The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (6 page)

‘Beautiful Mashechka,’ wrote Misha at the same time to his aunt. ‘Let your genius nephew greet you and tell you that here in Olya’s family he is being received wonderfully ... Today [Olga’s] family are going to see
The Cricket.
I am longing to go home to Mama and if it wasn’t so wonderful with [Olga‘s] family, I would have long ago died from homesickness. Waiting for your honoured reply. Count Mikhail Chekhov.’

Another member of the family recorded: ‘I was at the family dinner with [Olga’s] parents. I can remember being very surprised seeing Misha wearing a jacket and a collar although the collar was a soft one. [Olga] and he were sitting next to each other at the table, kissing every minute and putting the best bits of food on to each other’s plates.‘

But the idyll did not last long when they returned to Moscow in the early summer. Misha told her that she would get used to the apartment, but having to share it with an insomniac mother-in-law who hated her made it hard to hide her unhappiness. Meals were a penance, and Olga would try to find an excuse to slip away as soon as possible to escape to their bedroom. Only Mariya, the clumsy old peasant wet nurse, who had ‘two left hands’, was kind to her. According to Olga, Mariya was treated ‘like a slave’, with Natalya screaming at her in the kitchen and summoning her in the night when she could not sleep.

Misha, like almost everyone in Russian intellectual circles, wanted to avoid conscription. He later wrote how ‘waiting for one’s call-up medical examination was agony’. He admitted that he was in a state of total panic as he made his way towards the conscription centre in Moscow. He had confided his fears to an elderly member of the Moscow Art Theatre staff, who had then accompanied him to provide moral support. Misha almost froze when prodded and yelled at by corporals, who ordered these young male civilians to strip off in the filth and cold of the building. It seemed to go on for hours and with no purpose. Anxious relatives peered through the windows, trying to see what was going on. The conscripts stood in line naked for two hours or more as they queued for the doctors. Misha’s legs could hardly keep him upright. The exhausted doctor, who finally examined his heart and lungs with his stethoscope, called out: ‘Three months!’ Misha nearly collapsed in relief. There was some doubt about his state of health, so they would call him back for re-examination later. His sentence was suspended. It took him nearly another hour to recover his clothes, and when he emerged he was deeply touched to find that his confidant from the theatre was still there to ascertain his fate.

Olga’s brother, Lev, on the other hand, ran away from his high school at the age of seventeen to volunteer for the army. He later called it a ‘surge of false patriotism’. Although frustrated at the time, he was most fortunate. The authorities sent him back to his school to finish his studies. He progressed to the Moscow Higher Technical College, where he was allotted to a reserve unit. Then, almost as soon as he reached the front, he was sent back as an officer candidate at the school of horse artillery at Orel. He would graduate just as the Russian Revolution was about to destroy the world in which they had all grown up.

5. The Beginning of a Revolution

The ability of the theatrical community to exist apart from the terrible reality of the First World War seems slightly bewildering in retrospect. Their letters and personal accounts make few references to the events which were shaking Russia to pieces. They had despised the ‘patriotic plays’ of ’theatrical pasteboard’ put on in the early days of the war and concentrated on their own work.

Stanislavsky later acknowledged that ‘art showed that it had nothing in common with tendencies, politics and the topics of the day’. The collapse of the Russian armies in central and southern Poland during the summer of 1915 could have happened on another continent. Among the Knippers, that most Germanic and musical of families, there appears to have been no mention of the anti-German riots of June 1915 in Moscow, when Bechstein pianos were hauled into the street and set on fire.

These disorders were largely inspired by hatred for the Tsarina—‘the German woman’. She was seen, along with ministers bearing Germanic-sounding names, as proof of the enemy within. Rumour-mongers assured everyone that she had a direct telephone line to Berlin to give away the plans of the Russian high command. Her treachery, they claimed, was the reason why so many Russian soldiers were suffering in vain. This growing belief that the incompetence of the Tsarist regime was in fact a smokescreen for corruption and treason did not disturb Misha and his friends in the theatre. Their bohemian world despised politics and politicians as much as military patriotism and futile sacrifice. Some of them, such as Meyerhold, passionately supported the cause of revolution. And even Konstantin Stanislavsky, a patrician merchant as well as actor, looked forward to ‘the miraculous liberation of Russia’. He was convinced that it would bring a new era of artistic freedom and enlightenment. He also failed to foresee that his family business, which subsidized the Moscow Art Theatre, would be expropriated.

Apart from officers of the old school, the greatest believers in the war against Germany had been their relatives: the young women of the nobility and upper middle class who had volunteered to roll bandages and serve as nurses for the tragic mass of suffering soldiers - the amputees, the blind, the gangrenous and the shell-shocked. Many of these well-brought-up young ladies regarded this service as much more than a duty. They saw it as a spiritual experience, a homage to Christ washing the feet of the poor. The Tsarina set up her own little hospital, with the young Grand Duchesses suitably attired, but their patients do not appear to have been chosen for the seriousness of their wounds, which suggests something akin to a Petit Trianon version of medicine.

The mainly peasant soldiers, patronized by these earnest women, had never shared the middle class’s enthusiasm for the war on its outbreak. They had known that once again the peasantry would be treated as ‘meat for the cannon’. Their villages had mourned their departure with the traditional lamentations of a funeral, never expecting to see these sons again. And the fact that they were commanded by young
barins,
members of the landowning class, who in recent years had taken back their land to profit from rising corn prices, had not improved relations between officers and men who felt that they were still treated as little better than serfs.

The war did not stop a group from the Moscow Art Theatre, including Stanislavsky, Olya Knipper-Chekhova and the great actor Vasily Kachalov, from touring southern Russia in the late spring of 1916. When it was over, the cast relaxed at the Caucasian spa of Essentuki, which Stanislavsky knew well from previous visits. They enjoyed trips out into the steppe and other diversions, but Stanislavsky himself found it hard to relax. He was in the middle of a row with Nemirovich-Danchenko over the management of the theatre.

