Changing the Image of a Russian Master

...A Marriageable Girl," canonized in Soviet criticism, follows the transformation of a young woman...

...Elsewhere, Hingley's arguable judgments intrude...

...Petersburg housewife and multiple mother" is a fair sample of his style...

...He began by turning out humorous sketches for daily tabloids in order to help support his family...

...His language is often arch and his choice of words jarring...

...Chekhov's artistry extended to his titles, and it is a disservice not to translate his own words literally so long as they are comprehensible...

...They omitted his occasional obscenities, several examples of which are attractively reprinted in Russian in the Preface to A New Life of Anton Chekhov...

...Why does "The Teacher of Literature" become "The Russian Master...

...At the book's conclusion Hingley writes that in organizing the volume, "I have gone out of my way to seek evidence of inconsistent, shabby, inconsiderate, or downright shameful behavior...

...One line reads, "In Chekhov's works only the naughtiest girls feel physical desire...

...the title and the details of the story reinforce each other...

...In some instances the changes made are understandable and acceptable...

...Hingley's description of Lydia as "an authoress, St...

...The rescue of Chekhov from those who would eulogize him is in any case a strange endeavor in the West, where few who know his work speak of him in that way...

...He quotes Lika calling Chekhov a word translated as "drip...

...At Suvorin's insistence he abandoned his pen name, but it was the appearance of "The Steppe" in a "thick journal," the conventional vehicle for serious work, that marked Chekhov's true arrival on the literary scene...

...And here is Chekhov the supposed noncomplainer carping about his ailments while refusing to diagnose or treat his own tuberculosis...

...Hingley includes a section on each of the publications Chekhov contributed to...

...Thus, in dividing up Chekhov's career, he labels the period from January 1900 to the time of the author's death in July 1904 the "Declining Phase...

...She was abandoned, pregnant, in Paris when Potapenko's wife turned up...

...She was awaiting a response to the declaration of affection—drawn from Chekhov's own writing—that she had inscribed on a watch fob for him: "If you ever need my life, come and take it...

...Nevertheless, I hope it will not be taken as the definitive biography of one of the masters of Russian literature...

...The work was "stimulated, negatively, by decades of evocative eulogies" whose tone, the author insists, would have deeply embarrassed the reserved Russian...

...He had promised to indicate his answer within the text of the play...

...House with an Attic" sounds like a landscape study, and it is about a landscape painter...

...He did, and Lydia rushed home with the "clue" only to discover it was a practical joke...

...it is eminently clear...

...The story "Angel," usually translated as "The Darling," about a woman who takes on the personality of whomever she lives with, is inacurately portrayed as being about a woman who has several happy marriages...

...In the audience, too, hanging on every line, was Lydia Avilova, another woman in love with Chekhov...

...The young girl he falls in love with lives in the garret beneath the mansard...

...Perhaps his protests are directed at past Russian and Soviet critics and whatever editors were responsible for the "castrations," to use Hingley's word, of the Russian texts of Chekhov's letters...

...From what Hingley tells us, it appears that they all attended the play's disastrous opening night...

...Hingley observes, for example, the interesting coincidence of the onset of tuberculosis with Chekhov's acceptance as a "serious" author...

...sneaking past claims made upon him by the ladies...

...The Grasshopper," a tale about a flighty woman, becomes "The Butterfly...

...Taking the Frenchified pseudonym "Antosha Chekhonte," Chekhov first wrote regularly for Splinters, a laugh-sheet that gave him seven kopeks per line and the valuable discipline of limiting a story to 100 lines...

...It is a delicate matter for a biographer to attempt to illuminate the life through the work, or the work through the life, without reducing either, and Hingley does not succeed...

...Indeed, his personal life and character are most effectively revealed when the narrative stays close to his career as a writer...

...He documents Chekhov's irritation with literary success and the subsequent feeling of emptiness and stagnation that possibly explains his decision to embark on a dangerous, dreary trip to the Far East penal colony of Sakhalin...

...These are bound to blast the hats off any Soviet scholar reading the book, since in the USSR the printed obscenity is still taboo...

...These three were to serve as models for the characters Nina, Trigorin and Arkadina in The Seagull...

...I was looking for anything which pointed to human fallibility rather than the virtues of a saintly ninny...

...Chekhov wrote fewer stories in the last years of his life, took more time with them, and included almost all of them in his own collection of his best work...

...Even so, he admits that his subject had remarkably few weaknesses, and the strain of the search for them gives the biography a peculiar tone—as if it were written by a cross between a scholar and an embittered ex-wife...

...From there Chekhov graduated to the conservative newspaper New Time, published by Alexei Suvorin, who became a close friend...

...The identification of the old Professor with the author became a cliche soon after the piece appeared, and Chekhov himself protested it in a letter to Suvorin: "If I present you with professorial thoughts then believe me and don't search them for Chekhovian thoughts...

