The Mystery of Olga Chekhova(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　From Publishers Weekly
　　Hitler admired her for her “cosmopolitan sophistication,” but
Olga Chekhova, niece of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, was far
too pragmatic to lose herself to the charms of a powerful man.
Drawing on numerous interviews, articles and books, Beevor
(Stalingrad) concludes that the great icon of Nazi cinema never
forgot where she came from and worked as a Soviet agent while
reaping the rewards of stardom under the Third Reich. Chekhova, a
Russian of German descent, could not help but see the benefits of
serving the motherland. As an émigrée in Berlin, she was already
held suspect by the Soviets and hoped her spying for them would
result in favorable treatment of her family in Moscow. Recruited by
her brother, Lev, a Soviet composer, Chekhova became a friend and
confidante to men like Goebbels, while serving Stalin by gauging
Germany’s interest in war against Russia. An accomplished
documentarian, Beevor has written an absorbing and expansive story,
not just of an actress/spy, but of revolution and of the stark
changes in Russian society that occurred between the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. He places Moscow and Berlin side by side and
shows how the divergent trajectories of the regimes could intersect
only on the battlefield. Amid the history lesson is the glowing and
graceful Olga Knipper-Chekhova, a woman made wiser by a bad
marriage and toughened by civil war. As Beevor illustrates,
survival was perhaps her most pronounced motivation, and it guided
her well, from the day in 1920 when she left the blight of Soviet
Russia behind with nothing more than a diamond ring smuggled under
her tongue to her death in 1980.
　　Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to an out of
print or unavailable edition of this title.

　　From The New Yorker
　　On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, Goebbels gave him a hundred and
twenty movies, and the pair indulged their love of cinema by
holding lavish parties for their favorite stars. One of these was
Olga Che-khova, a Russian émigrée living in Berlin who was the
niece of Anton Chekhov, and whose acting the Führer greatly
admired. But her biggest fans were the Soviet secret police, who,
seeing her closeness to the Nazi élite, recruited her as a sleeper
agent. The closest she ever came to active duty was a 1941 plot to
assassinate Hitler, but Stalin decided that keeping him around was
a better idea. Beevor soft-pedals the more salacious details of his
story and presents a documentary account of the large and
complicated Chekhov clan. His painstaking work clears away
historical gossip and shows how ingeniously Olga played powerful
figures off against each other to survive the revolution, the war,
and Stalin’s purges.
　　Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker –This text refers to an
out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

　　From Booklist
　　The award-winning author of Stalingrad (1998) has turned his
attention to the well-known Nazi-era actress and her links with the
Soviet government before, during, and after World War II. Chekhova
(1897-1980) was born Olga Knipper in Russia. Her aunt, also Olga
Knipper and a famous actress in the Moscow Art Theater, was married
to playwright Anton Chekhov. Further intertwining the two families,
the second Olga Knipper married the actor Mikhail Chekhov, Anton’s
nephew. In the early 1920s, Olga Chekhova, long divorced from
Mikhail and with a daughter, immigrated to Germany to escape the
poverty and atmosphere of the Soviet Union. She quickly established
herself in the German film industry, where she made more than 100
films. There is also some evidence that by the 1930s she was a spy
or at the very least a mole in place to possibly aid and abet in
Hitler’s assassination. Beevor crafts a good story. Frank
Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights
reserved –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable
edition of this title.

A fascinating spy story, a delicious entertainment, and a
compelling investigation. — Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening
Standard –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

　　A fascinating spy story, a delicious entertainment, and a
compelling investigation. (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening
Standard) –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

　　In his latest work, Antony Beevor—bestselling author of
Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 and one of our
most respected historians of World War II— brings us the true,
little-known story of a family torn apart by revolution and war.
Olga Chekhova, a stunning Russian beauty, was the niece of
playwright Anton Chekhov and a famous Nazi-era film actress who was
closely associated with Hitler. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for
Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev to
become a Soviet spy—a career she spent her entire postwar life
denying. The riveting story of how Olga and her family survived the
Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror, and
the Second World War becomes, in Beevor’s hands, a breathtaking
tale of survival in a merciless age.

　　Antony Beevor, a #1 bestselling author in the U.K., has
written the definitive histories of the fall of Berlin and the
battle of Stalingrad.

