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

Russian soldiers were suffering in vain. This growing belief that the incompetence of the Tsarist regime was in fact a smokescreen for corruption and treason did not disturb Misha and his friends in the theatre. Their bohemian world despised politics and politicians as much as military patriotism and futile sacrifice. Some of them, such as Meyerhold, passionately supported the cause of revolution. And even Konstantin Stanislavsky, a patrician merchant as well as actor, looked forward to ‘the miraculous liberation of Russia’. He was convinced that it would bring a new era of artistic freedom and enlightenment. He also failed to foresee that his family business, which subsidized the Moscow Art Theatre, would be expropriated.
    Apart from officers of the old school, the greatest believers in the war against Germany had been their relatives: the young women of the nobility and upper middle class who had volunteered to roll bandages and serve as nurses for the tragic mass of suffering soldiers - the amputees, the blind, the gangrenous and the shell-shocked. Many of these well-brought-up young ladies regarded this service as much more than a duty. They saw it as a spiritual experience, a homage to Christ washing the feet of the poor. The Tsarina set up her own little hospital, with the young Grand Duchesses suitably attired, but their patients do not appear to have been chosen for the seriousness of their wounds, which suggests something akin to a Petit Trianon version of medicine.
    The mainly peasant soldiers, patronized by these earnest women, had never shared the middle class’s enthusiasm for the war on its outbreak. They had known that once again the peasantry would be treated as ‘meat for the cannon’. Their villages had mourned their departure with the traditional lamentations of a funeral, never expecting to see these sons again. And the fact that they were commanded by young barins, members of the landowning class, who in recent years had taken back their land to profit from rising corn prices, had not improved relations between officers and men who felt that they were still treated as little better than serfs.

     
    The war did not stop a group from the Moscow Art Theatre, including Stanislavsky, Olya Knipper-Chekhova and the great actor Vasily Kachalov, from touring southern Russia in the late spring of 1916. When it was over, the cast relaxed at the Caucasian spa of Essentuki, which Stanislavsky knew well from previous visits. They enjoyed trips out into the steppe and other diversions, but Stanislavsky himself found it hard to relax. He was in the middle of a row with Nemirovich-Danchenko over the management of the theatre.
    Misha had not accompanied them. ‘I hope you aren’t angry with me for not having written for a long time,’ he wrote from Moscow to Aunt Masha that summer. ‘It is so nice not to be doing anything, although we are all three in town, but we are still in a very peaceful mood. My Kapsulka [my little capsule, i.e. Olga, who was now pregnant] isn’t particularly happy to be stuck in the city with Mama. She was dreaming of sketching somewhere in fields and forests. But what can I do? She shouldn’t have married me. She could have married Volodya, for example. But she preferred to share my fame with me than to be the wife of a provincial judge.’
    For the heavily pregnant Olga, relations with Misha’s possessive mother in the shared apartment had become unbearable. To make matters far worse, Misha was drinking again. He poured vodka into his beer for what he called ‘deep effect’, claiming that he was ‘a true Russian’, and drank constantly until he collapsed. At night he would wake suddenly and cry out: ‘Paper! Pen! Write, Olinka! Write! Great thoughts have come to me.’
    As the earlier letter suggested, Misha had fallen out with his cousin, Volodya, who resented the way he was treating Olga. ‘My dear Masha,’ he wrote to his aunt, ‘I love you but please keep that harmful