Janet Malcolm, a New Yorker contributor since the 1960s, has the knack of writing books about literary legacies that read more like good detective stories. In her unsparing investigations into the afterlives of Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein and Sigmund Freud, she delves into a world of gatekeepers, cranks and obsessives, uncovering stories of bad blood and hidden motives. But when it came to the case of Anton Chekhov, a writer for whom Malcolm has great affection, she instead took a journey across Russia in his footsteps, casting herself as wistful traveller rather than literary gumshoe, and produced a travelogue that doubles as a heartfelt tribute.
Thankfully her writing is just as exuberant when she isn't on the trail of intrigue, or interrogating suspect scholars. Malcolm can be captivating whatever her subject – hotel food, lost luggage, or Chekhov's "epistemological humility". Her journey, which takes in the houses where Chekhov lived, the hospital where he was treated, the cemetery where he is buried, as well as the settings for some of his stories, serves as the impetus for her to explore the nuances of his work, and to blow the cobwebs from his reputation.
Along the way Malcolm does fit in a bit of familiar sleuthing. A particularly good chapter makes short work of the biographers, exposing their accounts of Chekhov's death as a compound of Chinese whispers and wilful embellishment. But on the whole her powers of detection are reserved for the stories, in particular for the "benevolent deception" of Chekhov's realism. Beneath the straightforward, modern surface of his work, Malcolm argues, there is strangeness and paradox, absorbed almost imperceptibly by the reader. "We swallow a Chekhov story as if it were an ice," she writes, "and we cannot account for our feeling of repletion."
