The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (15 page)

Lev wrote a long letter to Aunt Olya describing her brother’s end. Konstantin Knipper had been delirious, talking about his work and making speeches. But the death itself was peaceful. Lev had then clearly been irritated when his Uncle Vladimir arrived and ‘sobbed like a child’, which ‘broke our harmony’. As well as Lulu Knipper and Lev, Olga’s former husband Misha joined them at the deathbed. ‘I was living through the most beautiful moment of my life,’ Lev continued in his letter. ‘I sensed Papa’s presence all the time. I feel no pain. I am happy for him. There aren’t many people who die in such a good and
pure
way. Misha and I washed and dressed him. We did it all with our own hands. I didn’t let Mama do anything. He seemed alive, he was still warm. It seemed to me as if he were still breathing. I am endlessly grateful to Misha for the colossal moral support that he’s given us. I will never forget this. He’s got such a generous and complete soul.’

After Misha left, Lev stayed with his mother. Lulu felt that all she had left after her husband’s death was Olga’s little girl. She did not want to go to Berlin, but at the same time she did not want to be parted from her granddaughter, whom Olga now wanted with her. Lev told their mother that she had to go to Germany.

In the same letter to Aunt Olya, he started talking of the future without wasting any time. ‘Now, on quite a different subject. You know what I mean. Money... My happiness lies in my art, in my work. I’ve made a huge step forward in the last two months. One more year, and I will stand on my own two feet. But now I don’t really want to work for money. I’ve written a foxtrot and sold it for fifty roubles, but it was so hard and unpleasant. My darling Aunt Olya, please forgive me for approaching you like this. You don’t like this. But you know me. I need money very, very much. Because the funeral is going to cost us (a very modest one) 200—250 dollars. I will take a break from my lessons and try to raise some money, but the problem isn’t so much mine, but Mama’s. [Olga], of course, will send us some money, but it won’t be much. Please don’t cry, don’t grieve. Death is beautiful, I’ve understood it clearly now for the first time. It is a great, mysterious celebration.’ And so ended Lev’s rather chilling letter.

Once family matters were attended to, Lev wasted little time in trying to establish his supremacy in modern music in a city cut off from all new developments abroad. Composers, conductors and musicians were indeed bowled over by this young apparition from abroad. His opinions, to say nothing of his plus fours and golfing shoes, left them open-mouthed. ‘Everyone was such a formalist in those days,’ wrote the conductor E. A. Akulov almost seventy years later. ‘I remember Lyovushka Knipper’s return from Berlin. We were all penniless and looking like shabby alley cats after a fight, and he came back wearing some incredible shoes. So, anyway, Knipper said to us: “One really can’t write music in this way.” We were looking at his incredible shoes with leather festoons, his unbelievable trousers, and we believed that major chords with three notes had actually been cancelled all over the world.’

In Berlin, meanwhile, Olga’s career had become exhaustingly successful. Germany was in an appalling economic crisis, and thus in desperate need to forget its present worries and the trauma of defeat in the First World War. The studios at Babelsberg were initially working flat out, but soon the financial situation reduced the output by half as inflation destroyed the value of money. Fortunately, in spite of the demand for escapism, the new industry attracted some brilliant directors from the theatre who were longing to experiment. Many came from Vienna. There were few prospects for them in that beautiful shell, emptied of meaning by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

After playing the title role in
Nora,
Olga Chekhova tried to produce her own film,
Die Pagode,
but this was not a commercial success. Her determination to seize every opportunity pushed her into accepting almost any part going, to the point where she was making up to five or even more films a year. Most of these roles stereotyped her as a society lady, but where she was extremely clever was in the way she could almost change her face at will for each part. One can compare photographs of Olga Chekhova in a dozen different movies, and even when you know it is the same actress, it is very hard to see. This did not just come with changing the style or colour of her hair; it seems that she even managed to change the shape of her face.

