G
Guest
Guest
Chekhov is one of my very favorite writers. I've read about half of his short stories (there are 14 or so volumes); don't know if I'll finish cos I keep rereading many of them. My favorite so far is A Story without an End.
Below are excerpts from an article by William Boyd in The Guardian. I think more than any other author Chekhov has been a great teacher and influence for me (not that I write anything like him). He has been so for many great writers and I believe will continue to be, so I take the time and space to promote him here in the centenary of his death.
- Perdita
Anton Chekhov died 100 years ago, on July 15 1904. He was 44 years old. His lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis. In Russia, Chekhov is revered as a short-story writer of genius; his plays are considered as extremely interesting but somehow ancillary and complementary to his main achievement. And this Russian conception of his work has some validity: Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short-story writer ever. Like certain great pieces of music, his stories repay constant revisitings. The two dozen or so mature stories he wrote in the last decade of the 19th century have not dated: what resonated in them for his contemporaries resonates now, 100 or more years on. Chekhov, it can be argued, was the first truly modern writer of fiction: secular, refusing to pass judgment, cognisant of the absurdities of our muddled, bizarre lives and the complex tragi-comedy that is the human condition.
Chekhov on critics: "For 25 years I have read criticisms of my stories and I don't remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once [a critic] said something which made an impression on me - he said I would die in a ditch, drunk."
Fine death scene: Chekhov's last act in life was to drink a glass of champagne. Fatally ill, he had travelled to the German spa town of Badenweiler in the vain hope that German doctors might save him. German medical etiquette demanded that, when the patient was near death and there was nothing more that a doctor could do, a glass of champagne would be offered. Chekhov knew what this meant. He accepted the glass, muttered, "Ich sterbe" ("I'm dying"), and drank it down. His last words were: "I haven't had champagne for a long time." Then he died.
Event-plot: this is William Gerhardie's phrase - one he uses to describe the kind of fiction written before Chekhov. … Gerhardie's analysis of Chekhov's genius maintains that for the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life was made the form of the fiction. Before Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions: the narrative was manipulated, tailored, calculatedly designed, rounded-off. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens and Turgenev could not resist the event-plot powering and shaping their novels. Chekhov abandoned this type of self-conscious "story" for something more casual and realistic. As Gerhardie says, Chekhov's stories are "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life". This is why Chekhov's stories still speak to us100 years on. His stories are anti-novelistic, in the traditional sense. They are like life as we all live it.
"My Life": this is the longest story Chekhov wrote; it's almost a novella and is, in my opinion, his greatest. In it you will find all the key Chekhovian tropes: the black humour, the candid depiction of the absurdity of life, its fleeting happiness, its "weirdness and vulgarity" (as Stanislavsky put it), its brutal randomness. This dark Chekhovian comic ruthlessness found its way into English literature via William Gerhardie. Katherine Mansfield plagiarised Chekhov but she responded to his more elegiac tone. Gerhardie sensed Chekhov's tough realism, his acknowledgment of life's bland cruelty. Gerhardie in turn was a huge influence on Evelyn Waugh (Waugh's early comedies are extremely Gerhardian, a fact that Waugh himself acknowledged later in life). This tone of voice has subsequently come to seem very English, but it was there in Chekhov first.
Real lives. Chekhov said: "Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy." ,,, Janet Malcolm, who has written a profound and insightful book on Chekhov (Reading Chekhov), says that "We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other." ... Chekhov tells us a great deal about his characters but, however, resists full exposure: there always remains something "blurry", something secret about them. This is part of his genius: this is what makes his stories seem so real.
Uncle Vanya: Tolstoy went to see Uncle Vanya and loathed it. Chekhov was backstage and asked what Tolstoy's opinion was. A kindly interlocutor said that the great man hadn't "really understood" the play. Chekhov saw through that one. But then he was told that even though Tolstoy hadn't enjoyed Uncle Vanya, that he thought Chekhov was an appalling playwright, he was not as bad as Shakespeare. Chekhov found this delightfully, hilariously amusing.
Writers. Chekhov wrote in a letter to Suvorin: "Remember that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk, have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind, but your whole being, that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet's father." He also said: "Writers must be as objective as a chemist."
