Chekhov

Introduction

I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley’s wonderful phrase—I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin’s Letters—that the “doors of the Russian house are wide open”: we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them.

In writing my present biographical and critical study of Chekhov I owe a great debt to the scholarship of others. For Chekhov’s stories I have usually followed the remarkable translations of Constance Garnett. They appeared in a haphazard chronology, inaccuracies have been pounced on, but her voice is close to Chekhov’s period. I have used her translation of a selection of Chekhov’s letters; but I have also turned to the spirited translations done by Avrahm Yarmolinsky and I have learned much from the well-documented translation and extensive notes of Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky’s edition. For Chekhov’s biography I have relied on Ernest Simmons’s solid volume published in 1962 and rather less on David Magarshack, and on the well-informed commentary of Ronald Hingley, translator and editor of The Oxford Chekhov. I have, of course, consulted Prince Mirsky’s History of Russian Literature and among critics Donald Rayfield’s illuminating study Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art and its approach to the Symbolists who followed him. I have also read William Gerhardi’s lively study written in the twenties. Gerhardi, himself a novelist, had the advantage of having spent his childhood in Russia. There is a rich store of Russian reminiscence of Chekhov in Gorky’s memoirs of him, also in Bunin’s conversations and in the memoirs of S. S. Kote-liansky, who contributed, with Leonard Woolf, a piquant selection from Chekhov’s Notebooks, published in 1921 by the Hogarth Press. For The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin I have used Luba and Michael Terpak’s translation, and for The Shooting Party, translated by A. E. Chamot, I have used the recent edition with its excellent introduction by Julian Symons. Among selections of Chekhov’s works I have also consulted Yarmolinsky’s The Portable Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-85, translated by Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher; also the Early Stories, edited by Nora Gottlieb. For the plays I am indebted to editions by Ronald Hingley and Elisaveta Fen. To all these scholars I owe a great debt.

As a writer and a public-spirited doctor, Chekhov was a restless man, continually working, who refreshed himself by travel. Gregarious though he often was, he was careful to preserve his independence and his puzzling silences. His life story really lies in his work, and his genius, in my opinion, lies above all in his creative gifts as a writer of short stories. I share Ronald Hingley’s concern that his supremacy in this genre is nowadays overshadowed by the popularity of his plays with a public that prefers to listen. In fact his plays derive directly from his stories, in which, it seems to me, the texture is far richer. (In the twenties, Prince Mirsky rather coldly said the plays were “infectious, indeed nothing but infectious.”) It seems to me that in richness of texture and feeling and the contradictions of human experience, Chekhov is more vigorous and wider in range in masterpieces like The Peasants or In the Ravine. No play matches Ward 6 or the leaping imaginative effects of Gusev or the anthemlike The Bishop. For this reason I have examined the stories in detail and have tried to show the growth of his astonishingly various art. Chekhov’s stories are, in this sense, his life, tunes that his Russia has put into his head, and are magically sustained.