Anton Chekhov: A Life

by Donald Rayfield Narrated by Fred Williams

Overview

Anton Chekhov's life was short, intense, and dominated by battles, both with his dependents and with the tuberculosis that killed him at age forty-four. The traditional image of Chekhov is that of the restrained artist torn between medicine and literature, but Donald Rayfield's biography reveals the life long hidden behind the noble facade. Here is a man capable of both great generosity toward needy peasants and harsh callousness toward lovers and family, a man who craved with equal passion the company of others and the solitude necessary to create his art. Based on information from Chekhov archives throughout Russia, Rayfield's work has been hailed as a groundbreaking examination of the life of a literary master.

Editorial Reviews

Arthur Miller

Full of fascinating surprises. It is hard to imagine another book about Chekhov after this one .... A sculpted likeness of a most human genius shown in the context of his time.
—(Sunday Times)

New York Times Book Review

The life Ravfield describes is no less impressive fo having a flawed, at times unsympathetic, figure at its center. And his restraint in presenting his controversial new findings.—along with the sheer quantity of fresh material he has amassed—is finally what makes his portrait so persuasive. His clear-eyed, critical sympathy for his less-than-perfect subject might have been borrowed from Chekhov's own writing.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gorky said of Chekhov that no one understood as clearly as he did "the tragedy of life's trivialities." Rayfield certainly does. His biography of Chekhov is rife with tiny details that together create a pointillist portrait of Chekhov, his large family and the legion of friends, hangers-on and "Antonovkas," or female admirers. About halfway through the book, there have been enough of these painstakingly applied points to create a nuanced portrait of an intensely Russian man. Chekhov was the grandson of a freed serf, the son of a brutish and sanctimonious father. His elder brothers were irresponsible drunkards while his numerous friends vacillated between braggadocio and desperate neediness. Perhaps because he could maintain a certain emotional aloofness, Chekhov managed to support his menagerie while writing some of the world's great short stories and plays. Rayfield's careful research into primary sources reveals numerous letters that have been ignored or tactfully bowdlerized. The result is a portrayal of a man rather randier, more put-upon and more human than previously betrayed. This does no disservice, but sometimes the sheer bulk of detail does. Do we really need to know that Chekhov's father made his own mustard or that in the winter of 1892, Chekhov bandaged his publishers' governess's leg after she fell off a wardrobe or even the schedule of family members' endless peregrinations? While this will no doubt be a crucial addition for Chekhov scholarship, a few broader strokes and more background into the rapidly changing politics and society of Russia would have made it more useful for the narodni as well. 24 pages of b&w illustrations not seen by PW (Feb.)

Library Journal

Having spent five years researching Chekhov's life in Russia, where he uncovered previously unpublished letters and documents from family, lovers, and friends, Rayfield (Russian, Univ. of London) is able to throw fresh light on the life and work of one of Russia's great writers. Rayfield concentrates on Chekhov's relationships with his family and friends and the role tuberculosis played in his life, paying less attention to analyzing his fiction except when the works emerged from his experiences. As a result, Chekhov's medical training and stormy relationships with his family come vividly to life, as does his battle with tuberculosis, which claimed him at age 44. Those new to Chekhov will find Rayfield's short, concise chapters a blessing. This should become a standard reference on Chekhov's life; recommended for all literary collections.Ronald Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., Kan.

Booknews

Rayfield (Russian Literature, Queen Mary and Westfield College) combed Chekhov archives to uncover thousands of documents and letters (most never before published) which tell of a life far more entangled and turbulent than ever suspected. Holding to the theory that biography is not criticism, the author discusses Chekhov's stories and plays only as they emerge from his life and affect it, and he explores Chekhov's life as a son, brother, friend, and lover. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

From the Publisher

"Without question the definitive biography of Chekhov, and like to remain so for a very long time to come. . . . [Rayfield] captures a likeness of the notoriously elusive Chekhov, which at last begins to seem recognizably human—and even more extraordinary." —Michael Frayn



"Full of fascinating surprises. It is hard to imagine another book about Chekhov after this one. . . . A sculpted likeness of a most human genius shown in the context of his time." —Arthur Miller



"The life Rayfield describes is no less impressive for having a flawed, at times unsympathetic, figure at its center. And his restraint in presenting his controversial new findings—along with the sheer quantity of fresh material he has amassed—is finally what makes his portrait so persuasive. His clear-eyed, critical sympathy for his less-than-perfect subject might have been borrowed from Chekhov's own writing." —New York Times Book Review

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169835236
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	04/01/2000
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Forefather

1762-1860

Who would have thought that such genius could come from an earth closet!

