Janet Malcolm - Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey

Table of Contents

TO GARDNER

PRAISE FOR READING CHEKHOV

Malcolm analyzes the transformations that Chekhov grants his redeemable rous and guileless heroines, and illuminates the hidden surreality and waywardness of his realism.

The New Yorker

Her method is that of the careful reporter who, in Chekhovian manner, starts out with quotidian details, small particulars of time and place... and, giving credit to other critics, where it is due, builds on her observations and recollections of the stories and plays to reach heights of feeling and judgment.

Washington, D.C., Sunday Times

Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey brings the Russian master under the gaze of an astute journalist and critic.

Newsday (one of Newsdays Favorite Books of 2001)

Part literary appreciation, part biography, part travelogue as Malcolm visits Chekhovs various Russian haunts, its a lush, thoughtful and beautifully written consideration of the premier practitioner of the [short story] form.

The Orlando Sentinel

... informative and beautifully written.

Time Out New York

[Malcolm] seamlessly stitches together both standard biographical information... and close analysis and interpretation.... Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of our poet of the provisional and fragmentary.

Kirkus Reviews

Malcolm... brings her considerable talents to Chekhov studies in a work that is a combination of biography, travel book, and literary criticism.... In each chapter, she deftly takes us back to Chekhovs day.... It is not necessary to know Chekhovs writings to enjoy this splendid book, but it will serve to prod the reader to Chekhovs works and the treasures that await.

Library Journal

Reading Chekhov is brilliantly composed and a delight to read.

The Sunday Oregonian

Malcolms thinking about Chekhov is clear and her writing is always good, often exceptionalstylistically worthy, in short, of her subject.... Malcolms biggest achievement is that she directs you back to the authora refreshing change from the critics who want to direct you to themselves, their colleagues and their jargon.

Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times

Janet Malcolms Reading Chekhov was fluent and engaging, testifying to, apart from everything else, the great affection and instinctive regard so many writers... have felt towards the Russian genius.

Times Literary Supplement (one of TLSs International Books of the Year)

Anton Chekhov

What torture it is to cut the nails on your right hand!

Chekhov, letter to Olga Knipper,
October 30, 1903

One

After they have slept together for the first time, Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna von Diderits, the hero and heroine of Anton Chekhovs story The Lady with the Dog (1899), drive out at dawn to a village near Yalta called Oreanda, where they sit on a bench near a church and look down on the sea. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops, Chekhov writes at the start of the famous passage that continues:

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundingsthe sea, mountains, clouds, the open skyGurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

Today, I am sitting on that same bench near the church looking at the same view. Beside me is my English-speaking guide Nina (I know no Russian), and a quarter of a mile away a driver named Yevgeny waits in his car at the entrance of the footpath leading to the lookout point where Gurov and Anna sat, not yet aware of the great love that lay before them. I am a character in a new drama: the absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an original scene that can only fall short of his expectations. However, because Nina and Yevgeny have gone to some trouble to find the spot, I pretend to be thrilled by it. Ninaa large woman in her late sixties, with short, straight blond hair, forget-me-not blue eyes, and an open passionate natureis gratified. She breaks into song. Its a big, wide wonderful world that we live in, she sings, and then asks, Do you know this song? When I say I do, she tells me that Deanna Durbin sang it in the 1948 film For the Love of Mary.

Do you like Deanna Durbin? she asks. I say yes.

I adore Deanna Durbin, Nina says. I have adored her since I was a girl.

She tells me of a chance encounter in a church in Yalta, two years earlier, with an Englishwoman named Muriel, who turned out to be another adorer of Deanna Durbin, and who subsequently invited her to the annual conference of an organization called the Deanna Durbin Society, which was held that year in Scarborough, England. Nina owns videos of all of Deanna Durbins movies and knows all the songs Deanna Durbin sang. She offers to give me the address of the Deanna Durbin Society.

Nina was born and educated in St. Petersburg and, after studying languages at the university there, became an Intourist guide, presently moving to Yalta. She has retired, and, like most retirees in the former Soviet Union, she cannot live on her pension. She now hires out as an independent guide and waits for assignments from the Hotel Yalta, currently the only habitable hotel in the town. My trip to Yalta is a stroke of good fortune for her; she had not worked for a long time when the call from the hotel came.

It is the second day of my acquaintance with Nina, the third day of my stay at the Hotel Yalta, and the ninth day of my trip to the former Soviet Union. I have worked my way south from St. Petersburg and Moscow. My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness as I pursued my itinerary of visits to houses where Chekhov lived and places he had written about. I had flown from Moscow to Simferopol, the nearest town to Yalta with an airport, a two-hour drive away. Chekhov lived in Yalta during much of the last five years of his life. (He died in July 1904.) At that time, exile to places with mild climates, like the Crimea and the Riviera, was the favored therapy for tuberculosis, into whose last stages Chekhov was entering in the late 1890s. He built a handsome villa a few miles outside the city center, in a suburb called Autka, and also bought a small cottage on the water in a seaside Tatar village called Gurzuv. He wrote