...There is much that is informative in A New Life of Anton Chekhov...

...12.50 Reviewed by Anne Frydman Instructor of Humanities, Columbia University In his second, hence "new," biography of Chekhov, Ronald Hingley is eager to debunk the cliched conception of the master short-story writer and playwright as saintly doctor...

...And why has the significant title "House with an Attic" (sometimes "House with a Mansard") been omitted entirely in favor of Chekhov's subtide, "An Artist's Story...

...Hingley's most egregious errors, though, directly affecting Chekhov's art—and all the more unfortunate because he is now translating a complete edition of Chekhov for Oxford University Press—are to be found in the rendition of titles...

...This incident, at least, seems to confirm a slightly cruel streak of prankishness and coldness in Chekhov...

...The piles are mentioned at least once every 50 pages, as well as in the concluding sentence of the book...

...For us, Hingley provides some new portraits of Chekhov to add to the existing gallery: We see a cold, raffish bachelor, who suffers from exasperation with his publishers and from piles as he writes and travels...

...Moreover, the chapter subheadings sound like movie titles: "Chekhov Goes West," "Outward Bound," "The Abstemious Lover...

...Chekhov comes across as perpetually restless: longing to travel abroad or return home, delighted with new places one day and bored the next, generating excitement with the purchase of new cottages and estates (four of them in Yalta...

...It is an optimistic story in Chekhovian terms, since she is able to escape a provincial marriage, which, for Chekhov, amounts to living entombment...

...In an analysis of "A Dreary Story" Hingley writes, "The Professor's lack of any unifying philosophy was . . . also Chekhov's own...

...And for years Chekhov held off Lika Mizinova, a girl who adored him but finally ran off with another writer, Ignatius Potapenko...

...Hingley paints Chekhov as more callous toward Lika...

...Toward the end, after the two men have quarreled, the authorial voice comments: "In both men the egotism of the unhappy was powerfully evident...

...By that point, though, Hingley doesn't have to tell us how hard he has tried to find flaws in Chekhov...

...Whatever one might say about "The Bishop" or "A Marriageable Girl," neither shows a short-story writer in decline...

...Do they deserve such emphasis...

...It includes only two stories, "The Bishop," and "A Marriageable Girl," both rather arbitrarily evaluated as "inferior" by Hingley...

...Although Hingley calls A New Life a "biography plain and simple," in contrast with his Chekhov: A Biographical and Critical Study, and although he promises not "to assess or analyze Chekhov's writings for their own sake, but solely to bring out their significance in his evolution as man and author," literary judgements abound...

...Since Chekhov is taken so literally at his word elsewhere, he should be here...

...Hingley does not name the critics whose "gush" he is trying to refute...

...This account of their editors, readership and political affiliations offers the reader a good view of exactly what Chekhov had to contend with...

...The attempt to equate Chekhov's views with those of his fictional characters is a case in point...

...In addition, because the stories are retold without understanding, the result is actually damaging to a comprehension of the author's evolution, both personal and professional...

...Actually, it could be argued that "The Bishop," with its bleak vision, is flawless...

...But why is the literal title "The Man in a Case" replaced by a pun, "A Hard Case...

...But according to E. J. Simmon's biography, Potapenko was not present, very likely because Chekhov asked him to stay away for Lika's sake...

...Hingley promises the "real" Chekhov, "as he was," and proceeds to present a mass of material, most of it familiar, some of it new...

...The book is best when it traces the successive phases of Chekhov's literary career...

...Unfortunately, this tastelessness extends to other parts of the book, particularly the discussion of Chekhov's stories and plays, where it is weakest...

...and somehow becoming a famous writer...

...His affair with the actress Lydia Yavorsky seemed to be over almost as soon as they had gone from "you" to "thou" in their letters, a shift Hingley takes as proof of intimacy...

...In fact, this may become the first piece of Chekhov scholarship to be confiscated at the border...

...Then, as a Moscow correspondent for the Petersburg Gazette he became one of St...

...One recalls the speculation that Rousseau was in fact a recluse because of a bladder condition...

...Hingley's interpretation of the early masterpiece "Enemies," echoing that of Soviet critic V. V. Ermilov, is a complete misreading...

...using the word "Yid" in his letters, becoming engaged to a Jewish girl and referring to her as "The Nose...

...Chekhov permitted himself many more intrusions in the text than usual, and they point to the correct way to read the story...

...His relationships with women also demonstrated a need on his part to keep distance and frequently to escape altogether—not to new conquests but solitude...

...Petersburg's most popular writers for a very broad reading public...

...He does not recognize that the character of the doctor, whose son has just died, is wholly insensitive and even cruel to the landowner, whose wife has just left him...