![]() ![]() It’s through this correspondence, and its evasions, that we have recently come to learn the truth about an event that darkened his last years and, indeed, could have ended his short, unlikely marriage. It became a marriage à distance, one carried out through almost daily correspondence. He went to the warm south, to Yalta in Crimea, and built a house there, only returning to Moscow and St Petersburg – and his wife – when the weather improved. Chekhov’s ravaged lungs meant he had to flee the bitter Russian winters. She had a career in Moscow, she was in demand as an actor. However, Knipper – devoted, capable and energetic as she was – could never be his nurse. As it grew more severe, he sensed the end of his life nearing: perhaps this was what spurred him finally towards matrimony. He was a doctor and knew exactly the inevitable, fatal potency of his malady. Their affair began in 1899 but it was shadowed by Chekhov’s terminal illness, tuberculosis. She was petite and vivacious, and the fact that she’d had to struggle so hard to make her way in the world gave her an energy and near-ruthless determination that Chekhov responded to. Many of his lovers were far more beautiful and beguiling than Olga. ![]() She caught his eye in 1898 when she was playing Irina Arkadina in The Seagull. At the time she met Chekhov she was an original member of the famous, radical Moscow Arts Theatre. She came from a bourgeois family that had hit hard times, and she had audaciously and tenaciously decided to become an actor, driving herself to rise out of genteel penury. Knipper was a second-generation Russian, of German Lutheran stock. Then suddenly, clandestinely, he married. Many women had fallen in love with him and wanted to marry him but he always quickly backed away. And, even more significantly, he was the ultimate commitment-phobe. He was also a regular visitor to brothels. In Russia at the time, Chekhov was as famous a writer as Tolstoy and, in addition, a passionate and amorous man who had enjoyed more than 30 love affairs. The marriage provoked great surprise and consternation among his friends and family. On, Anton Chekhov, aged 41, married the actor Olga Knipper, eight years his junior. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |