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'Anton Chekhov: A Life' by Donald Rayfield

Bio Emphasizes Chekhov's Body, Not His Soul

Thursday, January 01, 1998

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

	Anton Chekhov: A Life By Donald Rayfield Henry Holt $35.00

How rare it is these days for a major American publisher to take on a massive biography of the Russian playwright written by a British academic little known in this country.

Holt, publisher of the wildly popular Sue Grafton mysteries, purchased the British rights to Donald Rayfield's 1997 long account of Chekhov's short life. A professor at the University of London, he had gained access to a trove of letters and other materials long closed off to scholars under the Soviet regime.

Chekhov died at 44 in 1904, months after "The Cherry Orchard" opened in January in Moscow. He attended the first performance gaunt and wracked with pain, unable to enjoy the tributes. The play was not a commercial success, however, hurt by the devastating Russo-Japanese War, which began in the same month.

Both the war and Chekhov's last play were more indications that the end was coming for Russia. The humiliating destruction of the Russian fleet by the upstart Japanese was an obvious sign of rot; "The Cherry Orchard" was a far more subtle symbol of the desperation and blindness in the nation's gentry.

By his 40s, the writer had gained something of gentry status himself, able to afford a primitive house without plumbing and 600 acres outside Moscow. Yet, as a writer in a nation of illiterates and state censorship, Chekhov was never financially secure.

Most of his life was filled with poverty and disease. Born in a miserable Crimean trading village, he was beaten regularly by his father, portrayed here as a cheating, incompetent merchant, distinguished only by his ignorance.

Tuberculosis plagued Chekhov since he was young, yet he persevered to earn a medical degree and publish short stories, developing a sensibility and talent that produced the most moving dramas of the 20th century.

And as a physician and concerned Russian, he traveled thousands of miles under the meanest conditions in 1890 to explore Sakhalin Island, the czar' s Pacific Ocean penal colony. His book, appearing in 1893, showed him to be a person of conscience and moral purpose, characteristics that mark his fiction as well.

What we learn from Rayfield, however, is neither clear nor perhaps significant. His biography depends largely on unearthed correspondence filled with the mundane details of life in the late 19th century, particularly the twin miseries of disease and rail travel.

He faithfully transcribes these bits and pieces. Rayfield also is careful to cover everyone' s bouts of diarrhea and constipation and occasional battles with venereal disease and blood-filled coughing.

Add to this fascination with illness his belief that the reader can remember the hundred or so characters with similar names who come and go like intestinal problems, and "Anton Chekhov" demands far more than it delivers.

Serious students of the playwright will indeed uncover some pages of note, especially Chekhov's interest in sex, which Rayfield claims to have revealed here for the first time. However, the fact that the writer pursued the same pleasu res as most everyone else comes as no bombshell.

Most disappointing is Rayfield's account of the Sakhalin journey. Of course, he lays on the accounts of misery and bowel problems but treats Chekhov's experiences with the prisoners inadequately .

Somewhere beneath the bewildering, benumbing pile of unrewarding details hide the heart and soul of one of the century's greatest playwrights. If you find them here, let me know.