A new perspective on Chekhov

Contemporary Review, July, 2005 by Anthony Radice

Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. Rosamund Bartlett. Simon and Schuster. [pounds sterling]20.00. xxxii 395 pages. ISBN 0-7432-3074-4.

Globalisation and free trade provide, for the scholar as much as the economist, new delights and new dangers. Chekhov is now more available than ever, in the form of 'hundreds of memoirs, twelve volumes of annotated letters, articles, monographs, and copious other sources', and in the meticulous scholarship of biographies by Ronald Hingley, Ernest J Simmons and Donald Rayfield, who have rescued the man from the lingering aura of Soviet canonisation. What, then, remains for Rosamund Bartlett? Already a distinguished Slavist in general (author of Shostakovich in Context) and Chekhov scholar in particular (her edition of Chekhov: A Life in Letters is published by Penguin Classics), she has chosen to channel her considerable energies and expertise into creating a new perspective on the man. Instead of focusing on the human relationships of this notoriously reserved and elusive writer, she considers a relationship that is in many ways warmer: that with the Russian landscape.

The vast Russian spaces are not so much a background to Chekhov's greatest plays and short stories: they are a condition for their possibility, and this immense significance can be traced to Chekhov's earliest surroundings, his native town of Taganrog, a port on the Azov sea, and a town characterised on the one hand by oriental calm and immutability, on the other by the influence of Western capitalism via the merchant classes to which his father, Pavel, belonged. The tiniest details can be vital, and Rosamund Bartlett has an excellent eye for these: she notes how, for example, the shutters of the merchants' houses in Taganrog were almost always closed, symbolising their insecure and uncertain social status, but also, for the young Chekhov, the constriction and repression of his early years under his father's authoritarian and deeply conservative rule.

This 'suffocating atmosphere' formed a vital contrast with summer expeditions to the steppe, which, in sparsely populated southern Russia, 'began right where the town ended', and, as Chekhov grew older, came to represent freedom for the mind and body alike. Such contrasts were to remain as a cornerstone in Chekhov's thinking: ever-present, if not always immediately obvious.

For what is it that most fundamentally creates an artist's consciousness? The poet, John Ashbery, spent several years in Paris in the late fifties and early sixties, but rather than pointing to the prevailing mood of post-war existentialism, he commented that he was more influenced by the sight of water flowing through open channels in the Paris streets. Physical surroundings cannot be discounted as a deeply significant factor in the making of an artist; they also provide a welcome relief from the endlessly proliferating information that can weigh down the modern biography and its reader. Rosamund Bartlett's approach is as refreshing and invigorating as those summer expeditions must have been for the young Chekhov: it allows us, with him, to breathe freely, as we enjoy this liberating and mind-broadening biography.