The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (7 page)

‘She had been brought up in an orderly German environment,’ wrote Sergei Chekhov, ‘and could not put up with the breadth of his soul and his indifference towards the conditions in which he lived. She was attuned only to the superficial tone of life and his philosophical mind was alien to her. I think that he never opened his spiritual world to her and apparently she thought him simply insane sometimes. Her relations with her mother-in-law became worse and worse.’ This explanation, while basically true, was unsympathetic and also misleading in one sense. Misha really was close to madness and to suicide, as he admitted himself much later. ‘In the drawer of my writing table,’ he wrote, ‘lay a loaded Browning, and I found it very hard to resist the temptation.’ Not many eighteen-year-olds, and especially from Olga’s sheltered background, could have been expected to cope with Misha and his semi-demented mother.

One also wonders how they coped at a time of acute food shortages. Misha’s old wet nurse, Mariya, had to stand in queues for them while Olga looked after their little daughter and Natalya retired to her bedroom. Misha used black-market contacts to maintain his supplies of vodka, a commodity banned by the Tsar in a show of austere patriotism at the beginning of the war. In fact the bread riots of 1915 and 1916 were partly caused by peasants diverting grain supplies to the far more profitable exercise of making
samogon,
moonshine vodka. As the government took a tougher line with the rural population to secure food supplies, the peasants increasingly held back their grain or fed it to their cattle. Prices rose even more rapidly and food shops in the cities emptied. Queuing for bread now sometimes meant sleeping in the street outside a bakery. And bread queues seethed with rumours and political argument.

Olga’s younger brother, Lev Knipper, was by now an officer cadet at an artillery school. He graduated as an ensign of artillery in the early spring of 1917 and, like so many, his fate in the coming civil war was largely dictated by his whereabouts at its outbreak.

Lev and Olga’s parents, meanwhile, were fortunate to be living in Tsarskoe Selo rather than in Petrograd itself. Although the spontaneous chaos of the February revolution which overthrew the Romanovs was comparatively good-natured at first, an uglier side appeared within a few days. Gangs looted shops and middle-class houses, looking for alcohol. Women and girls were raped with impunity, since policemen who had escaped lynching were in hiding and trying to escape the city. Any respectably dressed citizen in a collar and tie was likely to be robbed in the street on the grounds that he was a bourgeois. The left-wing writer Maxim Gorky predicted that the revolution ‘would probably collapse in ruin worthy of our Asiatic savagery’. Many also remembered Pushkin’s phrase: ‘the Russian riot, senseless and without mercy’.

The final downfall of the Romanov dynasty came on 3March, with the renunciation of the throne by the Grand Duke Mikhail, who had been nominated as the Tsar’s successor. The news produced scenes of wild rejoicing in the streets of Petrograd and Moscow. Red flags were brandished and hung from windows. Crowds sang a Russian version of the Marseillaise, railwaymen sounded the whistles on locomotives at main-line railway stations, while industrial workers sounded the steam whistles of their factories. No owner or foreman dared object. In many places, enthusiasts broadcast the message of freedom by ringing church bells, whether or not the priest agreed. In Moscow, the monstrous statue of Tsar Alexander III was brought down with dynamite and crowds hauling on ropes, as if the Lilliputians were finally victorious. Red flags were raised at the front and on warships, to the horror of Tsarist officers, and parades were held, with military brass bands booming out the Marseillaise.

The sudden collapse of the autocracy took professional revolutionaries, such as Lenin and Trotsky, completely by surprise. They were exasperated to find themselves so far from the centre of events. But as things turned out, they had not missed their opportunity. The leaders of the Provisional Government, acting out of high-minded liberal naïvety in the case of Prince Lvov, and theatrical vanity in the case of his successor, Aleksandr Kerensky, proved easy to outmanoeuvre. The neck of the new freedom was exposed to the unscrupulous Leninists.

Kerensky was a lawyer. He was small and his starting eyes and curved nose made him look like a very intelligent frog, yet with ringing rhetoric and bursts of emotional energy he could dominate huge crowds. (Olga Chekhova later observed that whenever she saw Dr Goebbels speak, she could not help thinking of Kerensky.) Kerensky managed to convince many highly educated people - Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko among them - that he was a political genius, the Napoleon who would bring revolutionary excesses back under control and produce human justice. But historical parallels, especially in times of revolution and war, are often dangerously misleading. The balancing act which he had to undertake between reassuring the bourgeoisie and Russia’s Western allies on one hand, while at the same time appeasing the impatience of workers and peasants to take over factories and farmland, would have undermined the credibility of even the greatest leader.

