CHEKHOV
A BIOGRAPHY
V. S. PRITCHETT
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Introduction
I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley’s wonderful phrase—I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin’s Letters—that the “doors of the Russian house are wide open”: we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them.
In writing my present biographical and critical study of Chekhov I owe a great debt to the scholarship of others. For Chekhov’s stories I have usually followed the remarkable translations of Constance Garnett. They appeared in a haphazard chronology, inaccuracies have been pounced on, but her voice is close to Chekhov’s period. I have used her translation of a selection of Chekhov’s letters; but I have also turned to the spirited translations done by Avrahm Yarmolinsky and I have learned much from the well-documented translation and extensive notes of Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky’s edition. For Chekhov’s biography I have relied on Ernest Simmons’s solid volume published in 1962 and rather less on David Magarshack, and on the well-informed commentary of Ronald Hingley, translator and editor of The Oxford Chekhov. I have, of course, consulted Prince Mirsky’s History of Russian Literature and among critics Donald Rayfield’s illuminating study Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art and its approach to the Symbolists who followed him. I have also read William Gerhardi’s lively study written in the twenties. Gerhardi, himself a novelist, had the advantage of having spent his childhood in Russia. There is a rich store of Russian reminiscence of Chekhov in Gorky’s memoirs of him, also in Bunin’s conversations and in the memoirs of S. S. Kote-liansky, who contributed, with Leonard Woolf, a piquant selection from Chekhov’s Notebooks, published in 1921 by the Hogarth Press. For The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin I have used Luba and Michael Terpak’s translation, and for The Shooting Party, translated by A. E. Chamot, I have used the recent edition with its excellent introduction by Julian Symons. Among selections of Chekhov’s works I have also consulted Yarmolinsky’s The Portable Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-85, translated by Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher; also the Early Stories, edited by Nora Gottlieb. For the plays I am indebted to editions by Ronald Hingley and Elisaveta Fen. To all these scholars I owe a great debt.
As a writer and a public-spirited doctor, Chekhov was a restless man, continually working, who refreshed himself by travel. Gregarious though he often was, he was careful to preserve his independence and his puzzling silences. His life story really lies in his work, and his genius, in my opinion, lies above all in his creative gifts as a writer of short stories. I share Ronald Hingley’s concern that his supremacy in this genre is nowadays overshadowed by the popularity of his plays with a public that prefers to listen. In fact his plays derive directly from his stories, in which, it seems to me, the texture is far richer. (In the twenties, Prince Mirsky rather coldly said the plays were “infectious, indeed nothing but infectious.”) It seems to me that in richness of texture and feeling and the contradictions of human experience, Chekhov is more vigorous and wider in range in masterpieces like The Peasants or In the Ravine. No play matches Ward 6 or the leaping imaginative effects of Gusev or the anthemlike The Bishop. For this reason I have examined the stories in detail and have tried to show the growth of his astonishingly various art. Chekhov’s stories are, in this sense, his life, tunes that his Russia has put into his head, and are magically sustained.
Chapter One
Anton Chekhov was born on January 17, 1860, in the small seaport of Taganrog, a town just outside what are now the boundaries of the Ukraine, on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia. In the following year Emperor Alexander II had decreed the abolition of serfdom, and it was a matter of pride in the Chekhov family that their peasant grandfather, who had been the manager of the sugar-beet mill and eventually the steward of a large estate in the province of Voronezh, had saved enough money to buy the freedom of his family twenty years before. He had shrewdly educated his sons and put them into trade. Pavel, Chekhov’s father, became a bookkeeper in a merchant’s office in the larger port of Rostov-on-Don. There, by hard work, he was able at last to marry and to open a general store in Taganrog. His young wife was the daughter of a merchant in the textile trade. Anton was their third son. A daughter and two more sons followed.
With the great difference that Russia was scarcely yet an industrial country and indeed had hardly moved out of its medieval condition, Pavel had much in common with the classic self-made Victorian puritan. He was a fierce believer in Self-Help and the work ethic, a despot in the family, shouting his wife down, ruling his sons by beating them, saying—when his wife protested—that the same had been done to him and that it had made a man of him. Pavel, the slave turned master, was a tall, almost handsome figure with a grizzled beard and a glare in his eyes, a man not to be argued with. All heads were lowered at mealtimes as he hectored the family on their duties. On the wall of the living room was a timetable of the children’s tasks, hour by hour, during the day. There were to be no idle minutes, there was to be no playing in the streets. At an early age the children had their duties in the shop. It was open from five in the morning until midnight.
Like the majority of the houses in the poorer parts of the town, the Chekhovs’ house had a single story and a tin roof; the store was attached to the house. There was no sanitation: the family had to go to common bogs in a field at the back. For washing there was the communal bathhouse in the town. Where did the family sleep? Behind screens in the living room. Chekhov often slept in a shed where his father kept his lifetime store of newspapers. When the boys started school they had to sit at the counter of the shop, doing their homework, and keeping an eye on the wretched, ill-paid apprentices, who had been trained in the art of short weight and were inclined to steal. In later life when Chekhov was famous he paid for the education of the daughter of one of these lads.
The store sold everything—tallow candles, kerosene lamps, general provisions, tools and sandals. It stank of cheese, herrings and, of course, vodka—sold in a separate room. In the summer the flies swarmed on the greasy counters; rats ran about, and there is a tale that one day a rat drowned in a tub of oil and Pavel, with cunning piety, got a priest in to reconsecrate the oil. Later in his life Anton told the writer Ivan Bunin, whose origins were comparatively genteel, that what he remembered chiefly was the cold nights when he worked in the store, but, with shy pride in his hard times, added: “I sold tallow candles and took the greatest pleasure in wrapping up the icy candles in a scrap of paper.”