Rylkova , Galina Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 744 Rylkova, Galina. Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2020. xviii + 185 pp. Illustrations. Table. Notes. Index. $29.95; £24.95 (paperback). Galina Rylkova’s Breaking Free from Death explores how Russian writers deal with the psychological burden of authorship. By attending closely to the writers’ daily routine, familial relations and correspondence with friends, it seeks to demonstrate that the source of authorial anxiety, especially in the face of mortality, was not caused by abstract philosophizing but stemmed from the complex psychological dynamics of mundane interactions with friends and relatives. The first part of the book focuses on the theme of death in Tolstoi and Chekhov. The argument here is that as both authors were nearing their deaths, they were trying to make the thought of mortality both psychologically more manageable and artistically more productive. On Rylkova’s reading, Tolstoi’s intense interest in death was due to his formidable hypochondria which he concealed and nursed behind the façade of his literary masterpieces (p. 16). For example, Levin’s search for meaning in Anna Karenina is also Tolstoi’s own search for a distraction from his depression and continuous self-deprecation. By turning hypochondria into fuel for his writing Tolstoi not only solved his own psychological problems but also wrote himself out of an artistic crisis. The Death of Ivan Il´ich for Rylkova serves as the most vivid example of Tolstoi using literature to draw himself away from a spiritual and creative precipice. A psychoanalytical study of The Death of Ivan Il´ich serves as an effective bridge for an exploration of Tolstoi’s biography. In chapter two Rylkova makes a compelling argument for why the late Tolstoi’s relationship with his disciple and editor Vladimir Chertkov, which lasted for a quarter century, should be seen not as Chertkov’s selfish manipulation of a senile writer, but as a collaboration created by Tolstoi himself to remain creative up through his final years. Like Dante’s Virgil, by means of ‘epistolary psychotherapy’ Chertkov gently guided Tolstoi through the writer’s vulnerable descent to mortality (p. 42). The chapters on Chekhov open with an original reading of Uncle Vania. Rylkova sees Voinitskii’s revolt against Professor Serebriakov not as Uncle Vania’s late spiritual awakening but rather as a tragic misunderstanding of his existential dependence on Serebriakov’s literary career. On Rylkova’s reading the world of the play emerges as an unrecognized psychological ‘ecosystem’ wherein the co-dependencies of the writer and his immediate circle make everyone’s life possible. Through the tragic lens of the play Rylkova examines Chekhov’s own life. The focus is Chekhov’s two journeys to Sakhalin Island and through the southern provinces of the Russian Empire, which Rylkova sees REVIEWS 745 as his efforts to get away from his family and thus escape the ecosystem that sustained his authorial existence. Both trips exposed Chekhov’s psychological and artistic limits, revealing to him his creative and existential dependency on others, which, as Rylkova argues, he then explored in ‘Sakhalin Island’ (1893–95) and ‘The Steppe’ (1888). In ‘The Steppe’ Rylkova finds a synthesis of the apprehensions Chekhov had to live through on the steppe and his authorial anxiety at being alone in the boundless terrain of his first novel (p. 88). The form of the novel moved Chekhov to think intensely about the meaning of life and death. In the second part of the book Rylkova explores the effect of Tolstoi’s and Chekhov’s texts on other others’ exploration of mortality. For Meierkhol´d the staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895), where Meierkhol´d both identified with, and strove to overcome, the tragic fate of Konstantin Treplev, offered an opportunity to overcome his own artistic stagnation and develop his innovative stylized theatre. In a chapter on Ivan Bunin Rylkova explores Bunin’s attempts at writing biographies of Tolstoi and Chekhov as a means of living his own life through an intense identification with these two literary giants. The final two chapters offer Rylkova’s reading of Chekhov’s last play The Cherry Orchard (1904) in connection...