Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories: A Norton Critical Edition edited by Cathy Popkin

My name is Matthew and I am a Norton Critical Edition addict.

Hardly a term has gone by without my assigning students at least one NCE, both when I was a high school teacher and especially now that I'm teaching college students. (This term, it's The Red Badge of Courage.) I have been known to change syllabi each term just to try out new NCEs with students. I have bought NCEs for myself even of books that I already owned in multiple other editions. I have all four editions of the NCE of Heart of Darkness because the changes between them fascinate me. (I've been meaning to write a blog post or essay of some sort about those changes. I'll get to it one day.)

Anton Chekhov is my favorite writer, a writer whose work I've been reading and thinking about for all of my adult life. The Norton Critical Editions of Chekhov's stories and plays published in the late 1970s remained unchanged until Laurence Senelick's Selected Plays came out in 2004, and then, finally, last year Cathy Popkin's Selected Stories. Senelick's collection is good, and probably all that the average reader needs, though I'm more partial to Senelick's true masterpiece, the Complete Plays, which is awe-inspiring.

Popkin's Selected Stories is something more again, and easily the best single-volume collection of Chekhov in English. This is the place to start if you've never read Chekhov, and it's a great resource even for seasoned Chekhovians. I'll go further than that, actually: Because of the critical apparatus, this is a great resource for anyone interested in fiction, translation, and/or writing; and it is one of the most interesting Norton Critical Editions I know, almost as impressive as my favorite NCEs, Things Fall Apart and The English Bible.

A Decade of Archives 9: 2004

This is the ninth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

2004 was the first full year of The Mumpsimus. It was also the year with the largest number of posts: 319. (These days, I'm able to get out about 100 or so in a year.) And it was the year when a relatively large number of people began to notice what was going on here. That initial attention is what made me think this was not, perhaps, just a useless lark. A lark, yes, and largely useless, yes, but maybe not completely so...

The year began with a post about returning: I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the site at the end of 2003, having written one post in December and none in November. The first paragraph of that post indicates that I was still thinking of this as a site about, primarily if not exclusively, science fiction. The reason for my absence, I said, was, "my life has been busy and I haven't been reading nearly as much SF as I would like."

I made up for the absence quickly, with numerous posts, some of them with real substance. The first was a comparison of Sergei Bondarchuk's film of War and Peace with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. The rest of January 2004 covers most of the major topics that the site would continue to explore for the next 9 years: a review of a novel by a writer not known as a genre writer (Genesis by Jim Crace); a plea for a writer who deserves more attention (Judith Merril); a naive but (surprisingly!) not entirely embarrassing post on sexism and reading; somewhat literary theory-ish posts on characterization and narrative (which, despite their naivety — my education in lit theory was entirely autodidactic [read: haphazard, shallow] at that point — are still recognizably in the direction of ideas I now hold); a review of Lucius Shepard's extraordinary 9/11 story "Only Partly Here"; a look at Tim Burton's movie Big Fish; a mention of one of my favorite writers, David Markson; and, finally, a post that mentions Samuel Delany's Dhalgren in the context of a discussion of the baleful influence of the 3-act structure for screenplays. Clearly, it was winter in New Hampshire and I needed something to keep my mind occupied other than just teaching high school!

The rest of the year goes on in a similar manner. I hadn't look back on it all until now, and was a bit scared to — I haven't been thrilled with a few of the later years on the whole, so had no reason to assume the earliest years were of any value whatsoever. There's drivel, certainly, but also good stuff, at least in comparison to a lot of what came later.

World on a Wire Update, Plus Vanya

Consumer-citizens of the United States, rejoice! Criterion has announced that they will be releasing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's wonderful science fiction epic World on a Wire in February. Diligent and obsessive readers of this here blog may remember that I swooned over World on a Wire both here and at Strange Horizons back in September, and I remain as swoonful toward it as before. The DVD/Blu-ray will include a 50-minute documentary about the film by Juliane Lorenz, one of Fassbinder's most frequent collaborators and the head of the Fassbinder Foundation. Lorenz has created documentaries for some of the other DVD releases of Fassbinder's films in the U.S. and elsewhere, and I've enjoyed all of the ones I've seen, so am looking forward to this one quite a bit.

And in equally magnificent — indeed, perhaps even more magnificent — news, Criterion will also be releasing Louis Malle's final film, Vanya on 42nd Street. It's one of my favorites, a movie that has been important to me since the day I first saw it at the Angelika in New York during my freshman year at NYU — accompanied by Carol Rocamora, whose Chekhov course I was taking at the time, and for whom I later did work as a production manager and a copyeditor. My VHS of the film is wearing out, and it will be a real thrill to replace it with the Criterion Blu-ray. I know of only one other film of Chekhov's work that affects me as deeply as some of the great stage productions I've seen — Nikita Mikhalkov's Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, which is a much freer adaptation of Chekhov (created from elements of his first play, Platonov, and some short stories). Vanya on 42nd Street uses David Mamet's adaptation of a translation of Uncle Vanya, and while there are vastly better versions (Carol Rocamora's, for instance!), the synergy of the actors along with director André Gregory is pure magic. I disliked Wallace Shawn as Vanya for a while, but have grown to love him in the role. And Larry Pine as Dr. Astrov gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. And Phoebe Brand and Jerry Mayer are charming and brilliant and sad and hilarious. And— Well, I'd better wait. In February, I'm sure I'll want to write about the details, and about watching the film again, for what will be something like the 15th time (I used to watch it at least once every 6 months, and used it with a couple of classes years ago).

If you can't wait till February, Amazon has the film available online, and the old DVD is back in stock after having been unavailable for years (it seems to be still unavailable outside the U.S., alas). I expect Criterion will do an excellent job with the remastering of the image, and though it's not a film that has the sort of striking cinematography that World on a Wire does, nonetheless the intimacy and immediacy of the staging will, I expect, benefit from the new image and higher resolution.

Alice Munro and the Case of the Chekhovian Dames

[update: for some reason I originally attributed the New Republic article discussed below to Ruth Gordon rather than Ruth Franklin.]

I adore (adore, I tell you!) the stories of Alice Munro, as anybody who's looked at my bookshelves can attest, and I adore (adore, I tell you again!) the stories of Anton Chekhov, who actually takes up considerably more space on my shelves, but that's just because he wrote hundreds of stories, a bunch of plays, and all in Russian, which means, of course, that I absolutely must own every possible translation just to be able to compare.

Anyway, I discovered (via Scott) that  Ruth Gordon Franklin over at The New Republic has claimed that Munro just writes about women and Chekhov didn't do this and why won't this Munro woman explain herself, eh?  Writing primarily about men is just fine, everybody does that, no need to comment, but writing primarily about women is ... "not necessarily a flaw".  It would be understandable if she were a lesbian, of course, because what else do they know, and anyway those Canadians are ... weird...  And Chekhov, by the way, was neither a Canadian nor a lesbian, though he was a little bit weird, but he was also Russian, and we know what they're like from James Bond movies, so it all makes sense.

Sorry, I'm being deeply unfair in reductio-ing Gordon's ad for absurdum.  There are lots of things I could say about Gordon's premises about gender and writing, about characters and writers, about seeing what you want to see, or about Chekhov's complicated attitudes toward and relationships with women, but I'm really only in the mood to be facetious.  I haven't read any of Munro's or Chekhov's stories for a little while now, so I'm going to go back to them.  Maybe I'll start with this book:

Falling Into Oblivion without a Parachute

It ain't healthy to get too metacommentarial, but sometimes the zeitgeist blows such urges your way, and you neglect to duck. Or I do, at least. Thus, I have managed to get into some good conversations with a few different friends recently about our particular preferences when it comes to how we write and read book reviews, criticism, blog posts, etc. (out of laziness and a general aversion to taxonomy, I'm going to use the word "review" here to mean almost any commentary on books and other stuffs). Some of the conversations were sparked by thoughtful posts by Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen (e.g. here and here and here), some were sparked by reviews that annoyed one or both of us who were interlocuting (I know you and your friends just talk, but if you had the sorts of friends I have, you, too, would interlocute), and some were sparked by just saying to each other, "So what do you do when..." The ideas have caused me to keep thinking all week, and so I thought I would put some down here and see where they lead.

1. THE ARROGANCE OF WRITING ANYTHING FOR AN AUDIENCE
Larry's brave for having tackled the question of what a quality book review looks like, and I think it's a good exercise for anybody who writes about books to try now and then, but at this point it's not something that really interests me, because I've learned that my own ideas on the subject are mostly prejudices and are as full of exceptions as rules. I could, I suppose, lay out all the things I try to do when writing about books, movies, and tchotchkes, but I'd rather let the writing speak for itself. And anyway, who am I to offer pronouncements?

