“Why are thy songs so short?” a bird was once asked. “Is it because thou art so short of breath?”
The bird replied: “I have very many songs and I should like to sing them all.”
2004
Anton Chekhov (1)
An A — Z
A. Anton
Anton Chekhov died a hundred years ago, on 15 July 1904. He was forty-four years old. His lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis. In Russia Chekhov is revered as a short story writer of genius; his plays are considered as extremely interesting but somehow ancillary and complementary to his main achievement. And this Russian conception of his work has some validity: Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short story writer ever. Like certain great pieces of music, his stories repay constant revisitings. The two dozen or so mature stories he wrote in the last decade of the nineteenth century have not dated: what resonated in them for his contemporaries resonates now, a hundred or more years on. Chekhov, it can be argued, was the first truly modern writer of fiction: secular, refusing to pass judgement, cognizant of the absurdities of our muddled, bizarre lives and the complex tragicomedy that is the human condition.
B. Biarritz
Chekhov visited Biarritz in south-west France in 1897. His health was failing and he had to seek a warmer climate in the winter months. For an effectively monoglot Russian writer (scant French and a little German) and a semi-invalid he had travelled fairly far and wide in his life. In Europe he knew Germany, France and Italy (how one wishes he had visited England). In 1890 he made an epic eighty-day trans-Russian journey to Sakhalin, a prison island in furthest Siberia. The book he wrote about the conditions of the prisoners there is earnest but dull; it does not live up to the near-intolerable struggle it took to reach the place. He came home by steamer via the orient: Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon and then through the Suez Canal to Odessa.
C. Critics
“Critics,” Chekhov said once to Maxim Gorky, “are like horse-flies which prevent the horse from ploughing. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double bass and a fly settles on its flanks and tickles and buzzes… he has to twitch his skin and swish his tail. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: ‘Look I am living on the earth. See, I can buzz too, buzz about anything’.” Chekhov went on: “For twenty-five years I have read criticisms of my stories and I don’t remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once [a critic] said something which made an impression on me — he said I would die in a ditch, drunk.”
D. Drink
Untypically for a Russian of his era, Chekhov was not a heavy drinker. His elder brothers Kolia and Aleksandr were chronic alcoholics and perhaps the memory of the squalor of Kolia’s wasted life (he was a hugely talented painter who died aged thirty-one) put Chekhov off. Yet Chekhov’s last act in life was to drink a glass of champagne. Fatally ill, he had travelled to the German spa town of Badenweiler in the vain hope that German doctors might save him. German medical etiquette demanded that, when the patient was near death and there was nothing more that a doctor could do, a glass of champagne would be offered. Chekhov knew what this meant. He accepted the glass, muttered “Ich sterbe” (“I’m dying”) and drank it down. His last words were: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.” Then he died.
E. Event-Plot
This is William Gerhardie’s phrase — one he uses to describe the kind of fiction written before Chekhov. Gerhardie, who is tremendously acute about Chekhov (he published a passionately enthusiastic short book about him in 1923), spoke with real authority. An Englishman, born in Moscow in 1895, wholly bilingual, Gerhardie idolized Chekhov (whom he read in Russian long before he was translated). Gerhardie himself was described in his 1920s heyday as “the English Chekhov” and they do share a similar philosophy of life — though Gerhardie’s talent had a briefer flowering. Gerhardie’s analysis of Chekhov’s genius maintains that for the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life were made the form of the fiction. Previous to Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions: the narrative was manipulated, tailored, calculatedly designed, rounded-off. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens and Turgenev could not resist the event-plot powering and shaping their novels. Chekhov abandoned this type of self-conscious “story” for something more casual and realistic. As Gerhardie says, Chekhov’s stories are “blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life.” This is why Chekhov’s stories still speak to us a hundred years on. His stories are anti-novelistic, in the traditional sense. They are like life as we all live it.
F. Faith
Chekhov’s personal world was a Godless one: despite his orthodox religious upbringing, he asserted, in 1892, that “I have no religion now.” He wrote about religious folk, indeed one of his greatest stories is entitled “The Bishop.” But intelligent people who believed in God seemed baffling to him. “I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer.”
G. Grigorovitch
In 1886 Dmitri Grigorovitch, a distinguished Russian writer, wrote Chekhov a letter which changed his artistic life. Up until that date Chekhov had earned his living as a composer of humorous short stories, almost like variety sketches (he was a qualified doctor but it was his writing that sustained him financially). He published these jeux d’esprit under a pseudonym, “Antosha Chekhonte.” The vast majority of them have not aged welclass="underline" arch, knowing, manifestly trying to be funny, these stories were hack work. Then in 1886 he published a story, “Requiem,” under his own name. Grigorovitch was hugely impressed, and wrote to Chekhov acclaiming his talent and urging him to abandon his comic squibs. “Stop doing hack work… better go hungry… save up your impressions for work that has been pondered, polished, written at several sittings.” Chekhov was overwhelmed by this letter and his reply is valuable if only because it is perhaps the only time that Chekhov drops his guard and gushes. “Your letter struck me like lightning. I almost burst into tears, I was profoundly moved and I now feel it has left a deep trace in my soul.” Grigorovitch’s passionate urging worked. For Chekhov it was a Damascene moment. The eighteen years remaining to him bear witness to his new zeal as a serious artist.
H. Home
Chekhov was born in 1860 in the Crimea, in a town called Taganrog, far to the south of Moscow on the Sea of Azov. More Levantine than European (Turkey was 300 miles away), Taganrog was a hot, fly-infested port with a varied population — Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Italians. Chekhov’s father was an indigent grocer whose debts eventually caused the family to flee to Moscow. Chekhov had four brothers and one sister — Aleksandr, Kolia, Vania, Misha and Masha. Very early in his life Chekhov became the family breadwinner. He supported them all — doggedly and in the main ungrudgingly — until his death.
I. Intimacy
In his short life Chekhov had many lovers but he had, as we would now term it, a real problem with commitment. Most of the women he had affairs with would have been happy to marry him but Chekhov was always careful to keep them at a distance, to break the relationship off if it seemed likely to become too heated.