　　A fascinating spy story, a delicious entertainment, and a
compelling investigation. — Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening
Standard

　　During the night of 8 May 1945, lights stayed on all over
Moscow. People waited impatiently for news of the final German
surrender. Only the most privileged members of the Soviet elite,
such as the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, possessed a radio set which they
dared to tune to foreign stations. In Stalin’s Russia, victory did
not bring freedom from the secret police.
　　The announcement of the German surrender taken by Marshal Zhukov
in Berlin was eventually made by Levitan, the Radio Moscow
newsreader, at ten past one on the morning of Wednesday 9 May.
‘Attention, this is Moscow. Germany has capitulated. . . This day,
in honour of the victorious Great Patriotic War, is to be a
national holiday, a festival of victory.’ The Internationale was
played, followed by the national anthems of the United States,
Great Britain and France.
　　The inhabitants of communal apartments did not wait for the music
to finish. They surged out on to the landings in all stages of
dress to congratulate each other. Those with telephones rang their
relations and closest friends to share this historic moment with
them. ‘It’s over! It’s over!’ they kept repeating. Many broke down
in tears of relief and sorrow. With some 25 million dead as a
result of the war, there was barely a family in the whole Soviet
Union which had not known suffering. By four in the morning,
Ehrenburg noted, ‘Gorky Street was thronged: people stood about
outside their buildings, or poured along the street towards Red
Square.’
　　It was, as Ehrenburg wrote, ‘an extraordinary day of joy and
sadness’. He saw an old woman, crying and smiling, showing a
photograph of her son in uniform to passers-by and telling them
that he had been killed the previous autumn. It was a festival of
remembrance as much as a celebration. When bottles of vodka were
passed round, the first toast was to those who had not lived to see
this day, although loyal party members should have first paid
tribute to Comrade Stalin, the ‘great architect and genius of the
victory’.
　　Officers in uniform, above all those with medals, were cheered
and sometimes bounced in the air as victors. Even Ehrenburg, the
most famous propagandist of the Red Army, was recognized in the
street and suffered the same honour, to his great embarrassment.
Foreigners too were ‘kissed, hugged and generally feted’. Around
Red Square, ‘foreign cars were stopped and their occupants dragged
out, embraced and even tossed in the air’. Outside the American
embassy, the crowds shouted their admiration for President
Roosevelt, who had died just over a month before, to their genuine
sorrow.
　　Khmelev, the director of the Moscow Art Theatre, addressed a
spontaneous meeting of the company in the foyer. ‘What immense joy
is ours today!’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting for this so long, but
now that it’s come, I can’t find words to express what we feel.
When the radio played victory marches, I saw a woman through the
brightly lit window of a house, dancing and singing to
herself.’
　　During the course of that day between 2 and 3 million people
packed the centre of the capital, from the embankments of the
Moskva river up to the Belorussky station. Most of them came armed
with bottles of vodka or Georgian champagne, which had been hoarded
religiously for this very day. Workers and their families from the
suburbs had come into the centre wearing their best clothes.
Muscovites who had stayed in the capital during the war were better
dressed than those from elsewhere because, during the panic of
October 1941, evacuees from the city had sold all the clothes they
could not take with them to the thrift shops. Moscow, although it
had been bombed that winter, had been truly fortunate.
Comparatively few buildings had been damaged. Elsewhere, to the
south and west, towns and villages lay in ruins for hundreds upon
hundreds of miles. Some 25 million people were homeless. Survivors
lived in dugouts—literally holes in the ground covered by trunks,
branches and turf.
　　That evening, Stalin’s victory speech was broadcast and a salute
of 1,000 guns was fired, the shock waves rattling the windows.
Hundreds of aircraft flew overhead, releasing red, gold and purple
flares. Searchlights from Moscow’s anti aircraft batteries
illuminated a huge red banner held up by invisible balloons. Stalin
was cheered spontaneously. Many, like his protégé Ehrenburg, did
not reflect until later upon the fate of all those whose lives had
been wasted or who had been executed on false charges to cover up
the blunders of their leader. Yet even as strangers embraced each
other in the streets on that deeply emotional day, a true feeling
of victory and joy somehow still seemed just beyond their reach.
The only certain sensation was an exhausted, slightly numb
relief.
　　After these celebrations, members of the Moscow Art Theatre felt