She also made every effort to play the publicity game, with interviews, articles and photographic sessions. She had moved to a slightly larger apartment at 21 Berchtesgadener Strasse in Berlin-Schöneberg, but, as Aunt Olya had remarked in one of her letters, Olga had no time for relationships and was exhausting herself with work. There can be little doubt that after her feeling of helplessness when her marriage to Misha fell apart during the Russian Revolution, she never wanted to depend on a man again. This made her extremely circumspect in her relations with suitors beyond the usual good-mannered flirting. She was determined to earn enough money to avoid any such vulnerability, a feeling which must have been greatly strengthened by everyone’s sense ofpowerlessness during the raging inflation of 1923.

The collapse of savings during the inflation had deeply damaged the middle classes, psychologically as well as financially. The west end of Berlin became famous for large, gloomy apartments turned into boarding houses by ruined war widows. But once the currency was stabilized in a bold move by the Weimar government, economic prospects began to revive, at least for those who were employable.

Alongside the terrible unemployment and misery, the febrile gaiety of the 1920S was something of a
danse
macabre to banish any memory of what the world had just been through. The revealing short dresses which had so shocked Aunt Olya in New York were eagerly bought in Berlin by those women who could afford them. Olga Chekhova, now beyond the stage of needing to borrow clothes, had also had her hair bobbed, a style which the Germans called the Bubikopf, because it made a woman’s head look like a boy’s.

Once her German was good enough, she managed to obtain a one-year contract at the Berliner Renaissance-Theater. No doubt the theatre management was taken in by her totally false claims to have been a member of the famous Moscow Art Theatre. Yet she still drove out early to Babelsberg every morning for filming, which made it a very long day. The compensation, of course, was that her spending power was increased considerably. Soon she bought a smart new Talbot convertible with the enormous running boards of the period. She even had a chauffeur, but often preferred to drive the car herself. Olga Chekhova clearly revelled in the idea that she was at last in control of her life.

13.
The End of Political Innocence

Misha Chekhov came back into the lives of the Knipper family again in 1924. Aunt Olya told Nemirovich-Danchenko that she would ‘be happy to play the mayor’s wife’ in
The Government Inspector,
the Gogol play in which Misha was now the star. He was about to be made the first Honoured Actor of the USSR. The drama of Olga’s elopement with Misha must by then have seemed almost as distant a memory as a crisis in childhood.

Misha was certainly ambitious, yet all the time he held passionately to his ideals. Lev Knipper, on the other hand, seems to have harnessed his artistic credo to his driving ambition, yet he believed in himself so intensely that he felt he could follow any unconventional path which took his fancy. A month after his father’s death, Lev proudly sent Aunt Olya, then back in New York, a newspaper clipping which stated: ‘Intensive work is going on to prepare a new programme of plastic compositions based on the music by Liszt and L. Knipper—a young composer who has arrived from Berlin.’

The letter which accompanied it was briskly energetic in its descriptions of what he was up to. ‘I have left the Gnesina school and now I am studying on my own, preparing for the Conservatoire, for its conductors’ faculty. I am studying hard. At the same time, I am writing a ballet. It is going to be staged this autumn... I am already being spoken of in Moscow music circles ... The ballet is based on an absolutely new concept—a harmonious combination of music, eurhythmics and light, because I have concluded after studying them that the attempts of Wagner and Scriabin were erroneous from the start.’ He finally turned to the subject of the family. ‘I need to send Mama abroad as soon as possible, she is falling to bits from her illness. And I can’t leave [Sofya Chekhova, the mother of the suicide Volodya] in charge of our apartment, it would ruin the place.’

Lev must have been in touch with Olga about exit permits, warning her to prepare for the arrival in Berlin of their mother and her two granddaughters. Olga herself was also flushed with success at this time and could not resist boasting to their aunt. ‘Darling and dearest Aunt Olya,’ she wrote triumphantly of her first experience of the stage at the Renaissance-Theater. ‘I have just been baptized. Posters of me are everywhere and newspapers are writing about me.’ She was playing an aristocrat in a drama set in the French Revolution. ‘I could not understand what I would feel before I stepped on the stage, because I never had any acting training except for studying with Misha. There was just the influence from his studio, where we used to spend days and nights.’ This is the clearest possible admission from her own pen that she had not acted in the Moscow Art Theatre, as she had claimed on her arrival in Germany. It was a fiction she shamelessly maintained throughout her life. In her 1973 memoirs she lists ‘The Most Important Theatrical Pieces in which I Played a Leading Role’. They include Russian productions of
The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters and Hamlet,
plays in which Misha had acted.

