Anton Chekhov: A Life by Donald Rayfield HarperCollins 674pp, £25 in UK
Biographers of Chekhov have had to contend with the guardians of his reputation. His widow and his sister, who both outlived him by more than fifty years, frowned on anything that might discredit his memory, and the Soviet state censorship made sure that he was seen as both politically and morally correct. The editions of his collected letters are still subject to bowdlerisation but the author of this biography has searched out the originals of the nearly 5,000 letters written by Chekhov and of some 7,000 letters written to him. Much that had hitherto been discreetly glossed over is made available in this book and the Chekhov that emerges is far from the humanistic saint of the hagiographers; he resembles one of the bored, indecisive and unhappy characters of his fiction.
His family was upwardly mobile; his great-grandfather was a serf all his life; his grandfather bought himself and his family out of serfdom; his father became a merchant in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov and saw to it that the children were educated. The advent of the railway, bringing cheap goods from outside, ruined the small traders and the Chekhovs flitted to Moscow, 500 miles to the north. Somehow money was scraped together to give the children higher education. Aleksandr, the eldest, became a journalist, Kolia an artist, Anton a doctor, Vania and Masha teachers, and Misha a civil servant.
Though Anton was the third child he became, to all intents, the head of the family. He discovered that he could satisfy a demand for short comic sketches in the papers and that this brought in more money than medicine. He was the bastion on which all the members of the family leaned, looking for free medical attention and loans. When Anton abandoned them, and his entangled love-life, to go and examine conditions in Russia's penal colony, the island of Sakhalin that stretched northward from Japan, he was badly missed.
He travelled across Siberia, by boat along the rivers, by cart along the flooded roads, and stayed in Sakhalin for three months before returning by boat via Vladivostok, Singapore, Ceylon, the Suez Canal and the Black Sea. He had been gone for eight months. He returned with a confirmed disrespect for authority and strong men, and with a pet mongoose he had bought in Ceylon.
Not long after his return he took a holiday in Western Europe - Vienna, Venice, Rome, Nice, Monte Carlo, Paris - with his friend and publisher Suvorin, the influential editor of a conservative paper. He was greatly impressed by the prevailing freedom of speech: people were not afraid of the secret police as they were in Moscow.
The purchase of a country estate some fifty miles from Moscow gave Chekhov his first permanent home; he lived there for seven years with his parents and sister, with frequent visits from other members of the family who helped him on the farm. The mongoose, a troublesome pet, had been given to the zoo and replaced by two dachshunds. The local peasants began to trust him when he opened a free clinic.
There were many guests, literary friends and some of the many women with whom Chekhov had a relationship. He had, despite or because of the misogyny he shared with other Russian writers, an extraordinary number of liaisons. Just as he got bored with his estate and fled to Moscow, as he got bored with his guests and longed for solitude, so he got bored with women. This promiscuity stemmed from a rapid loss of interest in any one woman. He was not aroused by women he liked and did not like women who aroused him. It could be that his experiences with prostitutes inhibited his sexual drive.
His association with the very beautiful Lika Mizinova lasted for ten years: he was alternately attracted and repelled and treated her with something approaching cruelty. She perspicaciously said that if he did something hurtful it wasn't on purpose, but because he really didn't care how people would take it. Women were less important to him than his writing; people and places were subject matter to be transmitted into stories and plays. The last of his liaisons, however, ended in marriage, for in the actress Olga Knipper he met his match.
When they married, in 1901, Chekhov had only a few years left to live. Neither the move to the Crimea, nor winter sojourns in Nice, had arrested his TB. He had been plagued by coughing and diarrhoea since infancy and had had haemorrhages for seventeen years but had been extraordinarily reluctant to admit that he could have TB. He died, at a spa in Germany, 1904, in his forty-fourth year.
Donald Rayfield's biography gives an unrivalled account of Chekhov's relations with his closely knit family and with the many women who succumbed to his charm. In addition to the new information there are sixty-six photographs, two maps and a family tree. All future writers on Chekhov will have to take account of this book.
Douglas Sealy is a critic and translator