Chekhov: A Biography

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I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley’s wonderful phrase—I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin’s Letters—that the “doors of the Russian house are wide open”: we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them.

In writing my present biographical and critical study of Chekhov I owe a great debt to the scholarship of others. For Chekhov’s stories I have usually followed the remarkable translations of Constance Garnett. They appeared in a haphazard chronology, inaccuracies have been pounced on, but her voice is close to Chekhov’s period. I have used her translation of a selection of Chekhov’s letters; but I have also turned to the spirited translations done by Avrahm Yarmolinsky and I have learned much from the well-documented translation and extensive notes of Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky’s edition. For Chekhov’s biography I have relied on Ernest Simmons’s solid volume published in 1962 and rather less on David Magarshack, and on the well-informed commentary of Ronald Hingley, translator and editor of The Oxford Chekhov. I have, of course, consulted Prince Mirsky’s History of Russian Literature and among critics Donald Rayfield’s illuminating study Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art and its approach to the Symbolists who followed him. I have also read William Gerhardi’s lively study written in the twenties. Gerhardi, himself a novelist, had the advantage of having spent his childhood in Russia.

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