‘The theatre is full all the time,’ she wrote six days later, 16 March 1924. ‘They are predicting that I will be a very good actress. It is hard for me to write to you about this because I find it so funny that I have become famous here and that people go to the theatre just to see me and that they believe in me.’ She then made an interesting admission. ‘I find that what I am able to give people in the theatre is simpler for me than life outside the theatre.’

She acted in three plays in four weeks, then left for ten days’ filming in Rome and Florence. She returned to Berlin on 4May and took up again the punishing routine of making films by day, then leaving the studio at Babelsberg to drive to the theatre for her evening performance. ‘Of course it is very tiring to be filmed,’ she told her aunt, who had never strayed from the stage, ‘but one’s got to get along.’ In her case, this meant making as much money as possible. She now knew for certain that her mother, her daughter, Ada, and her niece, Marina Ried, were to arrive on 10 May. ‘I’ve got to buy them clothes and find a place to live.’ Olga wanted ‘to earn a lot of money this summer’, to take Ada and Marina ‘to the south of France or Italy for six weeks’.

Before leaving Russia for the last time, Olga’s mother, Lulu Knipper, took the seven-year-old Ada round to Misha’s apartment to say goodbye. Misha, then at the height of his success in Moscow, never imagined that he too would soon follow the path of exile.

Aunt Olya went back with Lev to Germany that summer, visiting both Freiburg and Berlin. On their return to Russia, they went down to Yalta to see Aunt Masha, who was still guarding her brother’s house as a shrine to his memory. After Moscow, the tall cypresses and the meridional warmth of the Crimea exerted an irresistible appeal. Aunt Olya, almost like a child, had a ritual on first catching sight of the sea. She would stand up in the railway carriage and bow to it, ‘with a slightly guilty smile’.

They first visited Masha at the Chekhov house in Yalta. The local young ladies, hearing of their arrival, came over, ostensibly to pay their respects to Chekhov’s widow, but also, it would appear, to make the acquaintance of her good-looking nephew. Lev was evidently an effective seducer, but one suspects that he gave little away emotionally.

After the visit to Yalta, the two holidaymakers from Moscow spent most of the time at Gurzuf, where Aunt Olya had the small seaside house left to her by Anton Chekhov. This simple house of whitewashed walls, terracotta tiles and pale green shutters was situated at the base of a promontory formed by dramatic rocks overlooking a small bay. The house had a handful of cypresses to provide a little shade from the blinding sunlight.

Soon after their return to Moscow, Aunt Olya received a letter from Masha in Yalta. ‘I am now working for the Soviet state,’ she wrote with a mixture of amusement and pride. ‘I am now officially director of the Chekhov house-museum. Give my greetings to Lyova and tell him that he has put splinters into the hearts of local ladies. They are unable to forget him.’ But the real reason for the letter came at the end: 1924 marked the twentieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death and there was to be a celebration in the Kremlin to mark it. ‘Tell me,’ she wrote, ‘how Lunacharsky sees Anton Pavlovich in the light of the present situation.’

Aunt Olya reported back a fortnight later. ‘The commemoration of Anton Pavlovich did not go very well in my view,’ she wrote. It had taken place in the Kremlin in the Hall of Columns. The audience consisted of two sharply opposite worlds, the lovers of the theatre and of Chekhov on the one hand, and hard-line Bolsheviks on the other. Aunt Olya had not enjoyed reading her memories of life with Chekhov to such a divided crowd. ‘What was liked by one made the other sceptical ... My memories could only be understood by an audience used to literary life. Lunacharsky spoke for a long time, but I did not listen and I told him so. He seemed to be talking about a “Chekhovist movement” which had not been understood correctly.’

In Berlin, Olga eagerly awaited the arrival of all her surviving family, save Lev. Her sister Ada was going to follow later. Olga had rented a new apartment with fifteen rooms at Klopstock Strasse 20in the Tiergarten district of Berlin. There had been no problem with exit visas. Lulu Knipper arrived safely with the two little girls. They had taken the same sea route as Aunt Olya, down the Baltic from Leningrad to Stettin, but they were spared from dreadful weather.