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William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and now lives in London. He was educated at Gordonstoun School and the Universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He is the author of A Good Man in Africa On the Yankee Station, An Ice-Cream War, Stars and Bars, The New Confessions, Brazzaville Beach, The Blue Afternoon, The Destiny of Nathalie X, and Any Human Heart. He has won various awards including the Whitbread Literary Award for the Best First Novel and been shortlisted for the Booker prize. His new collection of short stories, Fascination, will be published by Penguin in October.
A. Anton.
Anton Chekhov died a over a hundred years ago, on July 15th 1904. He was 44 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 complimentary 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 19th 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: secular, refusing to pass judgement, cognisant of the absurdities of our muddled, bizarre lives and the complex tragi-comedy that is the human condition. Chekhov’s stories survive as the great monument of Russian literature and of all literatures.
B. Biarritz.
Chekhov visited Biarritz 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 80-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 25 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 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 31) 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 1924) spoke with real authority. An Englishman, born in Moscow in 1895, wholly bilingual, Gerhardie revered 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 was made the form of the fiction. Previous to Chekhov, the event-plot shaped all fictions: the narrative was manipulated, tailored, calculatedly designed, rounded-off. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens, 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. He was the first to do this, and this makes him both modern and timeless.
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’esprits under a pseudonym, “Antosha Chekhonte”. The vast majority of them have not aged well: 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 is was a Damascene moment. The 15 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 potent 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.
J. Japanese girl.
On his voyage back through the orient from his travels to Siberia Chekhov went to a brothel in Japan. He wrote to a friend “The Japanese girl… doesn’t put on airs like a, or go coy, like a Russian woman. And all the time she is laughing and making lots of tsu noises… When you come, the Japanese girl pulls with her teeth a sheet of cotton wool from her sleeve, catches you by the “boy”, gives you a massage and the cotton wool tickles your belly. All this is done with coquetry, laughing, singing and saying tsu.”
K. Koumiss.
A fermented mare’s milk that was believed, in the 1890s, to be a defence against tuberculosis, as a source of ‘good’ bacilli. In 1901 Chekhov undertook a koumiss cure, drinking four bottles of the milk daily. He gained 12 pounds in a fortnight. A month later he was still coughing blood.
L. Lika Mizinova – the one true love of Chekhov’s life?
Chekhov married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901 when he had three years left to live. It was a union that dumbfounded and outraged most of his family - it seemed incomprehensible. It has subsequently been presented as one of the great romances of the 20th century. My own theory is that his long affair with Lika Mizinova was the real love story. He met Lika in 1889, she was a teacher, an aspiring opera singer, blonde and buxom and 19 years old. Chekhov was ten years older. For almost a decade they conducted a bantering, passionate on-off love affair. No other woman in Chekhov’s life held his affections so long but he always refrained from proposing marriage. Frustrated, Lika had an affair with Chekhov’s close friend and agent Ignati Potapenko (a married man). They had a child together. Betrayal enough to break up any relationship, one would have thought – but Chekhov kept seeing Lika. Her career failed, she grew plump but something kept drawing him back to her. They last met in 1897 but Lika remained very friendly with Chekhov’s brothers and sister. She is often considered to be the model for Nina in The Seagull.
M. My Life.
This is the longest story Chekhov wrote; it’s almost a novella and is, in my opinion, his greatest. In it you will find all the key Chekhovian tropes: the black humour, the candid depiction of the absurdity of life, its fleeting happiness, its “weirdness and vulgarity” (as Stanislavsky put it), its brutal randomness. This dark Chekhovian comic ruthlessness found its way into English literature via William Gerhardie. Katherine Mansfield plagiarised Chekhov but she responded to his more elegiac tone. Gerhardie sensed Chekhov’s tough realism, his acknowledgement of life’s bland cruelty. Gerhardie in turn was a huge influence on Evelyn Waugh (Waugh’s early comedies are extremely Gerhardian, a fact that Waugh himself acknowledged, later in life)). This tone of voice has subsequently come to seem very English, but it was there in Chekhov first. My other favourite Chekhov stories in no particular order are: The Lady with the Dog, In the Ravine, A Visit to Friends, Ionych, The Bishop, The House with the Mezzanine, Three Years.