Anton Chekhov and his eldest brother Aleksandr were bewildered: in two generations the Chekhovs had risen from peasantry to metropolitan intelligentsia. Little in Anton Chekhov's forebears hints at his gifts for language, or foretells the artistic talents of his brother Nikolai or the polymath versatility of his eldest brother Aleksandr. The key to Chekhov's character, his gentleness and his toughness, his eloquence and his laconicism, his stoical resolution, is hidden in the genes he inherited as well as in his upbringing.

Chekhov's great-grandfather, Mikhail Chekhov (1762-1849), was a serf all his life. He ruled five sons sternly: even as adults, they called him Panochi, Lord Father. The first Chekhov of whom we know more is Mikhail's second son and Anton Chekhov's paternal grandfather, Egor Mikhailovich Chekhov. As a child Chekhov met him on a few summer holidays. There was no affection between them. Grandfather Egor fought his way out of bondage. He was born in 1798, a serf of Count Chertkov at Olkhovatka in Voronezh province, the heart of Russia, where forests meet steppes, half way between Moscow and the Black Sea. (Chekhovs are traceable in this region to the sixteenth century.) Egor, alone of his kin, could read and write.

Egor made sugar from beet and fattened cattle on the pulp. Driving Count Chertkov's cattle to market, he shared the profits. Through luck, ruthlessness and thirty years' hard work, Egor accumulated 875 roubles. In 1841 he offered his money to Chertkov to buy himself, his wife and his three sons out of serfdom intothe next class of Russian citizens, the petit-bourgeoisie (meshchane). Chertkov was generous; he freed Egor's daughter Aleksandra too. Egor's parents and brothers remained serfs.

Egor took his family 300 miles south to the new steppe lands, tamed after centuries of occupation by nomadic Turkic tribes. Land was being sold to veterans of the Napoleonic wars and to German immigrants. Here Egor became estate manager to Count Platov at Krepkaia (Strong-point), forty miles north of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. He pushed his three sons onto the next rung in Russia's social ladder, the merchant class, by apprenticing them. The eldest, Mikhail (born 1821) went to Kaluga, 150 miles southwest of Moscow, to be a bookbinder. The second, Anton Chekhov's father, Pavel, born 1825 and now sixteen, worked in a sugar-beet factory, then for a cattle drover, and finally as a merchant's shop boy in Taganrog. The youngest son, Mitrofan, became a shop boy to another merchant in Rostov on the Don. Egor's daughter Aleksandra, her father's favourite child, married a Vasili Kozhevnikov at Tverdokhliobovo near the steppe town of Boguchar.

Egor remained on the Platov estates until he died, aged eighty-one. He was ruthless and eccentric. Like many managers of peasant stock, he was cruel to the peasantry: they called him the 'viper'. He also earned the dislike of his employers: Countess Platov banished him six miles away to a ranch. Egor could have lived there in a manorial house, but preferred a peasant's wooden cottage.

Chekhov's paternal grandmother Efrosinia Emelianovna, whom her grandchildren saw even less, for she rarely left the farm, was Ukrainian. All the loud laughter and singing, the fury and joy that Chekhov associated with Ukrainians, had been beaten out of her. She was as surly as her husband, with whom she lived fifty-eight years before her death in 1878.

Egor emerged once or twice a year to escort a consignment of the Countess's wheat to Taganrog, the nearest port, and to buy supplies or spare parts in the town. His eccentricity was notorious: he devised dungarees as formal dress and moved 'like a bronze statue'. He flogged his sons for any misdemeanour -- picking apples, or falling off a roof they were mending. Pavel Chekhov developed a hernia after one punishment, and had to wear a truss for it throughout his adult life.

Late in life Chekhov admitted:

I am short-tempered etc., etc., but I have become accustomed to holding back, for it ill behoves a decent person to let himself go ... After all, my grandfather was an unrepentant slave-driver.

