Reading Chekhov

Four

"They say that Olga refused to sleep with Chekhov because she was afraid of catching his TB,” Nina says as we walk back to the car along the footpath above the sea in Oreanda.

“I’ve never heard that,” I say. “From their correspondence it seems clear that they did sleep together.”

“Don’t you remember at Gurzuv, when you asked about the narrow bed in Chekhov’s room?”

I do remember. The day before, we had visited the seaside cottage, twelve miles outside of Yalta, that Chekhov bought soon after building his villa. One could understand why he was unable to resist it. The three-room wooden house, with a porch, sits directly on the shore of a rocky coastline rimmed by cliffs; a few stone steps to the right of the door lead straight into the water. It was now a state-run museum—like the houses in Autka and Melikhovo and the town house in Moscow where the Chekhov family lived— and two agreeable women were in charge of it. One, named Lydia, was young and very well dressed—she wore a fashionable white suit and high heels. The other, Eva, an older woman, who turned out to have been at the university with Nina, was more plainly dressed. When we arrived they were sitting on the porch, at a table with a pitcher of wildflowers on it, looking out at the water. Lydia was designated as our guide and she took us into a room that served as an entry hall (pausing to sell us admission tickets) and exhibition space for photographs and memorabilia pertaining to Three Sisters, much of which Chekhov wrote in the cottage. The second, and final, room on view (the kitchen was not open for inspection) was Chekhov’s reconstituted bedroom. The bed, covered with a chaste white spread, was extremely narrow, and when I wondered how he and Olga had managed to sleep in it, Lydia explained that what was now the entry hall had been Olga’s bedroom. Nina, having grown up in a society where five families lived in a single room, was perhaps unaware that it was customary for pre-Revolution bourgeois married couples to sleep in separate bedrooms. But her dark comment reflected a larger negative feeling about Olga. Russians have not taken Olga to their hearts as they have Chekhov. Harvey Pitcher, the author of a sympathetic book about Olga called Chekhov’s Leading Lady (1979), writes that the marriage of Chekhov and Olga “was the subject of a controversy that has never died down. Olga Knipper might be recognized as the Moscow Art Theater’s leading actress and interpreter of Chekhov’s heroines . . . but how had she succeeded in marrying Russia’s most elusive literary bachelor when he was already past forty? Could she be anything but one of those predatory females often described by Chekhov himself in his fiction? And what sort of wife was it who for more than half the year continued to pursue her acting career in Moscow while her husband was confined for health reasons to the Crimean resort of Yalta, more than two days’ journey from Moscow by train?”

But the enforced separation may have been crucial to the marriage’s success—perhaps even to its very being. In 1895 (three years before he met Olga) Chekhov wrote to Suvorin:

Very well then, I shall marry if you so desire. But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before; in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I’ll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next. Whenever someone talks to me day after day about the same thing in the same tone of voice, it brings out the ferocity in me. . . . I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky every day. [In “A Dreary Story” (1889) Chekhov writes mordantly of a wife who says exactly the same thing to her husband every morning.]

The separation had another benefit—the correspondence it generated. Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other’s side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion. The letters between Olga and Anton—available in an English translation by Jean Benedetti in a volume entitled Dear Writer, Dear Actress (1996)—make wonderful reading. One marvels at the almost uncanny similarity of style between writer and actress, until one stops to remember that actors are mimics. Olga performs on paper as she performed on the stage and in life. What she does, of course—what the actors among our friends do—is only an exaggerated version of the unconscious mimicry of the other we all engage in when we are making ourselves agreeable. The correspondence permits us to trace the relationship from its beginning, as a flirtatious friendship, to the period when the two became lovers, to the marriage itself, which probably would not have occurred if Chekhov had been left to his own devices. The letters record Olga’s pressings, his dodgings, and his eventual capitulation, on the condition that “you give your word that no one in Moscow will know about our marriage until it has actually happened. . . . Because I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around glass in hand with an endless grin on your face. . . .”

