Antony Beevor's The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

A friend of mine once confessed to me that he loved to play the "lottery game" as opposed to playing the lottery itself.  That is to say, this friend liked to imagine what he would do if he won a million dollars.  Up until that time I had naively imagined this game of fantasy to be something that I had personally discovered.  What is the source of our passion for this kind of counter factual activity?  Is the "lottery game" a  form of unhealthy escapism or does it actually propel us to investigate his core values?  What would we do if time and money didn't prevent us from living the life we really want, deep down?  Is it only money that prevents us from taking a different kind of job?  Do we really want to be free of work altogether?  The answers  to these and similar fanciful questions can be revealing.  For me one Russian history equivalent of the "lottery game" is to imagine the survival of a figure of nineteenth century Russia into the twentieth century.  What would Pushkin or Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Chekhov or Turgenev have made of the Russian Revolution?  How would liberal sympathy for Russia's oppressed masses have been translated when confronted with street violence, civil war, and purges?  Of course, most if not all nineteenth century writers did wrestle with revolutionary ideas as well as events, and at least a few "nineteenth century" men and women actually lived long enough into the twentieth century to see the 1905 Revolution first hand.  But we can't ultimately know how Tolstoy would have reacted to the lived experience of Bolshevik insurrection and Bolshevik government.  On the other hand, Tolstoy's family did encounter real revolution, so we can get at least a glimpse of what Tolstoy himself might have thought about the communist experiment.  So too did Chekhov's family encounter the world's first communist government.

The best overall treatment of these way aristocratic families--Tolstoys and Nabokovs and Bunins included--suffered at the hands of the Reds is provided by Douglas Smith's wonderful new book, Former People:  The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy.  But although Smith's book deserves the scholarly attention it is already getting, Antony Beevor's smaller book, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, deserves some attention as well.  To be sure, the Chekhov/Knipper family was not an aristrocratic clan.  However, the Chekhovs and Knippers, representatives of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, came to embody Russia's creative aristocracy.  Their ambiguous position between Old Russia and New Russia is tantalizing to say the least. On the one hand, the Moscow Art Theatre symbolized Russia's enduring claim to greatness even in the midst of economic and political confusion.  If the West had doubts about the Bolsheviks, let them remember that Russia had only recently invented some of Europe's most prized expressions of modernity.  On the other hand, the Moscow Art Theatre had been a product of the bourgeois, not proletarian, imagination.  How valuable any cultural institution be if it predated the proletarian revolution of 1917?

Ultimately, Antony Beevor devotes his book to one Chekhov/Knipper in particular, Anton Chekhov's niece, Olga Chekhova.  Fascinatingly, Olga left the Soviet Union and soon emerged as a film star in Wiemar, and then Nazi, Germany.  Olga's strange career tells us a great deal about how extraordinarily difficult it could be to bridge the gap between nineteenth and twentieth century Russia, and nineteenth and twentieth century Europe in general.  For Olga, who traded on her uncle's fame in order to establish her bona fides in the Central and Western Europe industry, ultimately found it necessary or perhaps desirable to become a Soviet "sleeper" spy even as she attended celebrity events with Hitler, Goebbels, and other high-ranking Nazi officials.  At one point, Stalin and Beria were apparently intent on using her to help assassinate Hitler. Of course, the niece's precarious life choices don't really tell us what Anton Chekhov would have thought about either the Soviets or the Nazis, but the fact that his cultural heirs were obligated to weave their way between two of modernity's greatest monsters, Hitler and Stalin, tells us something dreadful about how degraded European culture had become since the Moscow Art Theatre first opened its doors in 1898.

Modern Capital

This blog has already summarized Solomon’s Volkov’s majestic survey of Russian high culture in the twentieth century, The Majestic Chorus. That work was a supremely sophisticated and beautiful explanation of Russia’s cultural achievements prior to the First World War as well as the aesthetic continuity that somehow survived a frontal attack from the forces of Soviet totalitarianism. Volkov’s earlier book, St. Petersburg: A Cultural history, despite its longer chronology and geographical constraints, is a very similar book.


St. Petersburg is urbane, humane, well-written, and well-informed; and Volkov, expatriate musician and historian, is equally at home discussing St. Petersburg’s centrality to European art, music, dance, theater, poetry, architecture, literature, and politics. Even as an exile, Volkov somehow remained the ultimate Russian insider. And now he may be the doyen of the expatriate Russian intellectual community.

In addition to his career as a musician, Volkov has produced a series of books that are predicated on oral interviews with some of St. Petersburg most famous sons, including Shostakovich (See Nick’s previous post on Testimony), Brodsky, Balanchine, and Akhmatova.

Volkov’s purpose in this book is twofold: to assert St. Petersburg’s importance to the history of European and global modernity, even apart from the Revolution; and to explain how the St. Petersburg “mythos” operated in Russian cultural history.

Volkov necessarily begins with the city’s highly unusual founding by the highly unusual emperor, Peter the Great (for whom the city was not actually named). The city was nothing if not experimental: at great human cost, Peter built a new “window to the West” which bore little resemblance to Moscow or the rest of Russia. Its architecture was well-organized, spacious, and elegant, if also cold and sterile. The city immediately found both aesthetic champions and detractors.



Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, celebrating the imposing statue of the same name, launched the powerful but ambivalent poetic response to the physical city. Dostoyevsky and Gogol built on what Pushkin had written, although each had severely critical reactions to the city, for despite its grandeur St. Petersburg had its drawbacks. Built at the cost of tens of thousands of serf laborers, St. Petersburg was cold, landlocked during the long Russian winter months, subject to floods, strangely inorganic, and home to brilliant but often superficial court life.

Ultimately, it’s hard to dismiss Volkov’s claims about St. Petersburg. Smaller and newer than cities such as London, Paris, and Vienna, St. Petersburg’s cultural elites eventually became the most articulate artistic exponents of what it meant to live in the modern world. ). Marshall Berman has written very succinctly on the subject, exploring Dostoyevsky’s feverish explanation of modernity: on the one hand, you get freedom born of the anonymity of city life; on the other hand, you get uprooted from the traditional moral and social networks.

Eventually, St. Petersburg’s claim to historical importance would be solidified for all time by the October Revolution, though ironically Lenin hated the city and hasted to move the Russian capital to Moscow (though not entirely for the reasons Volkov suggests). It’s true that many of Russia’s aesthetic innovations predate the Revolution. However, although this may be impossible to prove, it seems likely that revolutionary aesthetics led to revolutionary politics, and of course the reverse is certainly true: once the political revolution occurred, the new political elite alienated traditional artistic elites and therefore coincidentally opened doors for radical artists and poets such as Blok and Mayakovsky.



St. Petersburg suffered tremendously for its radical pretensions. In some ways, its gloomy artists had expected as much: poets such as Blok has foretold the city’s collapse before it became inevitable. The Revolution, Civil War, Stalinism, and World War II, led to the murder, suicide, death by starvation, exile, flight, or imprisonment of countless artists, writers, and poets. Somehow, the city survived.

The survival was embodied by the great poet, Akhmatova, who refused to leave Russia, although Stalin executed a former husband and imprisoned another husband as well as her son. Volkov’s St. Petersburg is a wonderful reminder that even had the city of St. Petersburg perished, its “mythos” would live on. For better or worse, the city helped to define what it means to be a modern person. The legacy is complex and ambivalent, so perhaps Volkov’s hagiographic tone isn’t quite right. What is certain is that we need to think seriously about St. Petersburg’s legacy to the modern world if we want to understand our place in that world. It was the home of the Bronze Horseman, Mir iskusskva (World of Art), Suprematism, Acmeism, Russian Futurism, Constructivism, the Decembrist Revolt, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Krondstadt Revolt, the Marysky Theater, the Stray Dog, etc. This city meant something important (if not always positive) to people such as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belinsky, Herzen, Pasternak, Punin, Mirsky, Tchaikovsky, Balanchine, Lenin, Benois, Chukovsky, Ginzburg, Gumilyov, Mussorgsky, Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Shostokovich, etc. And if meant much to them, it should to us as well.

Moscow Art Theatre

It's taken me a very long time to get through Constantine Stanislavsky's verbose autobiography, My Life in Art. Although the book needed an editor, you can't read it without getting a very good idea about why Stanislavsky was so instrumental in placing Russia at the forefront of modern theatre. Stanislavsky emerges from these pages as a relentless critic of everything, even his own performances.

The book opens with a fairly lengthy description of Stanislavsky's childhood milieu within Moscow's haute bourgeoisie. The description of the author's family and friends helps to explain how pre-revolutionary Russia created so much of Europe's most brilliant and innovative art. It took incredible amounts of wealth to allow a man like Stanislavsky to forget all worldly cares and devote himself entirely to acting, directing, and producing. At one point, a depressed Stanislavsky wonders--but only rhetorically--whether a potential aesthetic failure might mean that he had nothing better to do than go back to the family business.

The intensity of the Stanislavsky's aesthetic journey also explains the Socialist Revolution that would engulf the country in 1914. How is that such an extravagant bourgeois artistic culture could live side by side with so much misery in the Russian proletariat and peasantry? Surely this state of affairs was a highly unstable one. Stanislavsky's book details his own evolution as an actor and dictatorial director. As he was in art, his journey is both heroic and comic. At one point, we see him asking someone in Italy to strip down in a restaurant so that Stanislavsky can have his closes in order to more closely approximate the gentleman's Moorish custom. At another, Stanislavsky leads his whole troupe to visit the area of the city that was populated by tramps in preparation for Gorky's play about the poor, "The Lower Depths."(Wasn't there a Simpson episode when a Stanislavsky-influenced James Wood gets himself incarcerated in order to research a part he would like to play?)



Whatever else it is, My Life in Art is elegant, honest, and urbane--so urbane in fact that Stanislavsky provides his readers with none of the US Weekly scandal modern movie goers prize so highly. Moreover, the book is filled with wonderful encounters with the royalty of Russian modernism, most especially Chaliapin, Meierhold,Duncan, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Bernhardt, Ostrovsky, Gorky, and Chekhov.

But the book also makes one appreciate that Russian modernism was deeply rooted in older Russian as well as European literary traditions. The influences (and sometimes the near acquaintances) of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Gogol are omnipresent. The influences of Shakespeare, Racine, and Moliere aren't neglibile either. And yet somehow the book moves inexorably from Shakespeare to the Stanislavsky system of acting, My System, as he calls it. I think immediately of the acting coach in the movie Adaptation whose hustle is so transcendent it becomes a kind of high art in its own right.