A noted scholar of the art of Anton Chekhov now turns to his life (1860-1904), with equally revelatory results. Rayfield's densely documented account avoids general statements in favor of quiet accumulation of detail that gradually creates a multifaceted impression of Chekhov's contradictions. Witty, charming, and an ardent lover of women, Russia's greatest dramatist was also coolly detached, capable of capriciousness and considerable cruelty. In Anton Chekhov, Rayfield does not attempt to tidy up a messily complex psyche or to downplay the faults that were as intrinsic to Chekhov's genius as were his merits.
Chekhov's Plays : An Opening into Eternity
In a highly impressive if occasionally meandering series of essays, Yale drama professor Gilman (The Making of Modern Drama) presents an extended look at the dramatic methods employed by Chekhov in each of his plays. Often drawing on Chekhov's letters and fiction, Gilman argues against both the Soviet school of criticism, which perceived Chekhov as writing political drama about the sterility of middle-class lives, and also against those critics who saw his plays as plotless excercises in Naturalism. Instead Gilman argues that Chekhov was a theatrical revolutionary, a deliberately anti-dramatic writer in whose plays events that don't happen are often more important than those that do, and whose disjointed and often digressive dialogue allowed him to write in a musical and allusive rather than mechanical and melodramatic way. Gilman sees in Chekhov a precursor of Samuel Beckett, although Chekhov's objectivity and emotional restraint kept his plays more balanced and less despairing than Beckett's. The case Gilman makes for his subject's formal radicalism and literary stature is convincing as well as free from academic cant. Though he has a tendency to ramble, Gilman's encyclopedic knowledge of all things Chekhovian makes for interesting digressions, and this work should be eagerly received not only by admirers of Chekhov but by serious devotees of the theater. [Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.]
The Portable Chekhov (Viking Portable Library)
640 pages Publisher: Penguin Books (August 1, 1977) ISBN: 0140150358
"Chekov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer." — Ernest Hemingway
"Chekhov! Chekhov! Chekhov!" — Tennessee William, asked to name his favorite authors.
"Art tells the truth," Chekhov says; according to Tolstoy, art tells the truth because it "expresses the highest feelings of man." These may well be two statements of the same thing, but whether they are or not, what do they mean? How do we apply them? A group of people from all over the world, all of whom describe themselves as artists and therefore may be, converge in Paris to chop apart an automobile and spread wet spaghetti on a woman who has taken all her clothes off. Is it true? What is the nature of the lofty feeling? Is this alleged happening less true, the feeling less lofty, than what we get out of the nearly impenetrable odes of Pindar, the comic quotation of the William Tell Overture in Shostakovich's Symphony No 15, the stern Christianity of Njal's Saga or Gulliver's Travels, or the godless terror of John Hawkes' The Beetleleg? — John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (Harper, pp 150-51)
For another thing, thanks partly to certain movements in modern philosophy, the art of fiction, like all the arts, has become increasingly self-conscious and self-doubting, artists repeatedly asking themselves what it is they're doing. Chekhov and Tolstoy could say with great confidence that the business of fiction was "to tell the truth." Contemporary thought, as we've seen, is often skeptical about whether telling the truth is possible. ... Telling the truth in fiction can mean one of three things: saying that which is factually correct, a trivial kind of truth, though a kind central to works of verisimilitude; saying that which, by virtue of tone and coherence, does not feel like lying, a more important kind of truth; and discovering and affirming moral truth about human existence — the highest truth of art. — John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (Vintage, p 129)
In great fiction we are moved by what happens, not by the whimpering or bawling of the writer's presentation of what happens. That is, in great fiction, we are moved by characters and events, not by the emotion of the person who happens to be telling the story. Sometimes, as in the fiction of Tolstoy or Chekhov — and one might mention many others — the narrative voice is deliberately kept calm and dispassionate, so that the emotion arising from the fictional events comes through almost wholly untinged by presentation; but restraint of that kind is not an aesthetic necessity. A flamboyant style like that of Faulkner at his best can be equally successful. The trick is simple that the style must work in the service of the material, not in advertisement of the writer. — John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (Vintage, p 116)
Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story: first, he said, throw out the first three pages. As a young writer I figured that if anybody knew about short stories, it was Chekhov, so I tried taking his advice. I really hoped he was wrong, but of course he was right. It depends on the length of the story, naturally; if it's very short, you can only throw out the first three praragraphs. But there are few first drafts to which Chekhov's Razor doesn't apply. Starting a story, we all tend to circle around, explain a lot of stuff, set things up that don't need to be set up. Then we find our way and get going, and the story begins ... very often just about on page 3. — Ursula LeGuin
"Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can’t. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That’s why I rate that second — it’s because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There’s less room in it for trash." — William Faulkner
The "short story" is a highly elastic term, after all. Poe's remarks are inappropriate to our time, and in fact to the marvelous modern tradition of the story that begins with Chekhov, Joyce, Conrad, and James. — Joyce Carol Oates, Studies in Short Fiction, XVIII (1981), 240.
