Book of a lifetime: A Life in Letters by Anton Chekhov

From The Independent archive: Scarlett Thomas explains why the Russian playwright’s correspondence chimes with her life

The Russian great has much to say on the struggle and art of professional writing (Getty)

I first encountered Chekhov’s letters when I took my lecturing job at the University of Kent in 2004. Chekhov’s stories were required reading on one of the modules, and the Norton edition I taught from had excerpts from Chekhov’s letters in the back. At the time I felt uneasy about teaching creative writing, because I didn’t think much of workshops and approaches to the subject that seemed too similar to therapy sessions and focus groups. But in these brief excerpts I found writing advice that I thought was actually useful for the students. In a letter to his brother Alexander, dated 10 May 1886 (sadly missing from A Life in Letters), Chekhov lays out something like a manifesto for writing that I think is almost perfect. Writing, Chekhov argues, should be objective, honest, spare, daring and compassionate.

A Life in Letters is all of these things. From a selection of the letters written by Chekhov between 1876 (when he is a young man in provincial Russia) and 1904 (when he is dying of TB in a German clinic) we learn much about the business, struggle and art of professional writing, but also about being a doctor (Chekhov’s day job, which sometimes involves post-mortems on cows if there are no vets around), fishing, travelling, holidaying, gardening, personal hygiene, sex, love and illness. With a bankrupt father, two alcoholic older brothers and an aptitude for the precise detail of everyday life, much of the organisation of family life falls to Anton: he can plot it as meticulously as he plots his stories.