The house at Melikhovo (winter 1973)
This recollection goes back almost twenty years, but it does not seem that long ago. As I grow older, time does not slow down, as one might expect, but races away at an alarming rate. Chekhov had died in 1904 and in the summer of 2004 a Conference was being held at Melikhovo, his onetime home, to mark the centenary. I was due to read in Russian the eye-witness account of his death given by a young Russian student, Leo Rabeneck, in an article entitled ‘Chekhov’s Last Minutes’. To almost all the delegates, and certainly all the Russian ones, who had grown up in Soviet times, this graphic account was completely unknown, as it had been published in Paris in 1954, the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death, by which time the young Russian student had become a prominent member of the Russian émigré community.
The reading was introduced as the concluding item in the Conference, although, as the organiser, Vladimir Kataev, pointed out, it might also have made a fitting opening. Living through those last moments for themselves, the audience was unusually quiet and attentive: ‘you could have heard a pin drop’ was no exaggeration. I’d added some details of my own about the Rabeneck family and knew the text well, as my translation had appeared in the TLS under the title ‘Chekhov’s Last Moments’, so I was not worried that I might stumble over any of the Russian words, but there was one point at which I feared I might not be able to control my voice. This was when the German doctor, who’d been looking after Chekhov in Badenweiler, asked Leo Rabeneck, who was only twenty-one and had never seen a death before, to break the news to an unsuspecting Olga Knipper that Chekhov was not resting comfortably on his pillows but had died. I was relieved when I managed to keep calm and negotiate the danger area. Afterwards one of the Russian delegates came up to thank me and said he’d found the account very moving, ‘especially the moment when your voice broke’. How had he heard that? I thought it hadn’t happened. Are Russians more finely tuned to other people’s emotions than we are?
I haven’t been back to Russia since 2004, and in retrospect that moment at Melikhovo seems like the high point in my involvement with that maddening country: a moment of genuine cultural exchange. Chekhov had provided me with an absorbing interest throughout my adult life, and in return I was giving something back in their own language to those Russian scholars who’d been quietly keeping his spirit alive during the previous century and preserving a part of Russian culture for future generations. The good times in Anglo-Russian relations that we enjoyed around the turn of the century now seem a distant memory, and those of us who lived through them can congratulate ourselves on our good fortune. Will the good times come again? Maybe they will, since Anglo-Russian relations have always been cyclic, but not, I fear, in my time.
© Harvey Pitcher, 2023
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Dear Harvey, thank you for this powerful, beautifully compact post. Several people have told me how moving they find it, and Rabeneck’s account. I appreciate that the post sums up so much both for you personally and for Anglo-Russian relations.
That 2004 occasion does seem like a high point in genuine cultural exchange with Russia. In 1987, on behalf of the British Council, Alison and I organised the UK-USSR Colloquium in Cambridge entitled ‘Chekhov on the British Stage’, which had the personal endorsement of Gorbachev, and genuine cultural exchange in Chekhov studies flowered through the next decade. But by 2007 the eminent Chekhov scholars Mikhail Gromov, Lidiia Opul’skaia, Aleksandr Chudakov, Emma Polotskaia, and others, who had worked on the Academy edition of Chekhov and all passionately believed in Anglo-Russian contacts, were dead. In the next decade, Chekhov’s house in Yalta even became caught in the crossfire between Ukrainian nationalists and the Putin dictatorship.
I think Russians are ‘more finely tuned to other people’s emotions than we are’. They have had to be in order to survive in such a repressive and murderous society. With certain Russians — in the Soviet period, at least — I often felt that as I was speaking, they were reading my body language so skilfully and fast that they were four or five jumps ahead of me in the discourse. Also, I think Russians became so adept at reading emotions because they could not place any trust in the actual words their compatriots were uttering, as everyone in Soviet life indulged in coded speech or brazen vran’e (compulsive lying).
Can Russia pull itself out of the obsessive victimhood, paranoia, and nationalist-fascist coal sack it has thrust itself into? If not, I don’t see the good times in Anglo-Russian relations and cultural interchange returning in my lifetime, either.