Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings by Michael C. Finke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings by Michael C. Finke Carol Apollonio Finke, Michael C. Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings. Reaktion Books, London. 2021. 236 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £25.00. In this essential, gripping book, Michael Finke combines biography and criticism with rare sensitivity and authority within a slight, action-packed 200 pages. Donald Rayfield’s classic 1997 biography, which drew on previously unavailable archival sources to offer readers a fresh, fully human Chekhov, will remain on the scholar’s bookshelf. Finke’s book shows why Chekhov’s life — as a writer, doctor and public figure — matters. Drawing upon new sources — notably the volumes in the second series of the Letopiś zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (2000–16) — and offering fresh readings of the epistolary and memoir literature, he tells the story of a man embedded in the social and intellectual culture of his time, and a writer whose works remain relevant in contexts unimaginable during his lifetime. Finke tells of Chekhov’s medical study and practice, his active social life, and his pathway to fame through the literary institutions of his time. Chekhov long cherished the goal of a scholarly career, which both prevented him from wholly committing himself to fiction during the 1880s and informed his distinctive treatment of narrative point of view as he became a literary master in the 1890s. Finke introduces Chekhov’s three planned dissertation projects — a history of sexual dominance; a history of doctoring in Russia; and the one that was realized, though did not lead to a doctoral degree: his famous research work, Sakhalin Island (pp. 25–26), the medical — Finke emphasizes — study where, [End Page 362] and only where, Chekhov ‘presented himself as the hero of his own narrative’ (p. 85). Despite the writer’s resistance to ‘being seen’ in his works, psychology is ‘the ground floor’ (p. 75). Characters’ utterances function lyrically and musically, ‘pointing to larger hidden complexes’ (p. 12). As early as the 1883 ‘The Death of a Clerk’, plot projects inwards — into the mind (or belly) of one individual, rather than emerging from the actions, reactions and interactions among characters (pp. 39–40). Troubled father-son relationships or absent fathers figure prominently from the early (disputed) play, Fatherlessness, to the late drama (p. 30). In works such as ‘Story of an Unknown Man’ and ‘My Life’, ‘the main character is the son of a dominant father; his life choices involve submissiveness, humiliation and pain’ (p. 155). Finke demonstrates that for Chekhov ideology is secondary to psychology, even in stories which have attracted attention as ‘anti-Tolstoyan’ narratives (p. 156). Finke reads Chekhov’s 1998 ‘Little Trilogy’ as a set of case studies presenting developmental stages a la Freud ‘from which remaining fixations may lie at the core of psychopathology’ (p. 148). The cycle traces a path of decreasing distance between storyteller and subject (neighbour, brother, self): the ‘man in the case’ suffers from a castration complex and obsessional neurosis; the ‘Gooseberries’ protagonist manifests pathological narcissism; and the narrator of ‘About Love’ has fallen into an Oedipal trap (p. 148). Chekhov’s attitude toward Jews evolves throughout his lifetime. Finke offers a nuanced treatment of the theme in life and works — though not, interestingly, in the pages devoted to Chekhov’s friend, the painter Isaac Levitan. Jewish women are prominent in Chekhov’s life, including as sexual partners. Chekhov’s unsavoury, eroticized portrait of a Jewish woman in the 1886 story ‘Mire’ was published, not coincidentally, in the antisemitic Alexei Suvorin’s New Times. Finke’s chronicle introduces welcome subtlety into the story of Chekhov’s ten-year friendship with Suvorin, addressing the complex forces at work for the young writer whose refusal to take political stands earned him the enmity of the liberal literary establishment, and who for some time depended on the wealthy publisher’s financial support — including for his research trip to Sakhalin in 1890, which Finke analyses as a ‘medical geography’. Chekhov’s famous support of Alfred Dreyfus in 1897, Finke shows, was only one of the factors at work as their paths diverged. As Finke...