Misha had not accompanied them. ‘I hope you aren’t angry with me for not having written for a long time,’ he wrote from Moscow to Aunt Masha that summer. ‘It is so nice not to be doing anything, although we are all three in town, but we are still in a very peaceful mood. My
Kapsulka
[my little capsule, i.e. Olga, who was now pregnant] isn’t particularly happy to be stuck in the city with Mama. She was dreaming of sketching somewhere in fields and forests. But what can I do? She shouldn’t have married me. She could have married Volodya, for example. But she preferred to share my fame with me than to be the wife of a provincial judge.’

For the heavily pregnant Olga, relations with Misha’s possessive mother in the shared apartment had become unbearable. To make matters far worse, Misha was drinking again. He poured vodka into his beer for what he called ‘deep effect’, claiming that he was ‘a true Russian’, and drank constantly until he collapsed. At night he would wake suddenly and cry out: ‘Paper! Pen! Write, Olinka! Write! Great thoughts have come to me.’

As the earlier letter suggested, Misha had fallen out with his cousin, Volodya, who resented the way he was treating Olga. ‘My dear Masha,’ he wrote to his aunt, ‘I love you but please keep that harmful parasite Volodka away from you. I know that he is sitting in your house in Yalta, writing letters to girls in Moscow, saying that you are going to give him a marriage settlement. He can write whatever he wants, but I am sorry for the girls, and your honour also means something to me.’ This letter also contained three drawings, a self-portrait signed ‘me’, a sun with big rays, labelled ‘you’, and the third, a heap of rubbish with flies buzzing round it, entitled ‘Volodka’.

Olga claimed later that she had tried to terminate the pregnancy with hot baths. When she had told Misha that she was expecting a child, he had avoided her gaze, shrugged his shoulders and left the apartment. The marriage was a farce, she realized. One day she returned to the apartment and found their bedroom door closed. She heard a giggle. Misha had brought one of his girlfriends home.

Moscow in the summer was unbearable, so finally Misha rented a dacha. Olga described it as a ‘small, utterly primitive little place, which one would only take for the shortest possible time’. She distracted herself painting while Misha, when reasonably sober, played tennis at a nearby court with a succession of girlfriends, one of whom would become his second wife. In August, when the birth approached, she returned to Moscow. Olga was just over eighteen years old when their child, a baby girl, was born on 9 September 1916. They christened her Olga, but she was always known as Ada in this family of confusing names.

Olga suffered a nervous collapse soon after the birth, presumably a form of post-natal depression, exacerbated by the state of her marriage. Another source states that she went down with meningitis. Her romantic illusions were finally, crushed by her experiences during the course of that year and the next. Misha showed no interest in their daughter and began drinking even more heavily. Olga had long been treated like a little girl, but now she found that the man she had worshipped was nothing more than a mother-dominated little boy, whatever his undoubted theatrical talents. She found herself forced to reassess everything. Married to a self-destructive drunk, she was trapped by responsibility for a baby daughter. Yet it was not just her own marriage that was collapsing. The whole of Russia and the secure existence that she had known since childhood were starting to disintegrate as fronts collapsed and talk of revolution spread in the streets.

The winter of 1916, the third of the war, was the harshest of them all. Food supplies became increasingly scarce in the rear, while at the front soldiers froze in their makeshift trenches. Their officers did not share their suffering. They lived in requisitioned houses behind the lines. Meanwhile, in Petrograd, the large garrison was becoming increasingly unreliable. Only a few of the officers were regulars. The majority now were recently commissioned civilians, many of whom began to sympathize with the demands of the soldiers to put an end to the war. Even the Tsar’s regiments offoot-guards were affected.

The greater the crisis, the more obdurate Tsar Nicholas II became. No politician could persuade him to make changes to save his throne. Once again the deep cultural split in the Russian nation emerged. The mass of the people, especially the rural population, became conscious of their own Russian identity, in contrast to their perception of foreign contamination within the court. And yet that hapless Tsar, crippled by an obsessive wife and his own obstinacy born of weakness, was the most austere, uxorious and Slavophile member of the Romanov dynasty in living memory. He had never liked the imported neo-classical style of Peter the Great’s capital. He longed instead for onion domes and massive Muscovite brick walls.

The nobility and the thoughtless rich, sensing that their privileged existence was sliding towards disaster, lost themselves in gambling parties and debauchery, drinking up their wine cellars, buying smoked sturgeon and caviar at wildly inflated prices on the black market and indulging in shamelessly open affairs. In Petrograd, following the Latin American footsteps of the tango, cocaine had also become fashionable in this
danse macabre.
French and British diplomats were shocked at the ‘hysterical hedonism’ and the careless, apocalyptic mood.

This had spread beyond the idle rich. According to Stanislavsky, it had even affected the Moscow Art Theatre itself. ‘The ethical side of the theatre is at present very low,’ he had written to Nemirovich-Danchenko from Essentuki. ‘Nowhere is there more drinking, more drunkenness than in our theatre, nowhere is there such conceit and disdain for other people and such insulting outbursts.’

6. The End of a Marriage

Stanislavsky, on the urging of Aunt Olya, intervened yet again at the end of 1916 to save Misha Chekhov from conscription. This was no longer a case of unjustified privilege. Not long after the birth of his child, whom he refused to acknowledge, Misha began to suffer a nervous breakdown. Like his father, he was incapable of assuming responsibility for himself, let alone for a young family. He could not cope with the emotional demands of a jealous mother and a miserable young wife. It is hard to imagine that any young woman could have met the approval of this emotional vampire.