The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read online

  The elderly actress was almost the last survivor of that extraordinary group led by Stanislavsky which had started to revolutionize dramatic art in 1898. Stanislavsky, whom she described as ‘a huge chapter’ in her life and who had fired them all with his artistic ideals, had died in 1938. Tall and elegant, with white hair and black eyebrows, he could have been an immensely distinguished professor or diplomat when not disguised in one of the many parts in which he immersed himself. The intensity with which he engaged in a role left him exhausted after a performance. Actors entering his dressing room discovered that he relaxed by taking off all his clothes and smoking a cigar. ’Just as he could wear any kind of costume,‘ observed one of the cast, ’he could wear his own naked flesh genuinely, with the utmost Hellenic simplicity.‘

  Shortly before his last illness in 1938, Stanislavsky had wanted the brilliant actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold, a companion of the early days, to succeed him at the Moscow Art Theatre. But Meyerhold had attracted the hatred of the Soviet authorities, and Stanislavsky could do little to help from beyond the grave. Meyerhold, who had been a supporter of the Bolsheviks at the time of the revolution, had fallen foul of the Stalinist regime because his plays did not conform to the new doctrine of Socialist Realism. He attacked the sterile state of Soviet theatre in a suicidally brave speech at the All-Union Congress of Stage Directors. He was arrested in June 1939. Two weeks later, his Jewish wife, the well-known actress Zinaida Raikh, was murdered in their apartment. Her body was mutilated and her eyes were gouged out. Meyerhold may well have been one of those personally tortured by Lavrenty Beria himself before being killed. Stalin signed his death warrant. Few now dared to mention his name, or that a former mistress of Beria had been given the Meyerhold apartment.

  Even the play chosen to celebrate the Soviet victory over Germany seemed to have its own ghosts. In 1917, the Moscow Art Theatre had performed The Cherry Orchard on the night of the Bolshevik coup d‘etat. And in May 1919, Olga Knipper Chekhova had been in Kharkov with a touring party to escape starvation in Moscow, when they heard during the second act of the play that the city had suddenly fallen to the White Army of General Denikin. But the heady advance of the White armies was short-lived. Denikin’s forces fell back in chaos towards the Black Sea coast. Along with a stampede of civilian refugees fearing Bolshevik vengeance, they were decimated by typhus and starvation. Olga Knipper-Chekhova and her companions in the travelling group escaped south across the Caucasus to Georgia. There, The Cherry Orchard had been their last performance in the capital, Tiflis, just before crossing the Black Sea into an indecisive exile.

  From September 1920 until their return to Moscow in the spring of 1922, Olga Knipper-Chekhova had been an émigrée: a category of deep suspicion to the Soviet authorities. But this brief period, although dangerous in itself, was nothing in comparison to the flamboyant career of her niece and namesake in Germany.

  In the autumn of 1943, the Moscow Art Theatre had requested a special honour for their greatest actress to mark her seventy-fifth birthday, but this had been received with an ominous silence from the Soviet authorities. Throughout the war she had never been invited to speak on the radio or to give solo performances as before. Other members of the family encountered similar sinister rebuffs. In the Soviet Union such signs could not be ignored. And now people were finding that the great victory had not eased the paranoia of the Stalinist regime. The recent wave of denunciations and pre-dawn raids by the NKVD made Muscovites afraid that another round of purges had begun.

  At least the building was reassuringly familiar. This theatre had literally been a second home to her for over half a lifetime. Apart from a great Art Nouveau bas-relief above the entrance, the outside was not so very different from most Moscow three-storeyed façades. Inside, the circle of ceiling lamps and door handles of the auditorium were also of Art Nouveau design. The fronts of the seats were upholstered in plush, but otherwise the walls and floors were bare of decoration. Stanislavsky had disapproved of anything which distracted attention from the performance. On the grey-green curtains, the only emblem was Chekhov’s single stylized seagull in flight. This symbol of a new reality in the theatre had remained in place throughout the revolution and the famine-stricken civil war. It had even survived the Stalinist Terror and the company being forced to stage Socialist Realist plays of pure propaganda.

  Olga Knipper-Chekhova had little to fear professionally in such a well-known role as the one she was to play for this special performance of The Cherry Orchard. In the autumn of 1943 she had played the part for the thousandth time for the troops and received fan letters from the front afterwards.

