from Russia, few of which expressed any sympathy for her bereavement, forced her to change her mind. When and where will Anton be buried reply prepaid Suvorin. Communicate New Times details my brother's deam Aleksandr Tschechoff Bury Anton Moscow Novodevichie convent Vania and Masha in Caucasus Msha with mother Mikhail Tschechoff.84
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bOVF AND DEATH Repatriating a body required the services of a Leichenfuhrer on special trains, and a petition from the Russian embassy in Berlin to fourteen German railway regions, to allow a refrigerated car carrying a sealed coffin to be coupled to a passenger express. Olga waited and wrote to her mother. Then she went to Berlin, and waited in the Savoy hotel for Anton's body. At the Potsdamer station the embassy chaplain held a service on a siding, while diplomats continued to lobby the railway.
Russia was flooded with memoirs. In Yalta the bereaved assembled. On 7 July Misha broke the news to Evgenia: with Vania and Masha, they took the train to Moscow. That morning a train carrying Anton's body (in a red luggage van) and Olga in a first-class carriage pulled into Petersburg. Kleopatra Karatygina was one of a dozen people waiting for it. So was Natalia Golden, who told a student who accompanied her how close a friend and collaborator she had been to Anton twenty years before. A government minister also met the train, but he was there to pay respects not to Chekhov but to a General Obru-chiov, whose corpse was also being repatriated. Suvorin was the only representative of the state. The philosopher Vasili Rozanov watched Suvorin run to sit and talk to Olga: He almost ran with his stick (he walked terribly fast), cursing the inefficiency of the railways, their clumsiness in shunting the carriage… Looking at his face and hearing his half-swallowed words, I felt I was watching a father meet the corpse of his child or the corpse of a promising youth, dead before his time. Suvorin could see nothing and nobody, he paid attention to nobody and nothing, he was just waiting, waiting, wanting, wanting the coffin.85 On leaving Olga's compartment, Suvorin collapsed to his knees. A chair was brought and he sat alone and motionless. Suvorin arranged a requiem, a refuge for Olga, and a refrigerated carriage for the journey to Moscow. A priest and a few choristers held a brief service on the platform.
Suvorin had other concerns: he immediately sent Aleksandr to Yalta to retrieve his frank letters to Chekhov. Unable to get a reply out of Misha, Aleksandr turned back halfway and wired him again from Moscow: 'Bring without fail from archive old man's letters. My instructions not to leave without them, am buying grave, at Vania's
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flat.'86 In Moscow Aleksandr was told to meet the coffin in Petersburg, and on 8 July he headed back. His brother's body sped past him, from Petersburg to Moscow. He missed Anton's funeral as he had his father's.
On 9 July a procession of 4000 began a four-mile walk across Moscow, from the station to the Novodevichie cemetery. Olga leant on Nemirovich-Danchenko's arm. The family arrived from Yalta when the procession was midway. Evgenia, Vania, Misha and Masha broke through to the catafalque, with great difficulty, for Evgenia's legs were weak, and the students guarding the cortege did not recognize them. Masha and Olga embraced; months of hostility were set aside. At the graveside Nikolai Ezhov placed a silver wreath on Suvorin's behalf. Gorky wrote to his wife: I am so depressed by this funeral… as if I were smeared with sticky, foul-smelling filth… Anton who squirmed at anything vile and vulgar was brought in a car 'for transporting fresh oysters' and buried next to the grave of a Cossack widow called Olga Kukaretkina… People climbed trees and laughed, broke crosses and swore as they fought for a place. They asked loudly, 'Which is the wife? And the sister? Look, they're crying… You know he hasn't left diem a penny, Marx gets the lot… Poor Knipper… Don't worry about her, she gets 10,000 a year in the theatre,' and so on. Chaliapin burst into tears and cursed: 'And he lived for these bastards, he worked, taught, argued for them.'87
At the apartment, Lika Mizinova joined the family. She stood in black, silently staring through the window for two hours.
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EIGHTY-FOUR O
Epilogue 1904-1959
IMMEDIATELY AFTER the funeral Olga left with Evgenia, Masha, Misha and Vania for Yalta. Aleksandr in Petersburg wept alone. Suvo-rin sent him back to the Crimea in pursuit. After the distress of the funeral, whatever Suvorin felt privately, publicly he disowned Anton.88 On 22 July he told Ivan Shcheglov, 'Chekhov was the bard of the middle classes. He never was and never will be a great writer.' Suvorin transferred his protection and even his affection to a new figure, the fifty-year-old philosopher Vasili Rozanov.