N. Nice.
Chekhov went to Nice in 1898 to protect his damaged lungs from the ravages of the Russian winter. It’s a city I know well, I spent most of a year there in 1971. Like Biarritz, Nice is a place where, here and there, the ghost of Chekhov haunts its streets. At the turn of the century it was popular with Russians and Chekhov stayed in a Russian pension in the rue Gounod. The room I rented was on the rue Dante, a few blocks away. Chekhov liked Nice (the weather was good) and tolerated the routine and circumscribed life he lived there. Nice was a good place to read, he said, but not to write.
O. Olga Knipper.
Was a leading actress at the Moscow Art Theatre. She acted in the earliest productions of Chekhov’s four finished plays - The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov married her in 1901, three years before he died. Olga survived him by 55 years, dying in 1959 (She also survived Stalin and Hitler). She was an ardent keeper of the flame but despite her efforts to portray it otherwise there is no disguising that the marriage was a strange one. They spent much more time apart than together (hence their copious and affecting correspondence): she acting in Moscow, Chekhov convalescing in Yalta on the Caspian/Black Sea. Sometimes she kept her address from Chekhov. She and Chekhov tried to conceive a child but failed. There is strong evidence, however, that she was unfaithful to him and miscarried another lover’s child in 1902.
P. Pavel Egerovitch Chekhov, Chekhov’s father.
The son of a serf, he was both absurdly devout and a ruthless disciplinarian. He beat his sons remorselessly. Chekhov saw the watershed in his life as the day he woke knowing that he would not be beaten by his father. Yet this sentimental, sadistic boor was financially supported loyally and tirelessly by his third son throughout his life, living with him in his various establishments and particularly at Melikhovo, the small estate Chekhov bought to the south of Moscow and which, of all the places he lived in from 1892 to 1899, he most loved. Pavel Chekhov effectively ran the estate with shrewd serf-like application. He died in 1898, aged 73, on an operating table when the surgeon was attempting to rectify a gangrenous hernia. Pavel had forgotten to put on his truss and developed the hernia by picking up a 20lb bag of sugar. Chekhov declared it the end of an era, that “the main cog had jumped out of the Melikhovo machine”. He never loved his father but he had never let him down. He abandoned Melikhovo shortly after his father died.
Q. Quinine.
At Melikhovo Chekhov had two dachshunds which he called Quinine and Bromine. Quinine was his favourite. The most natural and unposed photographs of Chekhov show him sitting on the steps of his verandah with Quinine tucked under his arm.
R. Real lives.
Chekhov said: “Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy”. By this I take him to mean that other people are fundamentally opaque, mysterious - even people you know very well, your wife or husband, your family. Janet Malcolm, who has written a profound and insightful book on Chekhov (called Reading Chekhov), says that “We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other.” This, it seems to me, is the great and lasting allure of all fiction: if we want to know what other people are like we turn to the novel or the short story. In no other art form can we take up residence in other people’s minds so effortlessly. In fiction there are no secrets - the novelist, the writer, knows everything about his characters and can reveal them in intimate, confidential detail to the reader. Chekhov tells us a great deal about his characters but, however, resists full exposure: there always remains something blurry, something secret about them. This is part of his genius: this is what makes his stories seem so real.
S. Aleksei Suvorin.
A vastly wealthy, right-wing publisher and newspaper magnate and probably Chekhov’s closest male friend. He achieved a bond with Suvorin which is hard to explain, given the latter’s rebarbative politics. It’s rather as if George Orwell’s best friend had been, say, Julius Streicher. I suspect Suvorin functioned as something of a surrogate father for Chekhov - also he paid him well and Chekhov’s fame largely came about through his stories appearing in Suvorin’s publications. Suvorin had no illusions about Chekhov: “…a man of flint and a cruel talent with his harsh objectivity. He’s spoilt, his amour proper is enormous.” They fell out, finally, irrevocably, over the Dreyfus affair. Chekhov was an ardent Dreyfusard; Suvorin unashamedly anti-Semitic. There was no rapprochement and Suvorin bitterly regretted the rift. Asked about his politics once, Chekhov declared that he wanted only to be a “free artist”. Like Vladimir Nabokov, he was deeply distrustful of fiction that openly proselytised for any political ideology. Chekhov’s view of the human condition, given his own terminal illness, was bleakly clear-eyed. “After youth comes old age; after happiness, unhappiness, and vice versa; nobody can be healthy and cheerful all their lives… you have to be ready for anything. You just have to do your duty as best as you can.”