I remember an old teacher quoting Chekhov to us: "Help us walk into someone else's mind. ... Look how you live, my friend." It's what I try to get my students to see. Don't judge your characters. You may want to set them up for your readers to judge, but don't savage them and don't make them look stupid, because what you're trying to do is understand what it feels like to be in their heads. Sometimes students don't want to hear that because it blunts their cleverness. It's easier to stand outside; more fun, too. — Rosellen Brown, Conversations on Writing Fiction (Harper, pp 53-4)
"Your story, like these other two, is essentially the presenting of a pathetic situation, and when you present a pathetic situation, you have to let it speak entirely for itself. I mean you have to present it and leave it alone. You have to let the things in the story do the talking. ... Chekhov makes everything work — the air, the light, the cold, the dirt, etc Show these things and you don't have to say them." — Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, pp 83-4)
"Well, for one thing he didn't do anything called workshops! As a matter of fact, the students never saw each other's stories, nor did he discuss our stories in class. What we talked about in class was Chekhov, Chekhov's stories. I read Chekhov's stories until I was blue in the face." — Stanley Elkin on Randall Jarrell as teacher, Conversations on Writing Fiction (Harper, p 91)
"And we were captivated by the craft of writing and fascinated by all the ways people had done it. We were always reading things, figuring out how Chekhov had written this sex scene without any nuts and bolts in it, and yet it's so wonderful — the one called "The Lady with the Dog." It's the way people really are when they're having an affair; it's those two people and their reactions. That's the kind of things we talked about. How it's done." — Gail Godwin on her time at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Conversations on Writing Fiction (Harper, p 131)
"Now, being irrelevant — or apparently irrelevant — for the moment is something that has its uses in fiction. Chekhov, for example, used that device exceptionally well for comedy, suspense, or for other effects. But irrelevancy cannot be piled on irrelevancy. Something must be proceeding in the scene, some addition to the pattern must be developing." — Robey MaCauley and George Lanning, Technique in Fiction, (Harper, p 142)
"Here’s what I think the basic problem we all face is: We did not become writers to be Jacqueline Susann. We became writers, in my case, because of Somerset Maugham, because of Chekov, because of all those guys. You’re not as good as they are. So your whole fucking life you’re faced with the failure of your own inadequacies." — William Goldman interview for Writers Guild of America
"There is never a time when I’m not reading or rereading a story or play by Chekhov." — Cristina Garcia
THE VISUAL:
Farces : stage level (Chekhov' story = death is above) -- the vulgar --
On the centenary of Anton Chekhov's death, Rosamund Bartlett, author of Chekhov: Scenes From a Life, explains why the work of a Russian writer who died a century ago continues to resonate so strongly with us today [Thursday July 15, 2004]
Thanks to the discovery of the unpublished memoir of an eyewitness, Julian Evans can tell the full story of the great writer's final moments... *
"He awoke in the early hours of the night," she (Olga) wrote, "and for the first time in his life himself requested that the doctor be sent for." She asked a Russian student who was staying in the hotel to run for Dr Schwoerer. "The doctor arrived and ordered champagne. Anton Pavlovich sat up and loudly informed the doctor in German (he spoke very little German): `Ich sterbe [I'm dying]…'
"He then took a glass, turned his face towards me, smiled his amazing smile and said: `It's a long time since I drank champagne…', calmly drained his glass, lay down quietly on his left side, and shortly afterwards fell silent forever."
