Vol. 19 No. 4 · 20 February 1997
pages 31-35 | 4128 words
Tongues Wagged
Donald Rayfield
- Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper selected, translated and edited by Jean Benedetti
Methuen, 202 pp, £16.99, November 1996, ISBN 0 413 70580 3
When The News seeped out that Anton Chekhov, the most sought after of Russia’s eligible bachelors, had, in Moscow on 25 May 1901, married a Lutheran actress, Olga Knipper, at least a dozen women exclaimed: ‘Why not me?’ There were the painters: Maria Drozdova dropped her brushes and her palette when she heard the news, exclaiming that she thought God had reserved Chekhov as a reward for her modesty and that she hated Knipper; Aleksandra Khotiaintseva, who had entertained him when they were staying in Nice in 1898 and whom Chekhov’s youngest brother wanted him to marry, kept her disappointment to herself. There were actresses – Lidia Iavorskaia, Vera Komissarzhevskaia, and the recently widowed Daria Musina-Pushkina – who had had their sights on him for years, even decades. There were writers: Elena Shavrova, who would have been prepared to divorce her civil servant husband; Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik, despite her lesbian preferences. There were women of no definite profession, above all Lika Mizinova – the original Seagull – to whom Chekhov had proposed at least twice, only to retract.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 6 · 20 March 1997
From Patrick Miles
Donald Rayfield’s article on Chekhov’s women acquaintances (LRB, 20 February) is full of unsubstantiated assertion, innuendo and plain inaccuracy. In February 1902, Rayfield writes, Chekhov’s wife ‘arrived in Yalta, not having seen Chekhov since the end of their honeymoon six months previously’. Actually, it is well documented that Chekhov stayed with her for five weeks in Moscow within those six months. It is clear from his wife’s letter of 13 November 1901 that they had ‘tried for a baby’ during that five-week stay. It is clear from her letter of 1 March 1902 that they had again ‘tried for a baby’ during her stay in Yalta. Five weeks after arriving in Yalta, she had an ectopic miscarriage in Petersburg. According to my medical dictionary, this is inevitable ‘between the fourth and twelfth week’ of an ectopic pregnancy. The natural assumption (also made by Chekhov’s wife and Chekhov) is that the child was Chekhov’s, and Professor Rayfield has not produced a shred of evidence to prove otherwise.
Patrick Miles
Cambridge
Donald Rayfield writes: Patrick Miles is right to point up one slip in my text: I meant to say that Anton had not seen Olga since the autumn after their honeymoon (not that this invalidates my point). The documentary evidence for Olga having conceived extramaritally does, however, add up to more than innuendo.
20 August 1901: Olga Knipper leaves Anton in Yalta and goes to Moscow.
17 September 1901: Anton arrives in Moscow to stay with Olga.
26 October 1901: Anton leaves Olga in Moscow to stay in Yalta.
22 February 1902: Olga arrives in Yalta to stay with Anton.
26 February 1902: Olga has bleeding, believes she is not pregnant.
28 February 1902: Olga leaves Anton in Yalta to go to Moscow and St Petersburg, nearly collapses in pain on train at Simferopol.
31 March 1902: Olga collapses off-stage; is operated on; embryo removed from Fallopian rube.
Patrick Miles is quite right (and I never implied otherwise) that Olga and Anton repeatedly tried to conceive a child in the summer and autumn of 1901 and in February 1902. My point, however, is that Olga’s pregnancy was not the result of these efforts. If Olga had conceived when they were together in September-October 1901, then on 31 March 1902 she would have miscarried a foetus of at least 19 weeks. This is contradicted by Professor Jakobson’s telegram and by the passage Olga later excised from her letter to Anton in early April 1902: ‘On 26 [February] I had some bleeding and that was it, I was convinced I was not pregnant … Ott and the other [doctor] decided to do a scrape and confirmed that it had been an embryo of about a month and a half.’ The bleeding on 26 February 1902 makes it equally unlikely Olga had conceived between 22 and 28 February in Yalta.
I am no more a gynaecologist than Patrick Miles: I put all his evidence, as well as Olga’s descriptions of her illness in summer 1902, to a well-qualified obstetrician and a midwife. They reported that neither September-October 1901 nor late February 1902 was a possible time for the conception and that an ectopic pregnancy was by far the most likely cause of her collapse and operation. The usual time for such an eruption would be between eight and ten weeks from conception, and the bleeding on 26 February and pain on 28 February would be typical warning signs. All this indicates conception some time at the end of January, a time when Olga was in the close company of Nemirovich-Danchenko, not Chekhov.
A full biography of Olga Knipper has yet to be written, but all the evidence points to her as a woman who throughout her adult life maintained a number of attachments. This is not the point I took issue with: if Olga Knipper was reprehensible it was in her management of the evidence.
