Chekhov’s chronic reaction to the production of his plays was revulsion, and so two months after the opening of Three Sisters, he was declaring, to Olga Knipper, “I will never write for the theater again. One can write for the theater in Germany, in Sweden, even in Spain, but not in Russia, where dramatists get no respect, are kicked by hooves and forgiven neither success nor failure” (March 1, 1901). Nevertheless, he soon was deep into The Cherry Orchard (1904), tailoring the roles to specific Moscow Art players. Each of these productions won Chekhov greater fame as a playwright, even when he himself disagreed with the chosen interpretation of the Art Theatre.
Chekhov languished in Yalta, which he called his “warm Siberia,” feeling that he had been shunted to an outpost for the moribund. At the age of forty, in 1900, to the great surprise of his friends and the temporary dismay of his sister Mariya, who had always been his housekeeper, he married the Art Theatre actress Olga Knipper. Chekhov’s liaisons with women had been numerous, ranging from a brief engagement in 1886 to Dunya Efros, a Jewish woman who refused to convert to Orthodoxy, to a one-night stand with a Japanese prostitute and a fling with the flamboyant actress Lidiya Yavorskaya. He exercised an involuntary fascination over a certain type of ambitious bluestocking and his fan mail from female admirers was considerable. Some women friends, such as Lidiya Avilova, projected their desires onto an ordinary relationship, casting themselves as Chekhov’s Egeria. Whenever the affair became too demanding or the woman too clinging, Chekhov would use irony and playful humor to disengage himself. In his writings, marriage is usually portrayed as a snare and a delusion that mires his characters in spirit-sapping vulgarity. His relationship with Knipper was both high-spirited—she was his “kitten,” his “horsie,” his “lambkin,” his “darling crocodile”—and conveniently remote, for she had to spend much of her time in Moscow, while he convalesced at his villa in Yalta. On those terms, the marriage was a success.
Chekhov’s villa, today a museum, became a Mecca for young writers, importunate fans, touring acting companies, and plain freeloaders. Such pilgrimages, though well meant, were not conducive to Chekhov’s peace of mind or body, and his health continued to deteriorate. Despite this rapid decline, and the disappointment of a miscarriage Olga suffered in 1902,6 a deeply lyrical tone suffuses his last writings. His late stories, “The Darling” and “Lady with Lapdog” (both 1899) and “The Bishop” (1902) and “Betrothed” (1903), offer more acceptance of the cyclical nature of life. They also reveal an almost musical attention to the structure and sounds of words, a quality to be remarked as well in the last “comedy,” The Cherry Orchard.
In December 1903, a failing Chekhov came to Moscow to attend rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard. The opening night, January 17, 1904, concided with his name day and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the commencement of his literary activity. Emaciated, hunched over, gravely ill, he did not show up until the second act and sat through the third, after which, to his great bemusement, a ceremony to honor him took place.
In June 1904 the Berlin doctors Chekhov consulted ordered him to Badenweiler, a health resort in the Black Forest. There the forty-four-year-old writer died on July 2. Shortly before his death, the doctor recommended putting an ice pack on his heart. “You don’t put ice on an empty heart,” Chekhov protested. When they suggested a glass of champagne, his last words came, “It’s been a long time since I’ve drunk champagne.” Unconsciously, he echoed the line of the old nurse Marina in Uncle Vanya: “It’s a long time since I’ve had noodles.”
Chekhov’s obsequies were a comedy of errors he might have appreciated. The railway carriage bearing his body to St. Petersburg was stencilled with the label “Fresh Oysters,” and, at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow, the bystanders spent more time ogling the controversial author Maksim Gorky and the bass singer Fyodor Shalyapin than in mourning the deceased.7 Finally, and inadvertently, Chekhov’s cortège became entangled with that of General Keller, a military hero who had been shipped home from the Far East. Chekhov’s friends were startled to hear an army band accompanying the remains of a man who had always been chary of the grand gesture.
NOTES
1 The date given by Chekhov himself, although he would appear to have been born on the 16th. The 17th was his “saint’s day” or “name day,” the day of St. Anthony after whom he was christened. Dates given here are “Old Style,” in accord with the Julian calendar, twelve days behind the Gregorian.
2 M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova (Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1980), p. 44.
3 Quoted in Ernest Simmons, Chekhov, A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 6.
4 Peter the Great had established a table of ranks that stratified social status into civil, military, naval, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. In the civil hierarchy, meshchanin (literally, townsman) came just above peasant. In The Seagull, Treplyov complains that his father had been classified as a meshchanin of Kiev, even though he was a famous actor, and the same rank appears on his own passport. He finds it particularly galling since the term had come to imply philistinism.
5 Letter to Dmitry Savelyov, January (?) 1884. All translated quotations from Chekhov’s writings and letters are based on Polnoe sobranie sochineny i pisem, the complete collected works and letters in thirty volumes published in Moscow in 1974–1983. On the cuts made by Soviet editors, see A. Chudakov, “ ‘Neprilichnye slova’ i oblik klassika. O kupyurakh v izdaniya pisem Chekhova,” Liter-aturnoe obozrenie (November 1991): 54–56.
6 Olga’s miscarriage is described in a letter of hers to Chekhov (March 31, 1902). However, a controversy has arisen among scholars as to whether it was a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, or something else; moreover, the paternity of the child has been questioned. See the articles of Hugh McLean and Donald Rayfield in The Bulletin of the North American Chekhov Society XI, 1 (Summer 2003), and letters in subsequent issues.
7 Maksim Gorky, Literary Portraits, trans. Ivy Litvinov (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 158–159.
CHRONOLOGY OF CHEKHOV’S LIFE
1860. January 17 (Old Style) / 29 (New Style). Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, third son of the shopkeeper and choirmaster Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna Morozova, is born in Taganrog, a port of the Sea of Azov. He is the grandson of a serf who managed to purchase his liberation.
Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s play Thunderstorm wins an award from the Academy of Sciences.
1861. Tsar Alexander II abolishes serfdom, but without providing enough land for the emancipated serfs.
1862. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is published.
Academic freedom restored to Russian universities.
1863. Flogging with birch rods abolished by law.
Konstantin Stanislavsky is born, as Konstantin Alekseev, son of a wealthy textile manufacturer.
Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, the gospel of nihilism, is written in prison.