"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...."
