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was starting to change. There was a new, ugly mood. The Knipper parents had discussed the political unrest quite openly at table. They were extremely concerned at the strikes and the ossified reaction of the Tsar and his entourage to an increasingly dangerous situation.

4. Misha and Olga
     
    Along with Aleksandr Chekhov’s alcoholism, Misha had also inherited a compulsion to seduce, although mercifully in a rather more romantic fashion than his father. ‘From my earliest youth,’ he wrote later, ‘I found myself in a constant state of falling in love.’
    Misha must have first met Olga Knipper when he was still at the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg. Just before the First World War, two or three of the Chekhov cousins went out to the Knipper house at Tsarskoe Selo to play tennis, swim and dance. Misha presumably did not pay much attention to her then, for she was almost six years younger than him. But when Olga came to Moscow in 1914 to study art she was seventeen and enchantingly beautiful. She had not yet emerged from an innocent naïvety and a tendency to day-dream, even though she had already demonstrated on occasion a streak of determination.
    Her own account of these early years is heavily romanticized. She claimed that as a child she used to play with the little Grand Duchesses at Tsarskoe Selo and that she had encountered Rasputin in alarming circumstances. She even recounted that she had been accepted at the Moscow Academy of Art at the age of twelve and later studied under Bakst and Rodin. But this compulsive mythologizing may well have been provoked by the patronizing attitude of a family which refused to take her seriously because of her beauty.
    Misha and Volodya met her at the apartment of Aunt Olya Knipper-Chekhova and at Aunt Masha’s Sunday night supper parties. In one after-dinner charade, Misha, wearing a white coat, played an unskilled medical assistant in a clinic. He rushed back and forth to a patient, played by young Olga, carrying medical implements and water, which he spilled in his clumsiness, all the time being shouted at by the doctor. Misha and Volodya became increasingly competitive in their acting and their joking. They had both fallen for their fair cousin-in-law.
    Perhaps inevitably in such a story of tangled love, none of the accounts agree. According to Sergei Chekhov, Volodya followed Misha to St Petersburg for the Moscow Art Theatre’s 1914 spring season. Misha came across Volodya carrying a tennis racket and dressed in check trousers, white shoes and a boater. Volodya was apparently intent on proposing to Olga during a moonlit walk, but then Misha, his best friend and hero, insisted that, since he was three years older, he had priority. Volodya answered that there was no priority in love. Misha retorted that he already had some standing in society, while Volodya was still a student and his future was uncertain. Volodya replied that he would make Olga promise to wait for him until he graduated from the university.
    ‘Your father is not going to let you marry her!’ Misha almost shouted.
    At this Volodya just grinned.
    ‘So what are we going to do?’ Misha asked more calmly.
    ‘Let’s toss a coin,’ Volodya replied. ‘The one who gets tails will leave Olya for ever and keep no place for bitterness in his heart.’
    He tossed the coin and it came down tails. The cousins embraced without a word.
    Volodya recounted all this to Aunt Masha in 1917, when he was staying with her down in the Crimea. Misha never really gave his side, except in the most offhand way. The only other version of events is that written by Olga herself She was utterly besotted with Misha, her cousin by marriage, who appeared to be as brilliant an actor as his uncle had been a playwright. Olga, then studying at the Moscow Academy of Art, went to as many of his performances in the Studio of the Art Theatre as she could. She helped paint the scenery for The Cricket on the Hearth, in which he had the lead part.