The Russians’ perception of Olga as an ambitious, cold, ruthless, unkind woman, not worthy of the gentle, delicate Anton Pavlovich, is not borne out by her letters, which are consistently gentle and delicate. But Olga’s German background—she came from an assimilated German family, like that of Anna Sergeyevna von Diderits’s husband—may have some bearing on the dislike and resentment she has attracted, as may her post-Revolution career as a leading People’s Artist. (She lived until the 1950s and never stopped acting.) In an article entitled “The Heart of Chekhov” (1959), Leo Rabeneck—who by chance had been present when Chekhov died in Badenweiler, and who stayed in touch with Olga until the Revolution, when he emigrated to Paris—gives us a chilling glimpse of her life under the Soviets:

The last time I saw Olga Leonardovna was in 1937, when the [Moscow] Art Theatre had come to Paris. After the performance I went to a small bistro where the actors usually dined. As I came in I saw Olga Leonardovna sitting at a table with two men I didn’t know. When she saw me, she quickly looked down at her plate until I had passed by. I understood she couldn’t speak to me. The next morning, I was walking along the Champs-Elysées, when I happened to meet Kachalov [the leading male actor of the Moscow Art Theater]. We kissed and embraced. I told him how Olga Leonardovna had pretended not to know me.

Kachalov replied: Lev L’vovich, she was sitting with two archangels [secret agents], how could she speak to you? They watch us here. They don’t allow us to fraternize with émigrés.

The anecdote raises a question: What if Chekhov had lived into the Soviet period? Would he have passed the test that no man or woman should be forced to take? Would he (like Gorky) have bowed to the dictatorship or would he have resisted and been crushed? One can never predict how anyone will behave—but everything in Chekhov’s life and work expresses an exceptionally strong hatred of force and violence. In all probability, the libertarian Chekhov would have fared badly under the Soviets. Almost surely he would not have died in a posh German hotel room after drinking a glass of champagne.

Chekhov’s death is one of the great set pieces of literary history. According to an account written by Olga in 1908 (and translated by Benedetti), on the night of July 2, 1904, Chekhov went to sleep and woke up around one. “He was in pain, which made it difficult to lie down,” Olga wrote, and continued:

He felt sick with pain, he was “in torment” and for the first time in his life he asked for a doctor. . . . It was eerie. But the feeling that something positive had to be done, and quickly, made me gather all my strength. I woke up Lev Rabenek, a Russian student living in the hotel, and asked him to go for the doctor.

Dr. Schworer came and gently, caringly started to say something, cradling Anton in his arms. Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe. The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: “It’s a long time since I drank champagne.” He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed, and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child.”

In another memoir, written in 1922, Olga refined and expanded the death scene thus:

The doctor arrived and ordered champagne. Anton Pavlovich sat up and loudly informed the doctor in German (he spoke very little German), “Ich sterbe.”

He then took a glass, turned his face towards me, smiled his amazing smile and said, “It’s a long time since I drank champagne,” calmly drained his glass, lay down quietly on his left side, and shortly afterwards fell silent forever. The dreadful silence of the night was disturbed only by a large moth which burst into the room like a whirlwind, beat tormentedly against the burning electric lamps, and flew confusedly around the room.

The doctor left, and in the silence and heat of the night the cork suddenly jumped out of the unfinished bottle of champagne with a terrifying bang. It began to grow light, and as nature awoke, the gentle, melodious song of the birds came like the first song of mourning, and the sound of an organ came from a nearby church. There was no human voice, no bustle of human life, only the beauty, calm, and majesty of death.

Awareness of grief, of the loss of such a man as Anton Pavlovich, came only with the first sounds of awakening life, with the arrival of people; and what I experienced and felt, standing on the balcony and looking now at the rising sun, now at nature melodiously awakening, now at the fine, peaceful face of Anton Pavlovich, which seemed to be smiling as if he had just understood something—that, I repeat, still remains for me an unresolved mystery. There had never been such moments as those before in my life, and there never will be again.