It takes a tremendous arrogance to write anything, and yet in most of the writers I know the necessary arrogance is tempered by a deep insecurity. For me, the insecurity wins as often as the arrogance does, and so there are as many days when I feel utterly mortified that I have ever put a sentence of my own in front of the world as there are days when I want somebody out there to pay attention to my sentences. Such feelings only grow more complex when it comes to reviewing -- what, after all, is more arrogant than spouting off in public about a book somebody has spent tremendous amounts of time and energy writing? (What's more arrogant? Asking somebody to spend hours of their life reading your book...)

There's tons of advice out there for neophyte writers, but the best advice I ever got when I was younger and more idealistic came from Calder Willingham, whose wife was head of the English department at my high school. Willingham was one of the few professional writers I encountered as a kid (the others were Jim Kelly and Lee Modesitt), and he got frustrated by my idealism. We mostly wrote letters back and forth to each other, disagreeing about movies and books quite vehemently, and some of his sentences burned their way into my brain, particularly these: "You say you have to write. Why? Who is holding a gun to your head?" Everybody else in my life had always praised the activity of writing as a wonderful and ennobling one, but Willingham knew better, knew that it could be nothing more than an extension of the ugliest egotism (he'd suffered insults from some of the most prominent writers of his generation, including Norman Mailer, who called him "a clown with the bite of a ferret ... [who] suffers from the misapprehension that he is a master mind"), and he knew that even when writing doesn't bring out the worst in people that it can consume an otherwise worthwhile life in an activity that, more often than not, leads to perpetual disappointment and the likelihood of almost all the effort disappearing into an abyss of silence.

(Here's my advice to neophyte writers: Memorize Hugo von Hoffmannstahl's "Lord Chandos Letter". And, for that matter, Chekhov's "The Bet".)

And yet we all keep writing stuff. I'm grateful for it all, too, and not the least for reviews and commentaries -- I love reading thoughtful writings about books, and often enjoy such things more than I enjoy reading the books being written about. To put it clinically, it fascinates me to see how people interact with texts. The nature and history of publishing interest me for similar reasons.


2. THE FIRST PERSON
People seem to have strong opinions about the place of first-person pronouns and personal anecdotes in reviews and criticism. This is an argument happening not just among editors and writers, but among teachers and students -- my high school students invariably have been told by their teachers before me that they must at all costs avoid first-person pronouns in their papers. I tell them not to worry about it, and instead to consider what is relevant or irrelevant for their purpose and audience. Remember Thoreau:

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

If I were teaching a class on reviewing, I'd share a review by Borges in which the great master writes more about himself than the book under review. Why can Borges get away with this? The easy answer is: Because he was a genius. The slightly less easy answer is: Because what he has to say is more interesting and illuminating than anything else he might say in the review, and it still tells us, in a sly way, about the book. Achieve that once in your career as a writer and you should be able to die happy.

Part of the reason so much first-person reviewing is annoying is because it doesn't establish that the writer's point of view is an interesting one, and so it just comes off as narcissistic. The narcissism of great writers is mitigated by their art; the narcissism of banal writers overwhelms any virtues.

It's all about what works. Writing is an attempt to communicate, sure, but it should also be an attempt to communicate in an interesting way. Functional writing might get the job done, but we seldom want to end there. An interesting point of view can be as powerful as an interesting style. Both can also be a distraction, particularly when the writer seemingly has little to say.

Judging whether a writer actually has something to say can be more difficult than it may appear. Academic writing in the humanities often gets criticized for saying very little in as obfuscatory a way possible. Much deserves the criticism, but I still grow suspicious whenever someone starts complaining about academics and jargon, partly because it's an old argument (see also some of the posts in The Valve's symposium on Theory's Empire), partly because it smacks of anti-intellectualism ("I can't understand this, therefore it must be BAD!"), and partly because it seems like a distraction from the real problem, which tends to be a a matter of purpose and audience. If your intention is to write for a general audience, then it's self-defeating to use a specialized vocabulary, and specialized vocabularies in the wrong context are as likely to seem smug and shallow as they are to convey any meaning. Exceptions require real skill -- I think Samuel Delany's nonfiction collections are successful more often than not at using a mix of specialized vocabularies for a general audience because essays and interviews collected in his books tend to be from a wide variety of publications, and the mix of original audiences for pieces that usually have some overlapping subject matter helps the reader make a transition from the more accessible pieces to the more difficult.

