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annotation De Maegd-Soëp, Carolina. Chekhov And Women: Women In The Life And Work Of Chekhov. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1987. "Those I am afraid of," author Carolina De Maegd-Soëp quotes Anton Chekhov in a letter to a friend in 1888, "are the ones who look for tendencies between the lines and want to put me down definitely as a liberal or a conservative. I am not a liberal nor a conservative, nor an evolutionist, nor a monk, nor indifferent to the world. I would like to be a free artist" (63). The elusiveness of Chekhov, his avoidance of being effectively pigeonholed into one political group or another might be said also about his relationships with women. "Give me a wife, who, like the moon, would not appear in my sky every day," Chekhov wrote his publisher A.S. Suvorin in 1895. Like politics, Chekhov seemed to view women as a distraction from his work, and nimbly avoided serious involvement until he married the actress Olga Knipper late in life. Not that he wasn't drawn into relationships along the way. The most tempestuous and enduring, according to De Maegd-Soëp, was his intermittent romance with another actress, Lika Mizinova. An apparently strikingly beautiful libertine ten years his junior, Mizinova alternately, perhaps simultaneously, fascinated and repelled Chekhov with her "vulgar" persona, her "volatile temperament and...disorganized way of living" (127). Mizinova smoked and drank to excess and pulled few punches, including her correspondence to Chekhov. Annoyed by the playwright's tendency to disclaim his more intimate correspondence with a dismissive, comical pseudonym, Mizinova more than once expressed her displeasure at his evasion. "You are even afraid to sign your letters with your surname!" she reproached him at one point. "Do you want me to send each of your letters back after I have read them?" At another time she wrote simply, "you are an idiot" (119). Although Chekhov professed to her that "I love in you my former sufferings and my wasted youth" (120), his refusal to commit to anything more than a flirtatious relationship drove Mizinova in late 1893 to become the mistress of author Ignaty Potapenko. Dumped by Potapenko after becoming pregnant, Mizinova relocated to Paris where she gave birth to a daughter in November, 1894. Alone, she pleaded with Chekhov to join her, to visit her, but he never did. "You are a coward," she wrote to him finally in 1898. "That is why you will not come to Paris. You are afraid of my love...you were always frightened by it..." (128). Chekhov, De Maegd-Soep claims, modeled the character of Nina in "The Seagull" closely after Mizinova, who remained living in Paris until her death in 1937. Chekhov's other major sexual relationship was with the actress Olga Knipper, whom he abruptly married late in 1901. "We all felt overwhelmed by the unusual, delicate charm of his personality, his simplicity, his inability to instruct or put on airs," Knipper recalled of their first meeting. "....Somewhat confused, he would stroke his beard and adjust his pince-nez" (141). Although initially reticent over a serious involvement -- "...if I married an actress our child would certainly be an orangutan or a porcupine..." (144), Chekhov was attracted to Knipper's charismatic personality and relative good health, a contrast not lost upon Chekhov's physician, Dr. I. N. Altshuller. "She stood there, in a white dress, radiant, glowing with health and happiness," Altshuller later recalled of seeing them together in the spring of 1900. "He, stooping, thin, yellow, aging, hopelessly ill" (145). Chekhov and Knipper's decision to marry in May of 1901 was apparently spontaneous and took everyone by surprise, including Chekhov's sister Masha, and his good friends Maxim Gorky and Ivan Bunin. Of these, Gorky's response was the most benign. "They say you're getting married to...an actress with a foreign name," Gorky wrote Chekhov. "I don't believe it. But if it is true, then I am glad" (147). Bunin, concerned by what he termed Knipper's "frivolous society life", was somewhat less congratulatory, proclaiming the union "...a suicide, worse than Sakhalin" (158). Masha Chekhov, intensely devoted to her brother and a close friend of Knipper's, contributed her own best wishes. "I'll throttle you with my own hands," she wrote to her friend. "I shan't bite through your throat, I'll simply throttle you" (149). Only Chekhov's distress at his sister's protracted sulking caused her to recant a month later. With a peculiarly feminine logic, Masha wrote Chekhov in June, 1900, "If you had married someone other than Knipshits, then I would probably never have written you another thing for I would have hated your wife...so don't be angry with me and know that I love you and Olga more than anything in the world" (150). De Maegd-Soëp's depiction of Chekhov-Knipper marriage is one of a reasonably happy, if unconventional, union marked by lengthy separations. Knipper commented upon this in a September, 1902, letter to her husband. "It seems to me that if we should be together all the time, you would become less attached to me or you would become accustomed to me as to a table, a chair...is that right?" Chekhov responded, "I don't know, darling, whether I'm complete or incomplete, but one thing I do know: the longer I live together with you, the deeper and broader my love will become. So know that, dear little actress" (154). When De Maegd-Soëp holds to her thesis and writes of Chekhov and the women in his life, she is a succinct and able weaver of fact, letter excerpts, and informed speculation. However, just as The Iconoclast devoted an excessive amount of space to the plight of the Russian peasantry, big chunks of Women digress into a general critical analysis of Chekhov's work, with only the occasional token generalization adhering to the author's argument. For example, "Chekhov and the Woman Reader", part of a 50-odd page analysis of the author's short stories and plays, sweeping generalizations suffice where specific, detailed examples are needed. "In the letters, women describe their feelings, thoughts, experiences, aspirations and longings in such a truthful way that they provide us with a clear image of the mind and soul of women of that period," reads a typical passage through this section (50). Unfortunately, the author cites nary a single actual excerpt or example to bolster this claim, instead breezing to the conclusion that "obviously Chekhov...used this rich material in order to give his realistic portrayal of women" (50). I don't doubt it, but some examples would really have helped. Similarly, a section titled, "The Playwright and His Female Audience" is really a general analysis of "The Seagull", with the postscript, "the letters from unknown women frequently tell us more than those of Chekhov's women friends and acquaintances" (81) tacked on in the concluding paragraph. Excerpts that are cited invariably use a first initial only, such as "N. Konchevskaya", "E. Gorodetskaya", "N. Inozemtseva", etc. While it can be assumed that the "a" at the end of each name denotes the feminine, the question remains, why don't any of these individuals have actual first names? The reader is left to assume that the author read x-number of letters to come to her conclusions, but some specifically cited examples certainly would have helped both the author's credibility and the usefulness of this study. Copyright © 2001 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |