Power of Negative Thinking

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF ANTON CHEKHOV (331 pp.)--Edited by Lillian Hellman--Farrar, Straus ($4).

"Why do you always wear black?" "I am in mourning for my life. I am unhappy."

--The Seagull

The Anton Chekhov of the Selected Letters wears his rue with a difference: it is not black, only charcoal grey. No one mocked his low spirits more high-spiritedly than Chekhov. While he put his genius into his short stories and plays, he put his complaints into his letters. But deftly introduced and edited by Playwright Lillian Hellman, Letter-Writer Chekhov emerges as a sweet, kind and amiable grouch, and his correspondence as a thoroughly engaging testimonial to the power of negative thinking.

Noah Had Three Sons. In 1880 young Anton was 20 and all but the sole support of a threadbare clan of eight. His grocer father was too broke to keep his family in staples. His two older brothers were swaggering Moscow bohemians. No prig himself, Anton can confess: "I was so drunk all the time that I took bottles for girls, and girls for bottles."

Chekhov put himself through medical school, but he was a doctor only by chance and a writing man out of inner necessity. Before he was 30 he had churned out some 400 stories, sketches and one-act plays, and the first version of Uncle Vanya. He believed that a writer had to be an irritated oyster before he would produce any pearls: "He who doesn't desire anything, doesn't hope for anything and isn't afraid of anything cannot be an artist." Damning his own as a literary generation of "lemonade" dispensers, Chekhov makes a telling diagnosis of Chekhov: "We paint life such as it is--that's all, there isn't any more . . . We have no politics, we don't believe in revolution, we don't believe in God, we aren't afraid of ghosts, and personally I don't even fear death or blindness."

His great fear was art that did not honestly jibe with its model, life. "Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and, I think, Japheth. The only thing Ham noted was that his father was a drunkard; he completely lost sight of the fact that Noah was a genius, that he built an ark and saved the world. Writing people ought not imitate Ham."

Portable Sickroom. To avoid Hamyopia, Chekhov traveled widely. But the Russian hinterland rarely sent Chekhov into those flights of mystic brotherhood common to 19th century Russian intellectuals. He approached it with a clothespin ever ready to clamp to his nose, as when he described a provincial sausage: "The odor was as if you had entered a stable at the moment the coachman was unwinding his leg puttees; when you started chewing the stuff you experienced a sensation like sinking your teeth into a tar-smeared dog's tail." Yet he spent a heroic overworked year heading off a cholera epidemic in a west Russia country district, all the while grumping unheroically.

Chekhov was himself a portable sickroom, a walking one-man plague. At 24, he coughed blood for the first time, heralding the tuberculosis that would kill him 20 years later. In letter after letter, he issued bulletins on "my phlebitis in the left leg," on palpitations of the heart ("Every minute my heart stops for several seconds and does not beat"), on hemorrhoids ("a vile, despicable malady"), and even recognized the psychosomatic nature of some of his ailments. ("My intestinal catarrh left me the moment I left Uncle's. Evidently the odor of sanctity has a weakening effect on my insides.")

"The Hell with Philosophy." Yet he showed intestinal fortitude at the rarest moments. When The Seagull flopped miserably on its St. Petersburg opening, Chekhov went home, "gave myself a dose of castor oil, took a cold bath--and now I wouldn't even mind doing another play." When the 37-year-old Chekhov collapsed from a tuberculous attack in 1897, the great Tolstoy stormed past the nurses to soothe the patient with bedside chitchat, but stayed on to argue that a work of art only fulfilled its function if an uneducated peasant could understand it. By the time Tolstoy left, Chekhov had had a serious relapse.

Tolstoy always roused warring feelings in Chekhov. He could wholeheartedly write, "I have never loved anyone as much as him," but the sage's moralizing struck him as twaddle. "Old men have always been prone to see the end of the world," he wrote. "The hell with the philosophy of the great of this world!"

In his Black Sea exile at Yalta (the doctors ordered him out of the Moscow climate), Chekhov yearned for Moscow as wistfully as any of the famed trio in The Three Sisters. At 41, he made his last pass at life by marrying the actress Olga Knipper. He called her his "kitten," "pup," "lamb," and "my little crocodile," but she was really something of a big-name hunter out to bag the half-dead lion of the Russian theater. They scarcely lived together, but she was with him on a trip through Germany in 1904 when the final TB attack came. The doctor ordered an ice pack placed on his heart, and Chekhov said, "You don't put an ice pack on an empty heart." Then the doctor insisted that he drink a glass of champagne. Chekhov's last words: "It's a long time since I've had any champagne."

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