that they too should mark the end of the war. The Kremlin was
planning a huge military parade on Red Square to commemorate the
achievements of the Great Patriotic War. They, meanwhile, decided
on a special performance. They simply wanted to give thanks that
Russian culture had survived the terrible onslaught of the
Nazis.
　　With Anton Chekhov’s flying seagull emblazoned on the curtains,
the choice of author was not in doubt. The plays which he had
written for the Moscow Art Theatre, giving it such international
prestige, used to be known before the revolution as its
‘battleships’. And the work decided upon for this occasion was
Chekhov’s last, The Cherry Orchard.
　　Chekhov’s widow, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, a founder member of the
company, would take the part of the unworldly landowner
Ranyevskaya. She had played it during the very first performance in
January 1904, watched by their friends Feodor Chaliapin, Maxim
Gorky and Rachmaninov. It had painful memories. Anton, her husband,
had been seriously ill. In fact he was so ‘deathly pale’ that there
had been gasps of horror when he appeared on stage to receive a
tribute. Konstantin Stanislavsky, the presiding genius of the
Moscow Art Theatre, remarked that this triumphant occasion ‘smelled
of a funeral’. Six months later the playwright was dead.
　　In those days, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, with her small, animated
eyes and firm jaw, had possessed the clean good looks of a
determined, intelligent governess. But now, aged seventy-six and
quite stout despite the short rations of the war, she was a living
monument of the Russian theatre. She had been appointed a People’s
Artist of the Soviet Union as early as 1928. Yet under Stalin, this
was no protection. She had spent much of the war fearing arrest at
any moment by the NKVD secret police.
　　In the spy-mania of the time, her anxieties were perfectly
understandable. Both her father and mother were of German origin.
Her brother had assisted Admiral Kolchak, the White commander in
Siberia during the civil war. Her favourite nephew, the composer
Lev Knipper, had been a White Guard officer fighting the Bolsheviks
in the south of Russia. But most dangerous of all by far, her
niece, Olga Chekhova, had been the leading movie star in Berlin,
honoured since 1936 with the title of ‘State Actress’ of the Third
Reich and allegedly adored by Hitler. There had even been
photographs of her at Hitler’s side at Nazi receptions. And her
niece’s former husband, Mikhail Chekhov, was in Hollywood. They
were a family of émigrés at a time of Stalinist xenophobia.
　　The elderly actress was almost the last survivor of that
extraordinary group led by Stanislavsky which had started to
revolutionize dramatic art in 1898. Stanislavsky, whom she
described as ‘a huge chapter’ in her life and who had fired them
all with his artistic ideals, had died in 1938. Tall and elegant,
with white hair and black eyebrows, he could have been an immensely
distinguished professor or diplomat when not disguised in one of
the many parts in which he immersed himself. The intensity with
which he engaged in a role left him exhausted after a performance.
Actors entering his dressing room discovered that he relaxed by
taking off all his clothes and smoking a cigar. ‘Just as he could
wear any kind of costume,’ observed one of the cast, ‘he could wear
his own naked flesh genuinely, with the utmost Hellenic
simplicity.’
　　Shortly before his last illness in 1938, Stanislavsky had wanted
the brilliant actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold, a companion of
the early days, to succeed him at the Moscow Art Theatre. But
Meyerhold had attracted the hatred of the Soviet authorities, and
Stanislavsky could do little to help from beyond the grave.
Meyerhold, who had been a supporter of the Bolsheviks at the time
of the revolution, had fallen foul of the Stalinist regime because
his plays did not conform to the new doctrine of Socialist Realism.
He attacked the sterile state of Soviet theatre in a suicidally
brave speech at the All-Union Congress of Stage Directors. He was
arrested in June 1939. Two weeks later, his Jewish wife, the
well-known actress Zinaida Raikh, was murdered in their apartment.
Her body was mutilated and her eyes were gouged out. Meyerhold may
well have been one of those personally tortured by Lavrenty Beria
himself before being killed. Stalin signed his death warrant. Few
now dared to mention his name, or that a former mistress of Beria
had been given the Meyerhold apartment.
　　Even the play chosen to celebrate the Soviet victory over Germany
seemed to have its own ghosts. In 1917, the Moscow Art Theatre had
performed The Cherry Orchard on the night of the Bolshevik coup
d’etat. And in May 1919, Olga Knipper Chekhova had been in Kharkov
with a touring party to escape starvation in Moscow, when they
heard during the second act of the play that the city had suddenly
fallen to the White Army of General Denikin. But the heady advance
of the White…