Faber & Faber

First published in 1997, Donald Rayfield's study of the great Anton Chekhov polarised critical opinion. Theatre directors and playwrights including Michael Frayn and Arthur Miller applauded it, whilst Chekhov scholars hated it. Writing it meant accessing the vast Chekhov archives, and the result revealed much more than simply the life of a Russian icon, as Rayfield here explains.

I began writing this book in 1991, after testing the waters in the manuscript department of the Lenin Library and finding that the Soviet ban on foreign scholars really had been lifted (alas only for a
decade) and, with a little persistence, every document in the archives, notably the enormous Chekhov archive, could be accessed. 

Many of my guesses and suspicions about the real, as opposed to the 'canonized' Chekhov of Soviet literary biography, were confirmed, and my only problem (apart from deciphering the appalling handwriting of some of Chekhov's girlfriends and publishers) was to distil the enormous mass of correspondence into a book that could still be picked up with one hand.

The book first came out in 1997 and had strong support from two English-language playwrights, both very Chekhovian (if in different ways), Michael Frayn and Arthur Miller. It had its second life in a Russian version which is now in its third edition in Moscow, and which is as detested by xenophobes and by traditional Chekhov specialists as it is appreciated by theatre directors and many members of the public. 

'Without question the definitive biography of Chekhov, and likely to remain so for a very long time to come.' Michael Frayn

'It is hard to imagine another book about Chekhov after this one by Donald Rayfield.' Arthur Miller

It now begins a third existence.

Nearly twenty years have passed since I began the research for this book. Quite possibly there are bundles of letters buried in Belgrade (from Chekhov's close friend and publisher, Aleksei Suvorin), or in Rome and Switzerland (from discarded girlfriends). One day, some of Chekhov's student homework may be unearthed in the archives of Moscow's medical school, or his school-leaving examination essays may still be sitting somewhere in Kiev. Nevertheless, I suspect that we now know as much about Chekhov as we can about him, or about anyone. 

In fact, to me, the interest of the material is not just that this was the life of a great writer: it happens to be a uniquely well-documented life of a very typical Russian professional of the end of the nineteenth century. What distinguishes Chekhov from most other major writers was that he lived parallel lives: he was all his adult life a doctor, a gardener, a friend and lover to many, a traveller, and his brothers' keeper in the widest sense of the word.