The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (4 page)

Lev, after being sent to Moscow for treatment, recovered gradually and slowly began to walk again. But his childhood illness made him a solitary, rather introverted character. He did not join his two sisters when they played in laundry baskets, pretending that these were ships in which they sailed from room to room, each one designated a different country. The girls read
Robinson Crusoe
and
Don Quixote,
and adored dressing up. Yet even though they were not unduly noisy or ill-disciplined, Konstantin Leonardovich Knipper often exploded into rages, especially if his authority was questioned. Olga claimed that she once threw herself out of a ground-floor window in protest at one of her father’s outbursts. Whether or not the father’s rages were a contributory factor, Lev appears to have grown into a boy who controlled and concealed his emotions. Nobody knew what he was thinking.

Konstantin Knipper, although he loomed large when at home, was frequently taken away by his work on the railways. In 1904, with the onset of the Russo-Japanese War, he was summoned to rebuild a large section of the Trans-Siberian railway to help transport troops to the Far East. Whenever possible, Lulu Knipper accompanied her husband. On one of these occasions, she left the four-year-old Lev in the custody of his Aunt Olya. She adored Lev and wrote to Anton, now her husband, afterwards: ‘I hellishly wanted a son like that for you and me.’ From then on she saw herself virtually as Lev’s surrogate mother.

It was around this time that the family left Georgia for Moscow, a temporary resting place, before they moved on to St Petersburg once Konstantin Knipper became an official in the Ministry of Transport. The fact that he was of German origin and a Lutheran did not impede his career. Konstantin Knipper made clear at home that he wanted his only son, Lev, to follow in his footsteps as an engineer. Lev showed little reaction, as usual.

He started to recover from his childhood illness. Aunt Olya gave him boxing gloves and a football, which provoked energetic protests from the boy’s mother, convinced that he should take no risks. But it was not long before Lev became attracted to dangerous physical activity, almost certainly to compensate for the humiliations of an over-coddled childhood. He was also to become extremely competitive. His only foray into engineering as a child was to build a rudimentary plane ‘which looked like a see-saw’. It crashed, injuring his spine. The two sisters, Ada and Olga, looked after him for a whole summer holiday, and Aunt Olya also came to care for him.

Behind his controlled mask, Lev was clearly intelligent, so his overt refusal to indicate any special interest exasperated his father. Lev had in fact discovered his vocation, but did not reveal it to anyone, including himself, for many years. When he was about six, his parents took him to a concert in St Petersburg, presumably hoping like most adults that he would not embarrass or irritate them by shuffling around out of boredom. But the music—it was Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony - struck him with such exquisite power that he was quite overcome. He later described it as his ‘first music shock’. It was so intense that, to his mother’s alarm, he burst into tears. An evidently displeased Konstantin Knipper had to lead his young son out of the concert hall and take him home.

The two Knipper girls received piano lessons as a matter of course, but even in this musical family Lev did not. His mother used to organize musical soirees at home, so Lev hid in the drawing room to listen. He loved the Gypsy folksongs called romans performed by a friend of his mother: they seem to have had a lasting influence on some of his subsequent work. And whenever Aunt Olya was visiting St Petersburg with the Moscow Art Theatre during its spring season, she used to play adaptations of Beethoven symphonies with her brother Konstantin or sing
bergerettes
to her own accompaniment. Clearly Lev had so sealed himself off in boyhood that he never expressed his musical yearnings and nobody in the family guessed them until he became an adolescent.

Lev’s secondary schooling took place at the First Classical School Gymnasium. He was fortunate to have an excellent music teacher, and at last his inclination blossomed. In the school orchestra he wanted to learn all the instruments—wind, percussion and string. He even started to become a normal boy of his time, reading Jules Verne, Fenimore Cooper and
The Three Musketeers.
Most strikingly, he showed himself determined to conquer all the feelings of physical inferiority he had experienced as a child. He spent time running and engaging in the Russian version of ‘French wrestling’. Aunt Olya, thrilled to see this physical improvement, and proud of the presents she had given him to such family outrage, now brought back a full footballer’s outfit from one of her foreign trips.

At home as well as at school, Lev followed one passion after another. He was given a chemistry set and experimented constantly until an explosion led to its instant confiscation. His parents finally found a piano teacher for him, but the teacher in question was clearly of the old-fashioned school, making him play scales the whole time. After the freedom and innovation of the orchestra, this irritated Lev profoundly and his ‘unruly character’ revolted against this ’scale torture‘. The lessons were stopped.

