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Anton Chekhov

Tim Parks

in Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations between Them

This chapter examines the tension between involvement and withdrawal that characterized so much of Anton Chekhov's life and work, as well as the milieu in which he lived and the way he positioned ... More

This chapter examines the tension between involvement and withdrawal that characterized so much of Anton Chekhov's life and work, as well as the milieu in which he lived and the way he positioned himself in relation to friends, family, and reading public. Chekhov often felt trapped in the company of other people, but boredom and feelings of exclusion became equally oppressive once he was alone. “Freedom, complete and absolute freedom,” was the supreme value, something the author never tired of repeating. The chapter analyzes some of Chekhov's short stories, including “A Blunder,” “A Misfortune,” “Grisha,” and “The Robbers.” In all these stories the decision to love, whether it be marriage or an affair, is always an error and always leads to a prison from which there is no safe escape; yet love is powerfully seductive and life a prison of boredom without it.Less

Intimate Irritations: Living with Chekhov at the Dacha

Melissa L. Caldwell

in Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia's Countryside

This chapter investigates the significance of place to the dacha experience. Anton Chekhov truly understood and best captured the nature of dacha life in all of its intensely visceral, passionate, ... More

This chapter investigates the significance of place to the dacha experience. Anton Chekhov truly understood and best captured the nature of dacha life in all of its intensely visceral, passionate, and often conflicted glory. Dachas were a recurring theme in his work, and in particular were used as a setting for his critical commentaries on the pressing social issues of the day: the rise of populism, the consequences of the emancipation of the serfs, the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization, and the class tensions heightened by these changes. Maxim Gorky's play offers a glimpse into a typical day in a dacha community at the turn of the twentieth century, as his middle- and upper-class dachniki wander aimlessly into and out of the woods. Chekhov and Gorky are not just narrating fictional dachniki, but rather are telling the story of every dachnik.Less

Of Chekhov and Garlic

in The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature

This chapter examines Anton Chekhov's portrayal of the Jews in his novels “Tina” and “Skripka Rotshil'da.” It explains that Chekhov's correspondence attests to the consistent function of “the Jews” ... More

This chapter examines Anton Chekhov's portrayal of the Jews in his novels “Tina” and “Skripka Rotshil'da.” It explains that Chekhov's correspondence attests to the consistent function of “the Jews” in his imagination as a negative marker for a wide range of phenomena and suggests that “Jewishness” looms large in Chekhov's professional self-image. The chapter also argues that Chekhov is an example of a writer who must negotiate his imaginative dependence on the generative model of “the Jews” in an ideological context which stigmatizes overt public expressions of Judeophobia and anti-Semitism as socially and culturally retrograde.Less

Nikita Mikhalkov: European but Not Western?

Condee Nancy

in The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema

Mikhalkov’s films constitute Russian cinema’s most ambitious reclamation project. While several films, including 12, address contemporary subjects, his work more typically crafts an elegiac and ... More

Mikhalkov’s films constitute Russian cinema’s most ambitious reclamation project. While several films, including 12, address contemporary subjects, his work more typically crafts an elegiac and turbulent Russia of 1877–1937, simultaneously distinct from the West, yet recognizably European, with a leisured, pastoral enchantment that the West has putatively lost. The prerevolutionary estate becomes barely distinguishable from the Soviet dacha; the intensely charged enactments of one era come to stand in for those of another, as if they were recurrent or interchangeable. His films seek to draw audiences into a world where the morally ineffectual landowning class blurs into the Soviet ineffectual nomenklatura, lending moral anomie an aura of nostalgic, aristocratic allure. Property seizure becomes a paradoxically reassuring disruption of estate and dacha life, suggesting a cycle of imperial regeneration. Though often indebted to Chekhov, using his work to invite participation in a consensual fiction where class distinctions are sharpened, yet gentility is available with the purchase of a cinema ticket; historical rupture is reimagined as a newly coherent continuum; social dispersal is rescripted as endearing melodramatic excess.Less

Ivan Dykhovichnyi’s The Black Monk (1988): Madness, Chekhov, and the Chimera of Idleness

Alyssa DeBlasio

in The Filmmaker's Philosopher: Merab Mamardashvili and Russian Cinema

While Mamardashvili was teaching at Moscow’s Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors in the 1980s, he was also traveling back and forth between Moscow and Tbilisi. His series of lectures on ... More

While Mamardashvili was teaching at Moscow’s Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors in the 1980s, he was also traveling back and forth between Moscow and Tbilisi. His series of lectures on novelist Marcel Proust, which he delivered at Tbilisi State University as The Psychological Topology of the Way, was one of his most expansive lecture cycles. In this chapter, I will focus on a single movement in Mamardashvili’s Proust series: his discussion of mental illness and its implications for human consciousness. This chapter focuses on Ivan Dykhovichnyi’s 1988 adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Black Monk (1893), a novella that Mamardashvili regularly referred to in his lectures in the early 1980s. Dykhovichnyi was a student of Mamardashvili’s at Moscow’s Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors in 1980-1982. For Mamardashvili, Chekhov’s novella about an exhausted scholar with visions of grandeur was a literary exemplar of the unity of consciousness and, by extension, the indivisibility of selfhood. Mamardashvili’s vision of the self did not conform to the Soviet state’s approach to mental health, which sought to eradicate vices of the mind so as to perfect political and social consciousness through medical intervention.Less

