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To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.
- Sales Rank: #747947 in Books
- Published on: 2002-11-12
- Released on: 2002-11-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .50" w x 5.20" l, .36 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 224 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Longtime New Yorker magazine writer Malcolm (The Crime of Sheila McGough; The Silent Woman; etc.) is known for her fearlessly opinionated takes on controversial subjects, from psychoanalysis to murder cases. This short meditation in 13 untitled chapters is a reflection on her reading of a favorite author, famed 19th-century playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, in the context of a recent tourist trip she took through contemporary Russia. Malcolm's considerable investigative reporting skills reveal the expected squalor and fallout from the Soviet years, though she admits that she knows no Russian and relied on tour guides as translators (whom she describes mercilessly down to their bodily flaws). However, although Malcolm admits that she necessarily reads Chekhov in English, she does not inquire how much her own perception of the author results from depending (according to the slim bibliography at the end of the book ) on the Edwardian fallibility of translator Constance Garnett. She agrees with all biographers that Chekhov was an admirably humane man, writing prolifically to earn a living because he charged his peasant patients nothing for medical care. The anecdotes may be the more compelling stuff here, however, as when Malcolm squabbles with a curator of a Moscow Chekhov Museum, who does not wish to inform the inquiring American journalist how she manages to earn a living. Readers eager for a taste of the dismal tourist experience Russia offers these days trains, to no surprise, are decorated with "cheap and ugly relics of the Soviet period" and the food served on them is "gray and inedible" will snap up these concise, somewhat bitter musings. Fans of Russian lit may squabble with some of the heavier moralizing, but will appreciate this real example of a fan's notes. And Malcolm's many regular readers are a lock.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Recent biographies of Anton Chekhov, like Donald Rayfield's Anton Chekhov: A Life (LJ 2/1/98), have enhanced our understanding of this Russian genius. Now Malcolm (The Journalist and the Murderer), who has written extensively about psychoanalysis and other subjects, brings her considerable talents to Chekhov studies in a work that is a combination of biography, travel book, and literary criticism. Malcolm traveled to Russia, visiting the places Chekhov lived and his characters inhabited. In each chapter, she deftly takes us back to Chekhov's day. But she also relates her conversations with contemporary Russians, and her accounts of her Russian tour guides give the narrative a personal and sometimes humorous tone. She molds these individual episodes into a cohesive whole, bringing the reader wholly into Chekhov's life. It is not necessary to know Chekhov's writings to enjoy this splendid book, but it will serve to prod the reader to Chekhov's works and the treasures that await. Recommended for all libraries.
- Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
The author's pilgrimage to Chekhov's Russia—Moscow, St. Petersburg, the gardens of his villa in Yalta—is a reunion with this most reticent of literary fathers. Malcolm analyzes the transformations that Chekhov grants his redeemable roués and guileless heroines, and illuminates the hidden surreality and waywardness of his realism.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Short and sweet, but full of good things
By David Light
Few readers have time to wrestle with the long biographies and academic treatises that proliferate on beloved writers. Lack of time trumps the best intentions. Janet Malcolm has saved Chekhov enthusiasts the trouble by doing the reading herself, adding her own insights, and throwing in a bit of travel writing as well.
Literary criticism predominates in this 200-page book, with biography taking second place and travelogue third. Malcolm weaves the biographical details around comments about the stories and plays; so, for example, we learn that Chekhov was steeped in Russian Orthodoxy--more so, apparently, than even Tolstoy. What makes that especially interesting is the contrast between Chekhov's self-proclaimed nonbelief and the way he handles religious themes in the stories; there is some evidence, presented in this book, that these matters were not as settled in Chekhov's mind as one might think just based on his statements. (I, for one, have always been impressed with the sympathy Chekhov shows to the characters who appear in The Bishop, a story not discussed by Malcolm.)
Malcolm also takes on in brief compass Chekhov's trip to Sakhalin (arduous to get there; led to a rather dull, non-Chekhovian book); his death at 44 from tuberculosis in a hotel in Germany (which had various eyewitnesses and led to a variety of embellished accounts); and his relationships with women (he liked them pretty and well-dressed), with his publisher, with Tolstoy, and with his parents and siblings.
