Chekhov through his letters

Press, 28 November 1987, Page 27

Chekhov through his letters

Chekhov. By Henri Troyat. Translated from the French by Michael Henry Him. Macmillan, 1987. 364 pp. $59.95.

(Reviewed by

John Goodliffe)

Henri Troyat is the pseudonym of Lev Tarassov. He was born in Russia in 1911-and left with his family in 1917 to settle in France where he has since enjoyed a • distinguished career as a French, writer, winning several major prizes for his novels and biographies. He has specialised in accounts of the lives and works of the great writers of nineteenth-century Russia, beginning with his life of Dostoevsky, published in 1946. Since then he has published books on Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and a massive volume on Tolstoy. He has also written lives of Russian rulers: Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Alexander I, and Ivan the Terrible. His book on Chekhov is as meticulously prepared,and presented as all the others, its main source being Chekhov’s letters. Considering Chekhov died at the age of 43, his epistolary legacy is vast. The latest Soviet edition of his complete works and letters contains about 4400 letters, including telegrams and short notes. This amounts to more than 150 per year over 29 years, not counting those that have been lost. In addition, Chekhov carefully preserved about 10,000 letters sent to him. Chekhov did not want his letters to be published. In April, 1888, he wrote to his brother: “In general make a habit of tearing up letters.” This helps to emphasise Chekhov’s modesty as a man and writer. Since he wrote very little about himself otherwise, his letters are especially valuable. They are honest and revealing, a mirror of Chekhov’s life and times, his thinking, his relationships with other people, above all of his good humour and humanity.

Troyat, for the most part, lets Chekhov tell his own life-story through. his letters, not unduly intruding to make broad interpretative comments. In this respect he is less obtrusive than Ronald Hingley, whose “A new Life of Anton Chekhov” (1976) provides more background information and more critical commentary on Chekhov’s literary works. Troyat does make some comments, but his book is basically that of an experienced novelist, although by this I do not mean that he makes undesirable use of his imagination. Hingley’s is essentially the work of an academic, although by this I do not mean that he is dry and boring. Both biographers write extremely well and the two books perfectly complement each other. As I have written previously in these columns, Chekhov’s merits as a writer have shone with increasing brilliance as the twentieth century has advanced, whereas the reputations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have tended to fade somewhat. Chekhov’s unassuming scepticism, his lack of dogmatism, his economical method, his concern for basic human values, make him in many ways the most “modem” of nineteenth-century Russian writers and probably the most readable for an English-speaking public in the 1980 s. Troyat’s biography reminds us that Chekhov was, from all the evidence, an extremely pleasant man. Generous and kindly, he made many friends and tried to help people in all sorts of practical ways, especially as a doctor. There was only one exceptional episode in his life where he seems to have acted with unnecessary selfishness, or at least inconsiderateness, when in 1892, by his cold response to his sister Mariya, he effectively dissuaded her from marrying, apparently so that he could retain her services as a housekeeper.

If Chekhov’s life is compared with the lives of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it seems very short and uneventful. Dostoevsky’s included an encounter with a firing-squad and a spell in a Siberian prison; Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War and in his later years became a world-famous religious thinker and moral philosopher. Chekhov was the' son of a bankrupt grocer and the most exciting event in his tragically short life was the trip he made to the Sakhalin Island penal settlement in 1890 to make a sociological survey of the convicts there. Apart from this, he led a relatively quiet life as a professional writer of stories and plays, enjoying his hobby of gardening, and marrying only three years before his untimely death from pulmonary tuberculosis. But the very ordinariness and orderliness of Chekhov’s life make it easier for us to feel closer to him than we can to an erratic and unstable genius like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Troyat himself makes the point that “whereas the majority of great Russian authors had chequered and thunderous destinies, Chekhov’s existence would seem, at first glance, uniform.”

But he goes on to say that this uniformity conceals an immense richness: ”... it is as though a dear friend is softly speaking to me.” It is Troyat’s achievement that his book makes us feel that Chekhov is indeed speaking to us and that what he says is sensible, slightly sad, sometimes ironic, occasionally acerbic, but nearly always kind and understanding. Michael Frayn, distinguished English translator of Chekhov’s plays, has neatly characterised him as having the "capacity of combining personal warmth with dispassionate assessment.” Troyat’s book catches this perfectly in both content and form.