The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read Free Page B

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