William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

2004

Consider this situation. You are a handsome, celebrated writer in your thirties — male and unmarried. You have been having a passionate affair for some years with a beautiful young woman (a decade younger than you) that has reached such a pitch that the next logical step is marriage. She wants desperately to marry you, but, however much you are attracted to this young woman, you inevitably draw back: you cannot commit and so the affair effectively ends. But the young woman, spurned in this way, hugely frustrated, embarks on a fresh affair — but this time with one of your close friends (who also happens to be married) and who is also your business partner. These new lovers decamp to Paris where the young woman becomes pregnant and duly has a child. Whereupon her faithless lover abandons her and returns to his long-suffering wife.

What does one do, embroiled in such a soap opera? Cuckolded in this way by a real friend, how does one feel or respond? Do you laugh it off, chalk it up to experience, move on? Or are there deeper wounds, more profound regrets, moments of poignant self-analysis, of possible self-loathing? Or do you write it all up and put it in a play?

Exactly this situation happened to Anton Chekhov in 1894. Chekhov had a prolonged affair with a young teacher and apprentice opera singer called Lydia (“Lika”) Mizinova. When marriage was ruled out by Chekhov she began an affair with his friend Ignati Potapenko. This ménage moved to Paris, Lika had a child, Potapenko returned to his wife and Lika returned to Russia. Chekhov affected to be unconcerned.

I have been reading a great deal and writing a fair amount about Chekhov recently (this year sees the centenary of his death) and have become very familiar with his various biographies. Chekhov had a rare and complex personality. He was much loved, but remained a closed and sometimes cool acquaintance. He was incredibly generous but was often ruthlessly hard-hearted. He loved the company of women but he was terrified of marriage. When he did marry towards the end of his short life it was only because ill health (he was dying of tuberculosis) would ensure that husband and wife were more apart than together. Reading Russian, French, American and British commentaries and accounts of his life, I have found that there is one consensus that emerges in the face of these conundrums. Namely that Chekhov was constitutionally incapable of falling in love and giving himself fully to a woman; that something in his nature always drew him up short; that he was always destined to be a loner.

And yet, and yet… The nature of his relationship with Lika Mizinova struck me as something of an exception to his usual amours (Chekhov was promiscuous with his affections). As I read about Chekhov, the story of his affair with Lika nagged at me: it seemed different from his other romantic entanglements. I began to wonder if Lika was the one that got away.

The facts are relatively straightforward. Anton Chekhov met Lika Mizinova in 1889, she was nineteen and a friend of his sister, Masha, who taught at the same school. Chekhov was twenty-nine and on the verge of his great literary fame. Lika was very pretty: grey-eyed with dark eyebrows, buxom, with a mass of curly ash-blonde hair and a chain-smoker (somewhat daring for the 1880s). Chekhov fell for her and an affair began. It’s worth bearing in mind that, amongst artistic circles in pre-Revolutionary Russia, social and sexual behaviour seem remarkably “modern”—not far removed from the norms of today. The Moscow and St Petersburg intelligentsia led similar lives to fin de siècle Parisian artists and writers. Fun was had. Life was good.

The precise nature of Chekhov’s affair with Lika is best derived from their letters. Apart from his wife, Olga Knipper (whom he married towards the end of his life), and his sister, Masha, Lika is his most regular female correspondent. Ninety-eight letters survive from her to him, sixty-seven in the other direction, though it seems there were many more, now lost. The tone of these letters is fascinating: it is almost consistently one of bantering flirtation, of feigned identities (idiot lover, childish sweetheart and so on), of joking, of sexual innuendo. Chekhov is always speculating that Lika has other admirers, direly warning her off other men. There is, clearly, an erotic undercurrent to these letters and this persistent role playing, as if they were designed to stimulate. For example: “Ah, Lika, Lika, diabolically beautiful Lika! … Do not despair but come to us, and we will hurl ourselves upon you with might and main.”

A year later Chekhov alluded to a friend that he might marry Lika, then added, “I doubt if I’ll be happy with her — she’s too beautiful.” Maybe this was the problem: Lika’s beauty attracted constant admirers, she was the cynosure of all male eyes. A friend would walk down a Moscow street with her and count the number of male heads turning. She was evidently strikingly attractive. Chekhov tried not to be jealous as other men fell for her, but he still would not commit to matrimony. Then Lika had an affair with the painter Levitan, another of Chekhov’s friends. It was as if Lika was challenging him, but Chekhov responded only with more jokes and ironies. However, Chekhov was obviously wounded: he parodied Levitan and Lika with some cruelty in a story he wrote in 1891 called “The Grasshopper.” Levitan refused to speak to Chekhov for three years. Lika persisted. Like no other woman he knew — and he knew a lot — Lika got under his skin.

A year later, 1892, the affair was back on. Lika, wiser now, was aware that it was best for her to bide her time. Chekhov dallied with other admirers but he was always drawn back to Lika. The on-off affair continued: she visited him at his country estate, he came to her flat in Moscow — but Chekhov still kept her at bay. As long as Lika wanted him, Chekhov could maintain his ironic distance. The affair with Levitan had touched him to a degree, but he could not have imagined what she would do next to stimulate his jealousy.

Lika’s affair with Ignati Potapenko began at the end of 1893, four years after she and Chekhov first met. It was undisguised and Chekhov appeared to give the union his blessing, even allowing the lovers to stay together at Melikhovo, instituting an odd ménage à trois. Lika conceived her child here at this time. Chekhov’s sister, Masha, was disgusted by her brother’s supine behaviour. Yet, even now, Chekhov could still write to Lika: “Darling Lika, today at 6.30 pm I shall leave for Melikhovo, would you like to come with me?” He was playing a curious and dangerous game, both desiring her and letting her betray him — the immediate consequence of which was that Lika left Moscow for Paris to be with Potapenko.

But even in Paris Lika and Chekhov wrote regularly, tormenting each other with coy invitations and hard irony. Chekhov was beginning to block out the ideas for The Seagull, in which the central character of Nina was to be very close to Lika. Potapenko kept the fact of Lika’s pregnancy from Chekhov and the two men were still sufficiently firm friends to travel together on holiday in the summer of 1894. Lika, meanwhile, went to Switzerland to have her child. Chekhov couldn’t stop writing to her: “You refuse to answer my letters, dear Lika … I’m not very well. I have an almost continuous cough. I seem to have lost my health as I lost you.”

In fact more had changed. The tone of their letters seems to signal that some sort of watershed had been reached. Chekhov by now could not ignore the fact that Lika was pregnant and expecting Potapenko’s child: nothing could ever be the same. Lika gave birth to a girl, Christina. Potapenko, under enormous pressure from his wife (she threatened to kill herself and her children), told Lika he could never see her again.