Near Misses: From Gerhardi to Mansfield (and back), via Anton Chekhov

Summary

‘Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead! Why can't I talk to you – in a big, darkish room – at late evening – where the light is green from the waving trees outside.’ This heartfelt diary entry from July 1918 is a perfect example of Katherine Mansfield's five-year-long ‘dialogue with Chekhov that runs through her letters and notebooks’ until the end of her life. It was a dialogue fuelled by voraciously reading the volumes of Chekhov's short stories in Constance Garnett's translations as they were published; attending and reviewing Vera Donnet's production of The Cherry Orchard; embarking on extensive translations of Chekhov's letters and a biographical note in collaboration with S. S. Koteliansky, with whom she was also discussing details of the writer's life, convictions and poetics; reading his stories and plays aloud in the evenings; following the development of her husband John Middleton Murry's critical writings on Chekhov, which included acrimoniously taking him to task whenever she disagreed with his sentimental or metaphysical approach; and imaginatively identifying with Chekhov and recreating her life through his, especially throughout the months at the Gurdjieff Institute.

Inspirational and imaginatively present in her life as he was, Chekhov, who had died in 1904, could not respond to this ongoing, dialogicallyconstrued conversation. A letter that arrived out of the blue on 17 June 1921 was arguably the next best thing. It occasioned a fruitful renewal and redefinition of Mansfield's dialogue with Chekhov and prompted possibly the most insightful and vibrant epistolary exchange of her last years. The letter was from a certain William Gerhardi, an undergraduate reading Russian literature at Worcester College, Oxford, whose deferential tone only partially restrains his delight at discovering a new writer:

Dear Miss Mansfield,

I hope you won't mind if I write to tell you how extremely beautiful I

think your story is. I am speaking of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’.

I have only just read it, and I have never read anything of yours before. I

think it is, and in particular the last long paragraph towards the end, of a

quite amazing beauty. The restraint […] leaves me breathless. I hope you

won't think it presumptuous on my part to point out to you these qualities

in your own work […]