[ He was a self-made liberal in the first period of Russian liberalisation. Where and how to establish it? ]
"... Olga asked the brothers to drop in on her husband, who was "very homesick for Russia and for the company of his fellow countrymen". Olga apparently told Leo that Chekhov's health was improving. When he went to call on the writer, he wrote, "I was struck by the discrepancy between this seeming improvement - for he had a very good colour and was very sunburnt - and the impression he gave at the same time of general exhaustion." Chekhov coughed frequently and spat into a small spittoon which he carried in the pocket of his jacket.
Leo often visited Chekhov. He found him optimistic about his health and making plans to return to Russia, but rapidly his restlessness began to show. On June 29, he was writing to his sister Masha: "I just can't get used to German silence and calm… I've got a tremendous longing to go to Italy." Then, unexpectedly, a heatwave struck southern Europe - the worst weather for a man suffering from advanced tuberculosis. On July 12, Chekhov had the first of two heart attacks but still appeared to rally, then on the evening of July 14 events began to move rapidly.
Chekhov's last hours
(Filed: 04/07/2004)
Thanks to the discovery of the unpublished memoir of an eyewitness, Julian Evans can tell the full story of the great writer's final moments
What did Chekhov die of? That much we know: tuberculosis contracted as early as his teens, a disease that in the 1900s was not only linked with artists but incurable. How did he die? Of heart failure, at about 3am on July 15, 1904, in a first-floor bedroom of the Sommer Hotel in Badenweiler, south Germany. His wife, Olga Knipper, a star of the Moscow Arts Theatre, was with him and a German doctor named Schwoerer was in attendance.
These facts are mainstays of Chekhov biography.
Chekhov's death 100 years ago at the age of 44 (the same age as Robert Louis Stevenson, F Scott Fitzgerald, and DH Lawrence) has the poignancy of any writer's early death - the artist cheated of life, his readers cheated of his undone work. It is also, because of the eyewitness account by Olga Knipper, one of the set pieces of literary history.
"He awoke in the early hours of the night," she wrote, "and for the first time in his life himself requested that the doctor be sent for." She asked a Russian student who was staying in the hotel to run for Dr Schwoerer. "The doctor arrived and ordered champagne. Anton Pavlovich sat up and loudly informed the doctor in German (he spoke very little German): `Ich sterbe [I'm dying]…'
"He then took a glass, turned his face towards me, smiled his amazing smile and said: `It's a long time since I drank champagne…', calmly drained his glass, lay down quietly on his left side, and shortly afterwards fell silent forever."
In his stoicism and simplicity, dying without irritation or loss of self-control, Chekhov seems almost saintly. Perhaps he was. Dr Schwoerer, who had treated him throughout his three weeks'stay in Badenweiler, remarked, "He bore his severe illness like a hero; he awaited death with amazing stoical calm."
As a young man he possessed a supernatural maturity - a quality many readers feel when they read a Chekhov story, one that was due in part to his being forced to fend for himself as a teenager. His five great plays and more than 600 short stories are some of the best case-notes we have about the human condition. He was a self-made liberal in the first period of Russian liberalisation. He believed in education, in equal treatment for women and Jews. He built schools and clinics wherever he lived and fought for the peasants' cause in the famines of the 1890s.
Maxim Gorky famously wrote that "in the presence of Anton Pavlovich, everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself". There can't be many better descriptions of earthly sainthood. At the same time, Olga Knipper's account of the events of July 15 has never quite convinced me. I have often puzzled over this. I think the answer is that her picture of her dying husband has a theatrical quality about it. There is nothing in her account of death's ugliness or agony, although there are - to use that overused word - Chekhovian details. In the immediate "dreadful silence" of Chekhov's dying, she mentions "a huge black moth which burst into the room like a whirlwind, beat tormentedly against the burning electric lamps and flew confusedly around the room". This detail seems on the surface so apt, but I distrust it. It seems too Chekhovian, and Chekhov would never have prettified the scene of his own death.
