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Sep. 15th, 2010 12:17 amI think I read what Chekhov I had during about three periods - in early 1995 when some were assigned for my second Russian lit class, a few years later when Bloom recommended a handful in How to Read and Why, and some summer when I put a few editions on my bedside table and read around in them. Mostly short ones. I've also read "Lady with Lapdog" a few times over the years - it gets better and better. And taught "Misery" twice, the only story of his in the assigned anthology. The plays I read separately, during my play-reading phase, though I've reread a couple recently in Stoppard versions. First exposure to that side of him must have been the Malle-Mamet-Shawn-Gregory Vanya on 42nd St. film.
This is my first time reading him in bulk and he's turning out to not be quite what I thought he was. When I first read him for the class I think my main impression was the documentary foreignness of it all. Which I respected, but documentaries from previous centuries aren't terribly compelling. I didn't see him as having much more than an objective, muckraking sort of function, however laudable that might be in the circumstances. Reading him later he seemed more entertainment oriented (early), or jumping all over the place for the sake of not missing any settings, characters, topics (post-1888). I was missing the core stories, I guess.
Turns out he's much like the authors I like best - not very objective at all, or anyway putting all the bits of the outer world back together in a coherent, if ever-evolving personal view, complete with almost incessant self-representations. Much like Turgenev, Tolstoy, and (I guess?) Dostoevsky. He has a message that's a world, and has the same anxieties of having not quite gotten it right, of trying again from a slightly different angle, of those authors' efforts, of his own in the theater. Strange how his story mode still feels slightly distinct, despite covering similar territory. The plays are obsessed with an inertia they tend to embody in the inertia of dialogue itself, its tendency to just spin wheels. I suspect he early fell into a kind of genre pit, with plays, but found it so fascinating he never bothered to move. You can write hundreds of pages of dialogue and get nowhere, as he presumably discovered while writing Platonov (or as Turgenev maybe showed him in Month in the Country and Alien Bread, perhaps both suggested by the violent woolgathering in Hamlet?), but that nowhere wasn't entirely unlike the nowhere of conversation, the conversation about What To Do that seemed the great, hypocritical failure of the mid/late 19th Century Russia intelligentsia. Wouldn't dream of attacking play-Chekhov in a million years, I'm just trying to work out the difference.
Because the stories move. Weather and landscape and diurnality make them, create changes in life and mood in the people of story-Chekhov. Decisions are actually made. If the plays are about everyone's failure to do anything, the stories are most often about everyone's failure to do anything smart. The '90s stories are a virtual catalog of mistakes, of the particular terrible, characteristic mistakes that together form what Chekhov called the devil. As this obsession grows he hits his stride, I think. The message coheres. He may stay documentarian in a limited sense, but he's gnostic now. These documents are court evidence. He's suing.
(Julie's present problem is that her new supervisor seems to be the "Man in a Case".)
And he makes no mistakes. He sees that the rich can be happy, truly happy, and oblivious to the damage they cause ("Anna on the Neck", "Gooseberries") - though the smarter ones are less likely to be ("A Medical Case" & "The Fiancee"). He sees that poverty makes poor people just awful as people ("Gusev", "Peasants") about as often as it makes them good ("On Official Business"). He has no answers, as he famously claimed. But he knows that just refusing all the awful mock-answers extant, and getting others, too, to see that reality doesn't support them, is enough to get back toward the beginning place. The reward is most often getting to see nature, in his stories. Before estranged, ignored, inimical, it swings back into focus, fresh and innocent.
He's clearly ambivalent about symbolism and allegory, since the plain truth is hypothetically his prophecy, but he's good at them when he lets them in - usually for brevity's sake, like in "Boring Story" where the professor's growing distance from his daughter's life and decisions gets literalized by the failure of his mission to find out if her fiancé is from the town he says he is - failed because they elope while he's performing it. His farewell story "The Fiancée" (1903) is among the most purely allegorical, while staying unfailingly realistic, and contains one of his most deprecating self-portraits in Sasha. But by reducing himself he's also announcing his mission: he may not know anything, but he knows the reader (Nadya) needs to turn her life around, needs to throw off empty, idle culture (Andrei Andreich) and the complacent religion that spawned it (Father Andrei) and the fanciful rationalizing that talks it into staying still (Nina) and the money/power that rewards all this non-disruptive behavior (granny). All he pretends to do is wake people - hence the incessant tea. To what, it's hard to say, but at least it's the future. And then he dies of consumption.
