Winning and Losing at the Great Game of Intimacy

A favorite professor of my undergraduate years taught the short stories of Anton Chekhov as models of supreme, writerly virtues: brevity, compression, (seeming) simplicity, a cold realism, yet deep compassion for the felt experience of human suffering. He also extolled Chekhov’s personal life—brief, cool, practical, compassionate—giving the impression that the style was the man. The Soviet Union was falling apart then, but this Chekhov was a writer the Soviets could claim as a pre-Revolution hero of the people: a wise, kind doctor who served in public health crises; traveled at great personal risk to a penal colony to write an early work of social science; helped build schools, libraries, sanatoriums, and local infrastructure; cared for his family as devoted son and brother; was a non-believer before atheism became state policy; and had brought fame to the motherland as a giant of literature and theater around the world. The fact that he died in 1904 at the age of 44, of the “Romantic affliction” and “poet-killing disease,” also meant he could never portray life under Lenin and Stalin. If the Soviets retroactively claimed this Chekhov for their project, it seems comical that the same Chekhov was being claimed for the West in classrooms at the end of history, where his influence showed in anglophone writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Carver, Joan Didion, Alice Munro, and Ethan Canin. American writing programs, which often taught Chekhov’s Apollonian aesthetics (despite students more often loving writers and poets who were Dionysian hot messes), agreed not to disagree with the Russians that Chekhov, though flirtatious, handsome, and famous, had been ascetic, perhaps even chaste, in his devotion to medicine (“my wife,” he said) and literature (“my mistress”). If this Chekhov had the scent of saintliness, it was partly because he cultivated it, as with “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” the jokingly self-titled photo of him visiting young women friends (here, often reproduced) that deflated worldliness with irony. He married only three years before his death; his relationship with actress Olga Knipper had been mostly epistolary and would continue to be. Their published correspondence is playful but positively demure compared to, say, the “wild filth and obscenity” that admirer James Joyce wrote to his own wife. If I felt happy, as a student, learning that Chekhov had found love late in life, I could be moved to tears by his life’s ending. Olga, who apparently adored Chekhov and whom he helped make famous with his plays, was younger and already had her own career, in Moscow, which he insisted on. His doctors had prescribed him the exile of warmer climes (Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula, and Nice, France) for his “health”—the tuberculosis killing him by inches, which he would not acknowledge—so he and Olga were often apart. In the letters they pledge their love, fuss over the shallowest parts of each other’s distant lives, gossip about the theater, and nag each other to write more often. They use nicknames (Dear Writer, Dear Actress is the title of the collection of their love letters edited by Jean Benedetti) and terms of endearment—“my wonderful horseykins,” and “my little sperm whale,” he teases Olga—with mildly sexual, romantic, or diminutive connotations. Many point to Chekhov’s probably most-anthologized short story, “Lady with the Dog,” as autobiographical, at least in terms of Chekhov’s maturation into actual love. Published in 1899, the year after he met Olga at rehearsals for his Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre, the story portrays the affair of one Gurov, an aging Muscovite, and a younger, more provincial woman, Anna, who meet in the resort town of Yalta. Gurov, who has had numerous affairs, realizes after long reflection that “only now when his head was gray he had fallen in love, really, truly—for the first time in his life” (trans. Vladimir Nabokov). In the story this means not just his affection for and new tenderness toward Anna, but also that he appears to see her as a real person and feels compassion and genuine concern for her. Readers are invited to believe this may be true, and that Anna believes she loves him. In his Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov called it “one of the greatest stories ever written,” in part for how it uses hedging words and conditional verb tenses, such as “it seemed as though…a new and glorious life would begin” [my emphasis] for the couple. As Nabokov says, “The story does not really end, for as long as people are alive, there is no possible and definite conclusion to their troubles or hopes or dreams.” If I felt happy, as a student, learning that Chekhov had found love late in life, I could be moved to tears by his life’s ending. He and Olga had traveled to Badenweiler, Germany, and she was there as comfort and witness when he began actively dying. She called a doctor to