“My Darling”: Chekhov’s wife Olga Knipper would have turned 155 years old

Admirers of the talent of the legendary Olga Knipper unveiled a memorial plaque in her homeland

At the end of September, Olga Knipper-Chekhova turned 155 years old. “My darling, angel, cockroach,” is how Anton Pavlovich called his wife Olga Leonardovna in his letters. But Knipper-Chekhova is also a student of Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko, a famous theater director and teacher, she lived next door to him almost all her life.

Olga was born in Udmurtia, and on her anniversary, local social activists and admirers of talent unveiled a memorial plaque in her small homeland in the city of Glazov.

“Olga Leonardovna’s personal archive—8,700 items—is stored in the Nemirovich-Danchenko museum-apartment. Letters, diaries, certificates, bills. The other day I specifically took one of the boxes and came across Olga Leonardovna’s petition to His Imperial Majesty, where she asks to be accepted into the Philharmonic Society, the acting department of which was headed by Vladimir Ivanovich, who immediately drew attention to the talent,” said Natalya Fedorenko, head of the department Museum-apartment of Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko Museum of the Moscow Art Academic Theater (MKhAT).

The keeper explained that it was not by chance that she became interested in the personality of the writer’s wife – she had just returned from her small homeland, Udmurtia, where the interregional festival competition of theater groups “Knipper-Chekhova’s Cherry Orchard” took place.

“I was very touched and surprised by how the province cherishes the memory of this woman. At a local newspaper in Glazov, journalists want to create a museum named after her – right in the editorial office, in order to popularize her creativity and heritage,” adds Natalya Fedorenko.

As you know, Olga Knipper-Chekhova was called the fatal love of Anton Pavlovich, who lived only 44 years. Of these, the last three years have been married. He said that he would never enter into an official relationship, but Olga Leonardovna changed everything. At the moment of her husband’s death in Yalta, she was also nearby.

As the actress herself recalled, at the beginning of the night Chekhov woke up and “asked to send for a doctor. Afterwards he ordered some champagne. Anton Pavlovich loudly said to the doctor in German: “Ich sterbe” – “I’m dying.”

His correspondence with his wife includes over 800 messages, and now such a relationship would be called “online love.”

Olga Leonardovna survived her great husband by 55 years. She never married again.

And, although the main archive of Knipper-Chekhova is kept in Moscow, her fans from the Knipper-Chekhov Society of Udmurtia live 1000 kilometers from the capital, who collect every bit of memory about her. And this despite the fact that Anton Pavlovich’s wife herself left Glazov at the age of three and returned there only while passing through – on her honeymoon to drink kumiss with Chekhov, who was suffering from tuberculosis, in neighboring Bashkiria. Nevertheless, even a century later, fellow countrymen organize plein airs, exhibitions in libraries and stage plays about this legendary woman.