Originally published in Russia in 1933, this is the first English translation of Mikhail Chekhov's memoir of his brother Anton. Marking the 150th anniversary of Chekhov's birth, it offers a matchless eyewitness view of a man remarkable not just for literary genius but heroic decency.
Family loyalty softens Mikhail's recollections of their childhood. His passing mention of "occasional corporal punishment" within the home contrasts with Anton's harsher memories ("Every morning as I awoke, my first thought was, 'Will I be beaten today?' "). Downplaying the brutishness of their sanctimonious father, Mikhail recalls their birthplace, Taganrog ("a new city with neat buildings and straight avenues lined with trees"), in terms remote from Anton's response to this backwater in southern Russia ("dirty, drab, empty, lazy and illiterate").
Where the memoir starts to grip with authenticity is in its account of the family's battle to survive in Moscow after Chekhov senior's fecklessly run store went bankrupt and he had to flee Taganrog to escape the debtors' prison. Crammed into a single room, three of them sleeping under the stairway, or renting part of a damp church basement, they show a prodigious capacity for work. Rising at 5am to get food for the family, often crying with cold as, poorly clad, he trudges two miles to school after scraping together enough roubles for his fees, Mikhail (undaunted by teachers who demand bribes or pilfer pupils' belongings) acquires an education. Anton, shouldering most responsibility for the family, studies medicine at university (where mandatory uniforms, police spies and on-campus detention cells feature prominently).
Despite tsarist oppression and censorship, Moscow and St Petersburg seethe with creativity. Anton's writing career begins with satiric sketches in comic magazines. An affecting cameo sees him fumbling with frozen fingers through one he has just bought and exulting that, for the first time, a piece by him has been accepted. Journals running serials such as Murder in the Chinese Baths sell like hot cakes. In bazaars, books are snapped up from peddlers' rugs. Students argue, over cabbage pie and vodka, about Tolstoy and Turgenev. Tchaikovsky admiringly presents Anton with a signed photograph. Levitan, Russia's great landscape painter whose canvases are as redolent of melancholy amid vast expanses of countryside as Chekhov's plays are, becomes a close friend - as well as inspiring, through his stormy love life, much of The Seagull.
Fascinating about people and events that stirred Chekhov's imagination, the memoir also reveals that his arduous journey to Sakhalin island (the Siberian penal colony where he spent three months in 1890 interviewing 10,000 convicts) was triggered by reading notes Mikhail had taken from a lecture about it. The result of this tour of hell was a report that alleviated the wretched plight of the prisoners.
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Chekhov's concern for social im-provement in "swine-like Russia" shines out from this memoir. Undeterred by the TB that would kill him at the age of 44, and endless overwork (even during his summers in the country, peasants queued outside the house for medical help), he set up schools, libraries and hospitals and provided relief against famine, cholera and typhoid. His hundreds of stories that incomparably capture prerevolutionary Russia for posterity, and his pioneering and enduring theatrical masterpieces, aren't the only accomplishments, this book displays, that make this anniversary a cause for celebration.
Anton Chekhov by Mikhail Chekhov
Palgrave Macmillan £17.99 pp238