She spices it up with thought-provoking insights; one example: "In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses--especially those who die prematurely--he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of Ward No. 6, he veers off--as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as Peasants and In the Ravine--to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world."
As for her travels, Malcolm visits St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta, each city in the company of a different tour guide. Her observations, far from being unfairly critical, are subtle, sardonic, and on the mark--certainly anyone who has traveled to Russia will recognize her guides.
As I wrote this, I changed the rating from four to five stars--I can't really think what would improve it. An index perhaps, since despite its brevity one would like to be able to search the contents more easily. And I would disagree with the book's jacket, which claims that those unfamiliar with Chekhov could enjoy this volume. At the very least, one should have read a volume of the major stories and be familiar with the plays. Among other works, she discusses The Lady with the Lapdog, The Steppe, The Kiss, The Schoolmistress, The Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orhard, and more.
Confound it, however, you're never off the hook--the book whets your appetite for more, naturally! Those longer biographies and critical treatments beckon...and all the stories, perhaps in a different translation this time...been a while since I looked at the plays...well, good intentions count for something, right?
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Reading Malcolm reading Chekhov
By lowell duluth
For any lover of Chekhov this wonderful breeze of a book is a must.
It was all the more poignant for me having, a few years ago, visited the places in the Crimea mentioned here, including Chekhov`s villa. Janet Malcolm interweaves her own journeys in Russia and Ukraine with pertinent scenes from the master`s stories and (occasionally) plays, in a way which sends one diving back to the sources once again. In the subtlest, most modest of ways, this author heightens one`s respect for Chekhov and his art, and made this reader fall in love once again with Chekhov the writer and Chekhov the man.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A Seminar
By Roger Lathbury
Sometimes I think that if Janet Malcolm decided to write a meditation about the way lint accumulates under beds, it would be an interesting book. Everything she puts her hand to becomes larger and more significant, increases in periphery, and connects to matters one would never have thought of oneself.
And so with her book on Chekhov, a writer whose transfigurations of the ordinary, whose appreciation of the extraordinary, and whose reticence in his art and his life constitute a beauty and decency that transforms. In _Reading Chekhov_ crucial data from half a dozen biographies are distilled and linked to selected precis of critical articles and by contrast to Malcolm's own observations of Russia, which she visited, one gathers, largely in homage to Chekhov himself. The pace of her treatment is just right; each subject--Chekhov's death, Olga's role in his life, the trip to Sakhalin, the relationship to Suvorin--is given brisk yet full-feeling treatment and placed in the arc of the book, which moves slowly toward the center of Chekhov's personality, which apparently Chekhov took care would be ultimately unknowable.
The story that begins and ends Malcolm's visit is the famous "Lady with a Lapdog"--a work alternately analyzed by "Aaron Green" in Malcolm's earlier _Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession._ The profundity, elegance, revelatory possibilities, and double-sidedness of the approach in that previous book and of that short story serve the presentation of Chekhov well. He emerges as the most delicate of perceivers, a man hesitant to say one jot more than he believes, as a twentieth century writer (as opposed to his hero Tolstoy), as a passionate moralist who understands how dubious it is to be a passionate moralist, as a devotee of loveliness and talent who respects honest, even dull and repetitious work.
The sense of the word "Chekhovian"--that mute combination of goodness and passivity--resonates throughout, with the singular difference that Malcolm conveys on every page: that Chekhov was a literary genius. After reading her fresh, reinforcing, and deeper-seeking illuminations, I pulled down my eight collections, wanting to reread everything all at once, "The Kiss," "The Steppe," "A Dreary Story," "A Duel," "Ionivitch," "In the Ravine," "Three Years," "Ward No. 6," "Little Apples," "Ariadne," the plays. (I don't have "Kashtanka," but that's what libraries are for.)
Another book by Janet Malcolm is coming out in September 2007--_Two Lives._ Just as _Psychoanalysis_ was like analysis itself, _Reading Chekhov_ is a seminar taught by a teacher in love with her subject. And look at how many stories and plays (the list above is not complete) and how much of Chekhov's life Malcolm presents in under 210 pages!
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