  Anton Chekhov had not written the part of Ranyevskaya with his wife in mind—he had in fact intended it for a much older actress - but this worked later to her advantage. It allowed her, even in her seventies, to continue playing the character and receive tumultuous applause, although the acclaim was perhaps more for a revered institution. She was known for her expressive hand movements - in the role of Ranyevskaya, they were fluttering and elegantly clumsy to express her emotional confusion—yet Olga Knipper Chekhova herself overdid things when nervous. Nemirovich-Danchenko once sent her a message which she had never forgotten: ‘One pair of hands is enough. Leave the other dozen pairs in the dressing room.’

  That evening, as the curtains closed on Stanislavsky’s final sound effect off-stage - the hollow thud of an axe chopping down cherry trees in the lost orchard—the 500-strong audience gave a standing ovation on this highly emotional occasion. Olga Knipper-Chekhova took her bow a few moments later. Her lowered eyes focused on the front rows. A beautiful, well-dressed woman in her forties gave her a discreet wave. Olga Knipper-Chekhova reeled back in shock and collapsed behind the curtain in confusion and terror. The glamorous woman who had waved to her, right there in the triumphant Soviet capital, was her niece, Olga Chekhova, the great star of the Nazi cinema.

  2. Knippers and Chekhovs

  Olga Knipper-Chekhova, People’s Artist of the USSR and grande dame of the Moscow stage, had no Slav blood in her body. Her husband, Anton Chekhov, had never ceased to be bemused by the utterly un-Russian family into which he had married in 1901. To the consumptive playwright, the Germanic Knippers looked so healthy; and they seemed so tidy and organized and bourgeois in comparison to his own chaotic family.

  The Knippers originally came from Saarbrücken, where the name was common. They were said to have been builders, which may explain the choice of family motto, Per ardua ad astra. Olga’s father, Leonard Knipper, had made enough money during those nineteenth-century boom years in the volatile Russian economy to allow his family to adopt the upper-middle-class style of the period. There was a grand piano in the drawing room and well-upholstered furniture. They had five servants, and the children were sent to private schools. Konstantin studied to become an engineer, while Olga, usually known as Olya, took lessons in languages, music and singing. She longed to be an actress, but her father and mother considered a career on the stage unthinkable for a well-brought-up girl.

  When Leonard Knipper died in 1894, a shock awaited his family. He had concealed his bankruptcy, but his death revealed their desperate situation. His widow, Anna, had to move to a small apartment with Olya, by then twenty-five, and Vladimir, who was just starting as a law student. Konstantin had already embarked on his career as a railway engineer. In their dramatically reduced circumstances, the small apartment had to be shared with two eccentric uncles.

  To make ends meet, Anna Salza-Knipper gave singing lessons. Her musical talents were clearly considerable. She eventually became a professor at the Moscow Conservatoire. Olya, meanwhile, gave music lessons to earn money to help her through drama school, opposition to a stage career having collapsed after her father’s death. Vladimir, the youngest in this handsome and talented family, later proved to have an even better voice than his mother and sister. After a brief career as a lawyer, he became a famous opera singer.

  Olya Knipper, in spite of
the memory of her father’s bankruptcy, showed little regard for the accumulation of money or personal possessions. The theatre was all that mattered to her. She impressed the theatre director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Philharmonic School, and was one of the young actors chosen in his crusade to revolutionize the theatre with Konstantin Stanislavsky. They wanted to throw out the pompous and melodramatic, and focus instead on everyday life, using new acting techniques which recreated that reality. Stanislavsky’s theory, which became known as the ‘System’—the idea that actors should immerse themselves totally in their part—later became famous in Hollywood as the ’Method‘.

  Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, helped greatly by Stanislavsky’s family money and the subsidies of rich supporters, set up the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. Olya became the mistress of Nemirovich-Danchenko, a great friend of Anton Chekhov and the champion of his play The Seagull. It was presumably quite an energetic relationship, since Nemirovich-Danchenko’s pet name for Olya was ‘my vaulting-horse’. But this did not stop her and Chekhov from falling in love after their first meeting that September, during rehearsals for The Seagull. Chekhov had sometimes railed against actresses—he once called them ‘cows who fancy they are goddesses’ and ’Machiavellis in skirts’—but this was partly due to his inability to keep away from them, and they from him.