At the forty-day requiem in Moscow on 10 August the church was crowded. By the graveside a choir of nuns sang. Olga Kundasova and the Chekhovs' old landlord, Dr Korneev, appeared. Korneev gave a communion loaf for Evgenia. On it were written the names of her dead: father-in-law, brother, husband, sister and two sons: 'For the peace of the souls of Georgi, Iakov, Pavel, Feodosia, Nikolai, Anton.' On 18 August Olga left Yalta. Her brother Kostia and Olga Kundasova came to stay with her in Moscow. She was beginning rehearsals for Ivanov in which her performance as the doomed wife, Anna, would be especially moving.89
Olga won Masha a few weeks' leave until the Chekhov inheritance could be clarified. Anton's 'will' of 1901, leaving everything to Masha, informally drawn up and improperly witnessed, was declared invalid, but Olga, to the family's relief and even gratitude, renounced all claim on the estate and gave to Masha the substantial sum in her and Anton's joint account. She would live on her earnings as an actress and shareholder in the theatre. All the survivors agreed that Anton's intentions should be honoured and that all his estate should pass to Masha, who would look after Evgenia and the Yalta house. The lawyers pondered the next step. As Anton had died effectively intestate, Russian law gave the inheritance to all his siblings. A year passed before Olga and
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the Chekhov brothers had signed a legal deed, giving Masha 'all the income and profit as heirs from literary works, theatrical plays and estate'. The houses and money in the bank were worth 80,000 roubles. This and Chekhov's plays now made Masha a rich woman.90
Trusting only Masha to keep her in comfort, Evgenia was relieved. Her sister-in-law Liudmila, and Irinushka, who had nursed Anton as a baby, came from Taganrog to live with her in Yalta. Aleksandr visited her and wrote to Vania: Old Mariushka is alive, toothless, and has no intention of dying. Mother has got two worthless mongrels to replace Tuzik who was poisoned. She's very afraid, seriously, that her children may steal her inheritance and send her packing. She doesn't believe in her children's decency.91 To Misha, Aleksandr wrote: She fixedly thought I was the main crook, able to lead you astray into a conspiracy. When she heard I had written a renunciation at Vania's, she bowed down almost to my feet… She won't give me Suvorin's letters: 'Masha told me not to.' The old ladies are not that unhappy, they laugh loud all the time.92 Evgenia enjoyed the garden, prosperity, and rides in the automobiles that came to ply the route from Yalta to the railhead. She died aged 84 in 1919.
Masha gave up schoolteaching and assumed responsibility for the home at Yalta as a temple to her brother. Once memoirs and letters were published, it was her life's task to manage the enormous archive. Through revolution, civil war, Stalin's terror and German occupation she never relaxed her grip on the Chekhov heritage. Her private life was set aside.93 She bought a dacha, which she sold to a Yalta dentist for diamonds just before revolution made real estate and money valueless. She died, aged 94, in 1957.
Aleksandr plunged back into alcoholism. In 1908, Natalia forced him out, despite his pleas.94 He lived with a servant, a dog and his chickens outside town. In 1906 he published vivid recollections of his and Anton's childhood. Masha and Misha, indignant at what they saw as Aleksandr's slurs on their father, ostracized him.95 Aleksandr's obituary ran:
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LOVE AND 1»AEOI
For a whole year he endured [throat cancer], the knowledge that it was incurable oppressed him horribly and he had many hours of severe physical and moral torment. He found peace at 9 a.m. on 17 May 1913. Masha told Olga that none of the family would go to the funeral.96 Misha worked for Suvorin's agencies until revolution destroyed them. Until his death in 1936, he was, like Masha, his brother's biographer. His son Sergei gathered an archive of all his kin except Masha and Anton. Vania remained a teacher. In December 1917 Vania's son Volodia, who knew he was incurably ill, stole his cousin Mikhail's revolver from a desk drawer and shot himself. Broken by this tragedy and by hunger, Vania died in 1922, aged sixty-one.
Aleksandr's son Kolia, discharged from the navy, appeared in Yalta, 'pathetic, ragged'. Masha gave him
