There But Not There

As the talent of Anton Chekhov blossomed and matured in the mid-1880s, his stories and plays presented Russian literary critics with a near-insuperable challenge. During the second half of the 19th century, Russian criticism was dominated by radical utilitarians who demanded that literature be a school of good morals and a catechism for social improvement. The mature Chekhov’s subdued and unemphatic writing manner and his refusal to blame his characters’ predicaments on any particular social class or political system led the critics to dismiss him as a mindless entertainer who gave no thought to the content of his writing. Later, at the turn of the century, the philosopher Lev Shestov launched another misguided version of who Chekhov was: He was a morose destroyer of all hope, a gloomy pessimist who betrayed the progressive, life-affirming heritage of Russian 19th-century literature.

And yet during his lifetime, Chekhov was hugely popular with readers and theatergoers. The most illustrious contemporary writers, including Tolstoy, saw him as their equal. But as Chekhov once pointed out, he lived in a culture without valid literary criticism. Only in the second and third decades of our century did there appear in Russia knowing and sympathetic studies of Chekhov, written by such people as the poet and novelist Andrei Bely, the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the critic and children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky. By then, Chekhov was already widely known abroad in translation.

But the real flowering of Chekhov criticism began in the early 1970s and is still going strong. Books and articles by Aleksandr Chudakov, Vladimir Kataev, Emma Polotskaya and Tatiana Shakh-Azizova, to name a few in the brilliant galaxy of Chekhov critics in Russia, are opening new vistas of understanding of Chekhov’s life, as well as his literary art. Kataev has demonstrated, for example, that many of Chekhov’s stories, hitherto regarded as plotless, are actually about learning experiences, in which little may happen but the central characters learn something of importance about themselves or about their world.

None of this new Russian criticism belongs to the structuralist or the post-structuralist schools, and this is why no one has bothered so far to translate it. (Scholars in general still seem more interested in those schools than in old-style criticism.) As Richard Gilman has shown in his fine 1995 study, “Chekhov’s Plays,” it is possible to write wisely and perceptively about Chekhov without access to current Russian criticism. Gilman’s book, however, is a rare and fortunate exception in English-language Chekhoviana. So are the translations of Chekhov’s plays by the English playwright Michael Frayn, which reach a new level of precision and accuracy (the much-touted, recent translations by Paul Schmidt regrettably abound in misreadings and free-flowing embroidery so that lines that consisted of one or two words in the original are unfurled like fans into full sentences).

Coinciding with the flowering of Chekhov criticism in Russia, two wrong-headed books appeared in England, books which to this day continue to have an impact on what is written in English on the subject. The first is Virginia Llewellyn-Smith’s 1973 study, “Chekhov and the Lady With the Dog.” Chekhov’s sympathy for most of his female characters and his tacit unanimity with the Russian feminist movement of his day should be clear to anyone who has read him with attention. Llewellyn-Smith, with astonishing perversity, has tried to turn him into a complete misogynist, a male chauvinist who supposedly mistreated and oppressed his sister Maria and his wife, Olga Knipper.

The other book is “Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free” (1988) by no less an eminence than V.S. Pritchett. Like Pritchett’s earlier biography of Turgenev, his Chekhov book betrays an amazing ignorance of Russia’s social and literary history. The worst parts are the discussions of Chekhov’s stories, most of which the author either did not read or had forgotten. “The Wife” is said to be about “a landowner being forced by his wife against his will to collect relief. He drives wildly by sleigh through the stricken villages and achieves nothing beyond a night of gluttony.” Actually, “The Wife” is about an egomaniacal husband who gradually learns that his wife, whom he believes to be inept and in need of his guidance, is widely admired for her organization of a relief agency during a famine. It is the husband who tries to force her to do things his way. At the end of the story, it seems that the husband is on the verge of overcoming his egomania and seeing his wife as she really is, and the couple’s hitherto miserable marriage might possibly be saved. Pritchett’s upside-down reading of this story appears in both books under review here.

Occasionally, there is a detailed discussion of a story which Pritchett must have reread just before writing about it because he gets the plot and text correct. Such is the case with “The Duel.” But for Pritchett’s reading of most of the stories, either some point, essential for understanding, is missing, or the entire plot and situations are garbled. The nadir is reached with “Sergeant Prishibeyev,” Chekhov’s great study of the archetypal authoritarian elderly male. Here, Pritchett summarizes the plots of two entirely different Chekhov stories, which have nothing to do with the one he claims to discuss.

But because of the august position of the late Sir Victor in the world of English letters and the elegance of his style, the book’s appearance was hailed in the British and American press as a revelation. The New York Times commissioned a review from the poet Andrei Voznesensky, who apparently knew little about Chekhov and could read English with difficulty. Voznesensky’s thesis was that the Russians themselves never really understood Chekhov, and now, miraculously, this Englishman had at last grasped what Chekhov was all about and revealed it to the world. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic followed Voznesensky’s lead. For a person who is knowledgeable about Chekhov, the book was an embarrassment for its author rather than any kind of critical breakthrough.

