The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (14 page)

While the real members of the Moscow Art Theatre concentrated on
Tsar Feodor,
Lev Knipper slipped away for his ‘intensive treatment’. He certainly saw his sister Olga at this period and later, during his fifteen-month stay in Germany. Some of the time he spent in Freiburg at a sanatorium, where he had a piano in his room and composed; the rest he spent in Berlin. There can be no doubt at all about Lev’s driving musical passion. And thanks to the OGPU he had the rare opportunity of being allowed to live in Germany and study modern composition. How much spying he managed to do on the émigré community in Berlin is impossible to tell, yet he must surely have achieved some results, because the OGPU and then the NKVD allowed him to go abroad again and again.

12. Home Thoughts from Abroad

The contrast between life at home in Soviet Russia and life abroad could be very disorientating for members of the Moscow Art Theatre. ‘My fate has torn me away from Russia and from the life I had been dreaming of,’ Aunt Olya wrote to a friend from Paris. ‘And with a kind of anger I have plunged into the easy life, feeling satisfied with momentary impressions. This city is unbelievably beautiful. It is a joy to walk in the streets.’

It was also unsettling for White Russians in Paris when the Moscow Art Theatre arrived to perform The Cherry Orchard. ‘This must have been so disturbing for our former fellow countrymen,’ she added. Many White Russian émigrés were reduced to tears, seeing the re-creation of the country they still longed for and loved, and experiencing once again its poignant, painful ending, with Ranyevskaya leaving for Paris and the lover who she knew was faithless.

Aunt Olya dreaded the next and largest stage of their tour, the United States. ‘Please think of me on the 27th when we sail from Europe’s shore,’ she wrote in the same letter of December 1922. Her misgivings were rapidly confirmed by the restlessness and brashness of the New World. ‘It’s so noisy here. Everything is catching up and overtaking. There’s a dance-hall for every three houses. There are movie theatres, restaurants and concerts, but the nation itself does not have a drop of artistic blood in it. It’s a kingdom of incredible advertising. You go out in the evening and you don’t believe your own eyes. One doesn’t know where to look. There’s a sea of light, everything is jumping, moving, shimmering, with words written in light... We are a huge success, but to be honest with you, it does not please us.’

The reputation of the Moscow Art Theatre was so great that the Friday matinees were packed with actors, treating the performance as a master class. And the general effect on the theatrical profession in the United States was inestimable. But even that was little consolation for Aunt Olya. She was homesick for the potholed road which led from her apartment building on the Prechistensky bulvar to the Moscow Art Theatre on Kamergersky pereulok. She could not understand the United States. ‘It’s like some wind-up clockwork machine. It’s impossible to read anything in people’s faces. It’s as if everything is always all right. This is the expression they wear in the street and when they go about their business.’ On the other hand, she was honest enough to admit that she loved the en-suite bathrooms in the hotels and the constant hot water.

The Moscow Art Theatre was clearly not prepared for the contrast in New York between well-heated hotels and freezing rehearsal rooms. Many of them fell ill with flu and even bronchitis. Aunt Olya was amazed by the luxurious fur coats of American women worn over (by Soviet standards) revealing little dresses. In her eyes, the dresses of the 1920s left women almost naked.

She received a letter from her brothers Konstantin and Vladimir in Moscow and burst into tears. She could not put on her make-up for the performance. Her homesickness cannot have been improved by Rachmaninov, Anton Chekhov’s old friend, coming to see them. ‘He’s thin and angular,’ she wrote after a late dinner with him on 5 March 1923, following a performance. ‘There’s suffering in his face and incredible tiredness.’ After another meeting with Rachmaninov, she wrote: ‘It is so touching when he speaks of Anton Pavlovich [Chekhov] and asks me to talk about him. His face lights up.’ For all émigrés, Chekhov was the essence of the Russia which they had loved and lost.

