Father of Wife's Unborn Child....Anton Chekhov and Peter Arno

William Boyd, The Guardian, August 20 2018:

"On 25 May 1901, Anton Chekhov, aged 41, married the actor Olga Knipper, eight years his junior. The marriage provoked great surprise and consternation among his friends and family. In Russia at the time, Chekhov was as famous a writer as Tolstoy and, in addition, a passionate and amorous man who had enjoyed more than 30 love affairs. He was also a regular visitor to brothels. And, even more significantly, he was the ultimate commitment-phobe. Many women had fallen in love with him and wanted to marry him but he always quickly backed away. Then suddenly, clandestinely, he married....

....On 1 March Olga wrote that on the train journeying back to Moscow she felt ill: pain in the belly, nausea. She wondered if she were pregnant. On 24 March she complained about feeling ill again with severe abdominal pain. Then in a letter of 31 March she wrote that she was so ill she collapsed and was taken to the Clinical Obstetric Institute and a foetus was aborted by a surgeon named Dmitri Oskarovich Ott, obstetrician to the tsarina, no less.

And this is where Knipper’s subterfuge begins. She implies to Chekhov that this child, this “failed Panfil” as she called it, had been conceived during her four-day visit to Yalta and was a six-week-old embryo....

She was indeed pregnant, but many months so – with a child fathered by someone other than Chekhov...."

Artist: Peter Arno, The New Yorker, December 26 1936