Reading Chekhov

"Errand" is one of those hybrid works in which real historical figures and events are combined with invented ones, so that the nonspecialist reader has no way of knowing which is which. In this case, the expert on Chekhov's death that the reader of these pages has become will be able to sort out what Carver invented and what he took from the primary and secondary sources. And he may well conclude that Carver has sinned as greatly against the spirit of fiction as Callow has sinned against the spirit of fact. As Callow does not inform us of what he lifted from Carver, so Carver does not inform us of what he lifted from Olga and the biographers. The young porter is his invention, but Schwohrer, Rabeneck, Olga, and Anton are not. Nor is he the author of the "plot" of the death scene. The author is Olga. Her powerful narrative is the skeleton on which all the subsequent death scenes hang, Carver's included. Callow's appropriations of Carver's fictionalizations-which are only a degree more imaginative than those of Magar-shack, Toumanova, Gilles, et al.-provide a Gogolian twist to the chronicle of the writing of Chekhov's death scene. It is all so dizzyingly mixed up that the moral is a little hard to make out. "Don't put ice on an empty stomach!" may be the one we will have to settle for. Harvey Pitcher's characterization of Chekhov before his marriage to Olga as "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor" is a given of Chekhov biography. Evidence of Chekhov's many liaisons-from which he always nimbly disengaged himself-was never lacking; the opening of the Soviet archives merely gives this part of his known life a more explicitly sexual shimmer. But one woman involved with Chekhov-Lidia Avilova, a pretty young St. Petersburg wife and mother with literary pretensions-stands out from the rest. Her distinction rests on two facts. One is that she wrote a memoir called Chekhov in My Life, chronicling her unhappy love affair with the writer; the other is that the affair was all in her head. Chekhov in My Life (published in Russia in 1947 and in America in 1950, in a translation by David Magarshack) is, by all accounts (except David Mag-arshack's), an exercise in stupendous self-deception, if not a deliberate fraud. Simmons demonstrates in his biography that there was nothing between Avilova and Chekhov beyond bovarysm on her side and embarrassed elusiveness on his. With a thoroughness that sometimes borders on sadism, Simmons tears apart the Avilova memoir, holding up documentary proof of the pathetic untenability of its claim; his savage rout of Avilova runs like a red thread through his otherwise calm biography. (Every time she appears, he can't resist giving her another whack.) Since Simmons, no biographer has been able to be anything but derisive about Avilova's claims. But the memoir alone-it is written in the dialogue-choked style of a girls' romance-gives the show away. "Remember our first meeting?" Chekhov says to her, and incredibly continues, "And do you know-do you know that I was deeply in love with you? Seriously in love with you? Yes, I loved you. It seemed to me that there was not another woman in the world I could love like that. You were beautiful and sweet and there was such freshness in your youth, such dazzling charm. I loved you and I thought only of you." Describing this first meeting-which actually did take place, in 1889, at a dinner party given by Avilova's brother-in-law Sergei Khudekov, the owner and editor of the Petersburg Gazette (in which Chekhov had published)- Avilova writes: Chekhov turned to me and smiled.

"A writer ought to write about what he sees and feels," he said. "Sincerely. Truthfully. I'm often asked what I meant to express by a story. I never answer such questions. My business is to write. And," he added with a smile, "I can write about anything you like. Ask me to write a story about this bottle, and I will write you a story under the title of 'A Bottle.' Living images create thought, but thought does not create images… If I live, think, fight, and suffer, then all this is reflected in whatever I happen to write…"

That Chekhov never spoke these complacent, self-vaunting words will be clear to even the most casual student of Chekhov's life, while the more advanced student will hear in them echoes of things Chekhov actually wrote, or, according to contemporaries, did say. Avilova wrote her memoir around 1940, and she surely could not have remembered what Chekhov said to her fifty years earlier-so she pilfered the published letters and the memoir literature. The comment about "A Bottle," for example, was apparently taken from a passage in Vladimir Korolenko's memoir of Chekhov: " 'Do you know how I write my little stories? Here!…' He glanced at the table, took the first object his hand happened to come across-it was an ashtray-put it in front of me, and said: 'Tomorrow, if you like, I'll have a story entitled "The Ashtray." ' "