Leo Rabeneck set down his own account of the night of July 2, 1904, though he waited fifty-four years to do so. Predictably, it differed in some details from Olga’s. In an article called “The Last Minutes of Chekhov,” published in Paris in a Russian émigré journal, he recalled that the doctor had asked him to buy oxygen at a pharmacy and had briefly administered it to the dying man. After quoting Chekhov’s (or Olga’s, as the case may be) “It’s a long time since I’ve drunk champagne,” and reporting on the draining of the glass, Rabeneck writes:

At that moment I heard a strange sound coming from his throat. I saw him lie back on the cushions and thought he did so to breathe more easily. Everything was silent in the room and the lamp grew dimmer. The doctor took Anton Pavlovich’s hand and said nothing. After several minutes of silence I thought things were improving and that Anton Pavlovich was out of danger. Then the doctor dropped Anton Pavlovich’s hand, and took me to a corner of the room. “It’s finished,” he said. “Herr Chekhov has died. Will you tell Frau Chekhov?” . . . I went to her. . . . “Olga Leonardovna, the doctor said that Anton Pavlovich has died.” She stood like a stone. Then she started to shout in German at the doctor: “It is not true, Doctor, tell me it is not true.”

The third eyewitness, Dr. Schwöhrer, left no account, but is quoted in an article dated July 5, 1904, which appeared the following day in the Moscow newspaper Novostia Dnia. Its author, an unidentified correspondent (he wrote under the initials S.S.), reported from Badenweiler: “I talked to the doctor who treated A. P. Chekhov here. . . . He was, the doctor said, until the last minute, stoically calm, like a hero. . . . ‘When I approached him, he told me peacefully: “Soon, doctor, I am going to die.” I wanted to bring him a new supply of oxygen. Chekhov stopped me, saying “There is no need for more. Before they brought the oxygen, I would be dead.” ’ ” Another on-the-scene Russian journalist, Grigori Borisovich Iollos (the Berlin correspondent for the Moscow newspaper Russkie Vedemosti, who had become friendly with Chekhov and Olga in Badenweiler and interviewed Olga the day after Chekhov’s death), wrote on July 3, 1904: “At one o’clock at night, Anton Pavlovich began to rave, talked of some sailor, then asked something about the Japanese, and after that came back to his senses and with a sad smile told his wife, who was putting an ice-pack on his chest, ‘You don’t put ice on an empty heart.’ ” Iollos went on: “His last words were, ‘I am dying,’ and then, quietly, in German to his doctor, ‘Ich sterbe.’ His pulse became very weak . . . dying, he sat in bed, bending, supported by pillows; then suddenly he turned on his side and without a sign, without any apparent external sign, his life stopped. An unusually peaceful, almost happy expression appeared on his suddenly youthful-looking face. Through the wide-open window came a fresh breeze, smelling of hay; a light appeared above the forest. No sound anywhere—the small spa town was asleep, the doctor left, a deadly silence filled the house; only the singing of birds could be heard in the room, where, lying on his side, freed from difficulties, a remarkable man and a hard worker, rested on the shoulder of a woman who covered him with tears and kisses.”

How Chekhov’s biographers have handled the eyewitness testimony (both primary and secondary) in their various renderings of the death scene offers an instructive glimpse into the workings of biographical method.

In Anton Chekhov: A Life (1952), David Magarshack writes:

When the doctor arrived, Chekhov said to him in German:

“Tod?”

“Oh, no,” the doctor replied. “Please calm yourself.”

Chekhov was still finding it difficult to breathe and ice was placed on his heart. The doctor sent one of the students for oxygen.

“Don’t bother,” Chekhov said. “I shall be dead before they bring it.”

The doctor then ordered some champagne. Chekhov took the glass, turned to Olga Knipper and said with a smile, “It’s a long time since I drank champagne.” He had a few sips and fell back on the pillow. Soon he began to ramble. “Has the sailor gone? Which sailor?” He was apparently thinking of the Russo-Japanese war. That went on for several minutes. His last words were “I’m dying”; then in a very low voice to the doctor in German: “Ich sterbe.” His pulse was getting weaker. He sat doubled up on his bed, propped up by pillows. Suddenly, without uttering a sound, he fell sideways. He was dead. His face looked very young, contented and almost happy. The doctor went away.

A fresh breeze blew into the room, bringing with it the smell of newly mown hay. The sun was rising slowly from behind the woods. Outside, the birds began to stir and twitter, and in the room the silence was broken by the loud buzzing of a huge black moth, which was whirling round the electric light, and by the soft sobbing of Olga Knipper as she leaned with her head against Chekhov’s body.

