The Mystery of Olga Chekhova by Antony Beevor
‘I decided to move south to join Lyova [Lev]. The Stanislav skys are here too. At the moment I am staying with Lyova, who has moved from the sanatorium to a private house [in Freiburg]. I am thinking of wandering in the mountains [of the Black Forest] to return to my senses. Lyova has got his own room with a grand piano. He is writing music, but very advanced music. I haven’t yet heard enough of it to make it out.’ Stanislavsky was also taking a break from the American tour to write his book My Life in Art. Maxim Gorky was in the area as well, so Aunt Olya and Stanislavsky went over to visit him.
Olga came down a little later from Berlin to join them and, while Lev composed, she and Aunt Olya walked and sat together chatting. Olga told her about her life in Berlin and also about Sergei Bertensson, the stage manager of the Moscow Art Theatre who had fallen in love with her. ‘I know that our Bertensson had serious intentions,’ Aunt Olya wrote to Vladimir in Moscow, ‘and that he had proposed to her, but nothing came of it, and she keeps him by her side as a friend. He is very much in love with her and he does everything that she commands him to do. She has told him that she is not going to have any more ties in her life without strong feelings.’
At the end of August, when ‘more slave labour in America’ appeared on the autumn horizon, she wrote again. ’It looks as if Lyova is going to become someone very interesting. In my opinion, his compositions are intriguing. I feel that it is not nonsense. He has met many young composers and was beyond himself with awe at this artistic environment. He is very confident of his talents.‘
Lev and Olga, accompanied by Aunt Olya, soon returned to Berlin. Lev began studying with Philip Jarnach and spent much time at the Society of Modern Music. While Olga returned to work in the studios at Babelsberg, Aunt Olya had to embark on the second part of the American tour, which she so dreaded. But it was Stanislavsky who suffered the most in the United States. He received a telegram from Nemirovich-Danchenko in Moscow warning him that the Communist satirical magazine Krokodil had quoted him in an interview in America describing the results of the Russian Revolution. ‘What was our horror,’ he was reported as having said, ‘when the workers invaded the theatre with dirty clothes, uncombed, unwashed, with dirty boots, demanding the performance of revolutionary plays.’
Stanislavsky immediately sent back a rebuttal to be printed in Pravda, claiming that this interview was ‘lies from beginning to end’. He had in fact said the very opposite, boasting of the Art Theatre’s great success with proletarian audiences. This was some way from the truth, but Stanislavsky was outraged at the position he found himself in. ‘Moscow accuses us of disloyalty,’ he wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko, ‘but we get even blacker looks abroad... In Paris a considerable number of people, both French and Russian, boycotted us because we came from Soviet Russia and therefore were Communists. Now they won’t let us into Canada, officially declaring us Bolsheviks.’ Not long afterwards, Prozhektor, another satirical magazine, published a photograph of Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper-Chekhova with Prince Feliks Yousupov, the assassin of Rasputin. The obvious implication was that the Moscow Art Theatre mixed with émigrés whenever it was abroad.
In Germany, Olga Chekhova had to be even more discreet about politics. In the absence of accessible records, one can only speculate about the details of her recruitment by Lev, but the most obvious incentive presented would have been exit visas for members of her family, especially her mother and little daughter. These were indeed delivered the following year, again an unusual gesture to assist a Soviet citizen who had failed to return after the expiry of her own exit permit.
According to General Sudoplatov, who was later in charge of Soviet intelligence in Germany, the basis for Olga Chekhova’s collaboration consisted of ‘a trustful relationship with us and the obligations imposed by recruitment’. This rather Delphic but standard phrase in Soviet intelligence circles denotes that although she signed a paper (probably under pressure), she was a voluntary, unpaid agent. Professor Anatoly Sudoplatov, who worked with his father on every aspect of his book, said that the main interest in Olga Chekhova was as a ‘sleeper’, to be activated when her contacts in high places might be useful. She was not considered the right material to be an active agent.
Olga Chekhova was indeed unsuited for imminent operational needs in that autumn of 1923. It was a period of intense OGPU and Comintern activity in Germany. A self-deluding myth had gripped the Politburo in Moscow that an uprising by Communist workers could trigger a German revolution. They were desperate for this momentous event to take place before the death of Lenin, who had suffered a series of strokes. Zinoviev had given the order to the German Communist Party in August. Trotsky could hardly contain himself with excitement. ‘Here at last, Comrades,’ he told fellow members of the Politburo, ‘is the tempest we have been expecting impatiently for so many years ... The German revolution means the collapse of world capitalism.’
