The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (5 page)

‘Agitation is expressed by pacing up and down the stage very quickly,’ he wrote, ‘by the hands being seen to tremble when a letter is being opened or by letting the jug knock against the glass and then the glass against the teeth when the water is being poured and drunk.’ He regarded this as a lazy shorthand, a caricature of human behaviour, a copy of a copy of a copy, which had evolved into a standard pattern of theatrical clichés. The point for Stanislavsky was to convey inner feelings through every other means.

Misha often had breakfast with Stanislavsky, who would suddenly tell him to eat in a manner which expressed a particular mood: for example, as if he had just suffered the death of a child.

In the winter, the cousins went skiing in the Sparrow Hills outside Moscow. The ill-constructed trenches of the eastern front, in which several million men from the Tsarist army stood in icy mud up to their knees, must have seemed a whole world away. Misha and his mother dreaded his conscription into the army, yet the Moscow Art Theatre carried on as before.

The younger generation of Knippers as well as Chekhovs also started to move to Moscow from St Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd by the Tsar in a gesture of wartime Russian nationalism. Olga was sent to Moscow by her parents in 1914 to study art. She moved into Aunt Olya’s apartment on the first floor of 23 Prechistensky bulvar, a typical late-nineteenth-century Moscow stuccoed building with Italianate windows on the top two floors. It still stands on the broad Boulevard Ring, with a promenade bordered by large maples and grass running between the two carriageways. The view from Aunt Olya’s windows was of trees and the magnificent town houses of magnates on the far side of the boulevard.

The following year, Lev too came to Moscow to attend a new school. Aunt Olya made sure that she saw her favourite nephew frequently and she encouraged him in every way. The school, which was progressive for the times, put on a performance of Aleksandr Blok’s play
The Rose and the Cross,
for which Lev was allowed to select and adapt the music. Lev had mixed feelings about the move to Moscow. He had fallen in love with the beauty of St Petersburg a year or so before leaving it, yet the city in its wartime guise of Petrograd was starting to change. There was a new, ugly mood. The Knipper parents had discussed the political unrest quite openly at table. They were extremely concerned at the strikes and the ossified reaction of the Tsar and his entourage to an increasingly dangerous situation.

4. Misha and Olga

Along with Aleksandr Chekhov’s alcoholism, Misha had also inherited a compulsion to seduce, although mercifully in a rather more romantic fashion than his father. ‘From my earliest youth,’ he wrote later, ‘I found myself in a constant state of falling in love.’

Misha must have first met Olga Knipper when he was still at the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg. Just before the First World War, two or three of the Chekhov cousins went out to the Knipper house at Tsarskoe Selo to play tennis, swim and dance. Misha presumably did not pay much attention to her then, for she was almost six years younger than him. But when Olga came to Moscow in 1914 to study art she was seventeen and enchantingly beautiful. She had not yet emerged from an innocent naïvety and a tendency to day-dream, even though she had already demonstrated on occasion a streak of determination.

Her own account of these early years is heavily romanticized. She claimed that as a child she used to play with the little Grand Duchesses at Tsarskoe Selo and that she had encountered Rasputin in alarming circumstances. She even recounted that she had been accepted at the Moscow Academy of Art at the age of twelve and later studied under Bakst and Rodin. But this compulsive mythologizing may well have been provoked by the patronizing attitude of a family which refused to take her seriously because of her beauty.

Misha and Volodya met her at the apartment of Aunt Olya Knipper-Chekhova and at Aunt Masha’s Sunday night supper parties. In one after-dinner charade, Misha, wearing a white coat, played an unskilled medical assistant in a clinic. He rushed back and forth to a patient, played by young Olga, carrying medical implements and water, which he spilled in his clumsiness, all the time being shouted at by the doctor. Misha and Volodya became increasingly competitive in their acting and their joking. They had both fallen for their fair cousin-in-law.

Perhaps inevitably in such a story of tangled love, none of the accounts agree. According to Sergei Chekhov, Volodya followed Misha to St Petersburg for the Moscow Art Theatre’s 1914 spring season. Misha came across Volodya carrying a tennis racket and dressed in check trousers, white shoes and a boater. Volodya was apparently intent on proposing to Olga during a moonlit walk, but then Misha, his best friend and hero, insisted that, since he was three years older, he had priority. Volodya answered that there was no priority in love. Misha retorted that he already had some standing in society, while Volodya was still a student and his future was uncertain. Volodya replied that he would make Olga promise to wait for him until he graduated from the university.

‘Your father is not going to let you marry her!’ Misha almost shouted.

At this Volodya just grinned.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Misha asked more calmly.

‘Let’s toss a coin,’ Volodya replied. ‘The one who gets tails will leave Olya for ever and keep no place for bitterness in his heart.’

He tossed the coin and it came down tails. The cousins embraced without a word.

Volodya recounted all this to Aunt Masha in 1917, when he was staying with her down in the Crimea. Misha never really gave his side, except in the most offhand way. The only other version of events is that written by Olga herself She was utterly besotted with Misha, her cousin by marriage, who appeared to be as brilliant an actor as his uncle had been a playwright. Olga, then studying at the Moscow Academy of Art, went to as many of his performances in the Studio of the Art Theatre as she could. She helped paint the scenery for
The Cricket on the Hearth,
in which he had the lead part. But carried away with the story, she claimed in her memoirs that the key moment in their romance took place after she played Ophelia to his Hamlet in the Moscow Art Theatre for a charity performance. Her version includes everyone, including Stanislavsky and Aunt Olya, congratulating her on her performance after the curtain. An emotional Misha then pulls her into the wings and kisses her passionately. Although the circumstances are unlikely, she was so innocent of the facts of life that she may well have thought, as she claims, that she would have a child if such a man kissed her.

