A portrait of Anton Chekhov

Jo Bratten


Realism

.

When real life is wanting one must create an illusion.
It is better than nothing.

                                 – Uncle Vanya
     .

After leaving work I meet Anton Chekhov on the stairs
at Kensington Olympia Station. Salt and grit stalactite

the edges; the air is brisk and dark at half-past four.
He looks just as he does in that picture people post online

saying STONE COLD FOX but is wearing a furry hat,

of course. We pass as he goes downstairs to head north
while I go up to head south. I am the only one to recognise him.

He is taller than I imagined he would be, his cheeks surprisingly 

pink. Is it really you? I ask. Father of Realism? Creator of Olga,
Masha and Irina, of Nina and Arkadina, of Sonia, of Anya,

Varya and Madame Ranevskaya? It is, he says, and coughs,

touches my arm. What is this place? Why so many people?
It’s the Christmas Fair at Olympia, I explain. Olympia? he asks.

No gods, just tinselly tat. Would you like to come with me

to Pizza Express? I ask. I’ll buy you doughballs and a Fiorentina,
which I think you’ll like. He agrees. We sit opposite each other

at a fake marble table with a fake candle juddering between us.

Tinny Christmas music plays. Let’s talk about our terrible
childhoods, I say. Over tiramisu, Chekhov asks me to marry him

and I say yes, of course. Separate houses and cities, I say.

Separate countries, he says, together a dozen times a year perhaps.
Perfect, I say. Outside, in the traffic on Hammersmith Road

he holds me and I clasp his coat collar as snow spits through

dipped headlights. The shining O of the Pizza Express sign hangs
on the dark like a moon. One day, he says, we will find out why

we suffer. If only we knew (his lips on mine), if only we knew.

.

.

Jo Bratten is a London-based poet whose debut pamphlet, Climacteric, was published in 2022 by Fly on the Wall. She won second prize in The Rialto Nature and Place Competition in 2023. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, with recent work (including other poems from her Chekhov-in-chain-restaurants series) in The Rialto, Perverse, And Other Poems, berlin lit and Poetry Wales. She has work forthcoming in Bad Lilies, Magma and Poetry London.


This is one of two poems by Jo Bratten in our February / March 2025 issue. To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.

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