  The love affair between Anton Chekhov and Olya Knipper was mostly a curious long-distance process. Except for summer visits, she stayed in Moscow with the theatre. The consumptive writer, meanwhile, was forced to remain for much of the year in the far warmer climate of Yalta in the Crimea. He called this exile ‘my hot Siberia’. The gap was bridged by letters to and fro. They sparred, sometimes quite mercilessly. She joked about Anton’s adoring former mistresses, whom she nicknamed the Antonovkas— the name of a variety of luscious apple. He teased her about her relationship with her former lover, the theatre’s elegant director. ‘Have you been carried away by his moire silk lapels?’ he wrote. Occasionally, his jester’s mask slipped, revealing his jealousy. But he had little to fear. Nemirovich-Danchenko, a pragmatist more than a cynic, knew that Olya’s relationship with the playwright was of great importance to the Moscow Art Theatre. He and Stanislavsky privately viewed the relationship as the theatrical equivalent of an important dynastic marriage.

  In the summer of 1900, as Chekhov settled down to write The Three Sisters, he resolved to marry Olya Knipper, his ‘little Lutheran’. But even when he had finished the play and they arranged their marriage the following year in Moscow, he still did not quite have the nerve to warn his mother and his utterly devoted sister, Mariya, always known as Masha. Olga’s mother, Anna Salza, was also unhappy about the marriage. After the brief service, Olya Knipper-Chekhova, as she now became, and Anton slipped away to see his friend and fellow playwright Maxim Gorky. An amazed Gorky slapped her on the back in congratulation. After this impromptu visit, the bride and groom departed for the railway station. Bewildered guests at the wedding reception were left to wait in vain, but this does not seem to have been that abnormal in the spontaneous chaos of the Chekhovian circle. Only after the wedding was over did Chekhov send his mother a telegram to announce it.

  The Chekhov and the Knipper families could not have been more different, as the playwright had so often joked. Yet there were odd similarities. Anton’s father, Pavel Chekhov, who had been born the son of serf, became a hard-nosed shopkeeper in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, but he also went bankrupt like Leonard Knipper.

  The bankruptcy of a parent often proves a powerful influence on the children affected. Some become determined to make so much money that they will feel beyond such dangers, but others long to emancipate themselves from a poverty of experience and knowledge, even more than from financial hardship. The Chekhov children took the latter route. The eldest, Aleksandr, wanted to be a writer. Nikolai became an artist and caricaturist. Anton trained as a doctor while writing his early comic pieces and short stories. Ivan was a primary school teacher, Mariya a painter and Mikhail, the youngest, a translator and general dogsbody on a literary magazine.

  Anton was the only one who made any money, so the others frequently turned to him for help and burdened him with their private catastrophes interrupting his work. Many friends and former mistresses who had fallen on hard times did likewise. In the prodigal and disordered world of the late-nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, few bothered to save money against unforeseen disaster. That was regarded as bourgeois and disgracefully un-Russian.

  Chekhov’s choice of subject for the play The Three Sisters was not entirely surprising. He had always been fascinated by such trios. One family in particular, the Golden sisters, had become closely linked with Anton and two of his brothers in St Petersburg’s bohemia of the early 1880s, a smoky demi-monde of debts, drinking and fornication. It was no wonder that the young Dr Chekhov, like most of his medical contemporaries, had to spend a large part of his professional life coping with venereal infections.

  The Chekhovs and Goldens lived and worked in the same round of literary weeklies, the boys as contributors, the girls as secretaries. The eldest of these three Jewish sisters, Anna Golden, a divorcee, became the common-law wife of Anton’s brother Nikolai, or Kolya. The youngest, darkest and thinnest of the three, Natalya Golden, fell in love with Anton, and their affair lasted two years. She was his ‘little skeleton’, even though her appetite for food was apparently as voracious as her sexual desire.