Experts to direct this revolution were sent from Moscow, including the deputy chief of the OGPU, who was to set up a similar organization in Germany to crush the counter-revolution. But all the Politburo’s hopes were in vain. The German Communists represented a small minority of the working class, and when the order went out for a rising on 23October, it was ignored everywhere except among the Hamburg dockers, who had unloaded weapons secretly shipped to them from Petrograd. They were rapidly crushed. Lenin had to be told that his favourite prediction had not come to pass. Although incapable of coherent speech, he was still mentally alert and the news must have been another heavy blow.
Olga Chekhova, meanwhile, concentrated on her career. Following her success as the Baroness Safferstädt in Murnau’s Schloβ Vogelöd, she played in over forty silent movies during the 1920s. She also worked hard to perfect her German and lose her rather heavy Russian accent. This would enable her to take on stage roles as well, but it also meant that she was well prepared for her first talkie in 1930.
The most controversial movies of her early career were Der Todesreigen (Dance of Death) and Tatyana. Both were made in 1922and both were set in the Russian Revolution. In Der Todesreigen Olga Chekhova played a young Russian aristocrat who falls in love with a revolutionary and the revolution, but the horrors, the squalor and the misery depicted in the film were far too vivid for German Communists. In one notorious scene, Olga was seized and mauled by Red Guards. German left-wingers attacked the theatre where it was premiered, chanting ‘Down with anti-Bolshevism!’ and a riot developed. Olga avoided any comment on these events and this interesting moment in her career naturally raises the question of her agreement to help Lev and Soviet intelligence.
Olga wanted to help her family back in Russia, and particularly Lev, who needed it most after his time as a White Guard. She had also decided to get her daughter out, having created a far better life for herself in Germany. In her new country, she was admired and taken seriously, a very welcome change for her after the patronizing attitude of Misha and the Moscow Art Theatre circle. Her political instincts, as Soviet intelligence recognized in 1945, were basically those of an old-fashioned conservative. But for purely pragmatic reasons she was ready to be a ‘fellow-traveller’.
After filming Der verlorene Schuh, based on the fairy tale The Lost Shoe, Olga Chekhova then played a young fishwife in Das Meer, set on a Breton island off Brest. She also played the part of Nora in an adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll’s House. This received excellent reviews. But soon afterwards, in December 1923, she and Lev heard from Moscow that their father was extremely ill. Lev decided to return immediately. He was only just in time. Konstantin Knipper died on 6 January 1924. Lev sent a telegram in German to Aunt Olya in New York: ‘Papa gestorben 6 Januar. Leo’.
Lev wrote a long letter to Aunt Olya describing her brother’s end. Konstantin Knipper had been delirious, talking about his work and making speeches. But the death itself was peaceful. Lev had then clearly been irritated when his Uncle Vladimir arrived and ‘sobbed like a child’, which ‘broke our harmony’. As well as Lulu Knipper and Lev
After Misha left, Lev stayed with his mother. Lulu felt that all she had left after her husband’s death was Olga’s little girl. She did not want to go to Berlin, but at the same time she did not want to be parted from her granddaughter, whom Olga now wanted with her. Lev told their mother that she had to go to Germany.
In the same letter to Aunt Olya, he started talking of the future without wasting any time. ‘Now, on quite a different subject. You know what I mean. Money... My happiness lies in my art, in my work. I’ve made a huge step forward in the last two months. One more year, and I will stand on my own two feet. But now I don’t really want to work for money. I’ve written a foxtrot and sold it for fifty roubles, but it was so hard and unpleasant. My darling Aunt Olya, please forgive me for approaching you like this. You don’t like this. But you know me. I need money very, very much. Because the funeral is going to cost us (a very modest one) 200—250 dollars. I will take a break from my lessons and try to raise some money, but the problem isn’t so much mine, but Mama’s. [Olga], of course, will send us some money, but it won’t be much. Please don’t cry, don’t grieve. Death is beautiful, I’ve understood it clearly now for the first time. It is a great, mysterious celebration.’ And so ended Lev’s rather chilling letter.
Once family matters were attended to, Lev wasted little time in trying to establish his supremacy in modern music in a city cut off from all new developments abroad. Composers, conductors and musicians were indeed bowled over by this young apparition from abroad. His opinions, to say nothing of his plus fours and golfing shoes, left them open-mouthed. ‘Everyone was such a formalist in those days,’ wrote the conductor E. A. Akulov almost seventy years later. ‘I remember Lyovushka Knipper’s return from Berlin. We were all penniless and looking like shabby alley cats after a fight, and he came back wearing some incredible shoes. So, anyway, Knipper said to us: “One really can’t write music in this way.” We were looking at his incredible shoes with leather festoons, his unbelievable trousers, and we believed that major chords with three notes had actually been cancelled all over the world.’
