Chekhov: A Spirit set Free.

Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, by V S. Pritchett (Random House, 235 pp., $1795)

To THE CASUAL or sentimental tourist, the Russian literary and historical landscape seems dominated by tragedy on an epic scale: whole volumes have been written about the "Slavic soul." Actually, as the last five centuries of Russian history amply illustrate, the Slavic tone owes at least as much to farce as to tragedy. There is a strong strain of the absurd in everything from the surreal, pathological criminality of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin to the spiritual vaporings of the aging Tolstoi (and, to a lesser extent, of the once-heroic Solzhenitsyn) sentimentalizing about a lost Russian past which, in reality, had always been dominated by a lower-case orthodoxy of the most rigid and nasty sort.

No one sensed this element of the ridiculous more clearly than Anton Chekhov. As his latest biographer, England's venerable V. S. Pritchett, points out in recounting an exchange between Chekhov and the bombastic impresario of the Moscow Art Theater, Konstantin Stanislavsky, on the premiere of Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard: "There was only one jarring note: Stanislavsky had called the play 'a great tragedy.' Tartly . . . Chekhov replied that it was not even a drama -'It is a farce.' "

With his affectionate but penetrating eye, Chekhov, who had experienced the reality of Russian life at more levels than had most of the more comfortable members of the Russian intelligentsia and the aristocracy, saw through the illusions of both the cultural Right and the cultural Left. After his last meeting with Tolstoi, Chekhov reluctantly concluded: "Old men have always been -prone to see the end of the world, and have always declared that morality was degenerating to the uttermost point, and that Art was growing shallow and wearing thin, that people were growing feebler . . ." In a prophetic letter written at the height of the Dreyfus affair, Chekhov decried the fact that "a brew has been gradually concocted on the basis of anti-Semitism, a principle reeking of the slaughterhouse. When something is wrong with us we seek the cause outside ourselves . . . capitalism, the Masons, the Syndicate, the Jesuits all phantoms, but how they do relieve our anxieties!" Seeing through the shallow seriousness of many of his contemporaries, Chekhov realized that "pharisaism, stupidity, and tyranny reign not only in shopkeepers' homes and in lock-ups alone: I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation." His only hatreds were "Iying, and violence, whatever form they may take," and this is what gives nearly all of his writing the ring of truth.

It is not surprising that a man who so clearly recognized the delusions of his fellow human beings could write about them in his fictional works with such perception and edge. What is surprising, and perhaps most endearing, about Chekhov is the irrepressible sympathy he shows for his characters despite it all. He was that priceless rarity, a kindly critic, and in Pritchett he has found a kindred spirit. By concentrating on Chekhov's writing, and by studying his life primarily as a source of his art, Pritchett gives us a clearer and deeper understanding of both than even the most scrupulously -not to say tediously-detailed scholarly biography could.

Born poor and a peasant-the descendant of serfs-Chekhov struggled to become first a doctor, then a journalist, and finally, and triumphantly, a man of letters. He combined a Russian soul with a universal intellect, able to plumb the depths of his ethnicity without drowning in them. In the 44 years allotted him, he created a heroic body of work, most of which reads as well today as it did at the turn of the century.

As death approached, his devoted wife, the actress Olga Knipper, asked him the sort of "profound" question that people who spend too much time on the stage and too little time thinking still delight in. What, she implored, is the meaning of life? That, answered Chekhov, is like asking what a carrot is: "A carrot is a carrot and nothing more is known." Yet, thanks to Chekhov, we have learned a great deal more about "life," a few precious drops at a time.

Chekhov died serenely, shortly after sipping a last glass of champagne. But the genuine grief that followed his death mingled with a strong element of farce. His coffin was transported to Moscow in a goods wagon marked "FRESH OYSTERS," and his funeral procession collided with that of a nowforgotten Czarist warrior, General Keller. Some of Chekhov's mourners mistakenly followed the military band of the martial cortege, causing Maksim Gorky to fume that this "is how we treat our great writers." Chekhov would have been amused. As no one knew better than he, that is how life's ambiguities and absurdities treat us all, one way or another.