Reading Chekhov

The letters Chekhov wrote to Avilova herself are even less helpful to her narrative. All but one or two were written in dutiful response to letters of her own (Chekhov made a point of leaving no letter unanswered) and none of them can remotely be said to be love letters. In February 1895, for instance, he wrote Avilova

… I have read both your stories with great attention. "Power" is a delightful story, but I can't help thinking it would be improved if you made your hero simply a landowner, instead of the head of a rural council. As for "Birthday," it is not, I'm afraid, a story at all, but just a thing, and a clumsy thing at that. You have piled up a whole mountain of details, and this mountain has obscured the sun. You ought to make it either into a long short story, about four folio sheets, or a very short story, beginning with the episode when the old nobleman is carried into the house.

To sum up: you are a talented woman, but you have grown heavy, or to put it vulgarly, you have grown stale and you already belong to the category of stale authors. Your style is precious, like the style of very old writers…

Write a novel. Spend a whole year on it and another six months in abridging it, and then publish it. You don't seem to take enough trouble with your work… Forgive these exhortations of mine. Sometimes one cannot help feeling like being a little pompous and reading a lecture. I have stayed here another day, or rather was forced to stay, but I'm leaving for certain tomorrow. I wish you all the best. Yours sincerely, Chekhov

The Avilova book points up the problem of memoir literature in biography. In this case, the discrepancy between Chekhov's letters and Avilova's clumsy quotations is so huge that one can only dismiss her book as a piece of self-aggrandizing fantasy. A more skillful writer who claimed to have had a secret love affair with Chekhov-or anything else-might not be so easily dismissed. The silence of the famous dead offers an enormous temptation to the self-promoting living. The opportunity to come out of the clammy void of obscurity and gain entrance into posterity's gorgeously lit drawing room through exaggerated claims of intimacy with one of the invited guests is hard to resist. The Korolenko story about the ashtray may itself be an invention, as may many other chestnuts of the Chekhov memoir literature. Memoirs have little epistemological authority. They provide the biographer with the one thing the subject cannot provide and over which the subject usually has little control: the sense of how others see him. The consensus that arises from the memoir literature becomes a part of the subject's atmosphere. But one must be wary of memoirs, factoring in the memoirist's motives, and accepting little in them as fact. Five

A

fter returning to the hotel from the trip to Gurzuv, I was summoned again to Igor's office. Without looking up from some papers on his desk, he said, "Your suitcase has been found. They will bring it from the airport this evening." It took me a moment to grasp what he had said and to hope it was true. I said thank you and left the office. Something in Igor's manner made me disinclined to question him-and even to feel obscurely in the wrong. Humor-lessness as profound as Igor's is unnerving. In fact, the suitcase materialized a few hours later. Someone had rifled it, but had taken nothing. I will never know what happened. Grace, as usual, had arrived on flat, silent feet.

I went to eat dinner at a restaurant Nina had recommended on the hotel's seaside boardwalk. To reach the boardwalk, one descends several hundred feet in an elevator built into the cliff on which the hotel stands. The elevator opens into a long tunnel leading to the beach. The tunnel is dark and dripping, and one's pace quickens the way it does in the sordid transfer tunnels in the New York subway. I met no one in the elevator or the tunnel or along the boardwalk; most of the bars and restaurants and saunas and massage studios were closed. (I later learned from Igor that there were only fifty guests in the hotel; more were expected in the hot, dusty season.) The beach was nearly deserted. I passed a father playing in the dark sand with a shivering child. It was a melancholy scene-not the sweet melancholy of twilight on summer beaches after everyone has gone home but the acrid melancholy of failed enterprises. The sea was gray and still, as if it, too, had lost its will to beguile.