(no subject)

"A Boring Story"'s a presence in Bergman, esp. Wild Strawberries. Curious how no filmmaker, even Renoir, means as much in his work as Chekhov - or Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for that matter. Strindberg and Ibsen are more important still, but those you'd expect.

And of course Kurosawa loved the Russians and Shakespeare. (We tried to watch The Idiot but some idiot executives mangled it heartbreakingly.)

"Boring" answers "Ivan Ilych", which was in turn a relative secularizing of A Christmas Carol (I switch to italics around 75 pages, apparently). My father said "Ilych" showed that the universe is a perfect moral machine; I said, "No it isn't" and he said, "No, but that's what the story shows." Chekhov is also saying "No it isn't" but not in a nihilistic sense. It's up to us, since the universal machine stopped being good for anything but blood tattoos a while back, and we're going to fail. And until we do, that, I guess, is success. The evocation of a terrible unhappiness persisting around a dwindling (or just-gone) genuine happiness is handled brilliantly.

His stark revision of the final Faust moment's quite beautiful, too, as is the underplaying of that element throughout. I forgot that about Chekhov, that to read him you start to look for what's being underplayed. Definitely not the case with T. and D., or Ibsen and Strindberg, Kurosawa and Bergman, for that matter. But certainly the case with his many short story followers. Big budget, big-returns-needing productions like plays, movies, and (in terms of time put in writing them) novels have to be explicit, or at least explicate something, though other, implicit, Chekhovian somethings may infuse the works or be gestured at. Chekhov takes out everything but the Chekhov, as it were; the blank where plot satisfactions should be is a challenge, and a double dare with this particular story because of the title. I wonder if Frost and Bishop get some of their method, their apparently saying just a little too little to have ever bothered saying that, thus initiating quest-mode reading in those not dropping the book, out of Chekhov - though I think most of that must be from Dickinson or innate in them.

Chekhov comes out of Tolstoy and Turgenev; Tolstoy characteristically writes not plots but intense episodes, things that rivet us by being both true and astonishing, rather than by cleanly beginning and intelligibly ending (he does this esp. in his early work, which I like best); Chekhov often takes that farther by dimming out even the intensity, by treating common life circumstances themselves as freakishly riveting episodes. Turgenev's stories have plots but he and you half forget them in a constant (somehow most natural) wandering off and failing. Turgenev's sin is that this melancholy often touches the narration, not just the persons or events narrated, whereas while Chekhov's settings, concerns, and characters are similar he rigorously removes all sentiments from the handling. In "A Boring Story" the rather un-Chekhovian device of 1st-person narration is used, but sentiment's kept in bounds well because the narrator's so much a projection of Chekhov, into both fiction and the future. He applies the Chekhovian strictures to telling his own life.

(I'm not attacking Turgenev, btw - I love that about him; Turgenev is to Chekhov as Robinson is to Frost, but we need our Turgenevs and Robinsons.)

And everything about teaching in it was dead accurate, sublime and hilarious.

Thank you for recommending it, recommender. And I noticed it ended in one of your strange hotels.