Chekhov: The Hidden Ground - A Biographyby Philip Callow Constable 404pp, £18.99 in UK
Philip Callow starts his lively biography with an account of Chekhov's grandfather. Egor Chekhov was born a serf who, through savage hard work, succeeded in buying the freedom of himself, his wife and their three sons. There wasn't enough money to buy the daughter but the noble owner threw her in with the deal, a sort of luck penny. This is one way of telling the story of Anton Chekhov, a man who had an acute sense of the various illusions of freedom which people need in life, merely in order to go on living.
This blood knowledge of survival and its cost is somewhere near the forces that drove Chekhov as a doctor and a writer. The presence of failure at his shoulder, like a medieval figure of memento mori, casts its shadow across the life and writings, the necessary doubt which, in his words, "gave talent grey hair". The necessity, too, of work, work and more work, a consumptive's zeal, which even as it fuelled his own life, was also subjected to his peculiar brand of sad irony. "Work, that's what I must do, work!" cries Uncle Vanya and such hope of occupation becomes unbearably moving in the approaching silence at the end of that play.
Chekhov's own fierce sense of family was, even by Irish standards, tentacular. By the age of twenty-four he was already the head of the family, replacing a useless father and two feckless, if talented, older brothers. He had recently qualified as a doctor and was already spitting blood from the disease that would kill him within twenty years. But he had dragged the family up several rungs of the Russian ladder and they, in turn, smothered him with love and adulation, especially the mother and the smitten sister, Masha.
At times this love nearly choked him. There is the telegram to "Dear Mama" when he finally surrendered, in a kind of tiredness, to matrimony at the age of forty-one: "Bless me, I am getting married. All will be the same." The mother was in a state of shock, the sister near a nervous breakdown and the bride, the actress Olga Knipper, seemed to be aware from day one that she might have bitten off more than she could chew.
Last year, Donald Rayfield's Anton Chekhov, A Life caused a stir because it transformed the perception of Chekhov for readers in the English language. Gone was the cherished image of the sweet, near saintly humanist and in its place came something infinitely more interesting.
Rayfield, an expert in Russian literature, had unearthed and rectified the damage done by Soviet censors. He had gone back to primary sources, such as the manuscript department of the Russian State Library (formerly the Lenin Library) and had used the archives without any of the silent self-censorship which has bedevilled so much Russian scholarship, although this too, like much else in that country, has begun to change. He also informs us about some of the missing material which he believes still exists, including the letters of Suvorin to his friend Chekhov in answer to the remarkable Chekhov side of the correspondence.
What finally emerged was a vividly plain-speaking Chekhov with a huge appetite for life and a profound self-knowledge. The elegant womaniser is still there (it is remarkable how many of the ladies pursued by the three Chekhov boys came in sisterly trios). But now we also know about the periodic impotence and the recourse to prostitutes ("he had great difficulty being aroused by women he liked or liking women who aroused him").
Callow draws on Rayfield, as on much else; indeed, his subtitle refers to the dominance of love in Chekhov's life and writing. His is what is called a popular biography but of a superior kind. It is much easier reading than Rayfield's, which is so chockful of information that the writing, at times, reads like endless list making.
Callow is in control of not only the secondary material but the bulk of Chekhov's writings as well. He takes the implications of Rayfield's research further (quoting Anthony Cronin from his Beckett biography), showing that Chekhov's secret, psychosexual wound was part of the writer's sensibility. The man who wrote so well about the complex manoeuvres between men and women had himself spent a lifetime attracting and evading and then measuring the loss. Much of the time, he and Olga had a marriage at one remove, as it were, he in Yalta, she in Moscow, exchanging passionate, suggestive letters, and it is at this point that he poignantly regrets that they have not had a child.
Callow's is also the best account that I've read of Chekhov's nearsuicidal, extraordinary journey, alone, across Siberia to the horrors of the penal island of Sakhalin at the other end of the world. He also provides a sensible discussion of why Chekhov might have subjected himself to such an ordeal against everyone's advice and warnings. Chekhov's letter to his friend Suvorin:
. . . tell me what I stand to lose by going? Time? Money? Will I suffer hardships? My time is worth nothing and I never have any money anyway. As for hardships, the horse-drawn part of the trip won't last more than thirty days. - You write, for instance, that Sakhalin could be of no use or interest to anyone - a place of unbearable suffering, the sort of suffering only man, whether free or subjugated, is capable of. - No, I assure you, Sakhalin is of great use and interest, and the only sad part of it all is that I'm the one that's going and not someone more conversant with the problems and capable of arousing public interest. I myself am going there on a trivial pretext.
At this year's Hay-on-Wye Festival, Orlando Figes seemed to suggest that Chekhov was the one major 19th-century Russian writer exempt from the tormented quest for the soul of the "real" Russia. But Chekhov did make his own quest. He did so by going into the gulag.
Among his other plays, Thomas Kilroy has adapted Chekhov's The Seagull