Akhmatova’s room in the museum has none of the squalor of Chukovska’s description or the bleakness of Roskina’s. It is of a piece with the elegant young beauty in the drawings and paintings and sculptures and photographs. It is sparsely furnished, but as if by willful design rather than out of pathetic necessity. Only choice and rare pieces of furniture and objects have been admitted: a leather-covered chaise with curved wooden legs on which a small black leather suitcase mysteriously rests; a glass-fronted rosewood cabinet with a few interesting pieces in it (a fan, a strange bottle with a crystal stopper, a porcelain statuette of Akhmatova in her youth); a chair with a white fringed shawl thrown over it; a carved chest with a couple of leather-bound books and three commedia dell’arte rag dolls lying on it. The room looks out on the palace’s grassy, tree-filled courtyard. There is no trace in it of the line that stood in front of the Kresty prison or of the corpulent old woman Akhmatova became in the last years of her life. Shrines operate under a kind of reverse Gresham’s law: beauty, youth, order, pleasure drive out ugliness, old age, disorder, suffering. In Paris, in 1965, Akhmatova was shown an article in an émigré journal that spoke of her as a martyr, and she protested, “If they want to write about me over here, let them write about me the way they write about other poets: this line is better than that one, this is an original use of imagery, this image does not work at all. Let them forget about my sufferings.” Chekhov sounded a similar note of asperity in the summer of 1901 in a letter to Olga: “You write, ‘my heart begins to ache when I think of the silent, deep well of melancholy within you.’ What nonsense is this, my darling? I am not melancholy and never have been and feel tolerably well and when you’re with me I feel absolutely fine.” Akhmatova was fourteen when Chekhov died. Had he lived he undoubtedly would have met her in St. Petersburg literary society, and would not have complained about her looks or her clothes. He might or might not have liked her poetry, but he would have known better than anyone what she meant when she said, “Let them forget about my sufferings.”
Eleven
I left the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg after the second act of an exceptionally trite and listless Carmen, but not before mingling with the intermission crowd in one of the buffets, where children in velvet party clothes and adults in evening dress crowded around refreshment stands and carried away glasses of champagne and fruit drinks and dishes of ice cream and small plates piled with sandwiches and pastries and chocolates wrapped in cornucopias of colored foil. I felt a stir of memory, a flutter of the romance theater held for me when I was myself a child in a velvet dress.
The role of theater in relieving the bleak joylessness of Chekhov’s childhood has been noted by his biographers. He and his classmates would go to the Taganrog Theater to see plays or hear operettas, sitting in the cheap seats, and sometimes even wearing dark glasses and their fathers’ coats to avoid expulsion. (Unaccompanied schoolboys were not allowed in the theater. A boyhood memory doubtless inspired the moment in “The Lady with the Dog” when two schoolboys, illicitly smoking on the stair landing of a provincial theater, look down and see Gurov emotionally kissing Anna’s face and hands.)
Chekhov began writing plays at an early age. (The untitled manuscript of the half-baked play we call Platonov surfaced in the 1920s and was thought to have been written when he was twenty or twenty-one.) In the English-speaking world, Chekhov is better known as a dramatist than as a story writer. Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while few have even heard of “The Wife” or “In the Ravine.” But Chekhov was never comfortable as a playwright. “Ah, why have I written plays and not stories!” he wrote to Suvorin in 1896. “Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproductively.” A year earlier, when the first draft of The Seagull had been coolly received by theater people and literary friends, Chekhov had written to Suvorin, “I am not destined to be a playwright. I have no luck at it. But I’m not sad over it, for I can still go on writing stories. In that sphere I feel at home; but when I write a play, I feel uneasy, as though someone were peering over my shoulder.”
Chekhov wrote “The Steppe” (1888) in a month and “The Name-Day Party” (1888) in three weeks; it took him almost a year each to drag the Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard out of himself. Ill health undoubtedly played a role, but there is reason to think that the feeling of being watched as he worked, of no longer being alone in his room, was implicated as well. Of course, writing a play is never as private an act as writing a story or a novel. As he works, the playwright feels a crowd of actors, directors, scenery designers, costumers, lighting specialists, and sometimes even an audience at his back. He is never alone, and he evidently likes the company. But, just as Chekhov never resolved his ambivalence toward actual guests, so he never resolved his ambivalence toward the imaginary figures who, peering over his shoulders when he wrote for the theater, inhibited him as he was not inhibited when he wrote stories. (In 1886, though, when his stories first began attracting notice, he reported a similar feeling of invasion to his friend Viktor Bilibin: “Formerly, when I didn’t know that they read my tales and passed judgment on them, I wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes; now, I’m afraid when I write.”) The theater drew and repelled Chekhov in equal measure. When, in 1898, he was approached by Nemerovich-Danchenko of the newly formed Moscow Art Theater, for permission to perform The Seagull, he refused. He had sworn off the theater. As Nemerovich-Danchenko reported in his memoirs, “he neither wished nor did he have the strength to undergo the great agitation of the theater that had occasioned him so much pain.” Nemerovich persisted, however, and prevailed. Had he not, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard might still be rattling around the imaginary lumber room where Chekhov stored the subjects he didn’t want to “waste.”
During a torpid passage in the Petersburg Carmen, my mind drifted to a small, odd detail in “The Lady with the Dog.” As Gurov and Anna are strolling around Yalta after they have picked each other up in the restaurant, Gurov tells her “that he had taken his degree in Arts, but had a post in a bank; that he had trained as an opera singer, but had given it up.” Trained as an opera singer! After Chekhov drops this arresting piece of information about his hero, he moves on so quickly that it scarcely registers. Chekhov never returns to it; few readers of the story will recall it. Chekhov is characteristically laconic about Gurov. He doesn’t even tell us why he is in Yalta. He simply deposits him there. Chekhov was always admonishing writers who sent him manuscripts to trim down their work. “Abridge, brother, abridge! Begin on the second page,” he advised his brother Alexander in 1893. He may have begun “The Lady with the Dog” on his own second page, preferring a lacuna to an overlong explanation of why a healthy, youngish married man would be alone for a month at a seaside resort peopled largely by consumptives and women with symptoms of hysteria. But he pauses to tell us that Gurov is a failed artist and a reluctant bank official, and goes on to speak of his womanizing as if it were a kind of natural by-product of his antipathy to the Philistine male business world. “In the society of men, he was bored and not himself; with them, he was cold and uncommunicative, but when he was in the company of women he felt free, and knew what to say to them and how to behave; and he was at ease with them even when he was silent.” Gurov speaks of women as “the lower race,” but he doesn’t mean it. Women represent the freedom and ease of art, as men stand for the constraint and anxiety of commerce.