Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey

From the Publisher

“One of the most gratifying things about Reading Chekhov is its quiet, vigorous defense of the prerogatives of criticism against the imperial banality of biography.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[A] thoughtful and sensitive study . . . A great part of the charm and the skill of Janet Malcolm’s book lies in the very Chekhovian way she mingles personal with critical comment, taking us not only through Chekhov’s stories but through the removals and journeys of his life and her own travels in quest of his Russian haunts.” —The New York Review of Books

“With the gentle inevitability of a balloon lofting skyward, the discourse effortlessly ascends from chatter to contemplation to genuinely brilliant critique. . . . With its balance of distilled perception and companionable spirit, Reading Chekhov embodies the same qualities it celebrates.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Keith Taylor

Reading Chekhov is the intensely personal and lucid encounter of a reader with a writer whose generosity toward his characters is unparalleled. Malcolm tells us that Chekhov "didn't preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary." We can thank her for reminding us how beautiful that poetry can be.
— Los Angeles Times

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 maysquabble 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. (Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A noteworthy journalist who never makes it easy for herself, Malcolm here uses her travels in Russia as an opportunity to reflect on the works of Chekhov. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A typically sharp-eyed, tart tour by longtime New Yorker writer Malcolm (The Crime of Sheila McGough, 1999, etc.) to the places-and the creative landscape-associated with the Russian master. Playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) has become as misunderstood as he is beloved, Malcolm feels, not just by critics but by his homeland. As she travels to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and especially Gurzuv and Yalta (where Chekhov spent his last five years), Malcolm fumes at post-Communist Russia-not just at inconveniences such as lost luggage and seedy hotels, but at guides who sometimes seem more interested in palaces or old-time film star Deanna Durbin than they do in Chekhov. She grumps about this "absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an ‘original scene' that can only fall short of his expectations." Occasionally, Malcolm resorts to one of her trademark cranky generalities about factual writing (a novice journalist, she insists, who wishes to render subjects "in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused"). But once she considers Chekhov's life and work in earnest, her numerous insights run against the critical grain without falling into contrarianism for its own sake. For instance, she notes that far from being nonjudgmental, Chekhov underscores the nature of evil in stories such as "Ward No. 6"; that despite his overriding concern with ordinary lives, he was irresistibly attracted to useless beauty; and that, as someone who battled tuberculosis for almost a third of his life, his masterpieces obliquely tell what it is like to live under the constant shadow of death. She seamlesslystitches together both standard biographical information (such as his attitude toward his brutal and improvident father) and close analysis and interpretation (e.g., of memoirists' varying accounts of Chekhov's death, including the bizarre transport of his corpse back to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car filled with oysters). While occasionally crotchety about personal travails, Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of "our poet of the provisional and fragmentary."