Books: If We Only Knew!

CHEKHOV (669 pp.)—Ernest J. Simmons—Atlantic-Little, Brown ($10).

He saw men small and vulnerably human. In an era where others were con cerned with the conflict of good v. evil, Anton Chekhov saw mainly the conflict of simplicity v. pretension, and found the consequences depressing. In his writing, he refused to pass explicit judgment, and observing life, he found no meaning but only a mystery. In flamboyant 19th century Russia, choked with morality tales, nourished on progressive theories of history, lashed with messianic messages, Chekhov, who lived from 1860 to 1904, was ahead of his literary time, a lonely, gentle, restrained man who remains an ambiguous figure even in this exhaustive, meticulous, scholarly examination.

A practicing doctor. Chekhov had tuberculosis for 20 years and did nothing about it until it was too late. One of history’s most prolific story writers, Chekhov spent months trying to write a novel, never got much past Chapter 3. A lively ladies’ man (“I was so drunk I took bottles for girls, and girls for bottles”), he was skittish about marriage and invited his sister Masha on his honeymoon.

Masha didn’t go along, but she summed up her beloved brother in one sentence. “Antosha,” she said once in a rare moment of exasperation, “you are a fidgety person.”

Damaged Soles. “In my childhood.” Chekhov used to say. with typically accurate restraint, “there was no childhood.” His grim father was the self-taught son of one of the rare serfs in Russia who had been able to buy his family’s freedom. He kept an anemic grocery store on the Sea of Azov, enrolled his son in a tailoring school as an economic practicality, once shouted at him. “You can’t run about so much because you’ll wear out your shoes.” When a rat drowned in a vat of mineral oil in his store, Father Chekhov removed it, had the priests purify the vat with prayer, went on selling the oil.

The grocery business collapsed, and with it his father’s morale. The family moved into a small basement apartment in Moscow. Young Anton, at 19, began writing stories for cheap magazines to put himself through medical school and support the family. At one time or another, mother, father, a sister, an aunt and four brothers all lived in the apartment. The young Chekhov’s output was so great that in a few years he was able to buy a small country estate at Melikhovo, where he planted a cherry orchard and began, as he put it, to “squeeze the last drop of slave out” of himself. At Melikhovo, Chekhov was a lavish host, dressed up as a hussar to amuse his guests, flirted with his sister’s pretty friend “Lika” Mizinova.

But he never quite dared trust himself to happiness. “I am so happy,” he wrote, “that I superstitiously remind myself of my creditors.”

Worse than Shakespeare. Chekhov liked to think of himself primarily as a doctor. But after five years’ scribbling. Chekhov suddenly discovered that the literary world was taking seriously the stories he poured out purely for extra cash. “When I didn’t know they read my tales.” he explained to a friend, “I wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes. Now I’m afraid.” Taking more pains, Chekhov won more acclaim. He became a friend of Tolstoy’s, who praised everything except Chekhov’s dramas. “You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare,” the old man explained in a sort of anticompliment, “but your plays are even worse.”

Being Russians, his contemporaries were not put off by Chekhov’s lack of plot. What they could not forgive was his apparent lack of message. But Chekhov, who was dogmatic about little else, was dead sure of his literary methods. “In order to portray horse thieves,” Chekhov explained. “I must speak and think as they would. You would like me to say: ‘The stealing of horses is bad.’ Surely this has long since been known without my saying it.”

No Panaceas. Like any Russian of conscience, he longed to improve miserable conditions in his country, languishing under Czar Alexander III. Chekhov wrote stories about the brutalized existence of the serf and the stagnating intelligentsia. In 1890. he journeyed 10,000 miles to write a report on the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. He built schools for peasants and treated their ills for nothing. But he could not shake off a medical man’s distrust of all panaceas. Whether it was Communism, Tolstoy’s windy plans for the spiritual regeneration of mankind, or Dostoevsky’s wild chiaroscuro Christianity, Chekhov could see no practical help in any of them. “God preserve us from generalizations,” he wrote. “There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.”

Ernest Simmons, formerly chairman of the department of Slavic languages and literature at Columbia University, suffers from the biographer’s occupational disease —a constitutional inability to leave out any detail, however trivial. But his book does build to considerable power. Using new source material, Simmons demolishes Writer Lidiya Avilova’s claim, put forth in her book Chekhov in My Life, that she was the writer’s secret lifelong passion. Chekhov’s only love. Simmons insists, was Olga Knipper, one of the first of a long series of famous actresses (including Dame Sybil Thorndike. Dame Judith Anderson and Katharine Cornell) to revel in Chekhov’s rich feminine roles. Olga played Masha in the first production of The Three Sisters, in 1901, and married the playwright three years before his death at 44. If the play provided Chekhov with a wife, its ending also serves as his best epitaph: “The music plays so gaily and so joyfully, and it seems that in a little while we shall know why we live and why we suffer. If we only knew! If we only knew!”