Princess Nina Andronikova Toumanova in Anton Chekhov: The Voice of Twilight Russia (1937) writes:

Soon Dr. Schwöhrer arrived accompanied by his assistant. They sent for oxygen. Chekhov smiled: It will come too late. A few moments later he became delirious. He spoke about the war and Russian sailors in Japan. This great humanitarian remained true to himself to the end. It was not his family or his friends on whom his last thoughts were centered: it was on Russia and her people. . . . The physicians gave him some champagne. Chekhov smiled again, and then in a distant whisper said: “Ich sterbe.” (I am dying.) He sank on his left side. All was ended. Two silent men bent over the motionless form, and, in the stillness of the July night, one could hear only the sobs of a lonely woman.

Daniel Gilles in Chekhov: Observer Without Illusion (1967):

Chekhov’s fever was so high that he was half delirious: he was raving about some unknown sailor and expressing fear of the Japanese. But when Olga came to put an ice bag on his chest, he abruptly came to himself and gently pushed it away. With a sad smile, he explained: “One doesn’t put ice on an empty heart.”

Henri Troyat, in Chekhov (1984):

Fever had made Chekhov delirious. He went on about a sailor or asked about the Japanese, his eyes shining. But when Olga tried to place an ice bag on his chest, he suddenly regained consciousness and said, “Don’t put ice on an empty stomach.”

Irene Nemirovsky, in A Life of Chekhov (1950):

A huge black moth entered the room. It flew from wall to wall, hurling itself against the lighted lamps, thudded painfully down with scorched wings, then fluttered up again in its blind, impulsive flight. Then it found the open window, and disappeared into the soft, dark night. Chekhov, meanwhile, had ceased speaking and breathing: his life was ended.

V. S. Pritchett, in Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (1988):

They were going to send for oxygen, but Chekhov said he would be dead before it came, so a bottle of champagne was brought. He sipped it and soon began to ramble and he evidently had one of those odd visions that he had evoked in Ward 6. “Has the sailor gone?” he asked. What sailor? Perhaps his sailor in Gusev? Then he said in Russian, “I am dying,” then in German, “Ich sterbe,” and died at once.

Donald Rayfield, in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997):

He raved of a sailor in danger: his nephew Kolia. Olga sent one of the Russian students to fetch the doctor and ordered ice from the porter. She chopped up a block of ice and placed it on Anton’s heart. Dr. Schworer came and sent the two students for oxygen. Anton protested that an empty heart needed no ice and that he would die before the oxygen came. Schworer gave him an injection of camphor.

And, finally, here is Philip Callow, writing in Chekhov: The Hidden Ground (1998):

Chekhov was hallucinating, his eyes glittery, talking gibberish about a sailor, about some Japanese. She tried to put an ice-bag on his chest and he was suddenly lucid, fully conscious. “You don’t put ice on an empty stomach,” he told her, like a doctor supervising a nurse. . . .

Then the doctor, one of those Germans who according to Chekhov followed every rule to the letter, did something astonishing. He went to the telephone in the alcove and ordered a bottle of the hotel’s best champagne. He was asked how many glasses. “Three,” he shouted, “and hurry, d’you hear?”

In a final effort of courtesy Chekhov sat up, said “Ich sterbe,” and fell back against the pillows. The champagne arrived, brought to the door by a young porter who looked as if he’d been sleeping. His fair hair stood up, his uniform was creased, his jacket half-buttoned. He entered the room with a silver tray and three cut-crystal glasses and carried in a silver ice bucket containing the champagne.

Everything was now in slow motion. The young man, ignorant of the occasion, could hear someone laboring dreadfully for breath in the other room. He found a place for the tray and glasses and tried discreetly to find somewhere to put the ice-bucket. The doctor, a big ponderous man with a dense moustache, gave him a tip and he went through the door as if dazed.

Schwöhrer, not given to displays of emotion, opened the champagne bottle with his usual quiet efficiency. And perhaps because he thought it unseemly he eased the cork out so as to minimize the loud pop. He poured three glasses and replaced the cork. Olga freed her fingers for a moment from Chekhov’s burning hand. She rearranged his pillow and put the cool glass of champagne against his palm.