Stanislavsky’s family business, the Alekseiev factories, were seized by the workers, and his house, as he admitted to a friend, had been ‘done over’. Respect for private property had collapsed with the elastic notion of ‘revolutionary expropriation’. Stanislavsky now had nothing more than a salary from the Moscow Art Theatre. He could no longer subsidize it as in the past. Yet his enthusiasm for this new world of freedom did not diminish. He was certain it would lead not only to a fairer world, but to a more beautiful one. On the other hand, he also admitted that he was politically illiterate.

Kerensky was certainly no Napoleon, yet there were, nevertheless, a number of echoes of the French Revolution. Scurrilous, often pornographic pamphlets circulated depicting sexual excesses at court in lurid detail. It was an interesting example of supposedly patriotic prurience. The Tsarina - ‘the German woman’ - was accused of extraordinary sexual antics with Rasputin, rather as Marie Antoinette—’the Austrian woman’ - had been with her favourite, the Princesse de Lamballe.

A far more important resemblance to 1789, and every other revolution to come, was the abrupt collapse of law and order. Suspects, especially if well-to-do, were lynched, not tried. Citizen militias sprang up everywhere, especially the Red Guards, young workers with captured rifles ready to defend their factories against ‘sabotage’ by the proprietors. They formed a prototype for the Bolshevik militia later that year.

On 18 June, 400,000 people marched through Petrograd with banners proclaiming ‘All Power to the Soviets!’, a Bolshevik slogan, even though many did not yet know it. The strikes were endless as the demands of workers mounted and so many political meetings took place that production was continually interrupted anyway. This new attitude spread rapidly to the front, where soldiers refused to be on duty for more than eight hours a day, in line with the demands of the industrial workers. More ominously, the number of mutinies grew as well as the increasingly brutal murder of officers. The military authorities did not dare institute court-martial proceedings.

The more technical side of the civil administration was less threatened. Olga’s father, Konstantin Knipper, was fortunate to be a railway engineer as well as an official. His skills were still needed. But if he had been one of the Tsar’s ministers, as Olga later claimed in her memoirs, he would not have survived as he did.

The very last performance of the Moscow Art Theatre before the Bolshevik takeover in Moscow was a special guest performance of
The Cherry Orchard
at the Theatre of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Stanislavsky remembered ‘gray-clad mobs’ outside on the street, and ’mysterious preparations’ with soldiers ‘gathering around the Kremlin’. The atmosphere in the auditorium was feverish and the actors stood behind the curtain listening to the buzz. They wondered what this working-class audience would make of
The
Cherry Orchard at such a moment. ‘We won’t be able to finish the performance,’ Stanislavsky records them saying to each other. ‘Either they’ll drive us from the stage or they’ll attack us.’

In a not entirely convincing account of the evening, Stanislavsky attributed the play’s success to ‘the lyricism of Chekhov, the eternal beauty of Russian poetry, [and] the life-mood of country gentility in old Russia ... It seemed to us that all of them wanted to wrap themselves in the atmosphere of poetry and to rest there and bid peaceful farewell forever to the old and beautiful life that now demanded its purifying sacrifices.’ Yet the final sound-effect of the axe chopping down a cherry tree was rapidly followed by the distant sound of gunfire. When the audience emerged into the street, wounded revolutionaries and bystanders were already being taken away in trucks. The Moscow Art Theatre soon sent a message to the Moscow Soviet, asking how it could best serve the people. The reply came back telling them to reopen as soon as possible.

The Bolshevik coup was resisted more effectively in Moscow than in Petrograd and the centre of the city suffered during ten days of heavy fighting. St Basil’s Cathedral was damaged in the artillery exchanges. This upheaval sent Misha into a hysterical state, but other members of the extended family ran greater risks. Vladimir Knipper, living at 5 I Arbat, was seized by officers resisting the Bolshevik takeover after an unbalanced inhabitant on the top floor of their building started lighting different lamps in different rooms. This had provoked suspicions that he was signalling to the enemy. A drunk staff captain put a Nagan pistol to Vladimir’s head: ‘The Bolsheviks are ruining our capital and you’re helping them, you bastards. I’ll kill you.’ Another officer whispered to him that he was Olga Knipper-Chekhova’s brother and he relented.