This is my first time reading him in bulk and he's turning out to not be quite what I thought he was. When I first read him for the class I think my main impression was the documentary foreignness of it all. Which I respected, but documentaries from previous centuries aren't terribly compelling. I didn't see him as having much more than an objective, muckraking sort of function, however laudable that might be in the circumstances. Reading him later he seemed more entertainment oriented (early), or jumping all over the place for the sake of not missing any settings, characters, topics (post-1888). I was missing the core stories, I guess.
Turns out he's much like the authors I like best - not very objective at all, or anyway putting all the bits of the outer world back together in a coherent, if ever-evolving personal view, complete with almost incessant self-representations. Much like Turgenev, Tolstoy, and (I guess?) Dostoevsky. He has a message that's a world, and has the same anxieties of having not quite gotten it right, of trying again from a slightly different angle, of those authors' efforts, of his own in the theater. Strange how his story mode still feels slightly distinct, despite covering similar territory. The plays are obsessed with an inertia they tend to embody in the inertia of dialogue itself, its tendency to just spin wheels. I suspect he early fell into a kind of genre pit, with plays, but found it so fascinating he never bothered to move. You can write hundreds of pages of dialogue and get nowhere, as he presumably discovered while writing Platonov (or as Turgenev maybe showed him in Month in the Country and Alien Bread, perhaps both suggested by the violent woolgathering in Hamlet?), but that nowhere wasn't entirely unlike the nowhere of conversation, the conversation about What To Do that seemed the great, hypocritical failure of the mid/late 19th Century Russia intelligentsia. Wouldn't dream of attacking play-Chekhov in a million years, I'm just trying to work out the difference.
Because the stories move. Weather and landscape and diurnality make them, create changes in life and mood in the people of story-Chekhov. Decisions are actually made. If the plays are about everyone's failure to do anything, the stories are most often about everyone's failure to do anything smart. The '90s stories are a virtual catalog of mistakes, of the particular terrible, characteristic mistakes that together form what Chekhov called the devil. As this obsession grows he hits his stride, I think. The message coheres. He may stay documentarian in a limited sense, but he's gnostic now. These documents are court evidence. He's suing.
(Julie's present problem is that her new supervisor seems to be the "Man in a Case".)
And he makes no mistakes. He sees that the rich can be happy, truly happy, and oblivious to the damage they cause ("Anna on the Neck", "Gooseberries") - though the smarter ones are less likely to be ("A Medical Case" & "The Fiancee"). He sees that poverty makes poor people just awful as people ("Gusev", "Peasants") about as often as it makes them good ("On Official Business"). He has no answers, as he famously claimed. But he knows that just refusing all the awful mock-answers extant, and getting others, too, to see that reality doesn't support them, is enough to get back toward the beginning place. The reward is most often getting to see nature, in his stories. Before estranged, ignored, inimical, it swings back into focus, fresh and innocent.
He's clearly ambivalent about symbolism and allegory, since the plain truth is hypothetically his prophecy, but he's good at them when he lets them in - usually for brevity's sake, like in "Boring Story" where the professor's growing distance from his daughter's life and decisions gets literalized by the failure of his mission to find out if her fiancé is from the town he says he is - failed because they elope while he's performing it. His farewell story "The Fiancée" (1903) is among the most purely allegorical, while staying unfailingly realistic, and contains one of his most deprecating self-portraits in Sasha. But by reducing himself he's also announcing his mission: he may not know anything, but he knows the reader (Nadya) needs to turn her life around, needs to throw off empty, idle culture (Andrei Andreich) and the complacent religion that spawned it (Father Andrei) and the fanciful rationalizing that talks it into staying still (Nina) and the money/power that rewards all this non-disruptive behavior (granny). All he pretends to do is wake people - hence the incessant tea. To what, it's hard to say, but at least it's the future. And then he dies of consumption.