T. Theatre.
Chekhov was both drawn to and exasperated by the theatre. He wrote his first plays purely as a quick way of making money. One always feels that he was somewhat amazed at the acclaim his later plays achieved. Seen in the light of the mature stories, the plays are clearly heavily indebted to the fiction in their mood, themes and settings -which is what made them so revolutionary and, later on, so influential. But the plays lack the seamless authority of the fiction: there are great characters, wonderful scenes, tremendous passages, moments of acute melancholy and sagacity but the parts appear greater than the whole. Perhaps only in The Cherry Orchard does everything fuse and the drama take on an autonomy of its own. Days before his death he conceived the idea for a play about passengers stranded on an ice-bound ship. Perhaps his premature death makes the plays that Chekhov never wrote the real loss. The stories are fully achieved: a genuine apotheosis.
U. Uncle Vanya.
Tolstoy went to see Uncle Vanya and loathed it. Chekhov was backstage and asked what Tolstoy’s opinion was. A kindly interlocutor said that the great man hadn’t “really understood” the play. Chekhov saw through that one. But then he was told that even though Tolstoy hadn’t enjoyed Uncle Vanya, that he thought Chekhov was an appalling playwright, he was not as bad as Shakespeare. Chekhov found this delightfully, hilariously amusing.
V. Vanity.
Chekhov was six foot one inches tall – a very tall man for the end of the nineteenth century. He was handsome: in early photos he looks burly and strangely asiatic. The familiar images of his last decade, goateed, with pince nez, slimmed by his illness, carefully dressed, testify to a man who was proud of his appearance and knew he was attractive to women. He had a terror of going bald.
W. Writers.
Chekhov wrote in a letter to Suvorin, “Remember, that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind, but your whole being, that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.” He also said: “Writers must be as objective as a chemist.”
X. X-Rays.
An X-Ray of Chekhov’s lungs early in his life (had such a thing been available) would have should the shadowy traces of the “tubercules”: latent walled-in lesions of the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Chekhov probably caught the disease in childhood. And he saw his brother Kolia die of it in 1889. Moreover, Chekhov was a doctor: he knew exactly what was in store for him. The bacilli lies dormant in the body, kept at bay by the immune system. At moments when the immune system is under stress or weakened the bacilli effectively break out of the tubercule and begin to spread extensively in the lungs. The lung tissue is effectively eaten by the bacilli - consumed - hence the 19th century name for the disease: “consumption”. In Chekhov’s time - the pre-antibiotic era - the only cure was isolation, rest and good nutrition. In the last years of his life Chekhov’s lungs became increasingly devastated. The amount of lung tissue available for the exchange of gases in the breathing process radically decreased. Chekhov died of breathing failure, exhaustion and general toxaemia (the tuberculosis had also spread to the spine).
Y. Yalta.
A popular resort much favoured by tubercular patients. Positioned in the Crimea on the Black Sea it had a congenial climate. Chekhov moved there in 1899 and built a house, only returning to Moscow in the summer. The fact that he had taken up residence made the resort instantly chic - other invalids suddenly wanted to convalesce there rather than anywhere else - something that he doubtless found wryly amusing. His story The Lady with the Dog is set in the town. Many of Yalta’s transient lady visitors fancied themselves as the model for Anna, the eponymous heroine. Chekhov’s Yalta house is now a museum, its furnishings and décor theoretically unchanged since Chekhov lived there.
Z. Zoo.
About a month before he died, the desperately ill Chekhov visited Moscow zoo. Chekhov loved animals. Apart from his dachshunds and the livestock on his estate he also had as pets two mongooses and, in Yalta, a crane. Conceivably, during that visit to Moscow zoo, Chekhov might have seen a cheetah in its cage. Donald Rayfield, Chekhov’s best and definitive biographer, speculates that Chekhov’s sexuality was like that of the cheetah. The male cheetah can only mate with a stranger. When the male cheetah mates with female cheetah familiar to him he is - bizarrely - impotent. It’s a fanciful image but one worth contemplating: the dying Chekhov staring at a cheetah in its cage. Perhaps this explains this rare man’s extraordinary life and the view of the human condition that he refined in his incomparable stories. Perhaps it explains his enigmatic, beguiling personality: his genial aloofness; his love of idleness; his immense generosity; his hard heart. For this artist to avoid impotence only strangers would do; it only worked with strangers. Anton Chekhov was a cheetah.
This article first appeared in the Guardian on Saturday 3rd July, 2004.
Links for further reading
Plays (contains The Cherry Orchard/Three Sisters/Ivanov/Uncle Vanya/The Seagull)
Chekhov: A Life in Letters
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories
The Shooting Party
The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories
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