A real tragedy befell the family less than a month later, on 13 December 1917. Volodya Chekhov, Misha’s cousin and former rival in love, somehow managed to take Misha’s Browning pistol from the drawer of his writing table and shoot himself.

Just before the funeral, Misha caught sight of his uncle, Ivan Chekhov, Volodya’s father. He looked emaciated as well as crushed. Misha never forgot his prominent nose, the suit hanging off him and the crumpled trousers. He looked ‘like a carved wooden figure nailed to the floor’. Volodya’s mother gently nudged Misha, who was staring at the corpse of their son in its coffin. ‘Go to him,’ she whispered, ‘but I beg you, my dear, don’t cry.’ Misha gazed at his cousin’s face, remembering it with make-up and burnt cork from the charades after Aunt Masha’s Sunday night supper parties.

We cannot tell whether Volodya shot himself because he was still in love with Olga, as she suggested later, or because his father was so determined that he should be a lawyer. Perhaps the destruction of their world also played a part in his decision to kill himself. In any case, the effect on Misha was profound. He collapsed completely and was granted a six-month leave of absence from the Moscow Art Theatre. Photographs show that he aged dramatically during this period.

Another member of the family to suffer at this time was Aunt Masha, who came to Moscow from Yalta for Volodya’s funeral and contracted typhoid. As was standard practice in this lice-borne disease, her head was shaved immediately. She took that in good heart, but Volodya’s death had hit her hard. Aunt Masha, like almost everyone, was so impoverished that she found food very hard to obtain. She had inherited the rights to her brother Anton’s plays, but the Moscow Art Theatre could no longer pay royalties. Their mother, Evgenia Chekhova, who was still alive and living with her in Yalta, was too senile to understand that things had changed and that economies were necessary. Aunt Masha was reduced to taking in sewing.

Olga realized during the course of that tumultuous year of two revolutions that she would have to leave her increasingly unbalanced husband. In May, Misha had to abandon rehearsals of
The Seagull
due to nervous depression exacerbated by drinking.

It appears that Olga had left Misha shortly before Volodya’s suicide, but this is not entirely certain. There is as little common ground in the accounts of the end of their marriage as there was about its beginning. Misha wrote later that Olga had been lured away by an adventurer called Ferenc Jaroszi, an officer of the Austro-Hungarian army who had been a prisoner of war in Russia. ‘He was,’ according to Misha, ‘an adventurer of the sort about which my father had recounted many fascinating stories. Elegant, good-looking, charming and talented as he was, he had at his disposal a great inner strength, which made him irresistible.’ Misha claimed that when Olga came into the room - ‘already in her overcoat’ - to say goodbye that December, she remarked: ’How ugly you look! Well, be happy. You’ll soon forget it.‘ She then, apparently, gave him a friendly kiss and left. Not once in his memoirs does Misha mention their daughter.

Olga’s account is that she simply could not put up with Misha’s drunkenness and obsessions any longer. Her adolescent infatuation for him had clearly turned as much to pity as to anger. She moved her possessions and the baby to the Knipper family’s apartment in Moscow at 23 Prechistensky bulvar. But having made the decision to leave, she knew that she could not survive on the small sums of money her mother secretly sent her in defiance of Konstantin Knipper, who was still furious with his favourite daughter. The rampant inflation of the time made each batch of banknotes increasingly worthless. And city-dwellers, even when in possession of money, found that food was increasingly hard to come by. People began to live off barter and contacts. Olga claimed that her daughter’s life was saved during that winter of 1917—18 by the great singer Feodor Chaliapin, who gave her milk from the cow which he had brought into Moscow for his family’s use.

The shock of being poor for the first time in her life was considerable, and undoubtedly created Olga’s determination and ambition for the future. Since she could no longer depend on Misha, she had to forge her own career. Her paintings would not provide a secure income, so she worked for a wine merchant as an office assistant. She also claimed to have carved chess pieces from wood to sell, but perhaps she borrowed this idea from Misha, who used to make them when in his lowest depths of depression.