The Mystery of Olga Chekhova by Antony Beevor Read Free Book Online Page A

sitting next to each other at the table, kissing every minute and putting the best bits of food on to each other’s plates.‘
    But the idyll did not last long when they returned to Moscow in the early summer. Misha told her that she would get used to the apartment, but having to share it with an insomniac mother-in-law who hated her made it hard to hide her unhappiness. Meals were a penance, and Olga would try to find an excuse to slip away as soon as possible to escape to their bedroom. Only Mariya, the clumsy old peasant wet nurse, who had ‘two left hands’, was kind to her. According to Olga, Mariya was treated ‘like a slave’, with Natalya screaming at her in the kitchen and summoning her in the night when she could not sleep.
     
    Misha, like almost everyone in Russian intellectual circles, wanted to avoid conscription. He later wrote how ‘waiting for one’s call-up medical examination was agony’. He admitted that he was in a state of total panic as he made his way towards the conscription centre in Moscow. He had confided his fears to an elderly member of the Moscow Art Theatre staff, who had then accompanied him to provide moral support. Misha almost froze when prodded and yelled at by corporals, who ordered these young male civilians to strip off in the filth and cold of the building. It seemed to go on for hours and with no purpose. Anxious relatives peered through the windows, trying to see what was going on. The conscripts stood in line naked for two hours or more as they queued for the doctors. Misha’s legs could hardly keep him upright. The exhausted doctor, who finally examined his heart and lungs with his stethoscope, called out: ‘Three months!’ Misha nearly collapsed in relief. There was some doubt about his state of health, so they would call him back for re-examination later. His sentence was suspended. It took him nearly another hour to recover his clothes, and when he emerged he was deeply touched to find that his confidant from the theatre was still there to ascertain his fate.
    Olga’s brother, Lev, on the other hand, ran away from his high school at the age of seventeen to volunteer for the army. He later called it a ‘surge of false patriotism’. Although frustrated at the time, he was most fortunate. The authorities sent him back to his school to finish his studies. He progressed to the Moscow Higher Technical College, where he was allotted to a reserve unit. Then, almost as soon as he reached the front, he was sent back as an officer candidate at the school of horse artillery at Orel. He would graduate just as the Russian Revolution was about to destroy the world in which they had all grown up.

5. The Beginning of a Revolution
     
    The ability of the theatrical community to exist apart from the terrible reality of the First World War seems slightly bewildering in retrospect. Their letters and personal accounts make few references to the events which were shaking Russia to pieces. They had despised the ‘patriotic plays’ of ’theatrical pasteboard’ put on in the early days of the war and concentrated on their own work.
    Stanislavsky later acknowledged that ‘art showed that it had nothing in common with tendencies, politics and the topics of the day’. The collapse of the Russian armies in central and southern Poland during the summer of 1915 could have happened on another continent. Among the Knippers, that most Germanic and musical of families, there appears to have been no mention of the anti-German riots of June 1915 in Moscow, when Bechstein pianos were hauled into the street and set on fire.
    These disorders were largely inspired by hatred for the Tsarina—‘the German woman’. She was seen, along with ministers bearing Germanic-sounding names, as proof of the enemy within. Rumour-mongers assured everyone that she had a direct telephone line to Berlin to give away the plans of the Russian high command. Her treachery, they claimed, was the reason why so many