‘God forgive me, Tchehov, for my impertinence’: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Copying

Melinda Harvey

in Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

This chapter reexamines allegations that Katherine Mansfield copied her story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ from the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. It argues that Mansfield's copying of Chekhov's story ... More

This chapter reexamines allegations that Katherine Mansfield copied her story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ from the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. It argues that Mansfield's copying of Chekhov's story was not an isolated incident but instead part of a continuum, a compositional practice that privileged copying over pure invention. Harvey contends that copying was ‘central to Mansfield’s writing process and, ultimately, artistic and personal vision’, and that her writing practice involved much more ‘notetaking, sketching, drafting and revising’ than John Middleton Murry’s mythologising of Mansfield as a solitary genius has allowed. Harvey identifies three modes of copying – appropriation, translation and emulation – that disrupt conventional linear approaches to understanding influence: a precursor may influence a descendant, rather than the other way around.Less

‘More a Russian than a Dane’: the Usefulness of Hamlet in Russia

Peter Holland

in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics

Ivan Turgenev's essay ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ was originally presented as a lecture in 1860, the year Anton Chekhov was born. This chapter examines how William Shakespeare's Hamlet penetrates ... More

Ivan Turgenev's essay ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ was originally presented as a lecture in 1860, the year Anton Chekhov was born. This chapter examines how William Shakespeare's Hamlet penetrates Russian culture by focusing on Chekhov's 1879 letter to his youngest brother, Mikhail Pavlovich Chekhov, recommending some reading, including ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’. It also looks at Oswald LeWinter's comment on Turgenev's essay and the implication and embedding of Hamlet into Russia's social and political history. It first outlines the history of Russian translations of Hamlet and the social contexts for Turgenev which gave the play a specific cultural meaning. It then considers how the play has functioned recently in theatrical productions in Eastern Europe, in the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact.Less

“Everything Here is Accidental”: Chekhov’s Geography of Meaninglessness

Anne Lounsbery

in Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917

This chapter argues that, for Anton Chekhov, certain particularities of place matter in a way they often do not for other writers. It considers where, how, and how much. In other words, the chapter ... More

This chapter argues that, for Anton Chekhov, certain particularities of place matter in a way they often do not for other writers. It considers where, how, and how much. In other words, the chapter asks if Chekhov's provinces stand for the provinces, or if they stand for something else. A previous chapter has argued that for Gogol the provinces never really stand for the provinces, since his symbolic geography never allows us to imagine that a better life might be found in some other real place. But Chekhov's provinces, notwithstanding their clearly and even insistently symbolic import, are often locations that we could imagine pinpointing on a map of Russia: the specificities of place do matter in Chekhov's world, if in subtle ways. And perhaps most importantly, a place's meanings can change over time.Less

Performance as the Distribution of Life: From Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari

Andrew Murphie

in Deleuze and Performance

This chapter aims to establish the relation between contemporary VJing and the works of Anton Chekhov and Aeschylus through the philosophical thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It ... More

This chapter aims to establish the relation between contemporary VJing and the works of Anton Chekhov and Aeschylus through the philosophical thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It examines the way in which theatre and performance can incline themselves towards a wider distribution of difference in life and argues that the VJing event is a democratising performance-form that engages in combat with the normative configurations of image-culture. It argues that it is more important to evaluate the role of performance in directly adding to, or diminishing, life as lived than to evaluate it in terms of the success or failure of its representation of life.Less

Jealousy, Illness, and Diary Rescue

Barbara Lounsberry

in Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read

Can a diary help heal and restore? Emphatically. In her 1921 diary Woolf faces two foes. The first is physical and mental exhaustion, a danger that will arise periodically across her life. In 1921, ... More

Can a diary help heal and restore? Emphatically. In her 1921 diary Woolf faces two foes. The first is physical and mental exhaustion, a danger that will arise periodically across her life. In 1921, Hogarth Press work takes the time previously given to her diary—to her peril. In early January, she gives over her diary’s “casual half hours after tea” to Russian lessons for Hogarth Press translations of Chekhov, the Tolstoys, and more. The Woolfs also devote the year to printing Bloomsbury works, making the months ripe for rivalry—for literary envy of several shades. Woolf falls ill after hearing of James Joyce’s “prodigious” novel, Ulysses; however, once more she turns to her diary for rescue: to medicine herself. The diary becomes an anodyne, “a comforter” or “reliever of pain.” During this time, Woolf links arms with (and salutes) another literary doctor: Anton Chekhov. She draws the title of the only short story collection she publishes in her life, the 1921 Monday or Tuesday, from Chekhov’s Note-book[s], published the same month by the Hogarth Press.Less