A Chekhov Lexicon
Below are excerpts from an article by William Boyd in The Guardian. I think more than any other author Chekhov has been a great teacher and influence for me (not that I write anything like him). He has been so for many great writers and I believe will continue to be, so I take the time and space to promote him here in the centenary of his death.
- Perdita
Anton Chekhov died 100 years ago, on July 15 1904. He was 44 years old. His lungs were ravaged by tuberculosis. In Russia, Chekhov is revered as a short-story writer of genius; his plays are considered as extremely interesting but somehow ancillary and complementary to his main achievement. And this Russian conception of his work has some validity: Chekhov, whatever his standing as a playwright, is quite probably the best short-story writer ever. Like certain great pieces of music, his stories repay constant revisitings. The two dozen or so mature stories he wrote in the last decade of the 19th century have not dated: what resonated in them for his contemporaries resonates now, 100 or more years on. Chekhov, it can be argued, was the first truly modern writer of fiction: secular, refusing to pass judgment, cognisant of the absurdities of our muddled, bizarre lives and the complex tragi-comedy that is the human condition.
Chekhov on critics: "For 25 years I have read criticisms of my stories and I don't remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once [a critic] said something which made an impression on me - he said I would die in a ditch, drunk."
Fine death scene: Chekhov's last act in life was to drink a glass of champagne. Fatally ill, he had travelled to the German spa town of Badenweiler in the vain hope that German doctors might save him. German medical etiquette demanded that, when the patient was near death and there was nothing more that a doctor could do, a glass of champagne would be offered. Chekhov knew what this meant. He accepted the glass, muttered, "Ich sterbe" ("I'm dying"), and drank it down. His last words were: "I haven't had champagne for a long time." Then he died.
Event-plot: this is William Gerhardie's phrase - one he uses to describe the kind of fiction written before Chekhov. … Gerhardie's analysis of Chekhov's genius maintains that for the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life was made the form of the fiction. Before Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions: the narrative was manipulated, tailored, calculatedly designed, rounded-off. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens and Turgenev could not resist the event-plot powering and shaping their novels. Chekhov abandoned this type of self-conscious "story" for something more casual and realistic. As Gerhardie says, Chekhov's stories are "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life". This is why Chekhov's stories still speak to us100 years on. His stories are anti-novelistic, in the traditional sense. They are like life as we all live it.
"My Life": this is the longest story Chekhov wrote; it's almost a novella and is, in my opinion, his greatest. In it you will find all the key Chekhovian tropes: the black humour, the candid depiction of the absurdity of life, its fleeting happiness, its "weirdness and vulgarity" (as Stanislavsky put it), its brutal randomness. This dark Chekhovian comic ruthlessness found its way into English literature via William Gerhardie. Katherine Mansfield plagiarised Chekhov but she responded to his more elegiac tone. Gerhardie sensed Chekhov's tough realism, his acknowledgment of life's bland cruelty. Gerhardie in turn was a huge influence on Evelyn Waugh (Waugh's early comedies are extremely Gerhardian, a fact that Waugh himself acknowledged later in life). This tone of voice has subsequently come to seem very English, but it was there in Chekhov first.
Real lives. Chekhov said: "Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy." ,,, Janet Malcolm, who has written a profound and insightful book on Chekhov (Reading Chekhov), says that "We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other." ... Chekhov tells us a great deal about his characters but, however, resists full exposure: there always remains something "blurry", something secret about them. This is part of his genius: this is what makes his stories seem so real.
Uncle Vanya: Tolstoy went to see Uncle Vanya and loathed it. Chekhov was backstage and asked what Tolstoy's opinion was. A kindly interlocutor said that the great man hadn't "really understood" the play. Chekhov saw through that one. But then he was told that even though Tolstoy hadn't enjoyed Uncle Vanya, that he thought Chekhov was an appalling playwright, he was not as bad as Shakespeare. Chekhov found this delightfully, hilariously amusing.
Writers. Chekhov wrote in a letter to Suvorin: "Remember that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk, have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind, but your whole being, that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet's father." He also said: "Writers must be as objective as a chemist."
A Chekhov Lexicon
