Examples of Confusion

Jacob and his fiends had prospered in school, and most of all at the university, in a way they never had since then. Now five years had passed and were used. All of them were in some way disappointed as they had not been in school, where each had been able to do what he truly wanted to do. The school had been for them a kind of society very different from the adult society for which it was supposed to prepare them.

—Delmore Schwartz, “The World Is a Wedding” (via suitablesubstituteforwit)

First Lorrie has a new story in The Paris Review and now this!

(Source: tylercoates)

“I would go a step further: Chekhov is a writer for patient adults who are indifferent to action, color and finality in their fiction.”

So wrong, except the finality part. Lives don’t end when a short story ends, they keep going.

“Nor did Chekhov write stories to inspire or buck up: “Helplessness, hopelessness, misunderstanding and defeat are chief among his themes,” wrote the essayist Joseph Epstein”

Which great stories are meant to “buck up?” Name one. Chekhov said it best, “How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.” He also wisely said, “A writer is not a confectioner.”

“If love crops up in a Chekhov story, it is virtually certain to be mowed down by selfishness or insensitivity or staleness.”

Well, isn’t that exactly what happens in, like, life? Although, I’d disagree that those three attributes are what mow down love in Chekhov’s stories. For the most part, it is the societal constraints and mores of the time and place - Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In arguably his most famous short story, The Lady With the Little Dog, his narrator writes: “…and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.” The characters love is doomed not because of selfishness or staleness or insensitivity, but because of just the opposite of those things.

“But he’s not everyone’s cup of tea. His contemporary, N. K. Mikhailovsky, wrote, “Questions without answers, answers without questions, stories with no beginning or end, plots with no denouement…. Mr. Chekhov should turn on his work lamp in his study to light up these half-lit characters and dispel the gloom that conceals their silhouettes and contours.” The writer E.J. Dillon thought Chekhov’s characters were “fickle, spineless, drifting people,” and the poet Anna Akhmatova criticized Chekhov’s world as a “uniformly drab…sea of mud with wretched human creatures caught in it helplessly.”

Who are these people? The writers who cite Chekhov as influences I’ve read. Also, Anna Akhmatova, whomever you are, Chekhov’s world is our world. He is right.

“One way to approach Chekhov might be to listen to audio recordings of his stories; Stephen Fry and Kenneth Branagh, both of whom have beautiful voices, have recorded some of his work.”

Really? An approach to Chekhov would be to listen to him on tape? Read by two British actors? The British voice surely would give Chekhov some Shakespearean weight. That’s why Chekhov must be boring - he’s not British enough!

“Readers might also want to come at Chekhov obliquely—through the work of some of the many writers who have been called “the American Chekhov.” These include Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor and Lorrie Moore.”

I love these writers, but, to “come at” Chekhov through them as opposed to them through Chekhov?  I’m not even sure how that would work.

I suppose Cynthia Crossen had to write something, and not just answer B.R. from Toronto’s question, “I hate Chekhov…What aren’t I getting?” with “Everything! You idiot!”

 And, yet, her entire answer to the article’s question “Chekhov: Brilliant or Boring?” seems to be culled from Wikipedia. Wouldn’t it have been appropriate to include more than one direct quote on writing from Chekhov himself? Because she didn’t, I will: