Harvey Pitcher’s characterization of Chekhov before his marriage to Olga as “Russia’s most elusive literary bachelor ” is a given of Chekhov biography. Evidence of Chekhov’s many liaisons—from which he always nimbly disengaged himself—was never lacking; the opening of the Soviet archives merely gives this part of his known life a more explicitly sexual shimmer. But one woman involved with Chekhov—Lidia Avilova, a pretty young St. Petersburg wife and mother with literary pretensions—stands out from the rest. Her distinction rests on two facts. One is that she wrote a memoir called Chekhov in My Life, chronicling her unhappy love affair with the writer; the other is that the affair was all in her head. Chekhov in My Life (published in Russia in 1947 and in America in 1950, in a translation by David Magarshack) is, by all accounts (except David Magarshack’s), an exercise in stupendous self-deception, if not a deliberate fraud. Simmons demonstrates in his biography that there was nothing between Avilova and Chekhov beyond bovarysm on her side and embarrassed elusiveness on his. With a thoroughness that sometimes borders on sadism, Simmons tears apart the Avilova memoir, holding up documentary proof of the pathetic untenability of its claim; his savage rout of Avilova runs like a red thread through his otherwise calm biography. (Every time she appears, he can’t resist giving her another whack.) Since Simmons, no biographer has been able to be anything but derisive about Avilova’s claims. But the memoir alone—it is written in the dialogue-choked style of a girls’ romance—gives the show away. “Remember our first meeting?” Chekhov says to her, and incredibly continues, “And do you know—do you know that I was deeply in love with you? Seriously in love with you? Yes, I loved you. It seemed to me that there was not another woman in the world I could love like that. You were beautiful and sweet and there was such freshness in your youth, such dazzling charm. I loved you and I thought only of you.” Describing this first meeting—which actually did take place, in 1889, at a dinner party given by Avilova’s brother-in-law Sergei Khudekov, the owner and editor of the Petersburg Gazette (in which Chekhov had published)— Avilova writes:
Chekhov turned to me and smiled.
“A writer ought to write about what he sees and feels,” he said. “Sincerely. Truthfully. I’m often asked what I meant to express by a story. I never answer such questions. My business is to write. And,” he added with a smile, “I can write about anything you like. Ask me to write a story about this bottle, and I will write you a story under the title of ‘A Bottle.’ Living images create thought, but thought does not create images. . . . If I live, think, fight, and suffer, then all this is reflected in whatever I happen to write. . . .”
That Chekhov never spoke these complacent, self-vaunting words will be clear to even the most casual student of Chekhov’s life, while the more advanced student will hear in them echoes of things Chekhov actually wrote, or, according to contemporaries, did say. Avilova wrote her memoir around 1940, and she surely could not have remembered what Chekhov said to her fifty years earlier—so she pilfered the published letters and the memoir literature. The comment about “A Bottle,” for example, was apparently taken from a passage in Vladimir Korolenko’s memoir of Chekhov: “ ‘Do you know how I write my little stories? Here! . . .’ He glanced at the table, took the first object his hand happened to come across—it was an ashtray—put it in front of me, and said: ‘Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll have a story entitled “The Ashtray.” ’ ”
The letters Chekhov wrote to Avilova herself are even less helpful to her narrative. All but one or two were written in dutiful response to letters of her own (Chekhov made a point of leaving no letter unanswered) and none of them can remotely be said to be love letters. In February 1895, for instance, he wrote Avilova
. . . I have read both your stories with great attention. “Power” is a delightful story, but I can’t help thinking it would be improved if you made your hero simply a landowner, instead of the head of a rural council. As for “Birthday,” it is not, I’m afraid, a story at all, but just a thing, and a clumsy thing at that. You have piled up a whole mountain of details, and this mountain has obscured the sun. You ought to make it either into a long short story, about four folio sheets, or a very short story, beginning with the episode when the old nobleman is carried into the house.
To sum up: you are a talented woman, but you have grown heavy, or to put it vulgarly, you have grown stale and you already belong to the category of stale authors. Your style is precious, like the style of very old writers. . . .
Write a novel. Spend a whole year on it and another six months in abridging it, and then publish it. You don’t seem to take enough trouble with your work. . . . Forgive these exhortations of mine. Sometimes one cannot help feeling like being a little pompous and reading a lecture. I have stayed here another day, or rather was forced to stay, but I’m leaving for certain tomorrow.
I wish you all the best.
Yours sincerely,
Chekhov
The Avilova book points up the problem of memoir literature in biography. In this case, the discrepancy between Chekhov’s letters and Avilova’s clumsy quotations is so huge that one can only dismiss her book as a piece of self-aggrandizing fantasy. A more skillful writer who claimed to have had a secret love affair with Chekhov—or anything else—might not be so easily dismissed. The silence of the famous dead offers an enormous temptation to the self-promoting living. The opportunity to come out of the clammy void of obscurity and gain entrance into posterity’s gorgeously lit drawing room through exaggerated claims of intimacy with one of the invited guests is hard to resist. The Korolenko story about the ashtray may itself be an invention, as may many other chestnuts of the Chekhov memoir literature. Memoirs have little epistemological authority. They provide the biographer with the one thing the subject cannot provide and over which the subject usually has little controclass="underline" the sense of how others see him. The consensus that arises from the memoir literature becomes a part of the subject’s atmosphere. But one must be wary of memoirs, factoring in the memoirist’s motives, and accepting little in them as fact.
Five
After returning to the hotel from the trip to Gurzuv, I was summoned again to Igor’s office. Without looking up from some papers on his desk, he said, “Your suitcase has been found. They will bring it from the airport this evening.” It took me a moment to grasp what he had said and to hope it was true. I said thank you and left the office. Something in Igor’s manner made me disinclined to question him—and even to feel obscurely in the wrong. Humorlessness as profound as Igor’s is unnerving. In fact, the suitcase materialized a few hours later. Someone had rifled it, but had taken nothing. I will never know what happened. Grace, as usual, had arrived on flat, silent feet.
I went to eat dinner at a restaurant Nina had recommended on the hotel’s seaside boardwalk. To reach the boardwalk, one descends several hundred feet in an elevator built into the cliff on which the hotel stands. The elevator opens into a long tunnel leading to the beach. The tunnel is dark and dripping, and one’s pace quickens the way it does in the sordid transfer tunnels in the New York subway. I met no one in the elevator or the tunnel or along the boardwalk; most of the bars and restaurants and saunas and massage studios were closed. (I later learned from Igor that there were only fifty guests in the hotel; more were expected in the hot, dusty season.) The beach was nearly deserted. I passed a father playing in the dark sand with a shivering child. It was a melancholy scene—not the sweet melancholy of twilight on summer beaches after everyone has gone home but the acrid melancholy of failed enterprises. The sea was gray and still, as if it, too, had lost its will to beguile.