The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read Online Free PDF Page B

year with the Moscow Art Theatre on its spring tour, he found that his father did not have much time left to live. Natalya had thrown Aleksandr out in 1908, because of his relapse into alcoholism. Since then, Misha’s father had been living in a small dacha with one servant, his dogs and his chickens, and he was now dying from cancer of the larynx. Misha spent his spare time by his father’s deathbed. Despite the pain, Aleksandr continued to make jokes until the end came in May 1913. Misha was deeply touched. The experience, as he admitted later, influenced his portrayal of death on the stage.
    When Misha returned to Moscow after his father’s death, Natalya moved there with her two dachshunds to join him. They began to enjoy a style beyond his modest salary at the theatre. Perhaps they were living off the proceeds from the sale of the house near St Petersburg. In any case Misha, with his success on the stage, had acquired a taste for theatrical extrava gence. ‘I visited Mishka several times,’ Volodya Chekhov, another first cousin, wrote to his mother, who was staying during that last summer of peace in the playwright’s house at Yalta. ‘He is living in a four-roomed apartment with electric light near the Patriarshie ponds. He has bought a new piano and now he no longer borrows twenty kopecks from the porters, but is constantly handing out tips all round. He pays eighty-five roubles for his apartment. Natalya Aleksandrovna sits there in a black robe, squints and smokes, while Misha, in red shoes, grey unbuttoned trousers and no jacket, lies on the sofa and “spits at the ceiling” [an old Russian phrase which means doing nothing].’
    Volodya, younger by nearly three years, hero-worshipped Misha. He also felt himself to be in his shadow and something of a poor relation. Volodya had secretly longed to be an actor too, but lacked sufficient confidence in his own talents. He also faced parental disapproval. His father, the fourth of the five Chekhov brothers, had not even graduated from secondary school. Ivan Chekhov, who appears in family photographs as elegantly bearded and bearing a faint resemblance to the young Stalin, had taught in a primary school. There he had met Volodya’s mother, a beautiful young fellow teacher with fair hair. But his career had not been a happy one.
    Their side of the family saw comparatively little of the more artistic members, perhaps partly because Ivan Chekhov had convinced himself that actors were ‘second-rate people’. Volodya had not met Misha before because his parents would have nothing to do with Natalya, Misha’s mother and Anton’s former mistress. Volodya, now studying law at Moscow University, finally set eyes on him at one of Aunt Masha’s family dinners. Volodya adored the way Misha could not stop performing, often with brilliant improvisations and imitations. The two of them would invent and act out whole scenes together. And for Volodya, such associations with the theatre must have had a heady whiff of the forbidden.
    The cousins used to play charades after Aunt Masha’s dinners, using all the shawls, rugs, old hats, sheets and even the big carpet from the floor in the sitting room. Sergei remembered ‘Volodya wrapped in this carpet, wriggling on the floor, pretending to be a whale’. Misha, draped in a sheet and holding a staff, played Jonah and plunged into the carpet’s mouth. Another night, however, when perhaps playing the part of Noah too literally, he fell asleep having drunk too much.
    On some evenings, to Aunt Masha’s considerable distress, Misha would arrive already inebriated. She dreaded him inheriting his father’s alcoholism and offered him twenty-five roubles a month if he gave up drink. He promised to do so and took the money. Aunt Masha was very relieved, but then one evening he turned up swaying and slurring his words again. Volodya, who was with him, said gloomily that he had found Misha in this state outside in the street. Aunt Masha