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burst into tears, reproaching him. Misha, who had been putting on an act for fun, was horrified by the intensity of her reaction. He fell on his knees. ‘My darling Mashechka, calm down,’ he called to her in a sober voice. ‘I was pretending. Please forgive me.’ Aunt Masha was consoled and later used to tell the story, boasting how great an actor her nephew was. Yet the reprieve from alcoholism was only temporary.
     
    The cousins’ charmed life continued after the announcement of war in August 1914. They had ignored the middle-class crowds rejoicing in the streets. Even the terrible news when the First and Second Russian Armies were destroyed in East Prussia seemed to make little difference to their existence. Volodya was in his second year at university and, during that autumn season of 1914, Misha played in Turgenev’s A Woman from the Provinces. He also enjoyed great success in an experimental version by the Moscow Art Theatre studio of The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens.
    Stanislavsky’s ‘System’, Misha found, produced great demands on the actor, but he felt that he was learning far more than he ever had in St Petersburg at the Maly Theatre. It was not up to the actor simply to follow the director’s instructions. He had to create the role in a literal sense, by imagining the character he was playing and inhabiting his life. Stanislavsky did not want an actor to imitate the externals. The actor’s own emotional memories were to be used to help his re-creation, making it personal and real to him, and thus to the audience. Stanislavsky loathed the stock gestures of the theatrical profession which had made acting so mannered.
    ‘Agitation is expressed by pacing up and down the stage very quickly,’ he wrote, ‘by the hands being seen to tremble when a letter is being opened or by letting the jug knock against the glass and then the glass against the teeth when the water is being poured and drunk.’ He regarded this as a lazy shorthand, a caricature of human behaviour, a copy of a copy of a copy, which had evolved into a standard pattern of theatrical clichés. The point for Stanislavsky was to convey inner feelings through every other means.
    Misha often had breakfast with Stanislavsky, who would suddenly tell him to eat in a manner which expressed a particular mood: for example, as if he had just suffered the death of a child.

     
    In the winter, the cousins went skiing in the Sparrow Hills outside Moscow. The ill-constructed trenches of the eastern front, in which several million men from the Tsarist army stood in icy mud up to their knees, must have seemed a whole world away. Misha and his mother dreaded his conscription into the army, yet the Moscow Art Theatre carried on as before.
    The younger generation of Knippers as well as Chekhovs also started to move to Moscow from St Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd by the Tsar in a gesture of wartime Russian nationalism. Olga was sent to Moscow by her parents in 1914 to study art. She moved into Aunt Olya’s apartment on the first floor of 23 Prechistensky bulvar, a typical late-nineteenth-century Moscow stuccoed building with Italianate windows on the top two floors. It still stands on the broad Boulevard Ring, with a promenade bordered by large maples and grass running between the two carriageways. The view from Aunt Olya’s windows was of trees and the magnificent town houses of magnates on the far side of the boulevard.
    The following year, Lev too came to Moscow to attend a new school. Aunt Olya made sure that she saw her favourite nephew frequently and she encouraged him in every way. The school, which was progressive for the times, put on a performance of Aleksandr Blok’s play The Rose and the Cross, for which Lev was allowed to select and adapt the music. Lev had mixed feelings about the move to Moscow. He had fallen in love with the beauty of St Petersburg a year or so before leaving it, yet the city in its wartime guise of Petrograd