Volume 33, Number 19 · December 4, 1986
An Excellent Man
By John Bayley
Chekhov
by Henri Troyat, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Dutton, 364 pp., $22.50
Chekhov is not a good subject for a biographer. He is too nice, too evasive, too lacking in the kind of temperament usually associated with writers and artists. He was in fact the kind of subdued heroic figure who in life is usually ignored by and depended on by everybody: an excellent man, in the sense of one of Barbara Pym's 'excellent women.' Transpose his sex, and he could well be the leading character in one of her novels, the kind of person whose virtue is taken for granted, and about whose emotional needs and private life no one is in the least interested. Ironically, he would never appear as a character in one of his own plays or stories. He was that rare thing, a literary genius who had no need or impulse to live what he wrote.
Review, 2470 words
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