The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read Online Free PDF Page A

fact that he was of German origin and a Lutheran did not impede his career. Konstantin Knipper made clear at home that he wanted his only son, Lev, to follow in his footsteps as an engineer. Lev showed little reaction, as usual.
    He started to recover from his childhood illness. Aunt Olya gave him boxing gloves and a football, which provoked energetic protests from the boy’s mother, convinced that he should take no risks. But it was not long before Lev became attracted to dangerous physical activity, almost certainly to compensate for the humiliations of an over-coddled childhood. He was also to become extremely competitive. His only foray into engineering as a child was to build a rudimentary plane ‘which looked like a see-saw’. It crashed, injuring his spine. The two sisters, Ada and Olga, looked after him for a whole summer holiday, and Aunt Olya also came to care for him.
    Behind his controlled mask, Lev was clearly intelligent, so his overt refusal to indicate any special interest exasperated his father. Lev had in fact discovered his vocation, but did not reveal it to anyone, including himself, for many years. When he was about six, his parents took him to a concert in St Petersburg, presumably hoping like most adults that he would not embarrass or irritate them by shuffling around out of boredom. But the music—it was Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony - struck him with such exquisite power that he was quite overcome. He later described it as his ‘first music shock’. It was so intense that, to his mother’s alarm, he burst into tears. An evidently displeased Konstantin Knipper had to lead his young son out of the concert hall and take him home.
    The two Knipper girls received piano lessons as a matter of course, but even in this musical family Lev did not. His mother used to organize musical soirees at home, so Lev hid in the drawing room to listen. He loved the Gypsy folksongs called romans performed by a friend of his mother: they seem to have had a lasting influence on some of his subsequent work. And whenever Aunt Olya was visiting St Petersburg with the Moscow Art Theatre during its spring season, she used to play adaptations of Beethoven symphonies with her brother Konstantin or sing bergerettes to her own accompaniment. Clearly Lev had so sealed himself off in boyhood that he never expressed his musical yearnings and nobody in the family guessed them until he became an adolescent.
    Lev’s secondary schooling took place at the First Classical School Gymnasium. He was fortunate to have an excellent music teacher, and at last his inclination blossomed. In the school orchestra he wanted to learn all the instruments—wind, percussion and string. He even started to become a normal boy of his time, reading Jules Verne, Fenimore Cooper and The Three Musketeers. Most strikingly, he showed himself determined to conquer all the feelings of physical inferiority he had experienced as a child. He spent time running and engaging in the Russian version of ‘French wrestling’. Aunt Olya, thrilled to see this physical improvement, and proud of the presents she had given him to such family outrage, now brought back a full footballer’s outfit from one of her foreign trips.
    At home as well as at school, Lev followed one passion after another. He was given a chemistry set and experimented constantly until an explosion led to its instant confiscation. His parents finally found a piano teacher for him, but the teacher in question was clearly of the old-fashioned school, making him play scales the whole time. After the freedom and innovation of the orchestra, this irritated Lev profoundly and his ‘unruly character’ revolted against this ’scale torture‘. The lessons were stopped.
    Lev’s sister Olga showed none of his academic promise at all. In 1913, at the Stroganov Art School in St Petersburg, her final marks for religious education, Russian, maths, algebra, geometry, history and physics could hardly have been