Category: Chekhov

Chekhov and his continuing relevance

So, as I wrote a few days ago, Chekhov is the one great Russian writer of the late 19th century and also the most influential. His observational skills and his gentle irony were an opening into modernism.

Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” for example, has been read and reread, taught and retaught, adapted for the stage, and admired from a distance of time and space. How does this story of a man (Gurov) and woman (Anna) married to people they despise echo in the 21st century?

If you find yourself married to a cold, intellectual type of whom you are  secretly afraid (Gurov), what do you do? If you’re married to a bureaucrat, or “flunky” (Anna), ditto? You meet someone new and fall in love, and all is well?

It’s what Gurov and Anna do, and yet they cannot divorce without losing social standing not to mention economic wellbeing. So now what?

Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be free from this intolerable bondage?

“How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

This ending that is no ending, that presents no solution, this open ending, this peering into the psyche is what we still have, how long after the story was written? What do we do with our psychic problems, with our inability to adapt to conditions, to get along with the people who, at least at one time, were the most important in the world?

In America today half of all marriages end in divorce, and if you try it a second or third time the rate is higher. Why such failure in the art of intimacy? Why such eagerness to try it again? (I know a fellow writer and lawyer who has been married now seven times. The first few lasted about five years each, but the subsequent entanglements maybe 90 days.)

So we find ourselves in counseling or adultery, and seek illumination. Where is the light of our youth, the idyll we occupied when we were young and still inspires our illusions? How can we restore what we were promised, how, how?

Christopher Durang Dies: Playwright With A Genius For The Absurd Was 75
Absurdist playwright Christopher Durang, 75, died at home Tuesday, April 2.

Other writers, of course, have taken up Chekhov’s mantle, transforming his modernist stories and plays into postmodern or postrational performance. Christopher Durang, for example, who died just the other day of a rare aphasic form of Alzheimer’s, wrote the 2012 stage play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a Tony Award winning satire “that borrowed freely (and hilariously) from Chekhov.”

We continue to borrow from Chekhov, imitating his themes, his forms, his tones, and continue wondering how and why?

 

 

 

Chekhov and the Truth

Finished not long ago Donald Rayfield’s Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997) and am rereading Chekhov’s stories and plays.

This morning I run across an excellent essay in Literary Hub, “Everything You Think You Know About Chekhov is Wrong: What Would Chekhov Say of Vladimir Putin?,” by Boris Fishman. The author’s thesis seems to be that Chekhov was the opposite of programmatic and predetermined. That among classic Russian authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky — only Chekhov was modern: determined to observe closely and report faithfully, not indulge in polemics.

Anton Chekhov Biography
Anton Chekhov, 1860–1904

Fishman quotes Maxim Gorky, a “revolutionary” writer, about the Russian soul in Chekhov: “In the presence of Anton Pavlovich everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself, and I had many opportunities of observing how people threw off their attire of grand bookish phrases, fashionable expressions, and all the rest of the cheap trifles with which Russians, in their anxiety to appear Europeans, adorn themselves, as savages deck themselves with shells and fishes’ teeth.”

So what does Chekhov have to do with Putin or politics? The only party to which Chekhov belonged, says Fishman, was the truth party. Not Truth Social or Putin propaganda. Neither liberal nor conservative. Only truth. And that as the only great Russian writer of the 19th century to emerge from the peasant class Chekhov alone was situated to provide what moderns would recognize as the truth.

In the US today, as in Chekhov’s Russia, most of us are drawn magnetically to one ideology or another. It’s as if our brains were reduced to filings, the flimsiest scraps, and they’re pulled to one irresistible position or its polar opposite. We want to be right (or left), correct (or  infallible), and declare our allegiance to the truth, at least the truth as it’s been formulated and decreed by the various parties with stakes in the game.

But to quote Fishman on Chekhov’s likely response to America today:

… he would savage, equally, the witch-hunts enacted by social justice warriors, the soul-sellers lining up to lie for Trump, the provincialism of liberal echo chambers like New York and San Francisco, and the media’s reductions and manipulations.

Whether we’re planning to flee from the wrath to come (Trumpugees stampeding to Canada) or celebrate our astuteness and decency here in New York, San Francisco, and other provinces of the mind, we haven’t yet gotten to where Chekhov, among the few literary sages, might like us to be. If we want to call this place the soul, that’s fine with me.