Of the many cliches which have clung persistently to Chekhov's biography (frail, bespectacled, gloomy Russian writer etc.), the most tenacious perhaps is that of his elusive character. Here is an aspect where most memoirs seem to concur: we read that Chekhov kept his distance, that he was solitary, silent, reticent, sober, and possessed of a certain coldness.2 Even when he married, he preserved his autonomy, choosing not to live permanently with his wife. But there was one area of his life where he was unusually expansive, and that was in his relationship with the landscape. Chekhov's main subject as an artist may have been people's frailties and the complexities of human interaction, but human beings rarely inspired him to flights of iyric sm in the way that the Russian landscape dd. Chekhov h:i his lyrical persona carefully, but it is there to find i i his letters, and particularly in his short stories. It was the landscape which occas onally provoked him to utter the word 'poetic', the highest accolade in his vocabulary, and it was the landscape which was respon. ible for some of the happiest moments in his life. It also pervaded the unconscious world of his dreams and nightmares, as he intriguingly revealed in a letter he wrote to the writer Dmitry Grigoro1 ich in February 1887, when he was twenty-seven years old:
When my blanket falls off at night, I begin to see in my dreams huge slithery rocks, cold autumn water and bare riverbanks - all of this is foggy and unclear, without a single patch of blue sky; in despair and melancholy, as if I have lost my way or have been abandoned, I look at the rocks and feel that for some reason I must cross the deep river; I see little tug boats, pulling huge barges, pieces of timber, rafts and so on floating by. Everything ;s unbearably desolate, raw and stark. When I run away from the river I come to fallen-down cemetery gates, a funeral, my school teachers . . . And am I filled during this time with the sort of nightmarish cold which is unconceivable when I am awake ... I think if I had been born and lived permanently in St Petersburg, I would definitely dream about the banks of the Neva, Senate Square and massive pedestals.. .3
Chekhov was a writer who was profoundly sensitive to his environment. If it is difficult for as to penetrate Chekhov's character through his relationships with people because of 1 is inscrutability and reserve, perhaps our emphasis should be shifted to hi; relationship with the places in which he lived?
This biography therefore takes as its point of departure Chekhov's physical environment: the provincial town of Taganrog among the steppes in which he grew up, the burgeoning city of Moscow where he trained as a doctor and made his home as an adult, the more formal St Petersburg where most of his literary work was based, the rural summer retreats where he was аЫе со егюу being idle (which he regarded as an essential .ngredient of happiness), the empty wastes of Siberia which enabled him to fulfil his lust for adventure and also put into practice the ideals that he cherished, the country estate of MeliKhovo where he planted trees and roses and enjoyed living on the land, the beautiful but alien French Riviera, where he spent lonely winter months trying to get well, and the С r: mean resort of Yalta where he had the excruciating experience of seeing his life slowly ebb away. The aim of each chapter is to convey the texture of Chekhov's life in each of the places in which he lived or spent sign: ficant amounts of time, and in so doing shed 'ight on different aspects of his character. This book is a biography of Chekhov, and more specifically his creative spirit, but it is also a biography of the places in which he lived and worked, and an exploration of how they relate to his short stories and plays.
As the subtitle of this book suggests, this biography takes an impressionistic approach; .t is deliberately not intended to be comprehensive. Numerous events and people from the vast cast of characters .n Chekhov's life are not discussed at all, while others are explored at length, and certain small details examined closely Not all the places that he went to are included: the trips Chekhov made to the Caucasus, and his honeymoon in a remote provincial sanatorium are not covered, for example, because of their relative brevity and paucity of documentation. The length of each chapter does not necessarily correspond to time-span, furthermore: chapter eight explores Chekhov's time in the South of France, where he spent just a few months, while chapter seven describes his life at Melikhovo in the Russian countrys le, where he spent several years. Although they have been put together in a roughly chronological manner, the chapters themselves do not always adhere to a strict chronological framework, but sometimes look both forwards and backwards in time, and it is for this reason that a simple chronology of Chekhov's life and works has been ncluded.
CHRONOLOGY
1860 Anton Chekhov is born on 17 January in Taganrog, a town on the Azov Sea in southern Rass'a, the third son of the meichant Pavel Egorovich Chekhov (1825-1898) and Evgenia Yakovlevna Chekhova (1835-1919). Chekhov's parents married in 1854: of theii seven children, five sons and two daughters, only the youngest, Evgenia (1869-71), did not live to survive infancy
1868 Chekhov accepted as a pupil at the Taganrog classical gymnasium, following an unsuccessful first year at the Gieek Pa^sh school.
1873 Attends the theatre for the first time
1876 Father is declared bankrupt and flees with his family to Moscow, leaving Anton behind in Taganrog to finish school
Moves to Moscow and becomes a student in the Medical Faculty of Moscow University
First story published in a St Petersburg comic journal; meets the ardst Lev; an, who becomes a close friend
1882 Invited to contribute to the leading Petersburg comic journal, Fragments, by its editor Nikolai Leikin
Graduates from medical school; first signs of tuberculosis; writes almost 300 stories over the course of the year; publication of first book of stories, Tales of Melpomene-, serialization of only novel, Drama at a Shooting Party, in a Moscow newspaper
Invited to write for The Petersburg Newspaper; summer at Babkino; first visu to St Petersburg
Invited to write for New Times by its owner Alexei Suvorin, who becomes a close friend; first story puolished in Suvonn's newspaper is also under his own name; letter from Dmitri Grigorovich exhor,mg Chekhov to take his wilting more seriously; second summer at Babkino
Travels back to Taganrog and the steppe landscapes of his childhood; third summer at Babkino; first performance of Ivanov in Moscow