An "objective" tone is no more inherently good or bad than a "personal" tone. The more I read, the less patience I have for objective tones -- indeed, the more suspicious I am of them. Too often, the pose of objectivity is a disguise for shallow thought, because it's a rare statement that can be universally true. I may be an inveterate postmodernist, but you probably don't need to be as plagued by doubts as I am to realize that the truth of almost any statement we make is subjective and contingent -- it is a claim to truth at a particular time and from a particular perception.

The most annoying sort of "objective" writing (and it is hardly objective at all) is, for me, the sort that wants to claim great authority for sweeping statements. Oracular pronouncements belong in epic poetry; elsewhere they're usually pompous. Some people have built up their reputations by intoning their words as if those words contain some special glimpse of the Truth, but this is a performance of personality, not a way to advance an argument or contribute knowledge to the world. The writings of my own that I find most insufferable now are the ones in which I took what I've come to think of as the Old Man of Olympus position, a tone of certainty and universal truth. It's disingenous. It's why most manuals on "how to write" are drivel. It's why statements such as "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation" are useless. It's why I find people like Harlan Ellison occasionally entertaining, but more often obnoxious and certainly less worthwhile than more quiet, thoughtful, less certain, less combative personalities. Certainty is the province of fools. (He says with certainty.)


3. INTENTIONS AND AUTHORS
I keep seeing people say that a good book review judges how well a writer has achieved her or his intentions with the book. That seems to me to be more what a writing workshop should do -- there, you can ask the writer, "So what did you intend?" (Not that the writer always knows.) I'd rather read and write reviews that show what the book made the reviewer think about, because that's knowledge the reviewer can claim, whereas an author's intentions are generally both obvious and hidden -- obvious in the broadest sense ("I wanted to write a historical romance") and hidden in most other senses ("I hoped that by creating patterns of beautiful words I could resolve some of my feelings about poodles") -- and obvious things don't lead to interesting reviews, while hidden things are inaccessible. If the writer wanted to create an effect in the reader's mind -- and that's what writing does, after all -- then the reviewer will speak to that by presenting what it is the writing did in her or his mind, which is all a reviewer can truly speak to. I sometimes fall back on the fiction of saying a particular piece of writing does x, y, or z to "the reader", but I hope when I do so the fiction is obvious -- "the reader" is always and inescapably me.

I'm all for the death of The Author. (One of my favorite authors is Barthes, I must admit. Another is Foucault.) "The Intentional Fallacy" is an old idea, and one not without its critics. Reginald Shepherd says things much better than I could here, and the conversation in the comments shows how complex the subject can become. (And yes, for the moment I'm pretending most of those complexities don't exist. We have reached the section of the post in which my doubts threaten to consume me like a cute, furry creature in the mouth of a carnivore.)

For all practical purposes, for most readers a writer's name is simply a handy organizing principle, a way to group some texts together. A reviewer's name, then, is a sign attached to a document about a document that has another sign attached to it as a byline. Booby traps of delusion and deception await when we pretend otherwise. The age of the internet has resurrected The Author to some extent, because now we can read their blogs and make comments and sometimes, if we're brave, even email them, creating levels of intertextuality previously impossible (unimaginable!) ... but texts remain texts, not people.


3a. THE FIRST TRY
Here's what I said in an email to a friend, and I don't think I've much improved on it above: "The problem with most fiction, actually, is that the writer's intentions are all too clear (so, alas, they are mostly discernable), which is just no fun at all. I want more Brechts who intend to foment revolution and instead end up creating rich and nuanced characters and situations. The writer's intentions matter during the editing process, but once the book is out there, the book is what matters -- that's part of what you're arguing, but you're going about it in a way that is not logically sustainable, because it seems to assume either that we have knowledge of the author's mind while creating the text or that the writer matters more than the reader. A great review is not great because it shows us what the writer intended, but because it gives us a particularly compelling chronicle of the reader's experience of the text. That is why discussions of the writer and not what is written are irrelevant and annoying."

