Accidental Writer
No author's name, not even
Shakespeare's, has the talismanic effect of Chekhov's. Speak that name to any
intelligent reader or theatergoer and his eye turns inward, though not away,
and his mouth drifts into a soft, private smile. Chekhov belongs to
everyone who knows him.
Thus a
new serious biography has a commanding, basic importance. And Anton Chekhov:
A Life does more than fulfill basics. The author, Donald Rayfield, who
teaches Russian literature at the University of London and has previously
written two critical books on Chekhov, spent three years in Russian archives
(going through, among other items, 5,000 letters written by Chekhov, 7,000
letters addressed to him). These materials had not been thoroughly examined
even by Russian scholars, because the Soviet authorities had wanted to keep
Chekhov quasicanonized. The result of Rayfield's research is a book that
amplifies much that we have known and adds much in color and facet that has
been omitted or only sketched up to now.
Rayfield's prose is of the packhorse variety, bearing along
its load of information sturdily but not with much grace. Like many biographers
of our day, empowered by new research technologies, he is reluctant to discard
any of what he has been able to harvest. He includes minor stuff merely because
he has culled it. (Do we really need to know the eventual fate of a shopboy who
once worked for Chekhov's father?) But Rayfield gives us a more rounded
portrait of Chekhov than we have ever had, less sanitized, and he deepens the
flow of paradoxes that runs throughout.
The first
paradox rests in the first facts: Chekhov's origins. His grandfather, Egor, was
a slave. (The usual term "serf" gilds it slightly.) In 1841, Egor managed to
buy freedom for himself and his family. Egor's son Pavel became a shopkeeper in
Taganrog, struggling but free; and there Pavel's son Anton was born in 1860.
Anton certainly never forgot his origins. He once described himself as a "young
man squeezing drop by drop the slave out of himself and waking one morning
feeling that real human blood, not a slave's, is flowing through his
veins."
This grim self-knowledge begets contradiction.
The origins of some writers explain to a degree their subjects and styles.
Turgenev, the scion of elegance, reflected it in his work. Gorky, the child of
difficulties, wrote much about the wretched. But Chekhov, out of a childhood
that one of his brothers called "crushing anguish," ranged the full field of
society, and always with a delicacy that still makes the world gasp.
Writing, the art of writing,
entered Chekhov's life tangentially. In 1879, aided by a grant from the
Taganrog city council, Chekhov went to Moscow, where most of his family had
already moved, to study medicine. To help pay his way through medical school,
he began to write--sketches and stories for newspapers and magazines. Within a
very few years, he was established as a writer. In 1884 he qualified as a
physician, and he never completely gave up medicine as his short life raced to
a close. (He died in 1904 at 44.) But, paradoxically, what had started as an
adjunct to his medical education became his chief support--fairly handsome
support, too.
The
stories ascended breathtakingly in quality and varied greatly in length, though
he never wrote anything in grand "Russian novel" proportions. Rayfield says in
his preface, "Biography is not criticism," and he assuredly keeps his word.
Each of the major stories gets only a small identification tag from him, of not
much critical value. Possibly he deals more helpfully with them in his critical
books, unread by me. But this critical tagging becomes even less helpful when
he deals with the kind of writing that Chekhov came to in his last years:
drama.
Chekhov's major plays-- Uncle Vanya , The
Seagull , Three Sisters , and The Cherry Orchard --have links
with his antecedent stories, as well as with events in his life. Rayfield
clarifies these connections. But he does not come near conveying that, in the
whole of Western drama, there is no precedent for the style and texture of
these quietly towering plays. (For an exquisite illumination of these matters,
see Richard Gilman's recent study, Chekhov's Plays: An Opening Into
Eternity .)
But,
vividly, Rayfield presents the man: tall, energetic, socially scintillating.
The famous sought him out. The venerable Tolstoy, a secular saint in his time,
called on him more than once; Tchaikovsky contemplated writing an opera with
him at one time. Women pursued him feverishly. (Yet--another paradox?--he was a
frequent patron of brothels.) Involved though he was with a literary life, he
never abandoned medicine as long as his health permitted. He worked heroically
when a cholera epidemic struck the area of his country home. In 1890, he spent
81 days crossing Siberia to the penal colony of Sakhalin so he could spend
three months there studying the health conditions, about which he wrote a very
full report.
Another paradox, contradicting his broad
humanism and also contradictory within itself, is his attitude toward Jews, a
subject that Rayfield traces throughout this book. On the one hand Chekhov
believed that Russian Jews could never be truly Russian; he categorized every
new acquaintance as Jew or non-Jew; in his letters, he frequently used a
slurring term for Jews. Yet one of his dearest friends was a Jewish painter who
greatly influenced him aesthetically. When the Dreyfus case was raging, clearly
the result of anti-Semitism in the French army, Chekhov, then in France, was a
fiery Dreyfusard. He was even engaged for a time to a Jewish woman. Rayfield
assists us with these contradictions by saying that, "by the standards of his
time," Chekhov was a "judophile."
The overarching paradox of
his life, lucidly detailed by Rayfield, is the state of Chekhov's health and
his attitude toward it. By his middle 20s, he knew that he suffered from
tuberculosis, and he coughed blood increasingly as the years went on. When he
married in 1901, he and his wife (Olga Knipper of the Moscow Art Theater) went
directly from the ceremony to a honeymoon in a sanitarium. Why did this man,
himself a physician, pay so relatively little attention to his disease? The
only comprehensible explanation is that the vocation that had burrowed in next
to medicine had taken control, had insisted. In 1894 he said in a letter to a
friend: "Not for a minute am I free of the thought that I must, am obliged to
write. Write, write, and write."
Chekhov was an ingenious
phrase maker, with many of the phrases scattered in his letters. ("All
gynaecologists are idealists.") One line, unintended as an epigram, stings
unforgettably. In 1897 he was in Moscow, staying at the Great Moscow Hotel,
when he began to cough blood profusely. He sent a note to a doctor he knew:
"Bleeding, Great Moscow No. 5, Chekhov." The terseness, the immense taciturn
gravity, makes the note truly Chekhovian. In those circumstances, Dr. Astrov in
Uncle Vanya might have written it.
