to their early attempts to draw in audiences from the working classes and it had to be dropped.3 The word 'artistic' (typically contracted in English to 'art') remained, however, serving as a reminder of the idealistic goals nurtured by the theatre's founders. Going to the theatre suddenly became a serious business: auditorium lights were no longer kept burning during performances so that audience members could inspect each other; they were dimmed, forcing spectators to concentrate from within the blackness on what was unfolding on stage. The decor of the auditorium was similarly austere - a marked change from the gilt and velvet of traditional theatres. Productions were properly rehearsed, and a production method pioneered which placed the emphasis on ensemble work. For the first time in the Russian theatre stagings were conceptual, their style and atmosphere determined by a director. The story of the Moscow Art Theatre is by now the stuff of legend.