Chekhov: The Hidden Ground - Hardcover

Callow, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566631874 ISBN 13: 9781566631877

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 1998

Synopsis

Philip Callow's new biography of Russia's greatest dramatist and storyteller is a major achievement. By examining Chekhov's life within the context of the evolution of his art, Mr. Callow makes the reader acutely aware of the hidden ground from which Chekhov's work sprang and on which his divided life stood. Arthur Miller calls Chekhov “in nearly every way our contemporary.” His irony is as modern as Beckett's; as a letter writer he is as natural and irresistible as D. H. Lawrence. In his personal life he is as understated as in his work. But the love theme that is central to his biography and his art is profoundly convincing and humane, but in his own life he holds back coldly and perhaps fearfully from real commitment. He constantly surprises us: a modest genius who finds the whole nature of fame unseemly; a man furious at injustice who is apolitical; a humorist in despair before the mediocrity, stupidity, and cruelty of the world; a generous spirit unable to stop working to improve the lot of others, incapable of turning anyone away, who remains stubbornly apart and hidden. Readers of Mr. Callow's Chekhov will find it a supremely satisfying biography, beautifully told.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Callow's biographies of D. H. Lawrence, Son and Lover and Body of Truth, were widely praised. Mr. Callow, himself a novelist, poet, and biographer, has also written lives of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Walt Whitman, all published to critical acclaim. Mr. Callow lives and writes in England.

From the Back Cover

Examining Chekhov's life within the context of his art, Mr. Callow finds him astonishingly modern: the new kind of man, uncomfortable in the world and refusing to sentimentalize his unease. But the love theme that is central to his biography and his art, which Mr. Callow explores with a novelist's skills and sensitivities, has been somehow slighted by Chekhov scholars. It is the hidden ground from which his work sprang and on which his divided life stood. We must constantly remind ourselves that Chekhov was for years a doctor first and a writer second, seeing writing as a frivolous, irrelevant activity. He exhausted himself with this double life and was soon in bad health. Mr. Callow's portrait reveals a puzzlingly elusive man who constantly surprises us: a modest genius who finds the whole nature of fame unseemly; a man furious at injustice who is apolitical; a humorist in despair before the mediocrity, stupidity, and cruelty of the world; a generous spirit unable to stop working to improve the lot of others, incapable of turning anyone away, who remains stubbornly apart and hidden.

Reviews

Callow, a novelist and author of biographies on D.H. Lawrence, Cezanne, Walt Whitman and Van Gogh, has not been as thorough as Donald Rayfield in his recent biography of the great Russian playwright and short story writer. And this is rather a blessing. Callow draws equally on Chekhov's (1860-1904) own writing and smartly culls from secondary sources?taking valuable critical insights from V.S. Pritchett's Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, or using Rayfield's important discovery of previously censored passages in Chekhov's letters, while casting doubt on the same author's characterization of Chekhov's relationship with early editor Nikolai Leykin. Chekhov's life was filled with romantic, professional, familial, political and philosophical complications, and most biographies leave Chekhov either elusively unfinished or unsatisfactorily psychologized. Callow allows his subject these complexities, presenting Chekhov as neither saint nor misogynist (two proffered views) and never tries to apprehend the unknowable. "When we attempt to clarify his feelings about love we are soon faced with ambiguity," he writes. But what is knowable he clearly connects to Chekhov's writing, making for a cohesive whole. While Callow does a good job of contextualizing Chekhov as a private figure, he is not so successful in giving him a social context: more, for example, on the Russian stage, on its penal system and on the roiling political atmosphere that spawned Chekhov, Tolstoy and Gorky would have shed great light without imputing more to Chekhov's life than the facts will bear. (May) FYI: Everyone knows Chekhov's four great plays, but few are familiar with the humorous one-act plays he wrote in his 20s. To correct this, Smith and Kraus will release Chekhov: The Vaudevilles and Other Short Works, trans. by Carol Rocamora. ($19.95 224p ISBN 1-57525-127-2; May)
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This new offering in the expanding and increasingly noteworthy field of Chekhov studies lacks both the original scholarship and the intellectual depth of other recent studies. Callow (From Noon to Starry Night, 1992; Lost Earth, 1995) has made a career of writing biographies of artistic greats, from Czanne to Walt Whitman. Turning his attention to a writer clearly dear to his heart, he opens his study with sentimental musings on seeing his first performance of a Chekhov work at the age of 22. This opening immediately sets the tone for a biography that takes us on a bumpy and highly personal journey through Chekhov's life and work. Callow covers the usual ground: Chekhov's youth in Taganrog, his move to Moscow, medical school, family affairs, the writing life, and his marriage to the actress Olga Knipper. He also interweaves mostly tedious commentary on and synopses of individual stories and plays into the narrative, and includes extended excerpts from Chekhov's texts and letters. Callow's narrative, from the very start, lacks structure (for instance, his information about serfdom in Russia is never given a proper context or carried through to form an argument) and tends to wander in too many directions. Furthermore, his staccato style (``he'' can be repeated a dozen times in as many sentences) becomes irritating. As suggested by the biography's subtitle, Callow's loosely defined central interest in Chekhov is the ``hidden, or emotional, life of the author and the recurrent themes of romantic disillusionment and the search for intimacy that appear in Chekhov's plays and short stories. But these are subjects that have long interested scholars and literary critics, and have generated considerable interesting work. Callow's overly simplistic biography fails to convey the source of Chekhov's genius. Interested readers would benefit more from their own reading of Chekhov, or from the more stimulating biographies of Donald Rayfield or V.S. Pritchett. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Callow's biographies are a joy to read. Deeply involved with his subjects, whether he's writing about Cezanne, as he did in his last biography, Lost Earth (1995), or about Walt Whitman, as in the book before that, he is as comfortable with the inner progression of an artist's life as with its outer trappings and expressions. As Callow traces Chekhov's swerving path from medicine to literature, from pragmatic concerns to creative revelations, he presents a man split between duty and pleasure, the need for solitude and a taste for society, and a great love of women and the sharp fear of intimacy. Callow describes Chekhov as "astonishingly modern," and, indeed, this elusive artist has emerged from behind his brilliant creations as a figure more attuned with our time than with his own, an alignment that also inspired a major biography by Donald Rayfield earlier this year. Both books are excellent; each reaches different conclusions, and Callow's is the more concise and expeditious. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566631874
• ISBN 13: 9781566631877
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 443