The Magical Chorus

are the religion of slaves and masters!” and “The truth is the God of a free man!” The character played by the great Ivan Moskvin, the sly wanderer Luka, was deemed controversial: a philosopher who explains and accepts everything. (The poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who knew Gorky well, later suggested that Luka’s philosophy in many ways reflected Gorky’s personal convictions.) The play was performed fifty times to standing-room-only audiences in just a few months (December 1902–April 1903).

Chekhov, who had considered himself the leading contemporary author of the Art Theater and who had frankly not expected such adroitness from Gorky, grew worried and wrote to Knipper: “I was so pessimistic about Lower Depths this summer, and look what success!” She consoled her husband by telling him that Stanislavsky was “dreaming of Cherry Orchard and said just yesterday that even though Depths was a success, his heart was not in it. It’s lies, he says.”³³ Stanislavsky, who always felt that political engagement and art “were incompatible, one excludes the other,” was probably bothered by the openly political tone of Gorky’s triumph. A theater revolutionary, in life Stanislavsky was extremely conservative and cautious, which came in good stead in future complications, particularly in his dealings with Stalin in the Soviet era.

A rift—political, cultural, and personal—began between the two playwrights, threatening to break up MAT. Chekhov and Gorky were the protagonists, but remained in the shadows, while their wives, Knipper and Andreyeva, MAT’s stars, acted it out, each trying to pull the theater in her husband’s direction. In a letter to Chekhov on February 16, 1903, Nemirovich-Danchenko informed him that a disgusting “crack, like the ones in walls, needing some repair,” had formed in MAT and it is, alas, “growing slowly.”³⁴ Clever Nemirovich-Danchenko told Chekhov (as if the writer didn’t already know from his own wife) that two hostile camps had formed at MAT: in one were Stanislavsky with Nemirovich-Danchenko and Knipper, in the other, Andreyeva and Savva Morozov, the Moscow merchant and patron of the arts who was unrequitedly in love with Gorky’s wife.

The Moscow merchant class, long ridiculed by the liberal press for its wealth and its bigoted retrograde views, had by the start of the twentieth century nurtured a number of extraordinary figures who mightily increased Russia’s cultural prestige. An example was set in the late nineteenth century by Pavel Tretyakov, who put together the largest collection of Russian art (his younger brother, Sergei, collected French artists almost exclusively, from Gericault to Courbet). Following Sergei Tretyakov’s cosmopolitan line, the Moscow merchants Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin bought the avant-garde works of the young Picasso and Matisse, which now are the pride (and source of solid income through loans for exhibitions) of Russia’s major museums.

Matisse later said of Shchukin that he always picked his best works. Sometimes Matisse was reluctant to part with a good painting and he would say to Shchukin, “This didn’t come off, let me show you something else.” Shchukin would look at the canvases long and hard and end up by declaring, “I’ll take the one that didn’t come off.”³⁵

Many Moscow merchants were eccentric, but even in their midst, Savva Morozov (of the Morozov clan) stood out. The successful boss of family-owned pig-iron smelters and chemical plants with several thousand employees, he was also one of the main sponsors of the Russian Social-Democrats, namely, their most radical part, the Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin.

Morozov was also a generous patron of the arts; he saved MAT from bankruptcy. The brand-new building for MAT, designed by the Art Nouveau architect Fedor Shekhtel with a revolving stage, rare then even in the West, and state-of-the-art lighting equipment, was built with his money and personal supervision in Kamergersky Pereulok, where it remains one of the architectural landmarks of Moscow.

Morozov became the de facto executive director of MAT. The new triumvirate running the famed theater struck a curious picture: the elegant giant of a man Stanislavsky, with gray hair, demonic black eyebrows, and childlike eyes; the stocky, confident, shrewd Nemirovich-Danchenko, the typical Moscow gentleman with well-tended beard; and with them the nervous, grimacing, and extremely unattractive Morozov, with a dark red, Tatar-like face and a crew cut on his round head.

With his newfound power at the theater, Morozov began giving central roles to his goddess Andreyeva, cutting out MAT’s other star, Knipper. Naturally, Gorky was delighted and wrote to Chekhov: “When I see Morozov backstage, covered in dust and worrying about the success of the play, I am prepared to forgive him all his factories (a forgiveness he does not need)—I like him because he loves the theater altruistically.”³⁶ Chekhov, upset and informed by his wife that Morozov also loved Andreyeva altruistically but did not care too much for Knipper, tried to keep the patron away from the stage. “He should not be permitted to get too close to the essence of the work. He can judge acting, plays, and actors as a member of the audience, not as the boss or director.”³⁷

Few people knew that Andreyeva (before MAT she was married to a high tsarist official) had become a committed Marxist. She financed the Bolshevik press; Lenin gave her the party nickname “Phenomenon.” Only she could dare let a Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bauman, hide in her closet while she entertained the Moscow chief of police in the next room. Andreyeva was a welcome guest at the palace of Grand Duke Sergei, whose wife (sister of the empress) painted her portrait, never suspecting her subject was the financial agent of the Bolshevik Party. Andreyeva made both Morozov and Gorky sponsors of the party, introducing them to Lenin.

For the radically inclined Gorky and Andreyeva, their recent idol Chekhov was no longer revolutionary enough. In 1903 when he read The Cherry Orchard, Gorky, still smarting from Chekhov’s remark two years earlier about his aesthetic backwardness, disparaged the play: “In reading, it does not impress me as a major work. There isn’t a single new word.”³⁸

Chekhov himself was not averse to fame and popularity, and he was worried over The Cherry Orchard. He fretted that the “progressive” audience, typical of MAT, would reject the play as apolitical, and therefore old-fashioned. He was not comforted in the least by the raptures of Stanislavsky, who insisted that he had wept like a woman over the play. Stanislavsky’s tears, as Chekhov knew too well, did not mean much, since the director, who admitted that he did not understand contemporary literature anyway, considered The Cherry Orchard a tragedy, while Chekhov described it as a comedy, even a farce.

Chekhov’s apprehensions came to pass. The critics saw nothing in the MAT production, bathed in elegiac tones, but the author’s deep pessimism. One wrote: “If this theater needs a motto for the portal, I would recommend the inscription from a medieval bell: Vivos voco, mortuos plango [I hail the living, mourn the dead]…Mortuos plango: Anton Chekhov. Vivos voco: Maxim Gorky.”³⁹

Chekhov blamed Stanislavsky and MAT for the unsuccessful production of his last play; he died soon afterward. Andreyeva felt that she and Gorky were winning. She had already fought with Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, which is documented in the latter’s rather harsh letter to her (February 1902), in which he calls her the nastiest word in his vocabulary: “ham.” “I hate the ham actor in you (don’t be mad)…. You start telling lies, you stop being kind and intelligent, you become abrasive, tactless, insincere on stage and in life.”⁴⁰

Back then, in 1902, Andreyeva pretended not to take offense. But in 1904, she left MAT, telling Stanislavsky in parting, “I have stopped respecting the work of the Art Theater.” Naturally, Gorky broke off relations with MAT, too. The worst blow for the theater was Morozov’s announcement that he was quitting the directorship of MAT and stopping his financial support. Stanislavsky was horrified: the theater had suddenly lost two of its major authors, Chekhov and Gorky, a leading actress, and its main sponsor.