“Children are everywhere in Chekhov,” aptly notes Nadya Peterson in the opening pages of her compelling study (4). The numbers speak for themselves. There are, as the author reminds us, almost three hundred child characters of all ages and social groups in Chekhov's works. Moreover, there are as many as twenty stories written during his formative years (1880–88) that focus exclusively on children, some of which have long remained on the periphery of critical attention. Peterson's objective in this study goes far beyond surveying this body of work: she attempts to present Anton Chekhov's “model of childhood” within the broad context of his time, including “literary, pedagogical, medical, psychological, and private views on the topic” (22).
This ambitious objective explains the book's structure. The entire Part One is dedicated to the “context.” The first of its three chapters examines the “literary constructs” of childhood Chekhov inherited from his “literary fathers,” primarily Sergei Aksakov and Lev Tolstoi. The latter appears again, now as an educator, in the next chapter focused on the “pedagogical ethos” of the period, specifically, the opposing pedagogical views of Tolstoi and Konstantin Ushinskii. Finally, the last chapter immerses the reader in the pedagogical psychology field of Chekhov's times. As informed and informative as these chapters are, they would benefit from a closer engagement with Chekhov's oeuvre and his poetics.
It is not, however, that poetics plays a secondary role in this study: “Context, described in the first part, is but a necessary background for an informed exploration of Chekhov's poetics,” the author states firmly (22). Moving in Part Two from “context” to “text”—each of the five chapters in this part is centered on the selection of stories grouped around specific topics—Peterson reveals herself as an astute reader of Chekhov's style attuned to its multitude of nuances and subtleties. Acknowledging that Chekhov does not “guide his reader to the ‘correct’ interpretation of his stories” (246), she seems to make this attitude toward the reader her own guiding principle. An additional bonus is that, as I have mentioned above, many of these stories (“Naden΄ka N.'s Summer Holiday Schoolwork,” “The Mean Boy,” “The Fugitive,” “The Cook Gets Married,” “The Big Event”) have been undeservedly neglected in literary criticism for the sake of his more “famous” works. Peterson's book helps to fill this gap.
This study also confirms the principal unity of Chekhov's artistic world with no clear boundaries between his “humorous” and “serious” works where apparently disparate stories can naturally be viewed as parts of the larger whole. Indeed, extending from early childhood to what Peterson describes as “the afterchildhood” and embracing a broad variety of social experiences, the stories under discussion comprise a coherent and quite comprehensive picture (“the model,” in Peterson's terms) of childhood in late imperial Russia.
The book is thoroughly researched and annotated. Some visible omissions in literary criticism include Vladimir Golstein's essay on “At Home,” especially noticeable because of the scarce attention this story has received in English, and Michael Finke's study of The Steppe. Noting that the protagonist's name in The Steppe links the events in this work to St. George begs for a reference to Savely Senderovich's work (228). At one point, Alexei Suvorin's newspaper Novoe vremia is confused with Peterburgskaia gazeta (308n2).
Those, however, are just quibbles. Overall, the book succeeds in its presentation of Chekhov's model of childhood and goes even further than that. “For Chekhov, childhood is a continuous process of learning by failing” (252). The same would be true of life in general, as it occurs on the pages of Chekhov's multifaceted oeuvre.
