Literary Criticism: This brief study of Anton Chekhov is an amalgam of personal anecdote, travel journalism and self-reflective preening. Janet Malcom, a New York critic, intrudes throughout Reading Chekhov to give us her opinions of Crimean restaurants and St Petersburg trains, writes Ian Thomson.
In the course of her account, she emerges as sharp-witted if occasionally haughty. Clearly Malcolm loves to be among the Russians, but sometimes she upbraids them for their apparent want of humour or humility.
Malcolm specialises in urbane profiles of writers and thinkers (Plath, Freud), in which she wryly subverts literary biography to reveal its shortcomings and absurdities. She appears as a character in her own work and, eager to be fetchingly original, affects to divine Chekhov's ghost in Moscow hotel doorways and on a Yalta park bench. Her communion with the author of Uncle Vanya is so strong that she remarks of her Russian tour guide: "Chekhov would have relished Sonia".
Literary "pilgrimages" of this sort, where the author makes a drama of his or her research, are increasingly common. Fortunately, Reading Chekhov contains new research as well as intelligent insights about the Russian writer, his work and inner life. Most interestingly, Malcolm sees in the atheist Chekhov an obscurely religious writer. Certainly Chekhov was more conversant with the rites and scriptures of Russian Orthodoxy than his Christian friend Tolstoy. In 'Panic Fears', a tale by Chekhov from 1886, a supernatural light is seen to glimmer in the window of a church belfry, but no one knows why. Chekhov's plays and short stories often radiate a melancholy that some find "spiritual".
Malcolm surmises that Chekhov would have fared "badly" under the Soviets. He was too much of a libertarian and gentleman to have submitted to the red devil in Moscow; his poor wife, Olga, on the other hand, became a leading actor in post-Revolutionary Russia, and died as a People's Artist in the 1950s. Convincingly, Malcolm defends Chekhov from charges of misogyny, and even claims him as a proto-ecologist. Unfortunately, he is venerated in Russia today with a "sickening piety" that even the opening of the Soviet archives (which reveal hitherto unknown details about the author's sex life) cannot dispel. "You utter the name 'Chekhov' and people arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room", says Malcolm.
Though Malcolm derides what she calls the "inescapable triviality of biography", most of this book is in fact about Chekhov's life. Born in 1860, he was the grandson of a serf, and grew up in semi-poverty. He managed to pay his way through university in Moscow and qualify as a doctor. However, medicine brought Chekhov no money, so he began to write for semi-humorous periodicals. It was only with his first great play, The Seagull, that the "Chekhovian trend" was inaugurated. Chekhov's characters often seem to be waiting for life to happen to them and long to be elsewhere - preferably Moscow. Yet they suffer from a divan-bound inertia. A mood of Chekhovian inactivity pervades Joyce's Dubliners as surely it does the terminal theatre of Samuel Beckett.
Occasionally, Malcolm makes some decidedly odd remarks. Chekhov's most famous short story, 'The Lady with the Little Dog', is an exception in the writer's canon, she claims, as "no one dies or has died" in it. Yet many of Chekhov's mature stories - 'Gooseberries', 'The Kiss', 'A Case History' - share this death-free trait. Malcolm is on surer ground with Chekhov's famous, well-mannered reserve. Tennessee Williams thought Chekhov held rather "too much in reserve", yet theatrical or portentous overstatement was anathema to him. (Like Nabokov, Chekhov flinched from Dostoevsky's mystic histrionics.) Ironically for such a reserved and dignified soul, Chekhov made a comic exit from life. The refrigerated railway car repatriating his corpse from Germany to Russia in 1904 was marked "FRESH OYSTERS". He had died of tuberculosis at the age of 44.
This book, underpinned by a sly wit, is often illuminating and always well-written. Chekhov's influence on such diverse writers as Sean O'Faoláin, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield (whose short stories effectively introduced the Russian to the English-speaking world) has been incalculable, and by and large it is good to have Janet Malcolm on his trail. She does not speak Russian, she says, but has read Chekhov in the faithful (if now slightly fusty) Constance Garnett translations of the 1920s, and these are good enough. Whatever its drawbacks, Reading Chekhov is a singular addition to Chekhov studies, and many will care for it.
Ian Thomson's biography, Primo Levi, has just been published in Vintage paperback
Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. By Janet Malcolm. Granta Books, 210pp. £13.99