Books: The Melancholy Life of Uncle Anton Chekhov

A biography of Anton Chekhov is like a play by Anton Chekhov. The decors of both are mainly Russian provincial. The characters are an engaging assortment of dreamers and bored intellectuals. The atmospheres are tumid with unreleased passion, and there are ample supplies of tea and sympathy. Unlike the lives and works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, subjects of other Henri Troyat biographies, Chekhov’s belong to the 20th century, an age of fretful spirits and melancholy skepticism. These impulses guide his hundreds of stories, his theatrical masterpieces (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard) and especially his letters. “You ask me what life is,” he wrote his wife shortly before dying of tuberculosis in 1904. “That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know.”

He was reluctant to play the Russian sage or the Slavic mystic. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky had those parts sewed up, and besides, Chekhov was offended by the pronouncements of those who felt above the battle. “All great wise men,” he said, with the author of War and Peace in mind, “are as despotic as generals and as impolite and insensitive as generals because they are confident of their impunity.”

As Troyat points out, Chekhov “drew the line at glorifying the ‘holy Russian muzhik.’ ” He knew better; his grandfather was a peasant and his father an incompetent grocer and religious fanatic who spent most of his time praying, preaching and beating his six children. The family lived in Taganrog, a small port, a “deaf town,” on the Sea of Azov, and as soon as they were able, the young Chekhovs were put to work in the unheated shop. On Sundays they were made to stand for hours in church. Wrote the author years later: “When I was a child I had no childhood.”

His compensation was the gift of humor. It buffered him from harsh experience and provided the equanimity evident in his work both as a writer and a physician. Medicine suited his compassionate temperament and the need for a career to support his family after his father became a bankrupt and a drunk. Chekhov never shirked this responsibility; it became one reason not to start a family of his own. The other, more powerful rationale was his attraction to writing. In this matter, Troyat is particularly poignant, one might even say Chekhovian: “What was a woman to him, no matter how desirable, when his life was all pen and paper?”

Mozart once wrote that he composed music as effortlessly as a cow urinates. Chekhov was more genteel about his own fluency. “I wrote serenely, as if eating bliny,” he says, and elsewhere picks up an ashtray and offers to have a story about it ready for the next day. Editors of Russia’s literary journals appreciated this facility and Chekhov’s acceptance of editing to satisfy Czar Alexander III’s censors.

When in Three Sisters Olga, Masha and Irina yearn for Moscow, they echo the youthful Chekhov. He fell under the city’s spell while attending medical school, where none of his fellow students connected him with “Antosha Chekhonte,” the pseudonym under which he wrote comic stories. It was not until 1887, with the staging of his play Ivanov, that the public knew the author as A.P. Chekhov. Reviewers were generally hostile; “a flippantly cynical piece of foolishness, foul and immoral,” said the man from the Muscovite Newssheet. But with the appearance of the story The Steppe in 1888, Chekhov was compared with Tolstoy and Gogol.

Fame attracted critics and their pigeonholes. Chekhov would have none of it: “The people I fear are those who look for tendentiousness between the lines . . . I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”

There was more than figurative truth in the statement. Chekhov suffered a variety of chronic illnesses. Symptoms of tuberculosis appeared when he was graduated from medical school. The fatal disease surely contributed to his doleful outlook, though it does not appear to have affected his compassion. As Troyat suggests, while Chekhov’s journey to a remote penal colony was motivated by sympathy, writing The Island of Sakhalin was not a labor of love. Yet the book riveted attention on the inhuman conditions at the Czar’s gulag and eventually led to reforms.

On the evidence, Chekhov was always discreet and gentlemanly in his affairs with women. Lydia Avilova, a persistent and hysterical pursuer, was tactfully kept at bay for years. When the playwright finally married, it was to Olga Knipper, one of Moscow’s best-known actresses. Unfortunately, her career frequently kept her in the city, and his illness tied him to Yalta. He died at age 44, drinking champagne with Olga at his bedside. The death scene is cordon bleu Chekhov. A large black moth flutters into the room, and as the body of the famous man cools, the cork pops out of the wine bottle. It is the loudest sound in this beautifully modulated book.