Reply to comment

THE women would arrive in batches, like the supplies of feed for livestock or winter fuel.
And when they had disembarked, they’d be placed in a room, and then divvied up among the single men.
Anton Chekhov had schlepped across Russia to the Far East to gather material for a book, to a small penal colony called Sakhalin. It was here he watched this degrading, systematic and publicly accepted form of prostitution, and it gave him a further understanding of how women were being treated in his homeland.
This year is Chekhov’s 150th birthday. To celebrate – and raise money to restore the house in Yalta where Chekhov wrote Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard – Hampstead Theatre is hosting a week of his plays and readings of his stories.  It features Richard Eyre, Michael Frayn, David Hare and Michael Pennington, among others. And his approach to writing about women is the subject of an appreciation and readings by author Lynne Truss and actor Rosamund Pike. 
Lynne is known for her seminal book Eats, Shoots and Leaves that gave us all a shake over our deplorable standards of grammar, and more recently for Get Her Off the Pitch!, which lifted the lid on working as a sports reporter with essentially no interest in sports at all. She first discovered Chekhov at university and is a fan of his plays. But she admits his short stories, which will feature in the celebration, are not so well known to her. 
“After all,” she says. “There are 600 of them.”
But a common thread through many is his portrayal of the lives of women in a period when gender emancipation was a battle still firmly in the future.
“His experience in Sakhalin would have undoubtedly shocked him,” says Lynne. “Women were assigned to men – they’d be put in a room and then handed over to others.”
But while some have claimed Chekhov as a proto-feminist, a campaigner for emancipation in a period that was still 20 years before women were granted the vote in Britain, Lynne argues that the simple fact was he saw all humans as equal – and this was because he wanted to create interesting characters, and therefore did not care too much about gender.
“He wrote very well about women,” she says. 
“He was even-handed. To him they here just characters.”
Chekhov said that his mother “gave him his soul”, and had watched his father act as a tyrant in the confines of family life. This influence can also be found in his short stories, which often have female leading characters.
“What he believed in was civilised behaviour and he was aware that so often women were on the losing side – they were not allowed access to education or access to opportunities such as work and autonomy,” says Lynne. “He was very aware of how women were treated and limited in their lives, but what he was really interested in was a belief that people could behave in a better fashion towards one another.”
The two stories to be read by Bond actress Rosamund Pike are The Darling and In The Cart. Lynne says they show two sides of the writer. “At the time, The Darling was very controversial – it was seen as misogynistic,” she says. “The book is about how the lead character is only truly alive when she is in love with someone. It has been interpreted in various ways for its sexual politics, but it is really about love.” In The Cart is a series of anecdotes about the life of a schoolmistress.
“It tells of her life in plain terms,” says Lynne, and it shows Chekhov’s skill at his best: “He is brilliant at subtle, technical things. He can make your heart stop – he can make you see something differently. 
“You are led in one way and then he offers a different way of looking at things.”
And Lynne believes the inherent appeal of the Russian writer is the fact “there is always so much truth in them”.
“There is a truth I never doubt within his writing – how people behave,” he says. “There is an absolute psychological truth within it, and it doesn’t matter whether you are a man or a woman.”

• Lynne Truss and Rosamund Pike are at the Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, NW3 on Tuesday January 18 at 7.30pm. See box above for full details of A Jubilee of Anton Chekhov events. Box office 020 7722 9301

A Jubilee for Anton Chekhov Monday January 18-Sunday January 24

Monday, 7.30pm: Chekhov’s Vaudevilles: Michael Frayn (with David Horovitch, Miriam Margolyes and Steve McNeil)
Tuesday, 7.30pm: Chekhov's Women: Lynne Truss on In the Cart and The Darling (with Rosamund Pike)
Wednesday, 7.30pm: Chekhov’s Major Plays: Richard Eyre (with Tom Burke, Lisa Dillon, Michael Pennington and Harriet Walter)
Thursday, 7.30pm: Chekhov's Doctors: William Boyd on Ionych (with Eileen Atkins)
Friday, 7.30pm: The Perfect Short Story: David Hare on The Lady with the Little Dog (with Penelope Wilton)
Saturday, 3pm: Anton Chekhov: Michael Pennington’s one man show
Sunday, 7.30pm: Chekhov and Unrequited Love: William Fiennes on Verochka (with Simon Russell Beale)