Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey
by Janet Malcolm
Granta £13.99, pp210

Are You There, Crocodile? Inventing Anton Chekhov
by Michael Pennington
Oberon £19.99, pp273

In Chekhov's plays, tragedy has a disarming knack of crumpling into farce: 'The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself,' murmurs Dr Dorn at the end of The Seagull. Chekhov's own death was fairly farcical. During a fatal attack of tuberculosis, blood pouring from his mouth, Chekhov refused oxygen, saying that he would be dead before it came. Instead, he demanded champagne. 'It's a long time since I drank champagne,' he grinned, before descending into a delirious rant about a sailor and the threat from the Japanese. In the silence after his death, a huge, black moth buzzed around the electric light.

Only he didn't and it didn't - he didn't demand champagne, he didn't rant about the Japanese and a moth didn't buzz. There was some champagne around, he may have mentioned a sailor, and who's to say whether a moth was in the room. The rest is embroidery, some of it fabricated within minutes of his death.

In her sceptical pursuit of Chekhov's traces, Janet Malcolm has unearthed 13 conflicting accounts of this deathbed scene, including a lavish description in one recent biography which gives the number of champagne glasses, the type of tray on which they were carried and the position of the telephone from which the doctor rang down for room service, all details originating in a Raymond Carver short story, which was itself inspired by an unreliable memoir, which misquoted another, and another, right back to the night of 2 July 1904 when the only three witnesses to the event already began to misremember what they had just experienced.

Malcolm's journey in Chekhov's footsteps is an attempt to break this circle of Russian whispers and to understand the writer by visiting the places he inhabited. But her travels reveal more about Janet Malcolm than Anton Chekhov. Suspicious of her hosts, and occasionally disappointed in Chekhov himself, she traipses sombrely around Russia, taking her misery out on her tour guides.

'Journalists,' she remarks, 'like the novelists and short-story writers who are their covert models, practise a ruthless economy.' This seems to mean that because Chekhov's fictional characters are 'that peculiar creature - half-man, half-emblem', the people she meets may be treated the same way. So she introduces us to Nina, an overweight spinster obsessed with 1940s American musical stars; Sonia, the neurotically proud Muscovite; Igor, the humourless hotel manager; and Yevgeny, the foolhardy driver who refuses to buckle up in the front.

In various ways, these unfortunates fail to accord Janet the respect she deserves as a major American critic, and she uses the power of the pen to exact a revenge. If only Yevgeny had the right of reply; his comments on the prim American who drove from the back seat would be illuminating.

This is not the first time Malcolm has given reportage a bad name. In an earlier book, In the Freud Archives, she exposed a friend as a vain fool. He sued for libel and lost, and in The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm produced a high-minded apologia for her methods: 'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.' Yet she continues to do it, drawing people into her ambit and then sending them up in non-fiction. Her defence is that, if Chekhov was allowed to, why can't she?

Michael Pennington would respond that all Chekhov's characters were not 'emblems', but three-dimensional human beings, and that for every fault there is a redeeming feature. Pennington's Chekhov is a knowing but forgiving man, a writer who was constantly unsatisfied by his own efforts; a poet of the everyday; a journalist with an eagle eye for 'the obsessive... the ludicrous ease with which we ignore other people's needs', whose plays are 'a hymn to our doomed, resentful interdependence'. Neither heroes nor villains, Chekhov's characters are parts of an organic, amoral society.

Pennington is better qualified than most to write about Chekhov's plays, having spent the last 15 years perfecting a one-man show based on them. Yet this very intimacy causes some problems. When he talks about the character he plays onstage, Pennington slips alarmingly between the first and third person. He understands Chekhov like we understand ourselves, in a way that does not always help explain our behaviour to others.

Rather as Chekhov's unfinished five-hour play, Platonov, has been quarried for Chekhovian moments by writers and filmmakers, Pennington could have used a more seasoned hack, someone like Janet Malcolm, to extract the salient points from the anecdotes and close readings which throng his book. Her succinct study is far more polished than Pennington's, and beautifully written, yet, in her critical precision, she lacks his passion. Her work is impressively focused but puzzlingly disingenuous.

Next year sees the centenary of Chekhov's death, which may explain the appearance of these books, with more, presumably, to follow. Both have the virtue of sending the reader back to Chekhov's writing: Malcolm leads us to his prose, Pennington to his drama. They are, in fact, perfectly complementary studies of a chronically ambivalent man. Perhaps these two fine critics could work on a joint project.

Like one of Chekhov's odd couples, their incompatibility might be extremely productive: one imagines an adaptation of The Kiss, in which Malcolm, wandering acerbically through a great Russian house, stumbles upon Pennington's show and is startled into life by his generosity and wit.