Lev’s sister Olga showed none of his academic promise at all. In 1913, at the Stroganov Art School in St Petersburg, her final marks for religious education, Russian, maths, algebra, geometry, history and physics could hardly have been lower. Her French and German were adequate and she distinguished herself only in art. The reaction of many within the family was that ‘such a beauty didn’t need to go to school anyway’.

Young Olga longed to go on the stage, but her father, Konstantin, absolutely forbade any idea of the theatre as a career. He could not say so, out of loyalty to his sister, the great symbol of the Moscow Art Theatre, but actresses, like ballerinas, were seen in imperial Russia as not much better than high-class prostitutes. Yet Lulu, her mother, seems to have secretly sympathized. According to young Olga, her aunt, when acting for a season in St Petersburg, brought the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse to the house. Duse, she later claimed, patted her head and said: ‘You will definitely become an actress one day, my little one.’ Nobody, however, would have predicted that, like Aunt Olya, Olga too would marry into the Chekhov family, although in her case the marriage would prove disastrous.

3. Mikhail Chekhov

The acting talents of Olga’s future husband, Misha Chekhov, were evident from an early age. In 1907, when he was just sixteen, his besotted mother, Natalya, moved him to the school of the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg. He studied there for three years and graduated with distinction. In October 1911, aged only nineteen, he was given the lead role in the Maly’s production of Aleksei Tolstoy’s
Tsar Feodor.
It was the play which had launched the Moscow Art Theatre just before
The Seagull
and brought fame, as well as Chekhov’s attention, to Aunt Olya in the role of the Tsarina Irina.

Misha was an instant success. He had an extraordinary gift for mimicry, both facial and vocal, while his mesmerizing eyes and haunted face allowed him to play old men convincingly even before he was twenty. A first cousin, Sergei Chekhov, described Misha in the spring of 1912: ‘He was short, thin and moved restlessly. He dressed carelessly in a shabby velvet jacket and, horror of horrors, he did not just lack a starched collar, he wore no collar at all. But he had a captivating tenderness about him. He was warm and had a sweet smile which made one forget that he was not handsome. He would pull up his trousers in a characteristic gesture of exaggerated elegance, and rolled his eyes in an amusing way.’ The two of them went for walks together, fooled around and danced the tango, which was then the rage in St Petersburg. Misha gave his cousin a photograph of himself frowning and signed it with the words: ‘This is how I look after the tango.’

During the spring of 1912, the Moscow Art Theatre came to St Petersburg for its annual season. Anton Chekhov’s sister, Masha, the devoted guardian of the playwright’s flame, arranged for him to meet her sister-in-law Olga Knipper Chekhova, still the star of the Moscow Art Theatre, and she in turn promised to arrange an audition with Stanislavsky. Misha spent a sleepless night beforehand, so keen was he to join the company. The next morning he found that the collar of his only suitable shirt was so tight that it produced a ringing in the ears, and his trousers had to be hauled up so high ‘as if I had to step over puddles’.

‘Thank you, Aunt Masha,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘I can imagine what a silly and funny impression I made upon them. I am terribly shy. I can’t speak, and when I meet a person for the first time, I can’t even say two words.’ But Stanislavsky recognized his talent immediately and invited him to join the Moscow Art Theatre. The fact that he was a nephew of the theatre’s patron saint was certainly not a hindrance. In August of that year, Misha left St Petersburg for Moscow.

At first he lived under Aunt Masha’s wing in her apartment on Dolgorukovskaya ulitsa. She was a vegetarian at the time and was teased by the rest of the family. Misha called his aunt ‘the Countess’, and kissed her hand most elaborately. When he returned to St Petersburg the following year with the Moscow Art Theatre on its spring tour, he found that his father did not have much time left to live. Natalya had thrown Aleksandr out in 1908, because of his relapse into alcoholism. Since then, Misha’s father had been living in a small dacha with one servant, his dogs and his chickens, and he was now dying from cancer of the larynx. Misha spent his spare time by his father’s deathbed. Despite the pain, Aleksandr continued to make jokes until the end came in May 1913. Misha was deeply touched. The experience, as he admitted later, influenced his portrayal of death on the stage.

