The Mystery of Olga Chekhova
by Antony Beevor
300pp, Penguin, £16.99
Predicting the death of aristocratic Russia, if not the Russian revolution itself, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is arguably the greatest play of the 20th century. Certainly its production history puts it close to the events it seems to anticipate. It was playing at the Moscow Arts Theatre on the day of the revolution. During the 1919-20 civil war, the town of Kharkov shifted from Red to White army occupation during a single evening performance, condemning the Moscow Arts touring company to three years of exile. And the play was chosen as the theatre's contribution to the celebrations of Soviet victory in May 1945.
During the curtain call, Anton Chekhov's widow, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, who had first played Madame Ranyevska at the play's opening in 1904, looked out into the auditorium and was shattered to see her niece - a star of the Nazi cinema and favourite of Goebbels and Hitler - sitting in the front row. What Knipper-Chekhova didn't know was that her niece had been a spy for the Soviet secret police since the 1930s.
The Cherry Orchard runs through Antony Beevor's engaging and revealing memoir of the junior Chekhovs. Beevor can be credited with single-handedly transforming the reputation and commercial performance of military history. In his remarkable books on Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin, he managed to combine high strategy (the maps-and-chaps tradition) with the more democratic and fashionable view-from-the-tank-turret style of military writing, to paint a vivid picture of how the Nazi-Soviet war looked to the high command and how it felt to the common soldier. Taken together, these two great books present a vast and tragic action: the Red Army, which heroically defended and then liberated Stalingrad against seemingly impossible odds, goes on to burn, pillage and rape its way across eastern Europe, to take the German capital with massive cruelty (particularly against German women civilians) and profligate loss of life.
Beevor's skills as a military writer are on display in The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, as his characters live through and survive the great war, the Russian revolution, and the events of 1939-45. (His description of the cause and course of the post-revolutionary civil war is particularly compelling.) But there are other skills on display. Technically, he has to deal with the bewildering family tree of the Russian Chekhovs and the German Knippers (as complex as a Chekhov cast list). So after the playwright Anton's marriage to the actress Olga, the playwright's nephew Mikhail (aka Misha, later Michael, a noted actor, director and Stanislavski disciple) marries and later divorces the actress Olga's niece (also an actress and also called Olga), whose thrice-married brother Lev aka Lyovushka finds time to be a White Guardist, Soviet composer and indeed Soviet spy. Add in the complication that Olga's niece Olga's daughter is also called Olga (though thankfully known as Ada), and you have the makings of a biographical nightmare.
After explaining the epic logistics of the eastern front, Beevor has little trouble with these complexities. He tells the parallel stories of sister Olga and brother Lev with clarity and panache. For Olga, the story is of a failed marriage to the dissolute Mikhail, single motherhood, exile to Berlin in 1921 and the building of a film career which brought her to the attention of Goebbels and Hitler, with whom she conversed and was photographed, and from whom she received a Christmas parcel of luxuries in 1940.
Parallel to Olga's life is that of her younger brother Lev, who joined the counter-revolutionary army, was rehabilitated by the Soviet secret police, and became a loyal Soviet composer and spy. With his second wife he was groomed to assassinate Hitler should Hitler have visited Moscow after a military victory over the Soviet Union; when this risk faded he was instructed to defect to the Germans and conduct a suicide Hitler-assassination mission in Germany itself. This plan relied on the collaboration of his sister, whom the Soviet composer appears to have recruited in the 30s as a sleeper, to report on the likelihood of the Nazi leadership planning to invade Russia. Blissfully ignorant of the assassination plan, Olga was flown to Moscow for interrogation (and theatre visits) at the end of the war, before being repatriated to a life of Soviet-subsidised comfort in postwar Germany.
Under the dangerous circumstances of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Olga and Lev's survival was a kind of miracle, and Beevor's evocation of Stalinist Russia (and, to a lesser extent, of Nazi Germany) is effective and informative throughout. The use of these parallel stories as a way of telling the story of the times through which Olga and Lev lived goes some way to overcoming the problem that neither seems to have been particularly important as spies; we don't know what Olga reported, and Lev's great mission to assassinate Hitler in Moscow proved unnecessary (and in Berlin, inopportune - Stalin decided that if Hitler died the Allies might make peace with his successor and thus forbade any attempts on the Führer's person). And while Lev's personality comes across clearly, Olga's remains a little opaque (and the "deep but hidden scars" of her experience, advertised on the dust jacket, remain undescribed in the book).
Beevor points out that Olga built her career in Germany on the completely fictitious claim that she had acted at the Moscow Arts Theatre, but insists that she loathed Nazi anti-semitism, and helped a Jewish actor and his family (although she prudently demanded that her family provide her with a false certificate of racial purity, as her husband's mother was Jewish and her daughter at risk). But despite her many failings, "particularly her relationship with the truth", Beevor insists that Olga Chekhova "remained a brave and resourceful woman whose main priority was to protect her family and close friends".
The bravery and resourcefulness are not in doubt (after the dangers and dramas of the war years, Olga built up and sustained a successful cosmetics company, albeit with Soviet financial backing). But somehow she seems smaller than her story, and it's tempting to wonder what she would look like in the hands of a writer who could indulge in more speculation and extrapolation than the historian can allow.
Despite this caveat, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova remains as engaging a read as Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945. It is full of insights into the ironies as well as the contradictions of revolutionary Russia (the fact that the politically ruthless Lenin admired the delicate nuances of Chekhov, and had little time for his more politically moderate minister of education's policy of adapting high art for the needs of the proletariat).
The picture it paints of the Moscow Arts Theatre and its quixotic leader Stanislavski is sensitive and strangely moving: dispossessed of his family firm by the revolution, the maestro seems to have genuinely supported its ambitions. Beevor's insight that artists and their lives tend to be more important in dictatorships than democracies is demonstrated by the story he tells.
· David Edgar's most recent play is Continental Divide