The Mystery of Olga Chekhova by Antony Beevor
Aunt Olya was careful when expressing her reaction to the new Russia. Clearly the reality of Moscow had not lived up to her longings from abroad, but above all she had been shocked to find that so many friends had died in her absence. ‘Here I am in Moscow after three years of wandering,’ she wrote to her sister-in-law Masha in the Crimea, ‘and so far I am happy to be in Russia. I don’t know how I am going to feel afterwards.’
The main purpose of this hurriedly written letter was to take advantage of a reliable courier, the brother of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who could take Masha earnings from Chekhov plays staged abroad. ‘I only learned late yesterday evening that Yevgeny Emilevich [Mandelstam] is going to the Crimea today. In August we are leaving for America with the theatre for a year.’ Mandelstam was asked to deliver part of the Chekhov royalties from the earnings of the Kachalov group, most of it in German marks, the rest in ‘lemons’, the joke-name for inflated Soviet banknotes at the time, because million sounded like limon.
For Aunt Olya, part of the pleasure of her return to 23 Prechistensky bulvar was to see her two great-nieces - Olga and Ada’s little daughters. Although it was a large apartment by Soviet standards, the compulsively generous Aunt Olya shared it with many members of the extended family.
Aunt Olya was the only one to have a whole room to herself. Her nephew Vova, Vladimir’s son, described it: ‘There was a small bed in the far corner behind a silk screen, with a coverlet of red fox fur, a marble washstand and a wardrobe with a mirror. By the window there was a small desk and an antique little round table with several armchairs.’ It must have been quite a large room, because it also contained a grand piano, where Lev later wrote his music, and the pelt of a polar bear spread-eagled on the floor. Two glass-fronted bookcases on another wall were filled with publications presented to her by friends. Gorky had written the following dedication in one of them: ‘For you, Olga Leonardovna. I would like to have bound this book with the skin of my heart, but my wife would bark at me. You are nice, you are good, you are a sweet person and you are talented. I could say a lot more to you but it would be better if I just silently shake your hand with all my heart.’
She invited Sofya Chekhova, the mother of Volodya, who had shot himself in 1917, to move in after her husband died. There were also her brother Konstantin, now too sick to return to work as a railway engineer, his wife, Lulu, Ada and the two little girls. Lev turned up from time to time to stay as well. Aunt Olya, however, appears to have known about only one side of her adored nephew’s life.
‘On my return to Moscow,’ wrote Lev many years later, ‘I could not fight my passion for music any more.’ He was twenty-three. At first, his family was highly sceptical. His aunt, his father and his uncle Vladimir, the opera singer, sat as a jury to hear whether he had any talent, both as a pianist and as a composer. Their verdict was ‘very discouraging’ and they tried to persuade him to give up his plans. Lev, however, was adamant.
Aunt Olya, despite her participation in the unfavourable verdict, could not resist wanting to help. She introduced Lev to Yelena Gnesina, the director of the best-known music school in Moscow. Gnesina employed him as the administrator of the school building. Lev claimed later that, as a ‘White Guardist’, he could not be taken on officially as a pupil, so Gnesina gave him a job and private lessons. In fact the only problem was that Lev, at twenty-three, was far too old in a school for students between the ages of seven and seventeen. ‘Those were hard years,’ Lev wrote towards the end of his life, but his memoirs are just as disingenuous as those of his sister Olga, even if he did not indulge himself with fantasies.
According to the spymaster General Pavel Sudoplatov and other Soviet sources, Lev Knipper, ‘after he returned to Moscow in 1922, was interviewed many times by state security organs’ (at that stage the newly constituted OGPU, the forerunner to the NKVD and later KGB). Lev’s status as a ’former White Guard officer’ left him little option but to comply. Whether he was forced to recruit his sister in Berlin straight away or later is impossible to tell without access to the relevant files, which remain firmly closed, but according to General Sudoplatov’s son, Professor Anatoly Sudoplatov, who knew Lev’s controllers, ‘in the 1920S [Olga Chekhova] was a key figure, instrumental in arranging all sorts of meetings among Russian émigrés in Germany’. In any case, Lev was to visit her in Berlin quite frequently, a link neither of them ever mentioned, even to their relatives. Apparently Lev Knipper, ‘assisted by the NKVD, maintained regular communications with Olga Chekhova during the 1930s’.
In the beginning, Lev may have seen his relationship with the OGPU as an intriguingly dangerous game. He seems to have enjoyed a surge of self-confidence at this time. He had conquered his childhood weakness, he had survived the civil war, he was extremely good-looking and enjoyed the admiration of many women, and especially of his aunt, one of the most respected figures in Russian cultural life. Perhaps his new secret life encouraged him to think that he could flaunt Western ways and new artistic ideas and ignore the dreary dictates of Proletkult. Yet in his youthful arrogance, he must have also underestimated the dangers. As a former White Guard, he was forever in their power and might have to denounce friends and colleagues in the arts. It was probably a classic case of refusing to see that he was selling his soul, and then having to persuade himself of higher motives later, once the bitter truth became clear. One side of his character might also have been attracted to the work. Lev was extremely touchy and he did not forget a slight, whether perceived or real. His highly controlled exterior, according to some of those who knew him, concealed some deep resentments.
Aunt Olya, meanwhile, was impressed and worried by Lev’s dedication to his musical studies. ‘Lev has just turned up,’ she wrote to a friend that August. ‘He has completely plunged into his music. He was working so hard that he utterly exhausted himself He has lost fourteen pounds and the doctor has forbidden him to do any work and to rest and put those pounds back on.’
According to Lev, having learned the basics of theory, he started on harmony in that same month of August. He was also composing in any spare moment. The pressure of overwork, he claimed, led to a recurrence of his childhood osteo tuberculosis and ‘a committee of professors decided that it would not be possible to cure me’. Next month, a large group from the Moscow Art Theatre was about to go on tour abroad, first to Western Europe and then to the United States. It was part of the Bolshevik regime’s attempts to normalize relations and re-establish trade links after the civil war. Aunt Olya was able to arrange for Lev ‘to join the theatre on paper’ so that he could be treated by specialists in Berlin.
That a recently returned White Guardist should be allowed back to Berlin within such a short time would have been surprising to say the least. But as a cover story for a mission, it could hardly have been bettered. Lev was to re-establish contact with his sister Olga and report on any White Russian émigré activities in Germany, while he pursued his musical studies there as a cover. ‘From time to time,’ General Sudoplatov cryptically wrote later, ‘we used Lev Knipper’s contacts with the émigrés.’
This period was one of intense secret operations abroad mounted by INO (Inostrannyi Otdel), the Foreign Intelligence Department of the OGPU. Even after the destruction of the White armies, Lenin was determined to pursue counter-revolution abroad. In December 1920, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, had begun to organize operations against émigré groups in France and Germany. Berlin alone contained 200,000 White Russian refugees.
Relatives of prominent émigrés were seized as hostages at home and agents were rapidly recruited for operations abroad to infiltrate émigré organizations and arrange the kidnapping of their leaders. A sophisticated development was to create fake White Guard organizations within Russia to trap the regime’s enemies. These activities were given the highest priority. For the first dozen years of its life, INO’s ‘main foreign target remained the White Guard movement’.
The White Guard movement was directed fro
Lev, however, was not expected to take part in kidnappings. His task was to identify those émigrés, especially intellectuals, who could be persuaded to return to the Soviet homeland as obedient citizens. He apparently played a quiet but important role in providing information for the OGPU on writers like Aleksei Tolstoy, a former White officer like Lev and the author of the Moscow Art Theatre’s early success Tsar Feodor, in which Olga Knipper-Chekhova made her name and attracted the interest of Anton Chekhov. Tolstoy, who became known as ‘the Red Count’, was allowed back in 1923 as a ‘repentant expatriate’ and never disappointed the Kremlin. He was raised to the status of grand old man of Soviet letters after Gorky’s death.
The Russian émigré community in Berlin was more like a colony, largely because it was so concentrated on the western centre of the city. Berliners jokingly called the Kurfürstendamm the ‘Nöpski Prospekt’, and Charlottenburg was known as ‘Charlottengrad’. Writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak treated the cafés of the area, such as the Prager Diele, in the same way as French existentialists later used the cafés of Saint-Germain. There were around 200 Russian-language newspapers, magazines and journals in Berlin, a number of publishing houses and even a Russian high school. But this already precarious community was to be devastated and scattered within a decade by the economic crisis and unemployment triggered by the Wall Street Crash.
The Moscow Art Theatre touring group, some sixty strong, with Lev discreetly in attendance, reached Berlin at the end of September 1922. They had sailed from Petrograd down the Baltic to Stettin, encountering heavy storms on the way. Most of them felt very sick and battered when they took their train to Berlin, arriving a week after Stanislavsky.
Stanislavsky was very nervous. He could relax even less in foreign countries than at home in Moscow. Every arrangement for the tour had been made by the impresario Morris Gest, who was also a great publicist. As a result, Stanislavsky, already ashamed of his shabby overcoat, found himself, as he stepped from his carriage in the Friedrichstrasse station, ambushed with flashbulbs and moving-picture cameras. He even had to repeat his departure from the station for their benefit.
The tour, as he knew only too well, was an immense undertaking and politically fraught. Outside Russia they were likely to be seen as representatives of the regime which had butchered the Tsar and his children, while any soothing remarks they made abroad could be interpreted at home as ‘counter-revolutionary‘. The fact that Lenin and Lunacharsky had given permission for this foreign tour was not a guarantee of their safety on return.
The tour did not start well in Berlin. Stanislavsky was trying to lick the cast into shape for Tsar Feodor, only to find that they could not rehearse properly at their theatre, because they were sharing it with another company. Max Reinhardt, the great impresario of the period, stepped in to help with the offer of his own company’s workshops. Stanislavsky insisted that not a minute should be wasted. Although nearly a quarter of a century in the Art Theatre’s repertoire, Tsar Feodor had not been performed for some time and needed a good dusting.