Why is it important to ask how truthful Olga was? Perhaps because a misleading account can lead us into misleading thoughts about the kind of writer Chekhov was. Also, because we have had only Olga's word for what happened. Chekhov's biographers have retold, sometimes embroidered her version. In Janet Malcolm's delightful companion to his writing, Reading Chekhov, she points out that in 1988 Raymond Carver published a short story based on Chekhov's death, the details of which found their way into one biography as fact.
This doesn't do justice to a writer whose job, he once wrote, was to be an impartial witness. "I have no political, religious, philosophical Weltanschauung yet," Chekhov insisted. "I change it every month and so I have to restrict myself to describing how my heroes love, marry, have children, die and how they talk." Whenever I have read Olga's account of Anton's death, I have secretly longed for that impartial witness.
Now it turns out that there was one. At least, there was another witness: the young Russian student whom Olga asked to fetch Dr Schwoerer, and who returned to the Chekhovs' hotel room, bringing the oxygen Schwoerer had asked for. He remained in the room almost throughout the succeeding events. His name was Leo (or Lev) Rabeneck. His version of events was published in the Russian émigré journal Vozrozhdeniye in Paris in 1958 and has never appeared in English, apart from a dozen lines quoted in Reading Chekhov.
By sheer accident, I discovered that Leo Rabeneck's great-nephew, Andrew Rabeneck, was a friend of friends of mine, that he lived in London and had known his great-uncle (who had settled in Kensington) when he was a boy growing up in the 1950s. When we met, he gave me a copy of his great-uncle's 14-page typescript.
Although Leo waited 50 years to write down his memory of events - his account is dated September 6, 1954 - it is careful, precise, rich in the often prosaic details one might expect to be noticed by a young student curious about life (and death). It differs very significantly from Olga's version.
Rabeneck and his brother found themselves in Badenweiler in the summer of 1904. His brother had fallen ill in Berlin en route from Moscow to Switzerland, and a doctor had recommended a spell at Badenweiler to convalesce. By chance, the brothers took rooms at the Sommer Hotel, where they recognised Olga Knipper at breakfast because the Chekhovs and Rabenecks had both been guests at Lyubimovka, the estate near Moscow owned by Stanislavsky, director at the Moscow Arts Theatre.
Olga asked the brothers to drop in on her husband, who was "very homesick for Russia and for the company of his fellow countrymen". Olga apparently told Leo that Chekhov's health was improving. When he went to call on the writer, he wrote, "I was struck by the discrepancy between this seeming improvement - for he had a very good colour and was very sunburnt - and the impression he gave at the same time of general exhaustion." Chekhov coughed frequently and spat into a small spittoon which he carried in the pocket of his jacket.
Leo often visited Chekhov. He found him optimistic about his health and making plans to return to Russia, but rapidly his restlessness began to show. On June 29, he was writing to his sister Masha: "I just can't get used to German silence and calm… I've got a tremendous longing to go to Italy." Then, unexpectedly, a heatwave struck southern Europe - the worst weather for a man suffering from advanced tuberculosis. On July 12, Chekhov had the first of two heart attacks but still appeared to rally, then on the evening of July 14 events began to move rapidly.
By Rabeneck's account, he and his brother had been sleeping soundly after a long walk in the hills when he heard Olga calling him. He dressed and ran to the other end of Badenweiler to fetch Dr Schwoerer. On his return to the room Chekhov "was breathing with difficulty, and the doctor began to give him the oxygen". After a few minutes Dr Schwoerer whispered to Rabeneck to go downstairs to the hall porter and get a bottle of champagne and a glass. As medical etiquette dictated when all hope was gone, one doctor offered champagne to the other. Dr Schwoerer poured out an almost full glass, and… Chekhov took the glass of champagne with pleasure and, with his own particular and attractive smile, said: "I haven't drunk champagne in a long time!" He drained the glass in one valiant gulp. The doctor took the empty glass from him and gave it to me… At that very moment, as I was putting the glass on the table, a strange sound seemed to come from Chekhov's throat, something rather like the noise a water-tap makes when air gets into it, and there was a gurgling sound.
