Criticism - like poetry - is a genre where the difference between good and bad work is vast, that is to say, both are extremely difficult to do well, and yet so many people want to be a critic or a poet. The evidence is right here on this website, rife with screeds of vaporous opinions ( ( )

This delightful, and brief, book combines information Malcolm gleaned on her 1999 trip to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yalta to visit sites associated with Chekhov (and other Russian literary lights) with forays into Chekhov's life and analysis of some of his stories. It is not a travelogue or a biography or a work of criticism, but combines aspects of these in classic Malcolmian style in which she effortlessly (at least that's how it appears!) merges one topic into another in a way that makes complete sense. Of course, being Malcolm, she includes some perceptive psychological points as well. She seems to have read most of the biographies and critical works about Chekhov, as well as his letters, stories, and plays, and quotes from them aptly. Other writers she discusses briefly in the course of this book are Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Akhmatova.

She comments about Chekhov:

"To be sure, all works of literary realism practice a kind of benevolent deception, lulling us into the state we enter at night when we mistake the fantastic productions of our imagination for actual events. But Chekhov succeeds so well in rendering his illusion of realism and in hiding the traces of his surrealism that he remains the most misunderstood -- as well as the most beloved -- of the nineteenth century Russian geniuses." p. 22

"We do not ask such questions of the other Russian realists, but Chekhov's strange, coded works almost force us to sound them for hidden meanings. Chekhov's irony and good sense put a brake on our speculations. We don't want to get too fancy. But we don't want to miss the clues that Chekhov has scattered about his garden and covered with last year's leaves. These leaves are fixtures of Chekhov's world (I have encountered them in the gardens of no other writers), and exemplify Chekhov's way of endowing some small quiet natural phenomenon with metaphorical meaning. One hears them crunch underfoot as one walks in the allée where this year's leaves have already sprouted." p. 205

About the challenge of biography:

"The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography." pp. 35-36

Chekhov was only 44 when he died of tuberculosis.

Just as reading Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts led me to take this book off the TBR shelves where it has languished for nearly 15 years, reading this book has now led me take a book of Chekhov's stories off the shelf too.

This is a very readable analysis of the plays and stories of Chekhov, examining his characters and themes and how they may relate to aspects of Chekhov's life, leavened with the author's own observations on her travels through modern day Russia visiting places significant to the great author, while also taking into account places significant to Dostoevsky and Akhmatova. The close relationship between Chekhov and Tolstoy is also interesting. This offered the right kind of literary criticism, stimulating my interest in a relatively undemanding way. ( )

Una pequeña historia literaria sobre las distintas biografías de Chejov
Una larga fascinación por Chéjov, y un deseo casi más de proteger que de desvelar su intimidad, impulsa a Janet Malcolm a viajar a Rusia y visitar los lugares en que el escritor vivió o que con tanta fuerza plasmó en sus obras. Leyendo a Chéjov consigue ser a la vez un libro de viajes, un esbozo biográfico y un ensayo literario de primer orden, en el que no faltan la revelación incisiva, el detalle analítico y, sobre todo, un gran respeto por los secretos en los que descansa, como decía Chéjov en uno de sus relatos, «toda existencia personal». ( )