  They drifted apart, but then, in October 1888, Anton received an astonishing letter from his brother Aleksandr. ‘Natalya is living in my apartment, running the household, fussing over the children and keeping me up to scratch. And if she crosses sometimes into concubinage, that’s none of your business.’ Perhaps the greatest surprise came at the end of the letter. ‘If our parents, whose old age I intend to console by exemplary behaviour, don’t view this “intimacy” as incest, fornication and onanism, then I have nothing against marriage in church.’ Natalya also wrote to Anton professing her own astonishment at how things had turned out. She too was now keen on the idea of middle-class respectability; in fact the ‘onanism’ mentioned by Aleksandr was almost certainly due to her fear of becoming pregnant before they were married. The condoms he bought at thirty-five kopecks apiece did not seem to work. He bragged to Anton that they burst because they were not large enough.

  Nobody could accuse Natalya of being maritally ambitious. Aleksandr was a writer whose lack of financial and critical success was cruelly highlighted by the growing renown of his younger sibling. He was reduced to journalism for the right-wing Suvorin press in St Petersburg. Aleksandr was a big, powerful man with a ‘thunderous voice’ who loathed modern inventions such as the telephone or typewriter, preferring a goose-quill pen. He was also decidedly eccentric. He tried to train his chickens to use one door of the henhouse for entry and the other for exit, but they failed to understand such logic and neither threats nor inducements would alter their random behaviour. Utterly unpredictable in his own life, squalid in his surroundings and obscene in his language, both on the page and in public, he had often sought escape in the bottle and in the beds of indulgent women.

  Anton, who visited the couple in St Petersburg just over two months later, was appalled by his eldest brother’s crude behaviour in front of children and servants and his mistreatment of Natalya. On 2 January 1889, he wrote a letter of devastating criticism. It had a marked effect. From then on, Natalya ruled the marital roost. Yet her position of virtual ostracism within the wider Chekhov family improved only when she gave birth to a son, Mikhail, on 16 August 1891. This was the first legitimate grandchild for Pavel and Evgenia Chekhov and they were overjoyed. Aleksandr was soon trying to convince Anton of the blessings of marriage - or ‘God-fearing coitus’, as he preferred to put it - but it was not long before he started to suffer from impotence, probably as a result of his semi-chronic alcoholism.

  The marriage continued to undergo severe strains, mainly according to whe
ther Aleksandr was on or off the bottle. Sometimes he just disappeared. A telegram would arrive saying: ‘Am in the Crimea’ or ’Am in the Caucasus‘. Sometimes Natalya threw him out of the house when he lapsed again into alcohol and impotence. It was perhaps typical of this morally anarchic circle that the demanding Natalya, Anton’s former mistress, should write to him, complaining of his brother’s inability to satisfy her. She asked what he, as a doctor, could do to help. The answer was clearly discouraging.

  Natalya nevertheless remained devoted to Anton, especially if he came to see them on visits to St Petersburg and praised his young nephew Mikhail’s emerging talents. ‘Misha is an amazingly intelligent boy,’ he wrote in February 1895. ‘There’s a nervous energy shining in his eyes. I think he’s going to grow into a talented man.’ Aleksandr was also boastful of his son’s precocious prowess. He later claimed that, as well as speaking French and German, Misha at the age of twelve was already chasing girls. Natalya, however, had been so determined to protect her precious Misha from bad influences that she had made Aleksandr send Kolya, the unruly fourteen-year-old elder son from his previous liaison, away to the merchant navy. She became increasingly eccentric. Misha could do no wrong in her eyes, but her overpowering possessiveness evidently unbalanced him. He later told friends that she had seduced him. This was almost certainly untrue, but the brilliant youth who was to marry Uncle Anton’s niece by marriage was slightly unbalanced. He seems to have inherited his father’s self-destructive streak.

  During these turn-of-the-century years, Anton Chekhov’s brother-in-law Konstantin Knipper, had become a successful engineer in the great days of Russian railroad expansion. With his immaculate beard and the official frock-coated uniform of the imperial railways, Konstantin Knipper had the air of a better-looking version of the Tsar himself. He directed the construction of the Trans-Caucasian line, living with his young family near Tiflis. His wife, Yelena, usually known as Lulu, was also German, and also musical. Their daughter Olga, Mikhail Chekhov’s future wife, later claimed that Tchaikovsky had been her mother’s first love, a particularly improbable invention. She also claimed, in her exasperatingly disingenuous memoirs, that her mother was close friends with Tolstoy, Rachmaninov and the Tsarina.