At about 3am on 15 July 1904, in the sunny spa of Badenweiler, south Germany, Anton Chekhov died of advanced tuberculosis. He was 44. British commemorations of the centenary of his death will be strange, I think, because we have never really understood Chekhov, regarding him as a playwright and tragedian. British theatre is to blame. He is ingrained in the repertoire and, on the British stage, is often impossible to enjoy – David Hare’s excellent 1997 Ivanov excepted. The plays are overwhelmed by the histrionics of actresses of a certain age, and the fretful, transitory atmosphere of 1890s Russia is played as though it were a disintegrating Edwardian house party. This is not Russia’s Chekhov. It is not the author of more than 600 stories. Nor is it the doctor-writer of many of the best case notes we have about the terminal human condition, the stylist whose sense of point of view surpasses Henry James’s, the doctor-educator who built schools and clinics wherever he lived, and fought for the peasants’ interests in the famines of the 1890s.
Two events made me think about Chekhov’s centenary prematurely. The first was a new book by the American Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov (Granta, £13.99), a literate, exceptionally charming jeu d’esprit that merits a place on the bookshelf ahead of most of the conventional lives. The other event was the murder of a little girl, reported in our pre-Christmas newspapers. Ainlee Walker, who was two, was murdered by her parents Dennis Henry and Leanne Labonte in January 2002. What happened to her resembles in vileness the death of the infant Nikifor, scalded to death by his mother’s rival Aksinya in Chekhov’s “In the Ravine”, and in casual cruelty the near-fatal whipping of Mashenka in “Peasant Wives”.
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