Lev, on the other hand, rejoiced in the stimulus of foreign culture. From Freiburg, he went deep into the Black Forest for the festival of modern music at Donaueschingen, where he met Paul Hindemith. Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg were great influences on him at this time. He was in a whirl of new discoveries. ‘I’m plunged into expressionism,’ he wrote to Aunt Olya on her return to Europe. He urged her to bring his sister Olga down with her from Berlin, because she needed rest.

In that summer of 1923, his adopted mother rejoined him there after the first part of their American tour. ‘I spent only three days in Berlin,’ wrote Aunt Olya to her brother Vladimir. ‘After the hellish work in America I arrived after a twelve day sea trip, scatter-brained and not knowing what to do with myself.’ She stayed in Berlin with Olga and was most impressed by the way she had decorated her apartment. After America, even the hated Berlin—‘all green and almost beautiful’—appealed to her. Germany seemed ’almost small, sweet and cosy’ after New York.

‘I decided to move south to join Lyova [Lev]. The Stanislav skys are here too. At the moment I am staying with Lyova, who has moved from the sanatorium to a private house [in Freiburg]. I am thinking of wandering in the mountains [of the Black Forest] to return to my senses. Lyova has got his own room with a grand piano. He is writing music, but very advanced music. I haven’t yet heard enough of it to make it out.’ Stanislavsky was also taking a break from the American tour to write his book
My Life in Art.
Maxim Gorky was in the area as well, so Aunt Olya and Stanislavsky went over to visit him.

Olga came down a little later from Berlin to join them and, while Lev composed, she and Aunt Olya walked and sat together chatting. Olga told her about her life in Berlin and also about Sergei Bertensson, the stage manager of the Moscow Art Theatre who had fallen in love with her. ‘I know that our Bertensson had serious intentions,’ Aunt Olya wrote to Vladimir in Moscow, ‘and that he had proposed to her, but nothing came of it, and she keeps him by her side as a friend. He is very much in love with her and he does everything that she commands him to do. She has told him that she is not going to have any more ties in her life without strong feelings.’

At the end of August, when ‘more slave labour in America’ appeared on the autumn horizon, she wrote again. ’It looks as if Lyova is going to become someone very interesting. In my opinion, his compositions are intriguing. I feel that it is not nonsense. He has met many young composers and was beyond himself with awe at this artistic environment. He is very confident of his talents.‘

Lev and Olga, accompanied by Aunt Olya, soon returned to Berlin. Lev began studying with Philip Jarnach and spent much time at the Society of Modern Music. While Olga returned to work in the studios at Babelsberg, Aunt Olya had to embark on the second part of the American tour, which she so dreaded. But it was Stanislavsky who suffered the most in the United States. He received a telegram from Nemirovich-Danchenko in Moscow warning him that the Communist satirical magazine
Krokodil
had quoted him in an interview in America describing the results of the Russian Revolution. ‘What was our horror,’ he was reported as having said, ‘when the workers invaded the theatre with dirty clothes, uncombed, unwashed, with dirty boots, demanding the performance of revolutionary plays.’

Stanislavsky immediately sent back a rebuttal to be printed in
Pravda,
claiming that this interview was ‘lies from beginning to end’. He had in fact said the very opposite, boasting of the Art Theatre’s great success with proletarian audiences. This was some way from the truth, but Stanislavsky was outraged at the position he found himself in. ‘Moscow accuses us of disloyalty,’ he wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko, ‘but we get even blacker looks abroad... In Paris a considerable number of people, both French and Russian, boycotted us because we came from Soviet Russia and therefore were Communists. Now they won’t let us into Canada, officially declaring us Bolsheviks.’ Not long afterwards,
Prozhektor,
another satirical magazine, published a photograph of Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper-Chekhova with Prince Feliks Yousupov, the assassin of Rasputin. The obvious implication was that the Moscow Art Theatre mixed with émigrés whenever it was abroad.

In Germany, Olga Chekhova had to be even more discreet about politics. In the absence of accessible records, one can only speculate about the details of her recruitment by Lev, but the most obvious incentive presented would have been exit visas for members of her family, especially her mother and little daughter. These were indeed delivered the following year, again an unusual gesture to assist a Soviet citizen who had failed to return after the expiry of her own exit permit.

According to General Sudoplatov, who was later in charge of Soviet intelligence in Germany, the basis for Olga Chekhova’s collaboration consisted of ‘a trustful relationship with us and the obligations imposed by recruitment’. This rather Delphic but standard phrase in Soviet intelligence circles denotes that although she signed a paper (probably under pressure), she was a voluntary, unpaid agent. Professor Anatoly Sudoplatov, who worked with his father on every aspect of his book, said that the main interest in Olga Chekhova was as a ‘sleeper’, to be activated when her contacts in high places might be useful. She was not considered the right material to be an active agent.

Olga Chekhova was indeed unsuited for imminent operational needs in that autumn of 1923. It was a period of intense OGPU and Comintern activity in Germany. A self-deluding myth had gripped the Politburo in Moscow that an uprising by Communist workers could trigger a German revolution. They were desperate for this momentous event to take place before the death of Lenin, who had suffered a series of strokes. Zinoviev had given the order to the German Communist Party in August. Trotsky could hardly contain himself with excitement. ‘Here at last, Comrades,’ he told fellow members of the Politburo, ‘is the tempest we have been expecting impatiently for so many years ... The German revolution means the collapse of world capitalism.’

Experts to direct this revolution were sent from Moscow, including the deputy chief of the OGPU, who was to set up a similar organization in Germany to crush the counter-revolution. But all the Politburo’s hopes were in vain. The German Communists represented a small minority of the working class, and when the order went out for a rising on 23October, it was ignored everywhere except among the Hamburg dockers, who had unloaded weapons secretly shipped to them from Petrograd. They were rapidly crushed. Lenin had to be told that his favourite prediction had not come to pass. Although incapable of coherent speech, he was still mentally alert and the news must have been another heavy blow.

Olga Chekhova, meanwhile, concentrated on her career. Following her success as the Baroness Safferstädt in Murnau’s
Schloβ Vogelöd,
she played in over forty silent movies during the 1920s. She also worked hard to perfect her German and lose her rather heavy Russian accent. This would enable her to take on stage roles as well, but it also meant that she was well prepared for her first talkie in 1930.

The most controversial movies of her early career were Der
Todesreigen (Dance of Death)
and
Tatyana.
Both were made in 1922and both were set in the Russian Revolution. In Der
Todesreigen
Olga Chekhova played a young Russian aristocrat who falls in love with a revolutionary and the revolution, but the horrors, the squalor and the misery depicted in the film were far too vivid for German Communists. In one notorious scene, Olga was seized and mauled by Red Guards. German left-wingers attacked the theatre where it was premiered, chanting ‘Down with anti-Bolshevism!’ and a riot developed. Olga avoided any comment on these events and this interesting moment in her career naturally raises the question of her agreement to help Lev and Soviet intelligence.

Olga wanted to help her family back in Russia, and particularly Lev, who needed it most after his time as a White Guard. She had also decided to get her daughter out, having created a far better life for herself in Germany. In her new country, she was admired and taken seriously, a very welcome change for her after the patronizing attitude of Misha and the Moscow Art Theatre circle. Her political instincts, as Soviet intelligence recognized in 1945, were basically those of an old-fashioned conservative. But for purely pragmatic reasons she was ready to be a ‘fellow-traveller’.

After filming Der
verlorene Schuh,
based on the fairy tale
The Lost Shoe,
Olga Chekhova then played a young fishwife in
Das Meer,
set on a Breton island off Brest. She also played the part of
Nora
in an adaptation of Ibsen’s
Doll’s
House. This received excellent reviews. But soon afterwards, in December 1923, she and Lev heard from Moscow that their father was extremely ill. Lev decided to return immediately. He was only just in time. Konstantin Knipper died on 6 January 1924. Lev sent a telegram in German to Aunt Olya in New York: ‘Papa gestorben 6 Januar. Leo’.