‘But now you must marry me,’ she told him.

‘What could be better?’ he laughed.

Misha and Olga, whatever the exact details surrounding their decision to get married, undoubtedly acted on the spur of the moment without telling anyone. They knew that if they did ask for permission, it would be refused on the grounds of Olga’s age and Misha’s circumstances, and she would be taken home to Tsarskoe Selo immediately.

So early one morning in September 1914, soon after the outbreak of war, Olga packed a small suitcase with her passport, wash-bag and a new nightdress and slipped out of Aunt Olya’s apartment on Prechistensky bulvar without being seen. It must have taken considerable courage, even when carried away by romantic fever. She took a
drozhky
to join Misha and together they drove to a small Orthodox church at the other end of Moscow. Misha, saying that they did not have much time, handed their passports to the priest, a very old man with a wrinkled face. The priest clearly did not want to be hurried and kept shaking his head in disapproval. The bride and groom each grasped a flickering candle, and two bystanders, engaged by Misha, held the crowns over their heads. The fact that Olga was a Lutheran does not appear to have been a problem. By Orthodox standards it certainly seems to have been a simple, short ceremony. Even so, Olga claimed later that Misha was constantly looking at his pocket watch, afraid of being late for that afternoon’s performance.

For Olga, the enormity of what they had just done sank in only after they had returned to Misha’s apartment. They sat down to drink some tea from the samovar in his bedroom. The bed was so small that she wondered where she was supposed to sleep. Although the apartment had appeared large to Sergei Chekhov, it must have seemed very small to Olga, brought up in the houses at Tiflis and Tsarskoe Selo. And they had to share it with Misha’s old wet nurse as well as her mother-in-law. The atmosphere must have been unbearably oppressive. Next door, Natalya lay prostrate in her darkened bedroom. She had collapsed in shock and grief at discovering that her beloved son had married without telling her. That afternoon, even the egocentric Misha must have realized ‘that he could not go to work at the theatre on the day of his wedding, leaving together these two irreconcilable women in his life.

Aunt Olya found out a few hours later. One of the actors at the Moscow Art Theatre came up and congratulated her. She asked why.

‘Oh, but your nephew has got married,’ he said to her.

‘Which nephew?’ she asked.

‘Mikhail Aleksandrovich.’

‘Who’s he married?’

‘Your niece, Olga Konstantinovna.’

Distraught, she went straight home to Prechistensky bulvar. Olga wasn’t there, so she rushed round to Misha’s apartment. Olga herself opened the door. Aunt Olya fainted on the landing and Misha had to carry her into the apartment. Volodya, the defeated rival who turned up soon afterwards, described the situation in a letter to his mother: ‘You can’t imagine what a scene it was. [Aunt Olya] wanted to give Mishka a beating, then she changed her mind. She started to faint, she sobbed. In another room [Olga] was in hysterics. In the third one Natalya Aleksandrovna was lying unconscious. The scandal was grandiose and is still going on. I can’t imagine how it is going to end. Aunt Olya sent a telegram to St Petersburg and probably the parents are going to arrive tomorrow. How terrible it all is! Boris [his friend] and I have sworn never to get married.’

Aunt Olya returned home in despair. She sent an emissary that evening to try to convince Olga to return to the apartment, and then in the early hours Uncle Vladimir, the opera singer, arrived to persuade the young bride to come back. Olga received little support from Misha, who was appalled by the scandal they had unleashed. The self-absorbed young actor clearly felt sorrier for himself than for his seventeen-year-old bride. ‘I said that [Olga] herself should make the decision,’ he wrote to Aunt Masha, ‘and she decided to go to see her aunt just to calm her down. I decided to allow [Olga] to go back to St Petersburg with her mother in order to prepare her father and tell him the news. Now a few words about myself. I am in such a state, that I cannot write coherently. I won’t say anything about the insults and worries that I have undergone. A lot more are still to come my way.’

Aunt Olya, meanwhile, had sent a telegram to her sister-in-law, Lulu Knipper: ‘Come at once.’ On receiving it, Olga’s mother had taken the next train to Moscow and arrived the following evening. Her first question was evidently to find out whether Olga had married because she was pregnant. Olga assured her that was not the case.

‘Thank God for the lesser evil,’ replied her mother.

The train journey by wagon-lit back to Petrograd took thirteen hours. Before they reached Tsarskoe Selo, her mother told her to go straight to bed and stay there. She would tell her father when he returned from the ministry that she was ill.

Olga clearly needed little encouragement. She stayed in bed for two days, ‘crying her eyes out’.

Her mother gave her a good talking-to, emphasizing that she and Misha were married and nothing could now be done about that, but she should not commit a second blunder by having a child with Misha before she had got to know him better. Olga was confined to her bedroom, but she had already seen how she could exploit her position. She threatened suicide if her parents refused to allow her to return to Misha. Even her father in all his anger had to face the fact that the marriage was lawful and could be annulled only by a Church consistory. Olga, no doubt to heighten the pathos, recounted in her memoirs how she was allowed finally to return to Moscow, taking with her no more than a single set of clothes and no jewellery, on her father’s insistence.

Misha and his mother met her at the station in Moscow. Apparently, not a word was said in the
drozhky
on the way back to the apartment. It was a most unromantic homecoming. Things, however, must have improved that winter, both in their relationship and in Misha’s career. The next year, when Misha came back to Petrograd with the Moscow Art Theatre for the spring season, the young couple appear to have become completely accepted by the parents. ‘We’re already in Petrograd for a week,’ Olga wrote to Aunt Masha in Yalta. ‘Misha has given three performances. The success is unbelievable. However, you probably know that already from the newspapers. We’re staying with my parents. Papa is treating Misha very very well. There is complete peace.’