Reading Chekhov

I do remember. The day before, we had visited the seaside cottage, twelve miles outside of Yalta, that Chekhov bought soon after building his villa. One could understand why he was unable to resist it. The three-room wooden house, with a porch, sits directly on the shore of a rocky coastline rimmed by cliffs; a few stone steps to the right of the door lead straight into the water. It was now a state-run museum-like the houses in Autka and Melikhovo and the town house in Moscow where the Chekhov family lived- and two agreeable women were in charge of it. One, named Lydia, was young and very well dressed-she wore a fashionable white suit and high heels. The other, Eva, an older woman, who turned out to have been at the university with Nina, was more plainly dressed. When we arrived they were sitting on the porch, at a table with a pitcher of wildflowers on it, looking out at the water. Lydia was designated as our guide and she took us into a room that served as an entry hall (pausing to sell us admission tickets) and exhibition space for photographs and memorabilia pertaining to Three Sisters, much of which Chekhov wrote in the cottage. The second, and final, room on view (the kitchen was not open for inspection) was Chekhov's reconstituted bedroom. The bed, covered with a chaste white spread, was extremely narrow, and when I wondered how he and Olga had managed to sleep in it, Lydia explained that what was now the entry hall had been Olga's bedroom. Nina, having grown up in a society where five families lived in a single room, was perhaps unaware that it was customary for pre-Revolution bourgeois married couples to sleep in separate bedrooms. But her dark comment reflected a larger negative feeling about Olga. Russians have not taken Olga to their hearts as they have Chekhov. Harvey Pitcher, the author of a sympathetic book about Olga called Chekhov's Leading Lady (1979), writes that the marriage of Chekhov and Olga "was the subject of a controversy that has never died down. Olga Knipper might be recognized as the Moscow Art Theater's leading actress and interpreter of Chekhov's heroines… but how had she succeeded in marrying Russia's most elusive literary bachelor when he was already past forty? Could she be anything but one of those predatory females often described by Chekhov himself in his fiction? And what sort of wife was it who for more than half the year continued to pursue her acting career in Moscow while her husband was confined for health reasons to the Crimean resort of Yalta, more than two days' journey from Moscow by train?"

But the enforced separation may have been crucial to the marriage's success-perhaps even to its very being. In 1895 (three years before he met Olga) Chekhov wrote to Suvorin: Very well then, I shall marry if you so desire. But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before; in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I'll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next. Whenever someone talks to me day after day about the same thing in the same tone of voice, it brings out the ferocity in me… I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky every day. [In "A Dreary Story" (1889) Chekhov writes mordantly of a wife who says exactly the same thing to her husband every morning.]

The separation had another benefit-the correspondence it generated. Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other's side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion. The letters between Olga and Anton-available in an English translation by Jean Benedetti in a volume entitled Dear Writer, Dear Actress (1996)-make wonderful reading. One marvels at the almost uncanny similarity of style between writer and actress, until one stops to remember that actors are mimics. Olga performs on paper as she performed on the stage and in life. What she does, of course-what the actors among our friends do-is only an exaggerated version of the unconscious mimicry of the other wr all engage in when we are making ourselves agreeable. The correspondence permits us to trace the relationship from its beginning, as a flirtatious friendship, to the period when the two became lovers, to the marriage itself, which probably would not have occurred if Chekhov had been left to his own devices. The letters record Olga's pressings, his dodgings, and his eventual capitulation, on the condition that "you give your word that no one in Moscow will know about our marriage until it has actually happened… Because I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around glass in hand with an endless grin on your face…"