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.

Knipper was a second-generation Russian, of German Lutheran stock. She came from a bourgeois family that had hit hard times, and she had audaciously and tenaciously decided to become an actor, driving herself to rise out of genteel penury. At the time she met Chekhov she was an original member of the famous, radical Moscow Arts Theatre. She caught his eye in 1898 when she was playing Irina Arkadina in The Seagull. Many of his lovers were far more beautiful and beguiling than Olga. She was petite and vivacious, and the fact that she’d had to struggle so hard to make her way in the world gave her an energy and near-ruthless determination that Chekhov responded to.

Their affair began in 1899 but it was shadowed by Chekhov’s terminal illness, tuberculosis. He was a doctor and knew exactly the inevitable, fatal potency of his malady. As it grew more severe, he sensed the end of his life nearing: perhaps this was what spurred him finally towards matrimony.

However, Knipper – devoted, capable and energetic as she was – could never be his nurse. She had a career in Moscow, she was in demand as an actor. Chekhov’s ravaged lungs meant he had to flee the bitter Russian winters. He went to the warm south, to Yalta in Crimea, and built a house there, only returning to Moscow and St Petersburg – and his wife – when the weather improved. It became a marriage à distance, one carried out through almost daily correspondence. It’s through this correspondence, and its evasions, that we have recently come to learn the truth about an event that darkened his last years and, indeed, could have ended his short, unlikely marriage. This new information – this revelation – is detailed in the forthcoming French edition (in December) of Donald Rayfield’s great biography, Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997).

Chekhov was no fool. He even wrote to one of the surgeons at Olga’s operation seeking an explanation

Knipper and Chekhov often talked about trying to conceive a child – not an easy thing to accomplish if you’re living half a continent apart from each other. From time to time she would take leave from the theatre and catch the train south to Yalta to spend a few days with her husband. The significant visit took place in February 1902. Rayfield has discovered a letter (dated 1960) from EB Meve, a Russian writer who wrote about Chekhov and medicine and who had studied the Knipper/Chekhov archive in Moscow. The date is significant – these letters were sealed and the archives were not widely open to scholars until the 1990s. Given that in Russia Chekhov then enjoyed near sanctified status, Meve’s deliberations at the time were controversial, not to say shocking. He wrote about his findings to Chekhov’s nephew, Sergei Mikhailovich Chekhov.

Knipper arrived in Yalta on 23 February 1902 and left four days later. She and Chekhov had not seen each other since October 1901 and, naturally, they spent their time alone together. After a near five-month absence they tried – we can safely assume – to conceive a “little half-German” as they put it.

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. A miscarriage of a six-week embryo does not require the presence of famous surgeons and a laparotomy – any surgical intrusion into the abdominal cavity was extremely risky in 1902 – so it must have been a far more serious condition. To reiterate: Chekhov was a doctor; he would know that after this short period of time there would be no significant sign that Knipper was pregnant. The 1 March pain attack would have been baffling. Her agonising abdominal pain a few weeks later was equally mysterious.

Chekhov reads The Seagull to actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, 1899, with Olga Knipper standing to his left; Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko stands far left. Photograph: SVF2/UIG via Getty Images

After the operation Knipper became seriously ill with peritonitis, a condition that lasted through the summer of 1902 and during which she was nursed by her ailing husband. Rayfield’s research and analysis provide more details that cast clearer light on the half-truths and duplicities.

She was indeed pregnant, but many months so – with a child fathered by someone other than Chekhov. All the facts point to a diagnosis that in March 1902 Knipper was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy and the foetus was removed by Ott from a fallopian tube. The usual time for an eruption of an ectopic pregnancy is between eight and 10 weeks from conception. Given Olga’s collapse in March this would indicate conception around the end of January. In January Knipper was in Moscow and Chekhov in Yalta – 800 miles apart.

Chekhov was no fool and he even wrote to one of the other surgeons present at Olga’s operation seeking an explanation. During her post-operative illness he behaved with quiet restraint and dignity, though he did go away himself for a few weeks on a trip to the Urals. Chekhov, of course, was aware of his own chronic tubercular condition and of time running out. During this period, however, he began to ponder the subject of a play that would become The Cherry Orchard, which was heavily inspired by his story “A Visit to Friends”, a portrait of a man who cannot commit to women who love him.

So who was the father of Olga’s unborn child? In the 1960 letter to Sergei Chekhov, Meve points out that there are many enthusiastic mentions of an actor called Aleksandr Vishnevsky in Olga’s correspondence precisely around the beginning of 1901 and clearly implies that he thought Vishnevsky was the father. Vishnevsky (1861-1943) had known Chekhov in childhood and was also an actor at the Moscow Arts Theatre, someone very much part of Chekhov’s circle of acquaintances and with whom he corresponded. In photographs Vishnevsky appears a fair haired, burly, handsome man. But Meve’s allegation is circumstantial. Rayfield suspects that Olga’s lover was in fact one of the directors of the theatre company, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. He and Knipper had been lovers before she met Chekhov, and Chekhov was close to Nemirovich-Danchenko as well. Rayfield makes the point that Chekhov remained on friendly terms with Vishnevsky but relations with Nemirovich-Danchenko cooled – though, paradoxically, both men were solicitous in their caring for Chekhov through the summer of 1902 and he saw a great deal of them at his bedside. Those must have been very strange encounters.

In any event, when Knipper was restored to almost good health in August, Chekhov had a little less than two years left to live and was failing fast. He slipped away – to her anger – and returned to Yalta and warm weather. They continued their sparky correspondence and saw each other infrequently. After the triumph of The Cherry Orchard in 1904, it was Olga who suggested a palliative trip to Germany in July, to a spa at Badenweiler, and it was there that Chekhov, gravely weakened, died from his tuberculosis. He was 44 years old.

After Chekhov’s death Knipper became the indomitable keeper of the Chekhovian flame for the next half-century and more. And as such she was able to present to the world a portrait of her marriage that left out all the disingenuous, awkward and bitterly unhappy elements. The true story has been a long while emerging. Olga tellingly wrote in her memoirs: “Whenever in my life I really wanted something … I always succeeded and never regretted going my own way.” She died in 1959 at the age of 90.