Sad and dismal story
Ronald HingleY
Chekhov Sophia Laffitte (Angus and Robertson £3.50).
This is a desultory and moony mood-piece about Chekhov, originally published in French in 1963 and now offered for the first time in English translation. In no sense a systematic biography, for the material is scantily documented despite a spattering of foot-notes, it compensates for this deficiency by no brilliant insights; but it does present Chekhov as the subtle and hard-headed observer whom We know him to have been, and not as the usual saintly ninny.
There is, heaven knows, no lack of accessible primary source material on this particular life. What on earth is the point, then, of quarrying Chekhov's fiction as if it could Provide biographical evidence? For instance, late nineteenth-century Taganrog (Chekhov's native town, of which we know plenty) is Invoked through a lengthy quotation from the story My Life, though that work is neither set In Taganrog nor so much as mentions the Place! Similarly, Chekhov's views on progress are blithely equated with lines put by him into the mouths of two figments of his imagination, Dr Astrov and Colonel Vershinin (in Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters respectively). One might as well quote speeches from Macbeth, Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice to Prove that Shakespeare was a murderer, a Potential suicide and a usurer.
As for the chapter on Chekhov and women, though it indeed covers a once neglected topic and is by no means wholly misleading, it is now invalidated by the findings of Dr Virginia Llewellyn Smith, based on a study of material in Soviet archives and published last year.
If the material of the book is dull and eccentrically documented, the editing and translating of it are downright weird. We have, for example, the same work referred to by two different titles (A Sad Story, A Dismal Story) in two different parts of the book. We even have a character whose name is spelt in two different ways within the scope of a single paragraph (Kundasova, Kundrassova). As for the grotesquely maltreated names in general, no conceivable transliteration system can excuse the extra syllable given in Rajevski (for Rzhevsky), or that docked from Serghenko (for Sergeyenko). We also have a strange case of metamorphosis from the animal to the plant kingdom. In 1890, as any student of Chekhov should know all too well, he brought back two mongooses from the far east. These entertaining beasts (mangusy in Russian) kept peeing in people's hats or hiding their galoshes, as their master never tired of boasting; but Mme Laffitte or her translators have converted them into "mangosteen plants" (mangustiny)! After all this it is not surprising to find the professor-hero of A Sad or A Dismal Story (take your choice) quoted as the 'mouthpiece' of Chekhov's own ideas. So Chekhov was ,continually being told during his lifetime, much to his disgust, and what he had to say about it was this:
When you're served coffee, don't complain it isn't beer and when I offer you my professor's ideas, do trust me — and don't go searching for Chekhov's ideas, thank you very much. There's only a single idea in the whole story which I share — one lodged in the head of that scoundrel Gnekker, the professor's son-in-law: "The old man's off his rocker."
Ronald Hingley's selection of Chekhov's short stories has just been issued in paperback by Oxford University Press.
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