No knowing

SAMANTHA ELLIS
Ivan Builin ABOUT CHEKHOV The unfinished symphony 

Edited and translated by Thomas Galton Marullo 256pp. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. $52.95 (paperback, $24.95). 9780810123823

 Ivan Bunin's first encounter with Anton Chekhov was unpromising. In 1891, when he was a callow twenty-old, he wrote to Chekhov, ten years his senior: "Beginning writers have the habit of plaguing editors, poets, and writers . . . with requests to read their work .... I am one of these people". Chekhov responded, "I am a poor critic who always makes mistakes, especially when it comes to beginning writers". Bunin never sent the stories. Later, however, they became friends, and when Chekhov died, his sister Maria wanted Bunin to write his biography. It took fifty years for him to begin writing about Chekhov, by which time he was in his eighties, had won a Nobel Prize, and was looking back on his own life as well as on Chekhov's. This elegiac book is not so much a memoir as a double portrait of two very different writers; as Thomas Galton Marullo notes in his introductory essay to About Chekhov, Chekhov may have been writing his way out of poverty while Bunin came from "a gentry family on the way down", but both were fascinated by "'prosaics', that is, what they regarded as the revealing and relevant minutiae of existtence". Writing at a distance of almost five decades, Bunin is looking back on Chekhov and on his younger self from a perspective that gives this book a savour it would have lacked if he'd rushed into print immediately after Chekhov's death.

 This is not the book to read for narrative biography; Bunin left it unfinished at his death in 1953, and it is made up of fragments and vignettes, which build up slowly. It opens with Bunin remembering: "I often asked Evgenia Yakovlevna [Chekhov's mother] and [his sister] Maria Pavlovana: 'Tell me, did Anton Pavlovich ever cry?' 'Never,' they responded firmly. I find such a thing remarkable". The slightly distanced tone is one Bunin takes throughout; this is, above all, a book about a writer who admits that whatever understanding he may claim over the characters in his fiction, real people are always, to some degree, unknowable, opaque even.

 So when Chekhov advises Bunin that "A writer should sit down and write only when he feels cold as ice", the older, wiser Bunin glosses this, "Chekhov's coldness is of a special type. Indeed, do there exist many other Russian writers whose spiritual sensitivity and forceful perception are more complex than those of Chekhov?". Chekhov is equally uncompromising on the mechanics of writing. "Do you write a great deal?", he asks Bunin, who replies that he has written little. "What you are doing is wrong. You should work, you know - work without stopping your entire life." One of the most charming vignettes is of Chekhov jokily vacillating over what to wear to visit Tolstoy, emerging in different pairs of trousers: '''No, these are obscenely narrow! Tolstoy will think that I am a hack!' He went to put on the other pair and again came out, laughing, 'These are as wide as the Black Sea! Tolstoy will think that I am a dandy!"'. In fact, Tolstoy told him, "I cannot stand your plays. Shakespeare was a wretched writer, but you are still worse!". It is a point of view Bunin has some sympathy with. "I do not like [Chekhov's} plays. In fact, I am even somewhat embarrassed by them." He dislikes Chekhov's "dogmatic characters" such as Astrov "who drones on that he is out of place and worries about planting forests", and, having grown up on an impoverished estate, Bunin takes particular issue with The Cherry Orchard: "There is nothing wondrous about cherry trees. Everyone knows that they are extremely ugly things with gnarled branches and small flowers and leaves. They are not at all like the huge, luxurious blossoms that grew under the windows of the manor house on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre". (Marullo points out that Bunin must have been unaware that Chekhov owned a cherry orchard.)

 Perhaps it is partly Bunin's distaste for the theatre that makes him cast Chekhov's marriage to Olga Knipper, an actress, as "a slow suicide" in contrast to his passionate affair with Lydia Avilova, a writer. Avilova wrote a book after Chekhov's death claiming that she had been the love of his life. Most biographers have demolished her revelations but Bunin was so convinced by them that he devotes almost a quarter of his book to quoting her account of Chekhov, and telling the tragic story of her later life. It is fascinating to watch Bunin struggling to assimilate new information into his understanding of his friend; he describes how "many people think that Chekhov never experienced any great feeling. Even I thought such a thing at one time. Now I firmly declare: he did! And it was toward Lydia Alexeevna Avilova". He has watched Chekhov live without what he considered intense passion and, after his friend's death, has had to revise this view.

 The force of this new knowledge seems to. create a fissure in the book. After the chapters on Avilova, Bunin's prose breaks into smaller and smaller fragments. "Sakhalin - was it normal for him to go there?", he blurts out, in reference to an earlier passage where he had excoriated a critic who had characterized Chekhov as ineffably "normal". His final line, "Even now people do not know Chekhov as they should", seems to include himself in this unknowing. About Chekhov is, thus, not simply about Chekhov· but also a book in which a writer comes to terms with the limitations of his knowledge of other people.

TLS July 4, 2008