4. LOST ART
Ideally, we write everything with an equal determination to commit art. Practically, this seldom happens. It's more common for writers to dash off reviews and spend years writing one short story rather than vice versa. Perhaps that's how it should be. There is something suspiciously parasitic about reviews -- the image of the critic who is incapable of creating anything himself, but who nonetheless writes about what others have created. And yet isn't all writing parasitic, sucking blood and sustenance from traditions of language and culture? Borges imagined reviews of imaginary books, and Lem wrote books of them. More broadly, fictional nonfiction has many traditions -- I found the following passage from Carmen Boullosa's review of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas exciting:

As Bolaño acknowledged in an interview with Eliseo �lvarez, published posthumously in 2005, Nazi Literature in the Americas "owes a lot to The Temple of Iconoclasts by Rodolfo Wilcock...and The Temple of Iconoclasts owes a lot to A Universal History of Infamy by Borges, which makes sense, since Wilcock was a friend and admirer of Borges. But Borges's book, A Universal History of Infamy, owes much to [a book by] one of Borges's great teachers, Alfonso Reyes, Retratos reales e imaginarios (Real and Imagined Portraits), which is a gem. And Reyes's book owes a lot to Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob, which is where this all began. These are the aunts and uncles, parents and godparents of my book." I would add one more relative: Novelas antes del tiempo (Novels Before Time), a volume by the delightful Spanish writer Rosa Chacel, which consists of notes for novels, all charmingly related, that the author thought about writing but never did.

If only our book reviewers were more creative, more playful and artful! Do any of us have the courage to be so? The risk of failure becomes so much greater -- the risk of looking like an idiot in public, which is the great risk in writing anything, but we minimize the risk by writing in safe, hand-me-down modes. To aspire to art means to open yourself to a far greater possibility of failure -- indeed, perhaps the failure is inevitable and unavoidable, and that's why everybody quotes Beckett. Perhaps more accurate than the "Fail better" quotation would be this:

Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I'm far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That's where I'd go, if I could go, that's who I'd be, if I could be.

5. CODA
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry, 18 November 1924:

What I was going to say was that I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; and perhaps to loose it one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that.

Anton Chekhov, from a letter to Alexey Suvorin, 30 May 1888 (translated by Rosamund Bartlett):

It's time for writers, especially writers of real artistic worth, to realize, just as Socrates in his time and Voltaire in his, that in fact nothing can be understood in this world. The crowd thinks it knows and understands everything; and the stupider it is, the broader the compass of its perceived horizons. But if writers whom the public trusts could only bring themselves to admit that they understand nothing of what they see, that would be a great advance in the realm of thought, a great step forward.

Dambudzo Marechera, from "The Black Insider":

"Since reading is an industry in its own right somebody somewhere is getting the profits. Publishers, critics, lecturers, second-hand booksellers and shoplifters. It's a complete study of how parasites and their hosts exist. At the same time there are all the rest of them breathing down the writer's neck telling him he must write in a certain way and not in another way; and there are those who think that because they have read what has been written have got a perfect right to say just about anything to the writer and he is supposed to take it calmly. Every man is a walking collection of aphorisms. The thing about a story lurking round every corner, and a novel resting uneasily inside every human skull. Nonsense. Apart from the initial spark of creativity in the best and worst parts of the first book, the writer's road is littered with crumpled contracts, bleeding symbols, and broken teeth, all in the wake of big business. The hidden persuaders are well dug in behind the ramparts and they know exactly how to stimulate that kind of phoneyness which a complacent reading public takes for its own good taste. At the same time you get the heels crunching down on your spine to make you think that objectivity is possible where such things as language rule. Roland Barthes has tried to blow up that balloon and quite successfully too, though they have, of course, an in-built eject-mechanism and he will probably find himself falling into oblivion without a parachute."

Liz, who was staring out the window, said noncommittally:

"Those paratroops are still coming down. Something big is going on over there."

"The most desperate of all writers"

Victor Shklovsky, from Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, translated by Shushan Avagyan:

In the long story "My Life", Chekhov wrote about a bad architect who designed buildings so badly, planned the interiors so poorly, the facades were all so hideous that people simply got used to the style of this person.

The style of failure becomes the style of the town.

Chekhov hated expositions and denouements; he is the one who revived the two concepts.

I'll repeat once more about how he wrote to his brother saying that the plot must be new and a story isn't always necessary.

By plot he meant the false theatre, the poetics of that theatre, especially the expositions and denouements of plays -- things that the viewer is anticipating with pleasure.

It's like a shot of morphine.

Literature became a place of false denouements, false expositions, false successes, the successes of individual people.

