'Live in Peace Among Yourselves'

“Help the poor. Take care of Mother. Live in peace among yourselves.” 

How typical of Chekhov. No self-promotion. Wishes that might sound sententious in the words of others echo like blessings, even prayers. Chekhov is selfless in his last will and testament, written in the form of a letter to his sister Maria on August 3, 1901. He never mailed it and simply gave the letter to his wife, who passed it on to Maria after his death in 1904. Because it was never notarized, the will was not recognized by authorities and years of probate ensued, followed by Soviet distortions of Chekhov and his legacy.

 

The letter is collected in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentaries (1973), translated by Michael Henry Heim, with notes by Simon Karlinsky. The terms Chekhov spelled out are generous. To Maria he leaves his house in Yalta and income derived from his plays, and various sums go to his other siblings. To his wife Olga Knipper go his house in Gurzuf and five thousand rubles. Maria turned the Yalta house into the Chekhov Museum.

 

‘With single-minded determination,” Karlinsky writes, “she defended it from looters during the civil war that followed the October Revolution, saved it from nationalization by getting it assigned to the Lenin Library in Moscow in the mid-1920s, rebuilt it after it was damaged by an earthquake in 1927 and stayed in it during the German occupation of the Crimea in 1941.”

 

Maria Chekhova, in Moscow, met Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, Countess Alexandra (Sasha) Lvovna Tolstaya, who was trying to do for Yasnaya Polyana what Maria was doing for the house in Yalta. Alexandra, Karlinsky tells us, was “handicapped in her role as a museum keeper by her lack of patience with the distortion of her father’s ideas and principles by Soviet ideologues, by her inability to overlook the curtailment of civil liberties and by her refusal to remain silent about the persecution of Russian writers by the Soviet government.”

 

Tolstoya was arrested five times by the Bolsheviks and sentenced to prison for a year in 1920. In 1931 she emigrated to the United States and became an American citizen.

 

“Chekhov’s sister could not understand that kind of involvement,” Karlinsky writes. To make certain future generation read her brother’s work, she “was prepared to make considerable concessions and adjustments.” She removed all references to Chekhov’s friendship with Ivan Bunin, the Nobel laureate who fled the Soviet Union and denounced its literary policies. She permitted the placement of Lenin’s collected works on Chekhov’s shelves, making it appear the Soviet dictator was among his favorite writers. Maria encouraged “party-lining hacks who were distorting every view Chekhov ever held,” turning him into “a narrow and intolerant fanatic in their own image.”

 

Even the reputations of the greatest writers aren’t safe from the man-handling of ideologues. In 1944, the Soviet government awarded Maria Chekhova the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. She remained director of the Chekhov Museum in Yalta from 1922 until 1957, the year she died at age ninety-three, fifty-three years after her brother.