Post Diagnosis: Bashkirtseff, Chekhov and Gorky through Mansfield's Prism of Tuberculosis

Summary

If I do die perhaps there will be a small private heaven for consumptives only. In that case I shall see Tchehov.

When Katherine Mansfield was young, first living in New Zealand and then during her early years in England, Marie Bashkirtseff, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky were among the Russian writers firmly in her field of vision as she herself was becoming a writer. She admired Bashkirtseff's independence and perseverance to make it as a woman artist in a male-dominated world; she worshipped Chekhov, and she believed, as we will see, that she could already successfully compete with Gorky. All three writers suffered from tuberculosis, but this was of little importance until 1917 when Mansfield herself was diagnosed with the disease; at this point her attitude inevitably changed, in some ways that were predictable and some that were not. This article is an attempt to explore her post-diagnosis perspective on the three tubercular Russian writers whom she had discovered in her youth. Between them, Bashkirtseff, Chekhov and Gorky delineate an interesting trajectory not only of evolution in Mansfield's love for Russian literature but also in her struggles with a deadly disease.

Marie Bashkirtseff

The word ‘tuberculosis’ made its way into the medical lexicon across the world at the end of the nineteenth century. Up until that point the disease was called ‘consumption’ in English; and in Russian ‘chakhotka’ (чахотка), from the verb ‘chakhnut’, which means to wither or to wilt. So while Mansfield was already diagnosed with tuberculosis, as opposed to consumption, Chekhov and Gorky were probably still diagnosed with‘chakhotka’ (although by then Robert Koch had already discovered the tubercle bacillus), while Bashkirtseff – who was diagnosed in France and who identified herself much more with French culture than Russian (as for many members of her aristocratic class, French, not Russian, was also her first language) – suffered from ‘consomption’.

The perception of the disease in the West and in Russia was also quite different. As Susan Sontag – whose own father died of tuberculosis when she was five – points out in Illness as Metaphor, tuberculosis/consumption in Western culture was ‘spectacularly […] encumbered by the trappings of metaphor’.