At the technical rehearsal on 24 September Stanislavsky was sitting in the auditorium. The dramatic moment came when the bells of the Kremlin were to ring out, but the sound was tinny. ‘And when are we going to hear the real chimes?’ Stanislavsky called out from the darkness of the deserted rows. Somebody in Moscow, without telling Stanislavsky, had decided to leave the main bell behind because it weighed one and a half tons and was thus far too heavy for a European and American tour. Stanislavsky’s pent-up nerves exploded in a magisterial tantrum. He insisted that the performance must be cancelled. Eventually, a stagehand suggested that a large circular saw, if suspended, could prove a reasonable substitute if struck in the correct way. Circular saws were summoned for a trial from a nearby workshop, Stanislavsky was finally convinced and the play went ahead.
While the real members of the Moscow Art Theatre concentrated on Tsar Feodor, Lev Knipper slipped away for his ‘intensive treatment’. He certainly saw his sister Olga at this period and later, during his fifteen-month stay in Germany. Some of the time he spent in Freiburg at a sanatorium, where he had a piano in his room and composed; the rest he spent in Berlin. There can be no doubt at all about Lev’s driving musical passion. And thanks to the OGPU he had the rare opportunity of being allowed to live in Germany and study modern composition. How much spying he managed to do on the émigré community in Berlin is impossible to tell, yet he must surely have achieved some results, because the OGPU and then the NKVD allowed him to go abroad again and again.
12. Home Thoughts from Abroad
The contrast between life at home in Soviet Russia and life abroad could be very disorientating for members of the Moscow Art Theatre. ‘My fate has torn me away from Russia and from the life I had been dreaming of,’ Aunt Olya wrote to a friend from Paris. ‘And with a kind of anger I have plunged into the easy life, feeling satisfied with momentary impressions. This city is unbelievably beautiful. It is a joy to walk in the streets.’
It was also unsettling for White Russians in Paris when the Moscow Art Theatre arrived to perform The Cherry Orchard. ‘This must have been so disturbing for our former fellow countrymen,’ she added. Many White Russian émigrés were reduced to tears, seeing the re-creation of the country they still longed for and loved, and experiencing once again its poignant, painful ending, with Ranyevskaya leaving for Paris and the lover who she knew was faithless.
Aunt Olya dreaded the next and largest stage of their tour, the United States. ‘Please think of me on the 27th when we sail from Europe’s shore,’ she wrote in the same letter of December 1922. Her misgivings were rapidly confirmed by the restlessness and brashness of the New World. ‘It’s so noisy here. Everything is catching up and overtaking. There’s a dance-hall for every three houses. There are movie theatres, restaurants and concerts, but the nation itself does not have a drop of artistic blood in it. It’s a kingdom of incredible advertising. You go out in the evening and you don’t believe your own eyes. One doesn’t know where to look. There’s a sea of light, everything is jumping, moving, shimmering, with words written in light... We are a huge success, but to be honest with you, it does not please us.’
The reputation of the Moscow Art Theatre was so great that the Friday matinees were packed with actors, treating the performance as a master class. And the general effect on the theatrical profession in the United States was inestimable. But even that was little consolation for Aunt Olya. She was homesick for the potholed road which led from her apartment building on the Prechistensky bulvar to the Moscow Art Theatre on Kamergersky pereulok. She could not understand the United States. ‘It’s like some wind-up clockwork machine. It’s impossible to read anything in people’s faces. It’s as if everything is always all right. This is the expression they wear in the street and when they go about their business.’ On the other hand, she was honest enough to admit that she loved the en-suite bathrooms in the hotels and the constant hot water.
The Moscow Art Theatre was clearly not prepared for the contrast in New York between well-heated hotels and freezing rehearsal rooms. Many of them fell ill with flu and even bronchitis. Aunt Olya was amazed by the luxurious fur coats of American women worn over (by Soviet standards) revealing little dresses. In her eyes, the dresses of the 1920s left women almost naked.
She received a le
Lev, on the other hand, rejoiced in the stimulus of foreign culture. From Freiburg, he went deep into the Black Forest for the festival of modern music at Donaueschingen, where he met Paul Hindemith. Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg were great influences on him at this time. He was in a whirl of new discoveries. ‘I’m plunged into expressionism,’ he wrote to Aunt Olya on her return to Europe. He urged her to bring his sister Olga down with her from Berlin, because she needed rest.
In that summer of 1923, his adopted mother rejoined him there after the first part of their American tour. ‘I spent only three days in Berlin,’ wrote Aunt Olya to her brother Vladimir. ‘After the hellish work in America I arrived after a twelve day sea trip, scatter-brained and not knowing what to do with myself.’ She stayed in Berlin with Olga and was most impressed by the way she had decorated her apartment. After America, even the hated Berlin—‘all green and almost beautiful’—appealed to her. Germany seemed ’almost small, sweet and cosy’ after New York.