Chekhov in Love

When Anton Chekhov, who practiced medicine, turned his cold, clinical eye on the conundrums of sexuality, he made the following diagnosis: “Sex plays a great role in the world, but not everything depends on it, and not everywhere is it of decisive importance.”

It seems whimsical to speak of romance and Chekhov in the same breath, but as a handsome, young gentleman and gifted writer, he penned an avalanche of flirtatious, if cryptic, love letters. Their tone is witty and insinuating, but never sentimental. He playfully signed letters “vanquished by you” or “William Shakespeare.”

Many women have been put forth as having aroused in Chekhov l’amour passion. Some we know from his letters; others made claim to his affection only after his death. But we can verify numerous affairs. One was with Lydia Yavorskaya, a Moscow actress of ill-repute. An ambitious beauty, she seduced the playwright more for Machiavellian than sentimental reasons. After a few torrid months, they parted on amicable terms.

A curious episode took place in Chekhov’s life in 1886, when the playwright claims to have become engaged to Dunya Efros, a young Jewish woman. All we have are a few letters Chekhov wrote to friends, and some very proper notes in Dunya’s hand. She is not mentioned anywhere else by anyone else. Her identity remains mysterious, and their “engagement” lasted less than six months before “I broke with her, or rather say, she broke with me.” This liaison inspired a play written shortly thereafter: Ivanov. Another woman Chekhov dallied with was Lydia Mizinova, or Lika, a friend of Chekhov’s sister Masha. Their letters reveal a playful intimacy, and Chekhov even invented two imaginary suitors of Lika’s, Trophim and Bucephalus, of whom he feigned jealousy. Despite their closeness, Lika seems to have been more in love than he, and once she pleaded that he make love to her. Pushed, Chekhov refused to profess love for this woman, and the dejected Lika took up with Potapenko, another writer and friend of Chekhov’s.

In 1898 Masha Chekhova and Lika attended a performance of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre. Masha wrote to her brother that at the end of the play Lika was in tears, recognizing herself in the plight of Nina, who falls hopelessly in love with a philandering novelist.

Already as a young man, Chekhov had resigned himself to the unlikelihood of ever marrying. “Alas,” he noted, “I am not capable of such a complex, involved business as marriage.” And in 1895 he wrote Suvorin: “Very well then, I shall marry if you so desire. But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before, in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I’ll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next. I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not always appear in my sky every day. I won’t write any better for having gotten married.”

But at the end of his life, Chekhov did find a kind of love with an actress he met in 1898, when she played the role of Irina in the Moscow Art Theatre’s inaugural production, Tolstoy’s historical tragedy, Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich. Of the performance, Chekhov said the woman playing Irina was “magnificent. Her voice, nobility and sincerity were so good they brought a lump to your throat.” Even more telling was a comment to his friend Suvorin: “If I had stayed in Moscow, I would have fallen in love with that Irina.”

In a letter to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, concerning a proposed production of The Seagull, Chekhov could not resist asking “What has happened to that Irina? She seemed exceptional.” “That Irina” came to play Arkadina in The Seagull, and created the roles of Masha in Three Sisters and Ranyevskaya in The Cherry Orchard. Her name was Olga Knipper, and from 1901 till the playwright’s death in 1904, she was Chekhov’s wife.

In their garrulous correspondence, running to some 1,300 pages, Chekhov and Knipper often address each other as “Dear Writer” and “Dear Actress.” Many of Knipper’s endearing comments refer to her husband’s body parts – his eyes, his hair, his beard. By contrast, his letters read like conventional poetry addressed to an abstract ideal of a mistress: “Believe that I love you, love you profoundly, whatever might happen, even if you turned into an old hag, I’d still love you – for your soul, for your disposition.” Speculation runs wild about the nature of Chekhov’s marriage with the sensual Knipper, but no one denies he wrote his greatest plays – The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard – after having yielded to matrimony.

Given the prominent role that love and its peccadilloes played in Chekhov’s life, it is not not surprising that almost all his plays embrace the absurdities of sex. Although Chekhov started out as a fiction writer, the theatre had always tempted him. To conquer the stage, Chekhov started small, with vaudeville sketches borrowed from the French style of comic miniatures. For subjects he chose love, sex and marriage.

His vaudeville plays like The Bear and The Proposal proved commercially successful. Popular as they were, however, Chekhov’s purpose for writing them was not simply providing light and lucrative entertainment. Though the works themselves were never intended to be taken seriously, Chekhov never lost sight of his goal of becoming a “serious writer.” These plays represent studies in the craft of playwriting. Hard-hitting satires, the vaudevilles mock love but also revel in how fickle our hearts can be. He is laughing at us, but given his own amorous escapades, he is also laughing at himself.

The genre of these vaudevilles is important to note. Chekhov classifies The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding, as well as Swan Song, A Tragedian In Spite of Himself and On the Dangers of Tobacco as belonging to the same genre as The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard: comedy. Chekhov gives us an important clue in his deliberate association of these light-hearted sketches with his master drawings. The suggestion is clear: In the farces, sex is taken seriously. In the serious plays, sex is revealed as farce.

Misha Aster is a second-year dramaturgy student  at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.