Bedbugs and cockroaches
Gabriele Annan
CHEKHOV: A LIFE by Donald Rayfield HarperCollins, £25, pp. 674 November 1896 at Melikhovo, Chekhov's country estate near Moscow: Lika . . spent four desolate days in Anton's study, silently playing patience on his desk, while he wrote letters in pencil on his lap. Drozdova painted Pavel's portrait; Evgenya's new crockery arrived from Muir and Mir- rielees; old Mariushka moved out to live in the cattleyard, and a new cook took her place. Books were ordered, sorted, and sent to Taganrog library. On Monday, without Lika, Chekhov went to Moscow to settle his accounts: he had missed the small print in Marx's contract and only now discovered that he could not reprint My Life as a book for a year.
And so it goes, fact upon fact, relevant and irrelevant, important and trivial, bang bang bang, like machine-gun fire, page after page, 603 of them not counting the notes and index. The earlier chapters cover a year or two each, but by the middle a month or two is the norm. Professor Ray- field writes in lists — lists of the invitations Chekhov refused, as well as the ones he accepted; lists of what was cooked and eaten at Melikhovo over Christmas 1897 when he was away in Nice; lists of stages in mortgage arrangements and negotiations with publishers, of weather conditions whenever Chekhov travelled, or what went on in the families of his three married brothers; of the parties his wife attended in Moscow while he was in Yalta. When I got to the end, I felt as he did after the summer torrent of guests through Melikhovo — 'I just wanted to lie down.'
In his preface Professor Rayfield says that 'to write a full biography would take a lifetime longer than Chekhov's own'. This could be said of any biography, but fortunately most biographers, including Professor Rayfield, don't make the necessary sacrifice. Still, he spent three years in archives all over Russia (what fun a Russian small-town archive must be!) and found new material which had been suppressed in the Soviet era because of a prim tradition of not 'discrediting or vulgarising' one's subject. Nothing discred- itable seems to have turned up, except a few smutty jokes and a few extra mistress- es; but the list of known mistresses was already so long that one more or less hard- ly counts.
Chekhov was irresistible to women. In Yalta so many pursued him that they were known collectively as `Antonovkas'. Rayfield compares Chekhov to a cheetah: an animal, he says, that becomes impotent with each mate after he has copulated with her. I don't know how the female cheetahs take it, but Chekhov's lovers nearly all remained his friends for life, while some became chronic nuisances. He was a soft touch for sympathy, help and money — not just for mistresses but for every kind of private need and public good cause.
`In this biography', says the Preface,
stories and plays are discussed in as much as they emerge from [Chekhov's] life and as they affect it, but less as material for critical analysis. Biography is not criticism.
So there are no new insights about Chekhov's work, except the extent to which it was a clef The Seagull, The Darling, and The Grasshopper in particular gave pain to the women who recognised themselves among the characters. Chekhov seems uncharacteristically insensitive in this respect.
The advantage of Professor Rayfield's accelerated style is that it reinforces one's sense of the confusion, the mess, the ant- heapishness of Chekhov's world. He was born in Taganrog into a ghastly family. His father, Pavel, was a shopkeeper, a grotesque Dickensian monster rather than a mild Chekhovian one (unless you count Natasha in The Three Sisters). Incompetent, lazy, churchy, and not very honest, he went bankrupt and fled to Moscow, leaving his family in penury with Anton in charge. There were seven of them: the dim-witted wife Evgenya, five sons and one daughter. Anton was the third son, 16 years old and still at school; so were his two elder broth- ers, both unreliable, though talented (Alek- sandr became a journalist and drunkard, Kolya an artist and psychopath). From Moscow Pavel sent sanctimonious letters to his abandoned children, asking for money and enclosing duty rosters about shoe- cleaning, hair-brushing, and church:
Those who do not obey this roster are liable first to severe reprimand and then to punish- ment, during which crying out is forbidden. Father of the family, Pavel Chekhov.
Rayfield's quotations are brilliant.
Eventually the family moved to Moscow, where they lived in a succession of squalid flats, sharing bedrooms with one another and with various aunts, cousins, acquain- tances and bedbugs. Conditions improved when Anton began to make serious money from his writings, and the bedbugs were replaced by cockroaches — a step up the social ladder. No one replaced the family though: 'I always take it with me like luggage', he wrote to a friend, 'and am as used to it as a growth on my forehead'. He had no growth, but, as Professor Rayfield says, his life was a historia morbi. Tuberculosis shapes it and ends it: his efforts to ignore and cope with the disease form the weft of any biography.
Chekhov had other diseases as well, including chronic diarrhoea and piles. Several members of his family died of TB. His brother Kolya's death at 31 was partic- ularly horrible, and so was that of his close friend, the painter Levitan. The peasants had rickets, worms, TB and syphilis — plus cholera in the summer and frostbite in the winter, when the gentry merely had dysen- tery and pneumonia, respectively. One gets a sense of everyone always being ill. The remedies were as bad as the diseases. Chekhov was put on a different absurd diet by every doctor he saw, and when his devoted sister Masha had headaches, he himself told her to
abstain from alcohol, tobacco, fish, to take Aspirin, then subcutaneous arsenic, potassi- um iodate and electric shocks . . . and if this doesn't help then wait for old age, when all this will pass and new diseases start.
Chekhov, as we know, didn't wait, he died at 44.
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