In Breaking Free from Death, Galina Rylkova takes on the concept of creativity, approaching it from two points of view that are not entirely complementary: How do Russian writers stay creative while facing the inescapability of death and how do they navigate relationships with their contemporaries, including families and friends?
The opening chapters outline the ways Lev Tolstoi resolved his many creative crises and his fear of death through his literary characters on the one hand, and his relationships with family and friends on the other. One chapter looks at Tolstoi's relationship with Vladimir Chertkov. The bulk of the book is devoted to Anton Chekhov: his relationship with his family, a close look at Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and Cherry Orchard, and the stories “Steppe” and “Kashtanka.” One chapter is on Ivan Bunin's biographies of Tolstoi and Chekhov, and another—on Vsevolod Meierhol΄d's interpretation of the role of Treplev in Chekhov's Seagull under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavskii and beyond.
For a creative artist, Rylkova says, to fear death is to fear the failure to achieve immortality as an artist. When this fear brings on a creative crisis, the artist processes it through the experiences of his literary characters. Thus, Tolstoi subjects Ivan Ilych to pain and death to prove that his own palpable symptoms of depression have a physical cause. Meierhol΄d works through his anxieties by interpreting the role of Treplev in a personal and subjective way, and Chekhov in Cherry Orchard considers the therapeutic effects of resigning oneself to the death of someone (or something) dearly loved.
Complex relationships with family and friends might exacerbate a crisis or help to resolve it. Tolstoi's relationship with Chertkov received ambiguous treatment by Tolstoi's biographers, but, Rylkova argues, Chertkov served a vital role for Tolstoi in the last decades of his life by replacing Sophia Andreevna as the Muse and Nikolai Strakhov as the Friend. When Sophia loses the status of the Muse, Tolstoi verbalizes his dissatisfaction with the institution of marriage in “Kreutzer Sonata,” “written at the peak of his disagreements with his wife” (28) and turns to Chertkov, who plays the role of a therapist. In the end, this relationship is the reason Tolstoi is persuaded to write again.
An interesting chapter considers Chekhov's relationship with his family, which biographers have construed as financially and emotionally draining. Rylkova, however, convincingly argues that the family was Chekhov's “major source of sustenance and endurance” (74). She reads Uncle Vanya as a story of the man who does not recognize that his burden—working to support the family—is honorable and, moreover, necessary. Voinitsky's outburst against Prof. Serebriakov is misguided because he rebels against the very system that sustained him and gave his life meaning.
Rylkova does not claim new readings of the famous texts but rather adds valuable observations and nuance to familiar interpretations. For instance, in the analysis of “Steppe” she does not challenge the critical opinion that “Steppe” marks the new turn in Chekhov's work, but “goes further” and employs Edward Said's concept of “beginning intention” (86), pointing out the seeds of many of Chekhov's subsequent texts in “Steppe.”
Rylkova provides a great deal of excerpts from letters, diaries, primary texts, and critical and philosophical sources, almost too many, as they sometimes drown out the scholar's voice. Each chapter in the book might be read independently; they seem to be the products of years of careful reading (and teaching) the beloved texts that the author now assembled and brought under a theoretical umbrella. The theoretical apparatus is eclectic in a good way: from Edward Becker's Denial of Death to Arthur Schopenhauer, to Edward Said, to the Chinese Book of Changes, to Virginia Wolf's “Art of Biography.” All this makes for a satisfying reading, an invitation to reconsider writers’ relationship with mortality and our continuing relationship with them.
