The Magical Chorus

(including Bunin, who admired and envied him) believed that he owed his fame to MAT, Chekhov actually despised actors, calling them vainglorious and seventy-five years behind the rest of Russian society. He feared lofty sentiments, and sarcastically told Bunin, who had compared his work to poetry, that poets were those who mindlessly use words like “silvery vista” and “chord” and slogans like “forward, ye people, to battle darkness!” One should sit down to write, Chekhov said, only when one felt as cold as ice.

This outward coldness, unusual for Russian literature, unnerved all the political camps. The influential liberal guru Nikolai Mikhailovsky handed down his infamous verdict this way: “Mister Chekhov writes away in cold blood and the reader reads along in cold blood,” adding that for Chekhov “it’s all the same—be it a man or his shadow, a bell or a suicide.” Chekhov responded irritably, comparing critics to the gadflies that keep horses from plowing: “I’ve been reading criticism of my stories for twenty-five years, and I can’t recall a single valuable suggestion, I never heard any good advice. However, once the critic Skabichevsky made an impression on me, predicting that I would die in a drunken stupor under a fence.”²⁵

The Russian Marxists, flexing their muscles at that time, had the most bones to pick with Chekhov. It must be noted that their leader, Lenin, who was no aficionado of contemporary literature, made an exception for Chekhov and Tolstoy. (Chekhov was also a favorite of the young Stalin.) But Lenin’s friend, Vaslav Vorovsky, a leading Marxist critic, described the world of Chekhov’s plays as “a Philistine swamp, where frogs croak smugly and fat ducks swim officiously,” a world of “star-crossed ‘sisters,’ miserable ‘seagulls,’ wretched owners of ‘cherry orchards,’ and there are so many of them, and they are all oh so gloomy, exhausted by petty suffering.”²⁶

For the Marxist Vorovsky, Chekhov was a “pessimist and objectivist.” He championed another writer—the young Alexei Peshkov, who burst onto the Russian literary scene in 1892 under the pseudonym Maxim Gorky. According to Vorovsky, “while the wan, faded Chekhovian types were limping along on the surface of life…in those sad days, Gorky spoke out as the daring herald of the brave.”²⁷

By the age of twenty-five, Gorky had led a turbulent life. If his own account is to be believed, he had worked many odd jobs, as a laborer, stevedore, and baker, and had traveled around Russia by foot. He was the first to present a new hero in Russian literature—the vividly depicted tramp, the “declasse element”—and this brought him enormous fame. His first book became a best seller, his name was on everyone’s lips, his photographs in all the newspapers, and he could not walk down the street unaccosted by fans. Highbrow commentators were flabbergasted: “Neither Turgenev, nor Count Tolstoy at the time of War and Peace, nor Dostoevsky ever had such popularity.”

Gorky’s impact was similar in Europe and America; Stefan Zweig confirmed that Gorky’s works literally stunned Western readers at the start of the century. The shock was political, of course. While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy spoke of the coming violent Russian Revolution as a dangerous disease, Gorky’s was the first Russian voice to welcome it unconditionally with no sense of “mystical horror before the future,” as Zweig put it.

The relationship between Gorky and Chekhov, eight years his senior, developed in a rather curious way. They first met in March 1899, both tall and with deep voices, but otherwise quite different: Chekhov slender, with a neat beard, easy movements, always tastefully dressed, an ironic gaze above his pince-nez; Gorky stooped, red-haired with a yellow mustache, a duckbill nose (Tolstoy told Chekhov that “only the miserable and the angry have noses like that”), always deliberately clothed in a “simple fellow” manner, waving his arms about like a windmill.

At first Gorky was unreservedly ecstatic about Chekhov, who responded sympathetically; in a letter to a woman friend he wrote, “Gorky, I believe, is a real talent, his brushes and paints are real, but it’s untrammeled, swashbuckling talent.” He also wrote to her, “In appearance, he’s a tramp, but inside he’s a rather elegant man.”²⁸ Chekhov defended Gorky publicly in a cause celebre now known as the Academy Incident.

It happened in 1902, when Gorky at the age of thirty-four was elected honorary academician in the category of belles lettres of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (the president was Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, an accomplished poet). When Nicholas II learned of the selection, he was infuriated. Even sympathetic historians point out the fateful combustion of lack of will and stubbornness in the tsar’s character. His cultural tastes were as unassuming and eclectic as that of a provincial high school teacher: he was simultaneously an admirer of Chekhov, the tabloid Novoye Vremya, the popular humor magazine Satirikon, and the quasi-folkloric art of the famous singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, who would die in 1940 in a French prison, arrested as a Bolshevik spy. Regarding Gorky, Nicholas informed the minister of public education: “Neither Gorky’s age nor his slim works present sufficient cause for his election to such an esteemed title…. I am deeply incensed by all this and order you to announce that on my command Gorky’s election is annuled.”²⁹

The Academy obeyed slavishly, outraging the press. Chekhov, who had been made an honorary academician two years earlier, resigned in protest, thereby fanning the scandal. But in the meantime, offstage, relations between Chekhov and Gorky were deteriorating. A confrontation was brewing, and it was eventually played out by proxy, through their wives.

The French suggest cherchez la femme as the source of any conflict. Look for the politics, as well. Political, artistic, and personal relations often intertwine so that it is impossible to find where one ends and another begins. In 1900, MAT brought its production of Uncle Vanya to Yalta, the Black Sea resort where Chekhov was recuperating. Gorky was there, too, having fled from his wife. Chekhov kept teaching Gorky how to pick up women, considering himself, not without reason, to be an expert. Perhaps in order to goad Gorky, who was hesitating, Chekhov began courting two leading actresses of MAT at once—Maria Andreyeva and Olga Knipper. Both were striking, larger-than-life beauties and intellectuals, although Andreyeva was married with two children and Knipper was free. Perhaps this mattered most for Chekhov: he married Knipper the following year. Gorky took Andreyeva, and she became his common-law wife in 1903.

Gorky had become a famous playwright by then. He began writing plays in 1901, urged on by Stanislavsky, as well as by Chekhov, who, however, was underwhelmed by Gorky’s first attempt, The Smug Citizens, reproaching the author for aesthetic archaism—“an irreparable flaw, like red hair in a redhead.” Gorky, in a letter to a friend, had a rather different view of his debut: “I, your Alyoshka, scored honorably on my preliminary test for title of playwright. (Watch out, William Shakespeare!)”³⁰

The Smug Citizens, shown by the Moscow Art Theater in 1902, was not a success, even though publicity from the Academy Incident helped. (The play became popular much later, when the Soviet director Georgy Tovstonogov presented it in his Leningrad theater in 1966 with the incomparable Yevgeny Lebedev as the lead; I was lucky to see this legendary production.)

Undeterred, Gorky gave his second play to MAT as well, and this time he hit the jackpot. Originally titled At the Bottom of Life in Russian and shortened at Nemirovich-Danchenko’s suggestion to At the Bottom (known in English as The Lower Depths), the play first brought to the Russian stage the castoffs of society—thieves, prostitutes, and tramps. Now it is clear that it is Gorky’s best play (perhaps his best work) and a masterpiece of world twentieth-century drama. But critics were outraged after the premiere: “You feel as if you have been dunked forcibly in a cesspit!…Gorky plucks on the lowest and vilest strings of the human heart”³¹ “Too much cruelty, inhumanity, groaning, and curses…. Does life ever look like this?”³²

The public, however, loved The Lower Depths, applauding such catchphrases as “Lies