As I read these paragraphs, I marveled at the specificity of the new details—the telephone in the alcove, the doctor’s “quiet efficiency,” the cut-crystal glasses, the sleepy young porter with the half-buttoned jacket. Could Callow have stumbled upon a cache of new primary material in a Moscow attic? I looked for notes at the back of his book and found none. Then something stirred in my memory. I began to feel that I had met the sleepy young porter before. I went to the bookcase and got out a collection of Raymond Carver’s stories, Where I’m Calling From (1989). In a story entitled “Errand” I read:

Chekhov was hallucinating, talking about sailors, and there were snatches of something about the Japanese. “You don’t put ice on an empty stomach,” he said when she tried to place an ice pack on his chest. . . .

[Dr. Schwöhrer] went over to an alcove where there was a telephone on the wall. He read the instructions for using the device. . . . He picked up the receiver, held it to his ear, and did as the instructions told him. When someone finally answered, Dr. Schwöhrer ordered a bottle of the hotel’s best champagne. “How many glasses?” he was asked. “Three glasses!” the doctor shouted into the mouthpiece. “And hurry, do you hear?” . . .

The champagne was brought to the door by a tired-looking young man whose blond hair was standing up. The trousers of his uniform were wrinkled, the creases gone, and in his haste he’d missed a loop while buttoning his jacket. . . .

The young man entered the room carrying a silver ice bucket with the champagne in it and a silver tray with three cut-crystal glasses. He found a place on the table for the bucket and glasses, all the while craning his neck, trying to see into the other room, where someone panted ferociously for breath. It was a dreadful, harrowing sound. . . .

Methodically, the way he did everything, the doctor went about the business of working the cork out of the bottle. He did it in such a way as to minimize, as much as possible, the festive explosion. He poured three glasses and, out of habit, pushed the cork back into the neck of the bottle. . . . Olga momentarily released her grip on Chekhov’s hand—a hand, she said later, that burned her fingers. She arranged another pillow behind his head. Then she put the cool glass of champagne against Chekhov’s palm. . . .

“Errand” is one of those hybrid works in which real historical figures and events are combined with invented ones, so that the nonspecialist reader has no way of knowing which is which. In this case, the expert on Chekhov’s death that the reader of these pages has become will be able to sort out what Carver invented and what he took from the primary and secondary sources. And he may well conclude that Carver has sinned as greatly against the spirit of fiction as Callow has sinned against the spirit of fact. As Callow does not inform us of what he lifted from Carver, so Carver does not inform us of what he lifted from Olga and the biographers. The young porter is his invention, but Schwöhrer, Rabeneck, Olga, and Anton are not. Nor is he the author of the “plot” of the death scene. The author is Olga. Her powerful narrative is the skeleton on which all the subsequent death scenes hang, Carver’s included. Callow’s appropriations of Carver’s fictionalizations—which are only a degree more imaginative than those of Magarshack, Toumanova, Gilles, et al.—provide a Gogolian twist to the chronicle of the writing of Chekhov’s death scene. It is all so dizzyingly mixed up that the moral is a little hard to make out. “Don’t put ice on an empty stomach!” may be the one we will have to settle for.

Harvey Pitcher’s characterization of Chekhov before his marriage to Olga as “Russia’s most elusive literary bachelor ” is a given of Chekhov biography. Evidence of Chekhov’s many liaisons—from which he always nimbly disengaged himself—was never lacking; the opening of the Soviet archives merely gives this part of his known life a more explicitly sexual shimmer. But one woman involved with Chekhov—Lidia Avilova, a pretty young St. Petersburg wife and mother with literary pretensions—stands out from the rest. Her distinction rests on two facts. One is that she wrote a memoir called Chekhov in My Life, chronicling her unhappy love affair with the writer; the other is that the affair was all in her head. Chekhov in My Life (published in Russia in 1947 and in America in 1950, in a translation by David Magarshack) is, by all accounts (except David Magarshack’s), an exercise in stupendous self-deception, if not a deliberate fraud. Simmons demonstrates in his biography that there was nothing between Avilova and Chekhov beyond bovarysm on her side and embarrassed elusiveness on his. With a thoroughness that sometimes borders on sadism, Simmons tears apart the Avilova memoir, holding up documentary proof of the pathetic untenability of its claim; his savage rout of Avilova runs like a red thread through his otherwise calm biography. (Every time she appears, he can’t resist giving her another whack.) Since Simmons, no biographer has been able to be anything but derisive about Avilova’s claims. But the memoir alone—it is written in the dialogue-choked style of a girls’ romance—gives the show away. “Remember our first meeting?” Chekhov says to her, and incredibly continues, “And do you know—do you know that I was deeply in love with you? Seriously in love with you? Yes, I loved you. It seemed to me that there was not another woman in the world I could love like that. You were beautiful and sweet and there was such freshness in your youth, such dazzling charm. I loved you and I thought only of you.” Describing this first meeting—which actually did take place, in 1889, at a dinner party given by Avilova’s brother-in-law Sergei Khudekov, the owner and editor of the Petersburg Gazette (in which Chekhov had published)— Avilova writes:

Chekhov turned to me and smiled.

“A writer ought to write about what he sees and feels,” he said. “Sincerely. Truthfully. I’m often asked what I meant to express by a story. I never answer such questions. My business is to write. And,” he added with a smile, “I can write about anything you like. Ask me to write a story about this bottle, and I will write you a story under the title of ‘A Bottle.’ Living images create thought, but thought does not create images. . . . If I live, think, fight, and suffer, then all this is reflected in whatever I happen to write. . . .”

That Chekhov never spoke these complacent, self-vaunting words will be clear to even the most casual student of Chekhov’s life, while the more advanced student will hear in them echoes of things Chekhov actually wrote, or, according to contemporaries, did say. Avilova wrote her memoir around 1940, and she surely could not have remembered what Chekhov said to her fifty years earlier—so she pilfered the published letters and the memoir literature. The comment about “A Bottle,” for example, was apparently taken from a passage in Vladimir Korolenko’s memoir of Chekhov: “ ‘Do you know how I write my little stories? Here! . . .’ He glanced at the table, took the first object his hand happened to come across—it was an ashtray—put it in front of me, and said: ‘Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll have a story entitled “The Ashtray.” ’ ”

The letters Chekhov wrote to Avilova herself are even less helpful to her narrative. All but one or two were written in dutiful response to letters of her own (Chekhov made a point of leaving no letter unanswered) and none of them can remotely be said to be love letters. In February 1895, for instance, he wrote Avilova

. . . I have read both your stories with great attention. “Power” is a delightful story, but I can’t help thinking it would be improved if you made your hero simply a landowner, instead of the head of a rural council. As for “Birthday,” it is not, I’m afraid, a story at all, but just a thing, and a clumsy thing at that. You have piled up a whole mountain of details, and this mountain has obscured the sun. You ought to make it either into a long short story, about four folio sheets, or a very short story, beginning with the episode when the old nobleman is carried into the house.

To sum up: you are a talented woman, but you have grown heavy, or to put it vulgarly, you have grown stale and you already belong to the category of stale authors. Your style is precious, like the style of very old writers. . . .

Write a novel. Spend a whole year on it and another six months in abridging it, and then publish it. You don’t seem to take enough trouble with your work. . . . Forgive these exhortations of mine. Sometimes one cannot help feeling like being a little pompous and reading a lecture. I have stayed here another day, or rather was forced to stay, but I’m leaving for certain tomorrow.

I wish you all the best.

Yours sincerely,

Chekhov

The Avilova book points up the problem of memoir literature in biography. In this case, the discrepancy between Chekhov’s letters and Avilova’s clumsy quotations is so huge that one can only dismiss her book as a piece of self-aggrandizing fantasy. A more skillful writer who claimed to have had a secret love affair with Chekhov—or anything else—might not be so easily dismissed. The silence of the famous dead offers an enormous temptation to the self-promoting living. The opportunity to come out of the clammy void of obscurity and gain entrance into posterity’s gorgeously lit drawing room through exaggerated claims of intimacy with one of the invited guests is hard to resist. The Korolenko story about the ashtray may itself be an invention, as may many other chestnuts of the Chekhov memoir literature. Memoirs have little epistemological authority. They provide the biographer with the one thing the subject cannot provide and over which the subject usually has little control: the sense of how others see him. The consensus that arises from the memoir literature becomes a part of the subject’s atmosphere. But one must be wary of memoirs, factoring in the memoirist’s motives, and accepting little in them as fact.