The Stone: No Way Home

Jeremi Szaniawski

in The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox

This chapter talks about The Stone (1992). The Stone is preoccupied with the motifs of death and a return home. With its minimalistic plot and sedate, cotton-like atmosphere, the film conveys a sense ... More

This chapter talks about The Stone (1992). The Stone is preoccupied with the motifs of death and a return home. With its minimalistic plot and sedate, cotton-like atmosphere, the film conveys a sense of dreamy routine. The Stone is a film about the sentience of things and dead persons, the simple pleasures of senses found again, but only for a very short while, their impermanence eliciting sadness rather than hedonistic relish. In many ways, the emotional heart of the film lies in this sensory epiphany, and its most powerful scenes demonstrate the “added value” of sound multiplying the power of evocation present in the image. Memory is a strong engine of the film's poetics, but the predominant mood is hardly one of successful reunion with things past. In the end, the film resolves none of its questions or narrative knots, exhibiting the paradox of the impossibility of the return, momentarily made flesh through Anton Chekhov's character and through the practice of repetition and re-working proposed by the cinematic medium itself.Less

Through the opaque veil: the Gothic and death in Russian realism

Katherine Bowers

in The Gothic and Death

This chapter examines nineteenth-century Russian writers who drew on the Gothic in order to explore the experience of death, existential terror, and the possibility of an afterlife within the bounds ... More

This chapter examines nineteenth-century Russian writers who drew on the Gothic in order to explore the experience of death, existential terror, and the possibility of an afterlife within the bounds of literary realism. In Turgenev’s story ‘Bezhin Meadow’ and Chekhov’s sketch ‘A Dead Body’, Gothic language and imagery create a narrative frame that contextualizes an encounter between peasants and a traveller focused around a discussion of death. This chapter argues that the Gothic is juxtaposed with folk belief in these works, to underscore that both the peasants’ dvoeverie and educated Russia’s interest in natural sciences, materialist philosophy, and the pseudo-science of spiritualism represent attempts to systematise and explain the unknown. The Gothic mediates the tension between science and faith, the irrational and the prosaic, and the abject and the mysterious, while allowing these ruminations to remain ambiguously unfinalised for the reader.Less

My Ballets (Continued)

Maya Plisetskaya

in I, Maya Plisetskaya

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya reflects on her five decades as a ballerina. She marked her fiftieth year in the ballet world by dancing The Madwoman of Chaillot in the French city of Rennes in ... More

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya reflects on her five decades as a ballerina. She marked her fiftieth year in the ballet world by dancing The Madwoman of Chaillot in the French city of Rennes in Brittany on April 2, 1993. It was exactly fifty years previously that she had been accepted into the Bolshoi Ballet troupe. She performed Anna Karenina at the Bolshoi more than a hundred times and danced it in other countries as well. Two of her other performances were for Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, which she danced around sixty times and was staged in the Swedish city of Göteborg, and Lady with the Dog, which she danced on her sixtieth birthday on the Bolshoi stage, along with Carmen Suite.Less

Liberalism, Modernity, and Semi(o)tic Chaos

in The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature

This chapter examines the confluence of the intra- and intertextual functions of “the Jews” as holders of interpretive keys to authorial imagination, and as mediators in the dialogical rapports ... More

This chapter examines the confluence of the intra- and intertextual functions of “the Jews” as holders of interpretive keys to authorial imagination, and as mediators in the dialogical rapports between writers and texts in four different stories. These include Ivan Turgenev's “Zhid” and “Neschastnaia” and Anton Chekhov's “Tina” and “Skripka Rotshil'da.” The chapter analyzes these stories in the context of the personal and professional dilemmas of their authors, and in relation to contemporary works where the authors articulated their social, cultural, and aesthetic preoccupations in the language of “Jewish” difference.Less

American Beginnings: The European Legacy

Tom Ryan

in The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions

This chapter gives a brief outline of Sirk’s life after his emigration to the US and analysis of the early films he made there. It offers commentary on the ways in which this work reflected as much ... More

This chapter gives a brief outline of Sirk’s life after his emigration to the US and analysis of the early films he made there. It offers commentary on the ways in which this work reflected as much on where he was coming from as it did on where he now found himself, “an émigré filmmaker who was working in the US but whose heart and mind were still based elsewhere”.Less

Introduction: The Western Wall of Russian Literature

in The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the imagination and depiction of the Jewish persona in Russian literature. The book explores the representation of Jews in ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the imagination and depiction of the Jewish persona in Russian literature. The book explores the representation of Jews in literary fiction by placing them within the continuity of the Jewish vocabulary of difference, not only in Christian, but also in post-Christian Europe. It argues that most historical facts of European Jewish experience are not the sources of the “Jewish” image but its cultural role as the paradigmatic Other after Christianity lost its legal and social hold on European societies. The book also analyzes the relevant works of several Russian writers including Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Isaak Babel.Less