Mikhail Gromov: Chekhov Scholar and Critic. An Essay in Cultural Difference by Patrick Miles (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 847 in English, which is how Hinrich Siefken quotes Schlink in his introduction. Tom Paulin strikes exactly the right note in his preface: 'Keith Spalding crossed borders, had a narrow escape, and landed in this country as a refugee. He sought and was given asylum, and enriched the culture by his teaching, writing and giftfor friendship.' Attractively produced with a beautiful cover, these 'essays of discovery' include a drawing of Keith Spalding by Siegbert Prawer and photographs ofthe younger Keith Spalding with champagne glass in hand instead of his beloved pipe, celebrating the completion of the Langenscheidt encyclopaedic dictionary. Altogether this is a fitting tribute to a remarkable scholar and much-loved colleague and friend. Institute of Germanic Studies, London J.M. Ritchie Mikhail Gromov: Chekhov Scholar and Critic. An Essay in Cultural Difference By PatrickMiles. Nottingham: Astra Press. 2003. ?16. viii+i2opp. ISBN 0946134 -68-5. Mikhail Gromov was a very decent man and critic, one of those Soviet scholars who in the 1960s to 1980s steered a difficultcourse between conforming to officialideology and saying and writing something of genuine originality and interest. Others in his situation chose to keep their bodies in Moscow and their souls in Tartu, where a concentration on Bakhtinian structural criticism was tolerated since it skirted round, rather than clashed with, the banalities of the Soviet doctrines on the mirror-like relations between literature and reality. British students of Russian literature of this reviewer's and Patrick Miles's generation remember such men as Gromov with some fondness for the risks they took in accepting contact and for their quality?rare in most literarycritics?of concealing farmore knowledge, warmth, and inspiration than they revealed. Nevertheless, Gromov was firstand foremost an editor and biographer of Chekhov, rather than a critic in the sense of someone who give a new reading of a familiar text. Some of his contemporaries, e.g. Vladimir Lakshin, had more original things to say. Certainly, modern Russia, in its apparently brief decade of free speech, has produced surprisingly few critics as thorough and conscientious. Miles's book, at first sight, is an act of piety to the memory of an honest and under-appreciated scholar. He takes Chekhov works set in southern Russia, to which Gromov, as a fellow southerner, responded best?Platonov, Steppe, The Cherry Or? chard?and shows both the limitations and context of Gromov's critiques. In doing so, however, Miles has in fact written his own study of Chekhov, by teasing out of Gromov what a Western critic might have added, and rejecting what a W7esterncritic would have found redundant. He deals gently with Gromov's card-index mentality? a wonderful thing for an editor in the world before computers, but a dangerously deadening quality in a critic determined to find consistency and system in a writer as many-sided as Chekhov. Gromov was convinced by the overlap of images and phrases that Dostoevskii was a key influence on Chekhov, without which The Black Monk is incomprehensible, but as this re-examination shows, Dostoevsky's Adolescent never even spent the night in that orchard. Gromov was not always so easily carried away. His greatest failing in discussing the comedy of The Cherry Orchard was an only too apparent inability to laugh out loud at any point ofthe play. This is excused by Miles as the inevitable consequence of living in a country that 'doesn't like joking'. All in all, this beautifully written and very rich memoir is a stimulating resume of the best and most provocative in Gromov's work, and behind it the author demonstrates that he is a subtle and perceptive Chekhoved himself Queen Mary, University of London Donald Rayfield ...