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AFTERWORD BY PIERO BRUNELLO
Translated by Lena Lencek
A Life in Brief
The century was coming to an end, and Chekhov—at the age of thirty-nine still morbidly averse to writing about himself—complied with a request for a publishable autobiography by scribbling the following account:
I, A. P. Chekhov, was born on January 17, i860, in Taganrog. I was educated first at the Greek School of the Church of the Emperor Constantine, and then at the Taganrog gymnasium. In 1879, I enrolled in the medical school of Moscow University. I had a rather vague idea of the university at the time, and now cannot recall exactly what made me settle on medical school, but I have subsequently not come to regret my choice. During my first year, I began publishing in weekly magazines and newspapers, and by the early '80s, these literary activities had taken on a permanent, professional character. In i888, I was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In i890, I traveled to the Island of Sakhalin with the intention of later writing a
book about our colony of exiles and penal servitude. Not counting trial reports, reviews, feuilletons, news reports, and the columns I wrote for the daily press and that would be difficult to locate and collect, I have written over forty-eight hundred pages of novellas and stories during the twenty years I have been active in literature. I have also written plays for the theater.
I've no doubt that my work in medicine has had a serious impact on my literary work; it has significantly broadened the scope of my observations, and has enriched me with knowledge whose true value for me as a writer can be appreciated only by another physician. It also had a decisive guiding influence: my intimacy with medicine helped me avoid many mistakes. My familiarity with the natural sciences and with the scientific method always kept me on my guard; I have endeavored, whenever possible, to take scientific facts into account, and where this was not possible, I preferred to not write at all. I might note, by the way, that the conditions of creative art do not always permit full concord with scientific facts; death by poison cannot be represented on the stage as it actually occurs in life. However, some conformity with scientific data must be perceptible even within the bounds of artistic convention; in other words, the reader or spectator should be able to sense clearly that there is a convention at work, and that the author is knowledgeable about the situation at hand.
I do not count myself among those writers who have a negative attitude toward medicine; nor would I wish to be one of those who want to figure out everything for themselves.
As for my medical practice, as a student I worked in the Voskresensk Zemstvo Hospital (near the New
Jerusalem Monastery) under the eminent zemstvo doctor Pavel A. Arkhangelsky, and went on to do a short tour as a doctor in the Zvenigorod Hospital. During the years of the cholera epidemic (1892 and 1893), I was in charge of the Melikhovo region of the Serpukhov district.1
Typical of Chekhov is the way he juggles the two professions—writing and medicine—between which he divided his energies. Equally typical is his silence on the subject of his own illness. An acute attack of peritonitis at the age of fifteen left him with chronic digestive problems. The first symptoms of tuberculosis appeared nine years later. He managed to ignore them until the age of thirty-seven, when it was no longer possible to do so. The turning point came one evening in a fashionable Moscow restaurant when suddenly, over dinner with his publisher, editor, and friend Alexei Suvorin, "without warning, blood began gushing from his mouth." Raymond Carver re-creates the scene in a story dedicated to the author. "Suvorin and two waiters helped him to the gentlemen's room and tried to stanch the flow of blood with icepacks." They rushed him to a clinic. "When Suvorin visited him there, Chekhov apologized for the 'scandal' at the restaurant three nights earlier but continued to insist there was nothing seriously wrong. 'He laughed and jested as usual,' Suvorin noted in his diary, 'while spitting blood into a large vessel.'"2
The recovery was temporary, followed by longer and longer "cures" on the French Riviera, the Crimea, and, finally, in a sanatorium at Badenweiler in the Black Forest. With him was the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had married three years earlier. One night he asked her to summon a physician. He had never done this before. Olga instantly complied and called for ice, which, with the help of a Russian student lodging in the hotel, she began to crush and scatter on the floor.
"Doctor Schworer," Olga writes in her diary, "arrived and began to speak gently, cradling Anton Pavlovich in his arms. Chekhov sat up and in a loud, strong voice said to the doctor, 'Ich sterbe.'3 The doctor tried to calm him, gave him a camphor injection, and ordered a bottle of champagne. Anton Pavlovich picked up the full glass, studied it closely, smiled at me, and said: 'It's been such a long time since I've had champagne.' He drank it all to the last drop, quietly stretched out on his left side; I had just managed to run to him and bend over him in the bed, and call to him, but he had already stopped breathing; he had fallen asleep, like a child. . And when that which had been Anton Pavlovich had left, a huge, gray nocturnal moth came in through the window and kept crashing painfully into the walls, the ceiling, the lamps as though in his death throes."4
Chekhov died on July 2, 1904. He was forty-four years old.
The Sakhalin Project
In 1890 Chekhov set off on a journey to Sakhalin, a remote island in the Sea of Okhotsk that was colonized largely by convicts and political exiles. Chekhov's friends and family were aghast at his decision to embark on such an arduous adventure, all the more so because he was beginning to show symptoms of the same galloping consumption that a year earlier had killed his brother Nikolai at the age of thirty. What could posses Anton to make such a journey?
Chekhov gave several reasons. He wanted to gather information about deportation5; he needed a change from the routine6; he wanted to write a doctoral dissertation in medicine.7 He fantasized about navigating rivers by steamboat and crossing the steppes in horse-drawn carriages.8 He wanted to emulate two of his favorite heroes, the Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky, who had ventured into Central Asia and had wanted to be buried in the desert; and the American journalist Henry Stanley, who had tracked down the missionary-explorer David Livingstone in the depths of Africa. These men inspired him because they had done something significant with their lives.9 In a letter to twenty- year-old Natalya Lintvaryova, he playfully asked whether she would preserve his memory should he be mauled by bears or murdered by vagabonds, two of the many hazards associated with travel in Siberia.10
His true motive, however, appears to have sprung from moral outrage with a barbaric system of justice that "sent millions to rot in prisons" and "drove people in chains, thousands of miles through the cold, infected them with syphilis, turned them into degenerates, [and] bred criminals."11 Chekhov believed that "each one of us" had to bear responsibility for such appalling conditions, no matter how remote and distant they might be from people's lives. For him, writing about Sakhalin would be a way to fight indifference. Although a number of books had been written about Sakhalin, not one of them, in his opinion, rose above the level of rhetorical exercises. "Generally speaking," he wrote to Suvorin, "in our beloved homeland there is a great poverty of facts and a great wealth of the most diverse rationalizations: the more books I read about Sakhalin, the more convinced I am that this „.is a place of the most unbearable suffering of which man is capable."12