The young boys -- the fugitive convicts who turned rich and cried on the graves of their comrades who didn't fall under the protection of the ancient plot, the happy ending.

Even Dickens, after his discovery of ancient plot, got so bloated that he resembled an old sunken boat.

Chekhov is the most desperate of all writers, he is the most straightforward one.

He doesn't want to soften, loosen the threads of life, he doesn't want to be capable of bending them to make a false happy end.

For another excerpt, see here.

Chekhov and Perception

I promised a couple of weeks ago to write some posts about Anton Chekhov to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death, and so, to at least begin keeping that promise, here are a few small thoughts about Chekhov and the nature of perception within some of his works.

Consider the stories I said in that first post I would discuss: From the early stories written as little more than comic filler in newspapers ("The Telephone", "After the Fair") to the somewhat more developed stories soon after ("Dreams", "Kashtanka"), to the mature masterpieces ("Gusev", "Ward No. 6"), one of the central subjects of Chekhov's short stories is the way characters perceive the world, and how their perceptions can conflict.

Ideological critics have often twisted themselves into all sorts of interpretive contortions to prove that Chekhov stands for one philosophy or another in his work, but while his biography and his letters prove him to have been deeply humane and thoughtful, even his least significant stories and plays keep from endorsing any one position. This is one reason Chekhov can be frustrating to readers who first encounter him. He was profoundly interested in people and their interactions, an interest that often kept him from creating stories with traditional plots, though as such stories as "Ward No. 6" show, he was perfectly capable of weaving complex and satisfying plots. Plot was, though, for him a tool to illuminate the characters, and if it wasn't a necessary tool for a particular story, he dispensed with it. Perhaps "dispensed with it" is too extreme, for though Chekhov's work can certainly feel plotless, it is not necessarily so. The plot simply becomes less about external events than about encounters, both social and psychological. There is plenty of drama in Chekhov, but often the obvious drama is not particularly important or resonant, while a suggested drama is. (The Cherry Orchard, his final play, which is now 100 years old, is a perfect example of this sort of effect. Anyone who thinks the play is about the sale of a cherry orchard, or even the effect of the sale on Ranyevskaya and the other characters, will likely find the play uninteresting. Once you realize it is about various people coming to grips with time, change, and mortality, then it starts revealing some of its wonders.)

Perception is everything in Chekhov, whether it's being used for a purely comic effect as in "The Telephone" (a marvelous sketch about the perils of new technologies) or for more dramatic effect, as in the other stories. Chekhov is often cited by die-hard writers of realism, but he was only partially a realist, in that he was, indeed, interested in "the real world", yet he was willing to use many different techniques and styles as he tried to capture some sense of what it means to be alive. "After the Fair" is only one of many early stories that does not use a standard narrative structure, but rather utilizes the ability of fiction to imitate other forms of writing to convey meaning. I'm especially fond of that particular story because it tells so much so efficiently -- scraps of paper with a brief introduction framing the situation, all of which could have been fodder for novels by numerous other writers. And yet to the reader willing to commit her or his imagination to the story, the reader willing to let the fragments grow into a shadow and the shadow into a small universe, it is an emotionally affecting piece of writing. Not tremendously unique in terms of its situation, by any means, but the nature of the telling, the placing of the reader in the same position as the off-stage wife, is clever and touching -- more so than many stories twice its length.

In "Kashtanka" we have a story told from the point of view of a dog, a story that has been popular both with children and with critics of all types, who desperately try to place some sort of grand interpretation on it (for a marvelous chronicle and critique of these critics, see the first chapter of Kataev's If Only We Could Know). The story doesn't need any grand interpretation, though: it just needs readers who, like the children it is so popular with, will sympathize with the tale being told. If we do so, we might look a little differently at the world for a few minutes.

"Dreams" and "Gusev" are two favorites of mine, though I must admit to being utterly incapable of writing about them with any depth. They astound me too much, and they move me too deeply. Were every story in the world to disappear but those two, I would probably not mind very much. Both are about perception, about suffering, about living, and both are written so carefully that even the clunkiest translations convey something beautiful. The ending of "Gusev", in particular, seems to me to be one of the greatest bits of prose ever written, not merely for its language, because I don't read Russian and so can't judge the actual language, but for what it accomplishes within the scope of the story itself. A body is thrown overboard, and then the universe expands for the reader, since previously the story has been often claustrophobic in its intensity. It's a tour de force just for that opening up, but then when we begin to think how the choice of ending the story this way relates to the philosophical problems of the story ... the effect is breathtaking.