their room at his request. Chekhov sat up in bed and said, “Ich sterbe” (I’m dying, in German), as if in courtesy to his German colleague, and that doctor ordered champagne, a tradition then when one doctor attended another’s death. Chekhov famously, according to Olga, studied his full glass, smiled at her and said, “It’s been such a long time since I’ve had champagne.” He drank it to the lees, lay down quietly, and in the time it took Olga to run to his side, he was gone. Counting from his first major pulmonary hemorrhage, in 1897, he missed the cure for TB by only 45 years. Russia and eventually the world grieved with his widow, and his reputation only grew. “His plays are produced more frequently than those of any other playwright, except for William Shakespeare,” says scholar Rhonda Blair. “It is possible to argue that Chekhov gave us modern tragicomedy.” Olga lived another 55 years and never remarried. She was said to sit in a theater box in old age at performances of Chekhov’s plays and call out lines before the actresses playing “her” roles could say them. She and Chekhov are together forever, a different sort of Tristan and Isolde, in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where I traveled to visit their graves in 2014. What to call this Chekhov, whom I first encountered in 1988? The Master, perhaps—of vision, decency, modesty, and industry, and, one might hope, in the old game of love. • • • Would it matter if the story of the life of The Master had been shaped by lies of omission? By flattening a writer’s life, do we block the source of what made the work possible? Worse, if Chekhov’s obsession as an artist was to see fully and clearly, isn’t it a secular sin not to see his (and his partners’) full humanity? As Michael C. Finke, a longtime family friend, says in Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, one of several excellent books of his scholarship on the writer: “For years the image of Chekhov as a sexual ascetic prevailed among biographers, particularly in the West, where interest in the question was higher in the first place, and where very few scholars had access to the archival materials that might have shown otherwise. Among Russian Chekhov scholars of the pre-glasnost’ years, I believe, it was not only considerations of censorship that inhibited discussion of such matters, but also a charitable discretion and the lack of a theoretical interpretive framework—such as that offered by psychoanalytic theory —that would make the deployment of this material a valid act of scholarship rather than anachronistic and unprofessional gossip. All this has changed quite dramatically, in no small part owing to Donald Rayfield’s 1997 biography of Chekhov [that] utilized unpublished memoirs of and letters to Chekhov to replace the sexual ascetic of critical tradition with a red-blooded, and at times Don Juanish, man of the flesh.” (142-3) This Chekhov, “whose vanity and self-love were remarked by so many who knew him and loved him,” as Mike writes, had enough experience in the carnal world to satisfy any Dionysian MFA student, from sleeping (as a teen) with another man’s wife in his hometown, to the intimate relationship (much of it epistolary) with his friend’s sister, Lidiia Mizinova, before Chekhov’s marriage to Olga Knipper. Between those two women were 25 years of other women, at various levels of entanglement: actresses, painters, writers including a “lesbian” with a partner, a “black-eyed Hindi girl [i]n a coconut grove, on a moonlit night” (as Chekhov said) in the “heaven” of Ceylon, a Jewish woman with whom he had an almost-engagement broken off over conversion, the woman who would become his brother Aleksander’s wife, et al. Chekhov, it is clear now, also loved a good brothel, and a bad one too, from Western Europe to the Sea of Japan. This Chekhov surprised the non-scholarly, somewhat puritanical West, despite his bemused, direct gaze into the camera, his gentleman’s cane, and his immaculately groomed beard. I myself did not realize until recently that Chekhov was six feet tall, the first of today’s stereotyped criteria of women’s desire playing on social media. For some reason I thought he was diminutive. He had a deep voice, too, I remember writer Ivan Bunin saying. I would not have expected that either, given his breathing problems. Now, knowing the extent to which he was human and experienced, do we think he found the kind of love with Olga we might have hoped for them? That depends on our definition of love, of course. It has long been known that Chekhov could be distant and cruel with partners and friends when it came to sexual or romantic matters. His 1892 story “The Grasshopper,” eg, had “thinly disguised portraits” of his friend the painter Isaac Levitan, Levitan’s married lover, and her husband, which Chekhov may have written in part out of irritation and jealousy involving another woman in their group. Levitan was said to be ready to duel Chekhov over the scandal the story caused, and they were estranged two-and-a-half years.