These materials would later tell the molecular story of his death.Ĭhekhov, the author of theatrical masterpieces including The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and The Three Sisters, had suffered from tuberculosis for two decades before his death in 1904. Carver doesn’t describe what happens to Chekhov’s body and possessions, but someone that day had the foresight to preserve the shirt he was wearing as well as the letters and postcards he had been writing during his stay. In the decades that followed, Chekhov’s death became, in the words of journalist and biographer Janet Malcolm, “one of the great set pieces in literary history.” Raymond Carver fictionalized it in his final short story, “ Errand,” published in 1987. The stillness was interrupted by a huge black moth, “which kept crashing painfully into the light bulbs and darting about the room,” she wrote. “Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said, ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne.’ He drained it and lay quietly on his left side, and was soon silent forever.” The playwright’s wife, actress Olga Knipper-Chekhova, later remembered, “He awoke in the early hours of the night, and for the first time in his life himself requested that the doctor be sent for.” When the German doctor arrived, “Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly in German (of which he knew very little): Ich sterbe (‘I’m dying’).” The doctor ordered a bottle of champagne be brought up. That should have been the end of Chekhova's story, with an executioner's bullet or-slow death in the Gulag as an epilogue.Despite the champagne the mood was somber. She impressed Goebbels (but did not sleep with him), was photographed next to Hitler, and was in Berlin when the Red Xrmy took the city. She left soon after the revolution for Germany (she was by blood 100 per cent German), where, despite her poor knowledge of the language, she rapidly became a film star. This connection, added to her ambition, stunning looks and minimal acting ability, got her onto the Russian stage and screen before the First world War. The young Olga acquired the name Chekhova by a brief and disastrous marriage to another relative of Chekhov's, his nephew Mikhail (an actor and the only one of the next generation of Chekhovs to inherit his uncle's genius). It is the life of the actress's niece, another Olga Knipper, who had ten times her aunt's beauty, a tiny fraction of her talent, and an ability to manipulate, lie and survive which left everyone who met her - and will leave anyone who reads about her - flabbergasted. THIS IS NOT the story of Olga Knipper-Chekhova, the versatile actress who married Chekhov and survived him for fifty-five years.
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