Amongst our days of constant conservatory training here in Moscow, I feel I have rarely had the chance to really sit back and truly understand how lucky I am to be studying theatre in the Motherland. We’re studying at The Theatre where a lot of the ideas for modern theatre originated, and where the majority of one of my favorite playwrights, Anton Chekhov, allowed his allowed plays to originate. This Sunday, I had a moment where I fully embraced this reality in an awe-inspiring and personal way.
Chekhov is one of my favorite playwrights, and so getting to study his works here at the theatre he made them for has been exhilarating, to say the least. But I don’t just love Chekhov’s plays—he also has the most beautiful love story I’ve ever heard. His wife, Olga Knipper, was an actress at the Moscow Art Theatre where we’re studying now. He wrote plays for them, and when he saw her read for a character in his play The Seagull, they fell in love. Chekhov was a very sickly man, so he was forced to live in a town called Yalta, quite far south of Moscow. They had a long distance romance that developed into a long-distance marriage, writing letters to each other constantly while she acted in Moscow and he wrote in Yalta. They were married for three happy years before Chekhov passed away from his illness while they were on a trip together in Germany. Olga lived another fifty years after and never remarried.
In recent years, all of their love letters were collected and turned into a book called Dear Writer, Dear Actress. I saved this book to read here, in Moscow, where these letters were being transferred. You can feel their joy, their pain, their love, their longing to be together, and their happiness in each other’s success. This past weekend, I read the letters chronicling their last year together while sitting in the Novo-Devitchy cemetery where they are buried together. This cemetery is reserved to honor the best and the brightest of Russian citizens—people that have contributed greatly to the culture and society of this beautiful country. Though they never had the opportunity to live together for more than a few weeks at a time, they are at peace side by side in this resting place.
Reading these final words shared between the two of them in the Novo-Devitchy cemetery was surreal. Olga also continued to write to Chekhov for two months after he passed, telling him that she had spent hours on her knees sobbing at his grave—the exact place I was reading these words. Needless to say, I definitely shed a few tears of my own. I could feel their presence in this place, and I was overwhelmed by a tremendous gratitude for the lives they lived and the love they shared. I am working in class on a character that he wrote specifically for her to play, and sitting in that cemetery with them felt so intimate and beautiful—one of the best moments of my experience here. In that moment I understood why we come here to study Russian theatre and playwrights rather than just get the same information in DeKalb. You have to go to the places where it all began—and understand the legacy of the people that have come before us from around the world.
Studying abroad has given me such a broader perspective of theatre and of the world at large. I have had the opportunity to be in the places I’ve been dreaming about since senior year of high school when I performed in a Chekhovian play for the first time. In the play, our characters dreamed of leaving their provincial town and going to Moscow, Moscow, Moscow! I am here now, and I will never stop dreaming of this place when I go. I couldn’t be more grateful for this global exploration of theatre, and thankful to the people that created this beautiful theatre, and for the opportunity to be here discovering it for myself.