Egor wrote well. He is reported as saying: 'I deeply envied the gentry not just their freedom, but that they could read.' He apparently left Olkhovatka with two trunks of books, unusual for a Russian peasant in 1841. (Not a book was seen, however, when his grandsons visited him at the Platov estate thirty-five years later.)

His efforts for his children were not matched by much affection. A bully in life, on paper he could be rhetorical, obfuscating, or sentimental. A letter of Egor's to his son and daughter-in-law runs:

Dear, quiet Pavel Egorych, I have no time, my dearest children, to continue my conversation on this dead paper because of my lack of leisure. I am busy gathering in the grain which because of the sun's heat is all dried up and baked. Old man Chekhov is pouring sweat, enduring the blessed boiling sultry sun, though he does sleep soundly at night. I go to bed at 1 in the morning, but up you get, Egorushka, before sunrise, and whether things need doing or not, I want to sleep. Your well-wishing parents Georgi and Efrosinia Chekhov.

Like all the Chekhovs, Egor observed name days and the great Church feasts, but he was laconic. Pavel on his name day (25 June) in 1859 received a missive which read: 'Dear Quiet Pavel Egorych, Long live you and your dear Family for ever, goodbye dear sons, daughters and fine grandchildren.'

Anton's maternal line was similar, and Tambov province, where the family came from, was as archetypically Russian as neighbouring Voronezh. Again, a peasant family of thrust and talent had bought its way into the merchant classes. Anton's mother, Evgenia Iakovlevna Morozova, had a grandfather, Gerasim Morozov, who sent barges laden with corn and timber up the Volga and Oka to market. In 1817, aged fifty-three, he bought for himself and his son, Iakov, freedom from the annual tax which serfs paid their owners. On 4 July 1820 Iakov married Aleksandra Ivanovna Kokhmakova. The Kokhmakovs were wealthy craftsmen: their fine woodwork and iconography were in civil and ecclesiastic demand. The Morozov blood had, however, a sinister side. Some of Gerasim Morozov's grandchildren -- a maternal uncle and an aunt of Anton and his brothers -- died of TB.

Iakov Morozov lacked the stamina of Egor Chekhov: in 1833 he went bankrupt, then found protection (like Egor Chekhov), from a General Papkov in Taganrog, while Aleksandra lived with her two daughters in Shuia. (Their son Ivan was placed with a merchant in Rostov-on-the-Don.) On 11 August 1847 a fire burned down eighty-eight houses in Shuia: the family property was lost. Then, in Novocherkassk, Iakov died of cholera. Aleksandra loaded her belongings and her two daughters, Feodosia (Fenichka) and Evgenia, into a cart and, camping on the steppes, trekked 300 miles to Novocherkassk. She found neither her husband's grave nor his stock in trade. She travelled 100 miles west to Taganrog and threw herself on General Papkov's mercy. He took her in to his house and provided Evgenia and Fenichka with a rudimentary education.

Anton's maternal uncle Ivan Morozov, forty-five miles away in Rostov-on-the-Don, served under a senior shop boy: Mitrofan Chekhov. Either Mitrofan or Ivan introduced Pavel Chekhov to Evgenia Morozova. In his twenties Pavel had a signet ring made. He inscribed on it three Russian words meaning 'Everywhere is a desert to the lonely man'. (Egor read the inscription and declared, 'We must get Pavel a wife.') The autobiographical record that Pavel compiled for his family in his old age has a laconic melancholy that surfaces at the rare moments of frankness in Anton's letters and frequently in the heroes of his mature prose:

1830 [he was then 5 years old] I remember my mother came from Kiev and I saw her

1831 I remember the powerful cholera, they made me drink tar

1832 I learnt to read and write in the priest's school, they taught the lay ABC

1833 I remember the grain harvest failing, famine, we ate grass and oak bark.

A church cantor taught Pavel to read music and to play the violin, folk-style. Apart from this, and the ABC, he had no formal education. His passion for church music was the salve for his unhappiness, and he also had artistic ability, but his creativity drained away in compilations of ecclesiastical facts and what casual visitors called his 'superfluous words'. In 1854 Pavel and Evgenia were married. Evgenia had beauty but no dowry, while Pavel's appeal as a future merchant compensated for his equine looks.

Ivan Morozov, sensitive and generous, refused to sell suspect caviar, and was dismissed from Rostov-on-the-Don. He returned to Taganrog where Marfa Ivanovna Loboda, the daughter of a rich city merchant, fell for him. The youngest of the three Morozov children, Fenichka, married a Taganrog official, Aleksei Dolzhenko. She had a son, Aleksei, and was soon widowed.

Anton's mother, Evgenia, survived seven live births, financial disaster, the deaths of three of her children and her husband Pavel's tyranny. She had a shell of self-pity to retreat into, but she had few resources beyond the love of her offspring: she read and wrote with reluctance. Of the three Morozov children only Ivan had talent: he spoke several languages, played the violin, trumpet, flute and drum, drew and painted, repaired watches, made halve, baked pies from which live birds flew out, constructed model ships and tableaux, and invented a fishing rod which automatically landed fish. His tour de force was a screen painted with a mythological battle scene: it divided his shop from his living quarters, where he gave his visitors tea.

Anton loved and pitied his mother. He deferred to and detested his father, but from the son's birth to the father's death father and son never permanently separated. Pavel, like his own father Egor, could behave line a heartless monster or callous humbug, and portray himself as an affectionate self-sacrificing patriarch. He inspired loathing in his eldest son Aleksandr and saccharine affection in his youngest, Misha Few outside the family could regard him without amusement or irritation. Apart from the Lord God, with whom he constantly communed, his closest friend was his brother Mitrofan.

Mitrofan was a modestly successful merchant, liked in Taganrog. Constantly gathering and disseminating family news, he was the chief link in the family, a willing host and an effusive, if calculating correspondent. Mitrofan Chekhov and his brothers, Mikhail in Kaluga and Pavel a few hundred yards away, shared a fanatical piety and, sometimes, humbug. They were all founder members of a Brotherhood attached to the Cathedral in Taganrog. It collected money to support the Russian monastery on Mount Athos and to provide charity to Taganrog's poor. Pavel writes to Mitrofan in summer 1859 (the brothers addressed each other with the formal Vy, never the intimate Ty), giving the first hint of TB in the family.

go to the trouble in Moscow of asking the Medical men regarding the illness of Evgenia Iakovlevna, the sort of illness is very well known, she spits every moment, this dries her out extremely, she is very fussy, the slightest thing becomes unpleasant to her, she loses her appetite and there is no way now of putting her right, would there be a means or a medicine to give her peace of mind and settle it?

Family reunions were melancholy, quarrelsome occasions: from Kharkov in May 1800 Mitrofan writes to his brother:

this was a heavy day for me, from morning until dinner, I could in no way distract my heart, just the recollection that I am alone depressed me to the point of exhaustion ... I was taken to dine at Nikolai Antonovich's ... where I was received with affection and well, which rarely happens with us.

All three of Egor Chekhov's sons were life-affirmers in one respect: as patriarchs. Mikhail had four daughters and two sons, Mitrofan three sons and two daughters. Pavel and Evgenia had seven children. They married on 29 November 1854; two more years elapsed before Pavel scraped together 2500 roubles to join the Third Guild of Merchants. Their first child, Aleksandr, was born on 10 August 1855, as the Crimean War ended. Two English ships bombarded Taganrog, demolishing the dome of the cathedral the port and many houses. Evgenia and her sister-in-law Liudmila abandoned their homes, leaving a chicken still cooking, and fled to the steppes, to stay with Egor Chekhov. Here Evgenia gave birth in the priest's house. She returned to a tiny house belonging to Efrosinia, Pavel's mother, which Egor had divided between Pavel and Mitrofan. When Mitrofan married Pavel moved a few streets away to a rented two-room mud-brick house on Politseiskaia Street. In 1857 he began trading; on 9 May 1858 a second son, Nikolai [Kolia], was born. In 1859 the Third Guild was abolished; raising more capital, Pavel became a Second Guild merchant. Evgenia was pregnant again. Pavel was a conformist he became alderman on the Taganrog Police Authority. In January 1860 he wrote to brother Mitrofan: 'last Saturday the Church of St Michael was struck by lightning and caught fire right in the dome.' This seemed to him a portent before Anton's birth on 16 January 1860.

Videos