The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read Free Page A

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.