Rayfield Anton Chekhov

A Life
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30929-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 726 Seiten

The description 'definitive' is too easily used, but Donald Rayfield's biography of Chekhov merits it unhesitatingly. To quote no less an authority than Michael Frayn: 'With question the definitive biography of Chekhov, and likely to remain so for a very long time to come. Donald Rayfield starts with the huge advantage of much new material that was prudishly suppressed under the Soviet regime, or tactfully ignored by scholars. But his mastery of all the evidence, both old and new - a massive archive - is magisterial, his background knowledge of the period is huge; his Russian is sensitive to every colloquial nuance of the day, and his tone is sure. He captures a likeness of the notoriously elusive Chekhov which at last begins to seem recognisably human - and even more extraordinary.' Chekhov's life was short, he was only forty-four when he died, and dogged with ill-health but his plays and short stories assure him of his place in the literary pantheon. Here is a biography that does him full justice, in short, unapologetically to repeat that word 'definitive'. 'I don't remember any monograph by a Western scholar on a Russian author having such success. . . Nikita Mikhalkov said that before this book came out we didn't know Chekhov. . . The author doesn't invent, add or embellish anything . . . Rayfield is motivated by the Westerner's urge not ot hold information back, however grim it may be.' Anatoli Smelianski, Director of Moscow Arts Theatre School 'It is hard to imagine another book about Chekhov after this one by Donald Rayfield.' Arthur Miller, Sunday Times 'Donald Rayfield's exemplary biography draws on a daunting array of material inacessible or ignored by his predecessors.' Nikolai Tolstoy, The Literary Review 'Donald Rayfield, Chekhov's best and definitive biographer.' William Boyd, Guardian

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London. In addition to his definitive biography of Chekhov (reissued in Faber Finds), his books include The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839-88), Explorer of Central Asia and Stalin and His Hangmen. His 'superb new translation' (William Boyd - Guardian) of Gogol's Dead Souls was published in 2008.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rayfield, Donald

Leseproben

Forefathers

1762–1860

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.1 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.2 In 1841 he offered his money to Chertkov to buy himself, his wife and his three sons out of serfdom into the 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.3

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.4 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.5

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.6

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.7 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.8

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...