A biography of Anton Chekhov is like a play by Anton Chekhov. The decors of both are mainly Russian provincial. The characters are an engaging assortment of dreamers and bored intellectuals. The atmospheres are tumid with unreleased passion, and there are ample supplies of tea and sympathy. Unlike the lives and works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, subjects of other Henri Troyat biographies, Chekhov's belong to the 20th century, an age of fretful spirits and melancholy skepticism. These impulses guide his hundreds of stories, his theatrical masterpieces (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard) and especially his letters. "You ask me what life is," he wrote his wife shortly before dying of tuberculosis in 1904. "That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know."
He was reluctant to play the Russian sage or the Slavic mystic. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky had those parts sewed up, and besides, Chekhov was offended by the pronouncements of those who felt above the battle. "All great wise men," he said, with the author of War and Peace in mind, "are as despotic as generals and as impolite and insensitive as generals because they are confident of their impunity."
As Troyat points out, Chekhov "drew the line at glorifying the 'holy Russian muzhik.' " He knew better; his grandfather was a peasant and his father an incompetent grocer and religious fanatic who spent most of his time praying, preaching and beating his six children. The family lived in Taganrog, a small port, a "deaf town," on the Sea of Azov, and as soon as they were able, the young Chekhovs were put to work in the unheated shop. On Sundays they were made to stand for hours in church. Wrote the author years later: "When I was a child I had no childhood."
His compensation was the gift of humor. It buffered him from harsh experience and provided the equanimity evident in his work both as a writer and a physician. Medicine suited his compassionate temperament and the need for a career to support his family after his father became a bankrupt and a drunk. Chekhov never shirked this responsibility; it became one reason not to start a family of his own. The other, more powerful rationale was his attraction to writing. In this matter, Troyat is particularly poignant, one might even say Chekhovian: "What was a woman to him, no matter how desirable, when his life was all pen and paper?"
Mozart once wrote that he composed music as effortlessly as a cow urinates. Chekhov was more genteel about his own fluency. "I wrote serenely, as if eating bliny," he says, and elsewhere picks up an ashtray and offers to have a story about it ready for the next day. Editors of Russia's literary journals appreciated this facility and Chekhov's acceptance of editing to satisfy Czar Alexander III's censors.