Marriage of Chekhov Biography

In the case of Anton Chekhov, the biography of the authorship of Professor Donald Reifield is a sip of living water. It allows you to recognize the most ironic writer of the Russian land from a somewhat unexpected side. Donald Reifield, a Russian specialist, a Russian specialist, did a huge job, summing up materials from dozens of archives related to Chekhov, his family and friends, in one book.

The name immediately warns - this is not so much about the creative heritage, investigated in many other works, but about the personal side of Chekhov. In the focus - the world of his family and friends, what Anton Chekhov lived and breathed, and from where, obviously, he took the plots for his laconic, hobby and sad prose. The British Reyfield, not accustomed to the patronymics, calls Anton Pavlovich just Anton, and on the cover there is not the usual portrait of the Osip Braz brush that Chekhov himself did not like, but the less well -known sketch of the authorship of Valentin Serov.

Chekhov there is unofficial, without a pince -nez, with a tired face, and speaking: "How did it all have lifted me up, gracious sovereigns." The content of the book is to match the cover: the reader will find out much more contradictory Chekhov than that good doctor from the school course. So the official Anton Pavlovich turns into a guy named Anton, who died young at 44, and lived a significant part of his life as an exemplary disgusting man.

Anton is difficult to belong to the family: sincere love is interfered with extreme irritation - from a young age he had to earn money to ensure the life of his father, mother, brothers and sisters. Anton rushes from nobility and help to everyone in the world to sufficiently stale behavior and cruel ridicule. Anton knows that he will not live for a long time - his brother dies young from tuberculosis, and the family ailment will overtake him and his own - and painfully tries to catch everything: heal, write, help, bite, twist novels.

Women in Chekhov’s life are a separate song, and Refield disgraces this aspect with all the details. Babnik Anton was noble, having lost innocence at thirteen years in the Taganrog brothel. He loved to visit brothels to public houses - at least to marry. Room ... Clean, Asia-Sentimental ... neither basins, nor rubber, nor general portraits. She does not extinguish the fire and to the question, as this or that is called in Japanese, she answers directly and at the same time, understanding the Russian language poorly, she points with her fingers and even takes it in her hands, and at the same time does not break and will not make it like Russians.

And all this time he laughs and sprinkles with the sound “shopping center”. In the case, it shows skill amazing, so it seems to you that you do not use, but participate in the riding of higher education. Ending, the Japanese woman drags a piece of cotton paper from the sleeve with his hands, catches you for the “boy” and unexpectedly for you is wiping, and the paper tickles the stomach.

Perhaps you can understand teachers in high school who do not focus on such details. In addition to prostitutes, in the life of Anton there were enough noble women - a tall, beautiful, charming man broke more than one heart. His novels, apparently, resembled the American slides: the writer fell in love, fascinated, conquered - and then, as a rule, he fled in horror, fearing responsibility - of course, for the time being, until he decided to fit and heal a calm life with actress Olga Knipper.

But much more interesting is his intellectual diving in correspondence with, perhaps, the main woman of his life - Lika Misinova. She wrote to him: she wrote a long letter to you, and it’s good that she could not send, now she read it and was horrified - a continuous cry. Grandmother is angry that I go out and do not take care, prophesies me a consumption - I imagine how you laugh at it.

The ruthless master of irony answered: what are you coughing is not at all good. If you die, then Trophim Trofim will shoot himself, and pimples will get sick. Only one me will be glad of your death. I hate you to such an extent that, with the mere recollection of you, I begin to make sounds and La grandmother: "U ... e ... e". I would love to scal you boiling water ...

Farewell, my villain of my soul. Chekhov’s letters, abundantly quoted by Reyfield, are an inexhaustible storehouse of a funny, cooler than any stand -up, especially when it comes to correspondence with brother Alexander. Alexander Pavlovich, also a writer, but much less successful, in the epistolary went into even more frank details of his personal life. However, it was a bastard, it was a male of Chekhov’s house in Melikhov, demolishing pots with flowers and pulling a rather unpleasant man by the beard of the elderly Chekhov’s father, who, while he was in strength, pounded the children, and then hit Christian grassing and lived with their money.

Then the Mangust was slightly damaged by his mind and disappeared in the forests of the Kaluga province ... "Without faces, sisters and mongoose Anton was dreary and lonely," Refield concludes. But still it is wrong to think that the “life of Anton Chekhov” is only a collection of jokes. All the crap that we were taught at school, that Chekhov - a humanist and a good doctor who helped people and sting them - no crap, but true.Anton treated people, helped open a school in the village of Melikhovo, described the vices of society, scolded Russian inertness, and generally tried to make a cruel world around him a little better.

And also - he went to prostitutes, sometimes drunk, cursed with his relatives, missed and did not find a place for himself. There are no unequivocally bad and good people, in each and each everything is pretty pretty, and the life of Anton Chekhov is another evidence. High in half with a low -lying, beautiful -minded and cynicism in one person, and, like a side door through which you can quietly slip, is a saving irony, a gentle mockery of an imperfect world.

From here comes the honed Chekhov prose: Anton himself was not an angel, he understood this perfectly, and therefore did not judge anyone, did not grumble in a-Tolstoy in a beard, did not pour Donkey tears.

The brief credo of his life, perhaps, can also be found in one of the letters quoted by the rafield: no matter how many dogs and samovars behave, after the summer there should be winter, after youth, old age, happiness is misfortune and vice versa; A person cannot be great and cheerful all his life ... And we must be prepared for everything ... It is only necessary, as much as possible, to fulfill his duty - and nothing more.

Everything ended, as always, ugly: Chekhov died, and on his coffin crowded on onlookers, who did not understand anything in literature, rocked their teeth and considered other people's money. Gorky, the former there, recalled: "Chaliapin - cried and began to swear:" And for this bastard he lived, and worked for her, taught, reproached. " By and large, Chaliapin is right. But the life of Chekhov still lived in vain, teaching more than one generation to laugh quietly at his defeats and perceive the world philosophically, without hysterical and crusades.

Stories and plays do not need the performance - and Donald Reifield perfectly spoke about the life of Anton Chekhov himself.