When Misha returned to Moscow after his father’s death, Natalya moved there with her two dachshunds to join him. They began to enjoy a style beyond his modest salary at the theatre. Perhaps they were living off the proceeds from the sale of the house near St Petersburg. In any case Misha, with his success on the stage, had acquired a taste for theatrical extrava gence. ‘I visited Mishka several times,’ Volodya Chekhov, another first cousin, wrote to his mother, who was staying during that last summer of peace in the playwright’s house at Yalta. ‘He is living in a four-roomed apartment with electric light near the Patriarshie ponds. He has bought a new piano and now he no longer borrows twenty kopecks from the porters, but is constantly handing out tips all round. He pays eighty-five roubles for his apartment. Natalya Aleksandrovna sits there in a black robe, squints and smokes, while Misha, in red shoes, grey unbuttoned trousers and no jacket, lies on the sofa and “spits at the ceiling” [an old Russian phrase which means doing nothing].’

Volodya, younger by nearly three years, hero-worshipped Misha. He also felt himself to be in his shadow and something of a poor relation. Volodya had secretly longed to be an actor too, but lacked sufficient confidence in his own talents. He also faced parental disapproval. His father, the fourth of the five Chekhov brothers, had not even graduated from secondary school. Ivan Chekhov, who appears in family photographs as elegantly bearded and bearing a faint resemblance to the young Stalin, had taught in a primary school. There he had met Volodya’s mother, a beautiful young fellow teacher with fair hair. But his career had not been a happy one.

Their side of the family saw comparatively little of the more artistic members, perhaps partly because Ivan Chekhov had convinced himself that actors were ‘second-rate people’. Volodya had not met Misha before because his parents would have nothing to do with Natalya, Misha’s mother and Anton’s former mistress. Volodya, now studying law at Moscow University, finally set eyes on him at one of Aunt Masha’s family dinners. Volodya adored the way Misha could not stop performing, often with brilliant improvisations and imitations. The two of them would invent and act out whole scenes together. And for Volodya, such associations with the theatre must have had a heady whiff of the forbidden.

The cousins used to play charades after Aunt Masha’s dinners, using all the shawls, rugs, old hats, sheets and even the big carpet from the floor in the sitting room. Sergei remembered ‘Volodya wrapped in this carpet, wriggling on the floor, pretending to be a whale’. Misha, draped in a sheet and holding a staff, played Jonah and plunged into the carpet’s mouth. Another night, however, when perhaps playing the part of Noah too literally, he fell asleep having drunk too much.

On some evenings, to Aunt Masha’s considerable distress, Misha would arrive already inebriated. She dreaded him inheriting his father’s alcoholism and offered him twenty-five roubles a month if he gave up drink. He promised to do so and took the money. Aunt Masha was very relieved, but then one evening he turned up swaying and slurring his words again. Volodya, who was with him, said gloomily that he had found Misha in this state outside in the street. Aunt Masha burst into tears, reproaching him. Misha, who had been putting on an act for fun, was horrified by the intensity of her reaction. He fell on his knees. ‘My darling Mashechka, calm down,’ he called to her in a sober voice. ‘I was pretending. Please forgive me.’ Aunt Masha was consoled and later used to tell the story, boasting how great an actor her nephew was. Yet the reprieve from alcoholism was only temporary.

The cousins’ charmed life continued after the announcement of war in August 1914. They had ignored the middle-class crowds rejoicing in the streets. Even the terrible news when the First and Second Russian Armies were destroyed in East Prussia seemed to make little difference to their existence. Volodya was in his second year at university and, during that autumn season of 1914, Misha played in Turgenev’s A
Woman from the Provinces.
He also enjoyed great success in an experimental version by the Moscow Art Theatre studio of
The Cricket on the Hearth
by Charles Dickens.

Stanislavsky’s ‘System’, Misha found, produced great demands on the actor, but he felt that he was learning far more than he ever had in St Petersburg at the Maly Theatre. It was not up to the actor simply to follow the director’s instructions. He had to create the role in a literal sense, by imagining the character he was playing and inhabiting his life. Stanislavsky did not want an actor to imitate the externals. The actor’s own emotional memories were to be used to help his re-creation, making it personal and real to him, and thus to the audience. Stanislavsky loathed the stock gestures of the theatrical profession which had made acting so mannered.