`Unique, Strange, Fleeting, Beautiful and Awful'

In 1923, William Gerhardi, a writer best remembered for being forgotten, published the first book about Anton Chekhov not written in Russian. I started reading Anton Chehov: A Critical Study on Sunday. You’ll note the variant transliteration of Chekhov’s name, which extends to the page listing other books published by Duckworth in The New Readers Library series. There, as author of The Black Monk and The Kiss, Anton is identified as “Tchekhoff.” I’m reading the 1928 reprint of the 1923 R. Cobden-Sanderson first edition.

Gerhardi may have found the fluidity of names attractive, as he is best known to posterity by the self-chosen surname “Gerhardie.” Born in 1895 in St. Petersburg, of an English father, he grew up in England. During World War I, he served with the British Military Attaché in the city of his birth and witnessed the 1917 Revolution. Later, at Oxford, he wrote his first novel, Futility, and the Chekhov volume. His early admirers included Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Edith Wharton (who wrote a preface to Futility).

So, at the age of 28, Gerhardie published the non-Russian world’s first book on the Russian master, and it’s delightfully personal and non-academic, and captures some of the excitement English writers must have experienced when Constance Garnett published her pioneering translations of Chekhov’s stories. Henry Green, V.S. Pritchett and Virginia Woolf, among others, acknowledged their debt to Chekhov-via-Garnett. Gerhardie, a Russian speaker, praises Garnett but provides his own translations of Chekhov’s plays. On the first page he writes:

“We say as we read Chehov: `How true to our own experience!’ But we are living new, undiscovered lives. How is it? Because in truth there seems nothing that Chehov does not know. And the test? The test is that the truth that there is nothing that we do not know does not occur to us till we are reading him, and then we say: `How true to life.’ Why? It may be that, accustomed to a cruder literature and cruder intercourse, we deemed irrational, irrelevant thought as in some manner `illegitimate,’ perverse – a sort of growth confined to our own eccentric self, and so kept it back on the subconscious threshold. How deceived we were as to it importance. For life is more complex, fluid and elusive, not than we had privately suspected (for potentially in a semi-conscious, inarticulate way, we are all of us profoundly subtle), but than we had expected to be told by others, much less to see in print.”

At such a young age, Gerhardie understood the unrecognized, undocumented world of consciousness in which most of us dwell most of the time. Our consciousness is sovereign and unknowable, often even to our selves. There, fantasy and the hard-boiled sobriety of the real world easily co-exist and merge. There, we hate and lust and aspire and envy and resent with impunity. Like Shakespeare, delivered a new and previously ignored world to us. He expanded human consciousness. Gerhardie writes: “To him life is neither horrible nor happy, but unique, strange, fleeting, beautiful and awful.”

And this: “Truth made him see the lie in everything. And it is the clarity with which he saw the law that made him a great artist.”

Gerhardie continued to write but published nothing new after 1939. He died in 1977 after almost 40 years of literary absence – a fate worthy of inclusion in a story by Chekhov.