Donald Rayfield’s “Anton Chekhov: A Life” raises high hopes and expectations. Rayfield wrote a fine book about the 19th century explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky (a great favorite of Chekhov’s), edited a volume of Chekhov’s stories and published a study of the evolution of Chekhov’s literary style. As soon as all the Russian archives were opened to the general public, Rayfield must have rushed over to read Chekhov’s letters--which had been saddled with considerable censor’s cuts during the Soviet period--as well as the correspondence and diaries of his family members, friends, mistresses and casual acquaintances.

Let it be admitted that Rayfield’s book presents the classical case of being unable to see the forest for the trees. There is a clutter of minor facts and fleeting names that even specialists in Chekhov do not need to know. Soviet censors were more prudish than any British or American one during the Victorian age (even the infamous anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, who removed all body part references from Shakespeare) and deleted not only passages in his letters that were politically incorrect in their view but also any mention of normal body functions such as childbirth and digestion. In trying to restore all of their cuts, Rayfield comes up with a profusion of new information about latrines, chamber pots, flatulence, diarrhea, duck dung, bed-wetting and so on, ad infinitum. Now, in an edition of Chekhov’s correspondence, such passages would take their natural place within the context of his daily life. But Rayfield’s relentless accumulation of them makes one want to open a window or, perhaps, take a shower after reading certain chapters.

This is part of a propensity which Rayfield shares with Ronald Hingley, Chekhov’s biographer, translator and the editor of the nine-volume collection of his stories and plays in English, “The Oxford Chekhov.” Like Hingley, Rayfield wants to do away with the image of Chekhov as a “plaster saint,” to which they both believe certain commentators have reduced him. Chekhov was not a saint, plaster or otherwise, but he was a tremendously appealing man--fighting famines, building village schools, giving thousands of peasants free medical treatment at his private clinic and writing passionately about saving Russia’s forests from decimation. He was also a brilliant and innovative writer. No amount of trivia about his or his relatives’ unsanitary toilet facilities or digestive tracts (no matter that it is done to give an objective account of his life) could add or subtract anything from all that.

Rayfield’s book should not be given to anyone who wants to learn about the man: He emerges as a misogynist out of the Llewellyn-Smith school, a man who would stop at nothing to wreck his sister’s marriage plans and a man with no humanitarian activism to his credit. Chekhov the writer is also strangely absent from the book, with many of his stories mentioned in a garbled form following Pritchett’s example. Again and again, the reader is told that almost all the stories and plays were based on the lives of Chekhov’s friends and relatives, an idea always supported by the most superficial of resemblances. Thus, because earlier in his life Chekhov knew several families in which there were three sisters, his great play must have described them.

Rayfield’s contribution to our understanding of Chekhov can be epitomized by the following example. Most biographies mention the writer’s great fondness for his pair of dachshunds, Brom and Khina (Bromine and Quinine), among the first of their breed to be brought to Russia, and describe the games he used to play with them. Now, thanks to Rayfield, we know how these dogs ended their lives. One day, Brom began frothing at the mouth. This was taken for a symptom of rabies, and he was shot. While Chekhov was in the Crimea, the aged Khina--he addressed her as Khina Markovna--was attacked by some feral dogs from the steppe. They tore out both of her eyes. She managed to crawl to a nearby farm, where it took her two days and nights to die in horrible torment. A ghastly story, but does anyone need it to understand Chekhov’s writings?

Philip Callow is a British writer who is the author of numerous novels and volumes of verse. He is also the biographer of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, D.H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman. Knowing no Russian, he had to rely in his biography of Chekhov on whatever is available in English, including some very bad translations, such as the volumes of his letters edited by Louis Friedland (1924) and Lillian Hellman (1955). He has obviously studied the books by Pritchett, Llewellyn-Smith and Rayfield and believed their every word. The resulting biography, “Chekhov: The Hidden Ground,” is easier to read than Rayfield’s new book; there is less clutter. But, depressingly, there is again talk about Chekhov’s misogyny, garbled readings of stories and plays and the search for the sources of plots in the lives of Chekhov’s relatives and friends. A new dimension brought in by Callow is his frequent, erroneous assertion that Chekhov’s work is heavily influenced by Dostoevsky (whom he disliked and did not read much), by Ibsen, by Maupassant and, if there is a factory in the story, by Zola.

What has happened to Chekhov in England? England was one of the first countries to have recognized his genius; it has a long tradition of perceptive, subtle productions of his plays. Why is he now being written about by people who don’t know how to read him, who are eager to expose his shortcomings (inventing them if necessary) and, above all, are ignorant of all the fine new criticism now being written in Russia?