Hidden agenda

THE clarity of Anton Chekhov's language, his published letters and the biographical facts give one the illusion of knowing him. But the man who wrote “Three Sisters” is among the most secretive of writers. We learn as little about Chekhov from reading his plays as we do about Shakespeare from reading “Hamlet”. Despite his simple words and laconic sentences, he is one of the most difficult Russian authors to translate for the simple reason that so much remains hidden between his words.

Chekhov's “hiddenness” is one of the main motifs and motives of Janet Malcolm's book. To move beyond “the straightforward, natural, rational modern surface of Chekhov's prose” and into the area of the “wild, strange and archaic”, the New York journalist undertakes two journeys: a physical one—to Moscow and Yalta, where Chekhov was exiled by his tuberculosis, and a metaphysical one—into his letters and stories. Both are done through translations.

The first, physical journey, yields little more than clichéd observations familiar to any foreign traveller to Russia: lost luggage, depressing concrete-block hotels, and interpreters who turn out to be as irritating as they are warm-hearted. The critical journey produces a series of sharp and witty observations about Chekhov's life and work. On the way Ms Malcolm tears down the clichéd perception of Chekhov as a poet of Russian melancholy and destroys the saccharine image and “sickening piety” that his name attracts, though she offers little in its place.

Ms Malcolm is far too clever to suggest that a visit to Chekhov's houses—one of which has been completely rebuilt—can bring her closer to the meaning of his stories. The physical travelling that might have stimulated the creative process leaves an impression of scaffolding left behind after an elegant building has been completed. Her travelogue obstructs many of the book's finest features.

One of these is the way it shows how Chekhov's secretiveness, his inability to feel close to anyone—man or God—and his sense of mortality all shaped his literary universe. “He did not merely withhold information about his literary practice, the practice itself was a kind of exercise in withholding.” Most important, Ms Malcolm's book makes you want to read or reread the master's works, and that is a pleasure indeed.