Rabeneck had no idea that Chekhov had died until the doctor let the writer's hand fall and asked him to tell Frau Chekhov it was all over.
I controlled my emotion with difficulty, and said to her in a low voice: "Olga Leonardovna, my dear, the doctor says that Anton Pavlovich has passed away."
For the first minute, poor Olga Chekhova seemed to be turned to stone, so terrible and unexpected was the blow. Then, in a sort of frenzy, she threw herself at the doctor and, seizing him by the lapels of his coat, she started to shake him, repeating through her tears: "Doktor, es ist nicht wahr, Doktor, sagen Sie es ist nicht wahr. [It's not true, doctor, say it's not true!]"
Olga's own account understandably omits her breakdown. But she describes grieving alone with her husband's body till dawn, and two dramatic interruptions - the big black moth, and the champagne cork flying out of the bottle "with a terrifying bang". Leo mentions neither moth nor champagne cork - as of course he wouldn't if Olga were alone.
His account, however, clearly says that she was not. Dr Schwoerer, he wrote, asked him to stay with Olga, so he carried two armchairs on to the balcony and persuaded her to sit with him. They sat out in the mild night, occasionally exchanging a few words about Chekhov, until dawn came, and early morning, and Dr Schwoerer returned.
Rabeneck's account of staying with Olga, and of the painful process of Chekhov's dying, has the circumstantial feel of truth. His version also conveys death's dull immobility. The body was not laid out properly and, in the morning, despite Schwoerer and Rabeneck's efforts at straightening it, "[we] did not quite succeed, as the dead man's head still remained slightly turned towards the side".
A wonderfully mundane moment followed the next night, when the body was removed to the local chapel under cover of darkness, so as not to upset the other guests. Instead of a stretcher, a laundry basket was brought, Rabeneck wrote, "but, to our astonishment, the basket was not, in spite of its length, long enough for the body to lie flat, and Chekhov had to be put in it in a half-sitting position… I walked behind the men carrying the body. Light and shade from the burning torches flickered and leaped over the dead man's face, and at times it seemed to me as if Chekhov was scarcely perceptibly smiling at the fact that, by decreeing that his body should be carried in a laundry basket, Fate had linked him with humour even in death."
Yet if Leo Rabeneck gives us a more honest, less self-interested description of Chekhov's dying than Olga Knipper does, we shouldn't get too hung up on factual accounts. The more important question is, where to find truth?
Chekhov found it in realism, writing on subjects he knew at first hand. He set out to make ordinary people freer by showing them the truth, in fiction. How would he have written his own death - the one event he could not describe from experience?
There is an unfinished Chekhov story, "Poor Compensation", in which Bondaryov, a stickler for order, is dying very slowly (like Chekhov), and the unspoken emotion among his family, particularly his wife who is desperate to escape to her lover, is a wish that he would just hurry up and get on with it. He also rehearsed his death in two published stories, "The Black Monk" and "The Bishop".
In the second of these, a bishop who has contracted typhus dies peacefully, without protest. In both, the characters experience visions as they die. Chekhov believed that everyone who dies sees something that they cannot tell. We cannot know what he saw. To that extent, every report of his death will always be invented and incomplete."
....
FINITA
From "SmallChekhov" Fall 2005:
The Second Chekhov, invisible, only the dying Anton sees him, hears and talks with that Chekhov, who will live after his death in 1904. Who lives now... Even in Fairbanks, Alaska.
(Letters edited by Lillian Hellman, as if she wanted to write about him?)
...
theatre theory
polka5.mid is playing, when he is dying and dead...