"Ward No. 6" is a somewhat more literal exploration of perception, and some critics have slighted it for being contrived. But contrived stories don't get much better than this one, where the mechanics of the plot work smoothly and flip not only the circumstances of some of the characters, but the reader's expectations, and do so in a way that isn't gimmicky, but is, rather, quite disturbing. Regardless of how many times I've read this story, I always find something unsettling in it that I didn't notice before, while things that bothered me before, details that lodged in my brain like tacks, seem more benign. The last time I read it, it was Sergey Sergeyitch's pious praying in the chapel over the body that got me: the blind loyalty to an irrational god while faced with the evidence of the irrationality ... and yet is it really irrational? In some ways, I thought, this is one of the most rational stories ever written. Coldly, horribly so. And so we have a rational god sanctifying -- but then the two final, horribly abrupt sentences shut down my overthinking. Two tremendously matter-of-fact sentences. Two of the loneliest sentences I know.

Anton Chekhov, an introduction

I always forget birthdays and every other date of any significance, so I owe a debt to Mark Sarvas for noting that we are fast approaching the 100 anniversary of Anton Chekhov's deathday.

Chekhov is, simply, the one writer whose works I would not want to live without. Hundreds, even thousands of other writers are important to me, but Chekhov is the writer to whom I always return, the voice and imagination I trust the most, the dreamer whose dreams never fail to enchant me.

Thus, even though I'm not a proponent of numerology, I now have an excuse to write about him here, because I have wanted for a while to address the common perception of Chekhov as a realist, an idea I think limits his accomplishment. While certainly his work borrows much from both the Naturalists as a group and from realism as a mode of writing, the influence of the Symbolist movement on his stories and plays should not be discounted.

I'm writing off-the-cuff at the moment, and need to spend some time doing a bit of research, so let me simply offer some introductory material by and about Chekhov for readers less familiar with his work. I'm not an expert (I don't read Russian), merely a fan.

Constance Garnett's translations of Chekhov's stories have all been put online, which is a tremendous service, because though the translations are somewhat stilted, and Garnett's knowledge of Russian was not at the level of modern translators, scholars such as Donald Rayfield have said that her style and Chekhov's work well together.

If you want to prepare for some of what I expect to be writing over the next few weeks here, in a series of occasional posts about Chekhov, read the following stories online (I've mostly chosen quite short pieces, though the longer, later works are in many ways the height of Chekhov's achievement in fiction):

"The Telephone"
"After the Fair"
"Dreams"
"Kashtanka"
"Gusev"
"Ward No. 6"

Garnett had less of a talent for plays, and her translations, as well as all the other public domain translations of Chekhov's plays, can be painful to read. Two translations of the plays offer different, but accurate versions: those of Carol Rocamora and Paul Schmidt. The Schmidt translations are deliberately contemporary in their idiom, the Rocamora more "classical" (I should note my own bias here: I owe my love of Chekhov to a class I had with Carol Rocamora at NYU, and I did proofreading and editorial work on the second and third volumes of her translations of the plays).

Chekhov's letters are fascinating as well, though only a few editions offer unedited and faithfully translated versions. The best edition currently available in the U.S. is Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought.

There are numerous biographies of Chekhov, and Ernest Simmons's 1962 edition remains the most readable and interesting, though Donald Rayfield's more recent biography benefited from access to numerous materials Simmons didn't have. Unfortunately, Rayfield's biography is turgidly written.

Hundreds of critical works exist, and I've only read a small selection of them. I have been most impressed by Richard Gilman's book on Chekhov's plays, Vladimir Kataev's If Only We Could Know, and James McConkey's To a Distant Island. (The latter is an extraordinary mix of criticism, history, memoir, and fictional devices -- a beautiful book.)

For now, let me leave you with this, from the Simmons biography, about an idea Chekhov had for a play shortly before his death:

...both Olga [Knipper, his wife] and Stanislavsky mention that Chekhov outlned roughly to them the theme of a new play he had in mind. The hero was to be a scientific man. He goes off to the far north because of his disillusion over a woman who either does not love him or is unfaithful to him. The last act was to present an ice-bound steamer. The hero stands alone on the deck amid the complete stillness and grandeur of the Arctic night. And against the background of the northern lights, he sees floating the shadow of the woman he loves.