Reading Chekhov

"I reread much of this last night. It is a hugely fine biography and I’m a great admirer of Janet Malcolm, who is a journalist as well as a biographer. She has done something very original here. The book is called Reading Chekhov but it has the subtitle “A Critical Journey”. The word “journey” is important, because it is an intermingling of biography, travel and criticism. There is a lot of reading of Chekhov’s stories, and her footsteps approach to Chekhov worked brilliantly. She starts out in Yalta, where Chekhov was living at the end of his life – he was forced to leave Moscow because of his tuberculosis. He had the experience of living in the provinces, where he was probably longing for the capital, as so many characters in his plays and stories did. She begins with the end of Chekhov’s life, focusing on one particular story, The Lady with the Dog , but what I enjoyed very much was the presence of Janet Malcolm herself in this biography. It’s very unusual for a biographer to do that. She tells us about the tour guides who are either guiding her well or misguiding her. Her treatment of the visit to the ersatz dacha of Chekhov’s outside Moscow was amusing and delightful. She wasn’t going to allow the guide to put it over that here we worship Chekhov, because she thinks that Chekhov wouldn’t have liked it. His real dacha had been demolished in 1920 and rebuilt, and even though it was redone tastefully it wasn’t the real thing. She found the guide there outrageous, sanctimoniously spouting the facts of Chekhov’s life without thinking it important to read him. Yes. The reason I picked up the book – besides admiring Janet Malcolm as a writer – was the admiring reviews from Russian translators of Chekhov who thought she was a great reader of Chekhov. I went into Blackwell’s [bookshop] in Oxford to look for it, and remember causing some consternation because they didn’t know where it would be shelved. It wasn’t shelved with biography. They took the title literally as criticism of Chekhov and filed it in the Russian section, but actually it is something different. It was feeling with Chekhov through his life and its settings in order to read his stories. She doesn’t see the stories in terms of their realistic casing, which would lead one into a rather gloomy place as a lot of his characters are frustrated and melancholy. She sees a poetic kernel to Chekhov’s stories. She is sceptical all the time of what she is being shown. She is thinking about everything she sees. She admits to disappointment, which is very honest when writing a footsteps biography. Also, she is extremely sceptical of the genre of biography. She gives six instances of biographers writing about the last days of Chekhov’s life, and they’re all different. She wants to show us how slippery biographical facts can be. When writing biography there isn’t license to write fiction. But I think documentary fact on its own would give you just a dead shell. One solution is something Virginia Woolf suggests in her essay The Art of Biography in 1940, and she’s spot on. She says, “We can distinguish between the dead fact and the creative fact, the fact that suggests and engenders.” That’s stayed with me always – that one can slough off the dead facts, or keep a thin shell of formal facts but one must select for the living fact. So that’s one answer. The second point I would make is: Can imaginary truth coexist with documentary truth? I believe it must. I’ve always had the image of a glacier in mind – I don’t know why, as I’m from South Africa and have never seen a glacier. Say you’re descending into that glacier, and your footholds are all the facts that you’ve collected from archives. Then you take hold of a rope and let yourself down into the abyss. That would be supposition, that would be a likelihood of imaginative truth. And I think it’s alright so long as you alert the reader that it’s a different kind of truth – it isn’t documentary, it’s speculative, and then we return to documentary truth. It’s like a little excursion. But it’s a risk. Yes, exactly. I would say that in the latter half of the 20th century, the ideal was objective truth. The biographer would have tried to disappear. They wouldn’t have used “I” and would have tried to present a lasting compendium of truth, arranged chronologically. Whereas I accept there’s a subjective element in biography. I once heard [the biographer] Richard Holmes giving a lecture on Coleridge. He said it’s critical to decide where you begin and end a chapter, because those are strong points in a biographical narrative, and there’s a subjective choice here. Frances Wilson could have given a lot more weight to the fact that Dorothy’s mind deteriorated at the end of her life. It would have been objective to give equal weight to the more crazy period of her life. But she made what I think is the right and admirable decision to focus on what was creative, what was living. Yes. That would be more subjective, of course, because you don’t need the documentation with memoir which is so vital to the authentication of traditional biography."