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Feb. 8th, 2011 01:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionReading the Chekhov stories Garnett did but V&P didn't. In the Modern Library volumes - which I won't read through, hence can't number. So I'll use letters. Later Stories will be A, but I've got about ten left.
Nearly every story is amazing so far - I know he's supposed to be the best in his entire writing category, but seeing it happen so relentlessly is the kind of thing where even wildest expectation comes across as stale next to what's delivered. And in his missionary last twelve years, he goes schematic! Like Browning, almost, with his encyclopedia of different visionary sinners, but Chekhov's going over all the different progress quagmires: a story for the person who tries to help but gets driven away, a story for where the person trying to help goes bad, one for where they slog on but forget why etc. But not as boring or oppressive as that sounds, not tendentious at all. More like, he's turning over all the rocks, one by one, showing some new creature under each.
His pre-'92-conversion stories are a bit more concerned with effects of beauty and humor. I haven't read enough early Chekhov yet to say quite when hard-to-translate farcical sketches give way to actual Chekhov stories - he seems himself all the way back in '86, at the latest?
Unrelated: I think "akimbo" might be my favorite word.
Nearly every story is amazing so far - I know he's supposed to be the best in his entire writing category, but seeing it happen so relentlessly is the kind of thing where even wildest expectation comes across as stale next to what's delivered. And in his missionary last twelve years, he goes schematic! Like Browning, almost, with his encyclopedia of different visionary sinners, but Chekhov's going over all the different progress quagmires: a story for the person who tries to help but gets driven away, a story for where the person trying to help goes bad, one for where they slog on but forget why etc. But not as boring or oppressive as that sounds, not tendentious at all. More like, he's turning over all the rocks, one by one, showing some new creature under each.
His pre-'92-conversion stories are a bit more concerned with effects of beauty and humor. I haven't read enough early Chekhov yet to say quite when hard-to-translate farcical sketches give way to actual Chekhov stories - he seems himself all the way back in '86, at the latest?
Unrelated: I think "akimbo" might be my favorite word.