In Berlin, meanwhile, Olga’s career had become exhaustingly successful. Germany was in an appalling economic crisis, and thus in desperate need to forget its present worries and the trauma of defeat in the First World War. The studios at Babelsberg were initially working flat out, but soon the financial situation reduced the output by half as inflation destroyed the value of money. Fortunately, in spite of the demand for escapism, the new industry attracted some brilliant directors from the theatre who were longing to experiment. Many came from Vienna. There were few prospects for them in that beautiful shell, emptied of meaning by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
After playing the title role in Nora, Olga Chekhova tried to produce her own film, Die Pagode, but this was not a commercial success. Her determination to seize every opportunity pushed her into accepting almost any part going, to the point where she was making up to five or even more films a year. Most of these roles stereotyped her as a society lady, but where she was extremely clever was in the way she could almost change her face at will for each part. One can compare photographs of Olga Chekhova in a dozen different movies, and even when you know it is the same actress, it is very hard to see. This did not just come with changing the style or colour of her hair; it seems that she even managed to change the shape of her face.
She also made every effort to play the publicity game, with interviews, articles and photographic sessions. She had moved to a slightly larger apartment at 21 Berchtesgadener Strasse in Berlin-Schöneberg, but, as Aunt Olya had remarked in one of her letters, Olga had no time for relationships and was exhausting herself with work. There can be little doubt that after her feeling of helplessness when her marriage to Misha fell apart during the Russian Revolution, she never wanted to depend on a man again. This made her extremely circumspect in her relations with suitors beyond the usual good-mannered flirting. She was determined to earn enough money to avoid any such vulnerability, a feeling which must have been greatly strengthened by everyone’s sense ofpowerlessness during the raging inflation of 1923.
The collapse of savings during the inflation had deeply damaged the middle classes, psychologically as well as financially. The west end of Berlin became famous for large, gloomy apartments turned into boarding houses by ruined war widows. But once the currency was stabilized in a bold move by the Weimar government, economic prospects began to revive, at least for those who were employable.
Alongside the terrible unemployment and misery, the febrile gaiety of the 1920S was something of a danse macabre to banish any memory of what the world had just been through. The revealing short dresses which had so shocked Aunt Olya in New York were eagerly bought in Berlin by those women who could afford them. Olga Chekhova, now beyond the stage of needing to borrow clothes, had also had her hair bobbed, a style which the Germans called the Bubikopf, because it made a woman’s head look like a boy’s.
Once her German was good enough, she managed to obtain a one-year contract at the Berliner Renaissance-Theater. No doubt the theatre management was taken in by her totally false claims to have been a member of the famous Moscow Art Theatre. Yet she still drove out early to Babelsberg every morning for filming, which made it a very long day. The compensation, of course, was that her spending power was increased considerably. Soon she bought a smart new Talbot convertible with the enormous running boards of the period. She even had a chauffeur, but often preferred to drive the car herself. Olga Chekhova clearly revelled in the idea that she was at last in control of her life.
13. The End of Political Innocence
Misha Chekhov came back into the lives of the Knipper family again in 1924. Aunt Olya told Nemirovich-Danchenko that she would ‘be happy to play the mayor’s wife’ in The Government Inspector, the Gogol play in which Misha was now the star. He was about to be made the first Honoured Actor of the USSR. The drama of Olga’s elopement with Misha must by then have seemed almost as distant a memory as a crisis in childhood.
Misha was certainly ambitious, yet all the time he held passionately to his ideals. Lev Knipper, on the other hand, seems to have harnessed his artistic credo to his driving ambition, yet he believed in himself so intensely that he felt he could follow any unconventional path which took his fancy. A month after his father’s death, Lev proudly sent Aunt Olya, then back in New York, a newspaper clipping which stated: ‘Intensive work is going on to prepare a new programme of plastic compositions based on the music by Liszt and L. Knipper—a young composer who has arrived from Berlin.’
The letter which accompanied it was briskly energetic in its descriptions of what he was up to. ‘I have left the Gnesina school and now I am studying on my own, preparing for the Conservatoire, for its conductors’ faculty. I am studying hard. At the same time, I am writing a ballet. It is going to be staged this autumn... I am already being spoken of in Moscow music circles ... The ballet is based on an absolutely new concept—a harmonious combination of music, eurhythmics and light, because I have concluded after studying them that the attempts of Wagner and Scriabin were erroneous from the start.’ He finally turned to the subject of the family. ‘I need to send Mama abroad as soon as possible, she is falling to bits from her illness. And I can’t leave [Sofya Chekhova, the mother of the suicide Volodya] in charge of our apartment, it would ruin the place.’
Lev must have been in t
‘The theatre is full all the time,’ she wrote six days later, 16 March 1924. ‘They are predicting that I will be a very good actress. It is hard for me to write to you about this because I find it so funny that I have become famous here and that people go to the theatre just to see me and that they believe in me.’ She then made an interesting admission. ‘I find that what I am able to give people in the theatre is simpler for me than life outside the theatre.’