‘Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius’
By Bob Blaisdell
Pegasus Books, 444 pages

From the introduction: “To indicate instances of Chekhov’s imagination at work and at play, I quote at length from his stories and letters and provide continual biographical commentary. It’s possible, perhaps likely, that readers may become annoyed by how often I interrupt his stories with my remarks.”

With literary biography, it is almost always too much or too little: too much biography, not enough criticism, or vice versa. The correct balance between the life and the work is in the eye of the beholder, and Bob Blaisdell has his eye on you, with a full understanding that you might not be pleased with him. 

I cannot remember another recent biography in which the biographer speaks so directly to his readers and to his fellow biographers. This review may annoy you because I’m going to quote Mr. Blaisdell so much rather than gas on about what I know about Chekhov from reading this biography.  

Mr. Blaisdell had what he thought might be a novel approach to a Chekhov biography by concentrating on the years 1886-87, the period of his greatest productivity, when Chekhov becomes Chekhov.

“Had anyone else noticed all those 1886 and 1887 publication dates,” Mr. Blaisdell wondered. At this point he inserts an ellipses, as if to convey a gap in his own thinking, and then he resumes: “Of course others had,” including what he considers “the best book about Chekhov, read by me at least a few times since the early 1980s and ‘forgotten.’”

Mr. Blaisdell is referring to Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky’s “Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary.” Who, by the way, has done the forgetting? Mr. Blaisdell is pointing out that what is known is forgotten — often by biographers who are reluctant, even with their elaborate source notes, to disclose just how much their books are the work of others.

So Mr. Blaisdell builds a whole book around those two creatively explosive years in Chekhov’s life and work, showing us how the frame he puts around that period is made up of the materials gathered and assessed by other biographers. What a new biographer of Chekhov has to contribute, Mr. Blaisdell’s biography implies, is not so much new material, or even a new angle on his subject, but instead a sensibility that just might be different from that of previous narrators, so that certain well-known characters become defamiliarized:

“In most Chekhov biographies, [Nikolay] Leykin comes off as the crooked editor and publisher that all of us writers have in mind as blocking or exploiting our genius. But however much Chekhov defamed and mocked him, however much we naturally side with our hero and hold in contempt anyone or anything hampering his literary development, Leykin is my favorite supporting character.”

What do we actually know about Leykin from those other Chehov biographies? Chekhov called him Quasimodo because of Leykin’s bad leg and unattractive appearance. Mr. Blaisdell then calls out by name biographers who have wanted to get Leykin “off the stage.” However wanting Leykin might seem in Chekhov’s dismissals of him, the two men, Mr. Blaisdell points out, continued to meet and correspond until 1900, four years before Chekhov’s death. 

Mr. Blaisdell might have gone even further in pointing out that Chekhov was turning his publisher into a character, and like all characters who are written up, he became something on the page that does not necessarily correspond to what he was when not written about. 

Of course, the biographer knows as much, observing that while Chekhov’s “clever brothers would have recognized themselves, though not the circumstances, in many comic and serious stories,” his father, “born a serf to a ‘slave-driving’ serf-father, was reputedly incapable of recognizing the similarities between himself and the brutal or ridiculous fathers in his son’s stories.”

So it is with all those Chekhov biographies that remain in play and are not forgotten in Mr Blaisdell’s book: We meet the same characters we have read about before but recognize them differently, as if they have just appeared for the first time. 

Mr. Rollyson is the editor of “Critical Survey of Drama,” third edition, in eight volumes.