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Chekhov’s 150th anniversary | ||
Tags: Literature | Russian | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6484 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 1 of 2 31 January 2010 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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29.1.10 was Chekhov's 150th anniversary.
I've seen foreign media mention this, so I won't repeat what has been said there. Instead I'd like to add another perspective. I've found an excellent and brief article in Russian, titled "Classic common" [not of noble birth], which I'll retell here. 150 years are far enough to not see anyone who has seen him (his widow, for instance, passed just 52 years ago), but enough for him to be similar to us. Pushkin and Gogol rode in coach and wrote with goose feather. Chekhov rode in trains, spoke over phone and shaved with a safety razor. On one hand he ends the row of classic writers of XIX century, on the other hand opens the movement of modernists and lefties. This may seem strange that the accentuatedly old-fashioned Chekhov be avant-gardist but even such extreme avant-gardist as Mayakovsky didn't call to "drop him off the steamboat of modernity" (Mayakovsky's expression - Sib.), but spoke of him not nicely, but with a strong approval: "Chekhov was the first to understand that a writer bends a nice vase, but what get's put inside - wine or slops - doesn't matter." Not mistakenly he was being called an extreme modernist who carefully simulated a realist. A provintial common Chekhov, who with hard work became one of the most influential intellectuals of the time, didn't want to have anything in common with bohemian artists that were abundant in his environment, just his elder brother Nikolay, a painter, for example. Those took poses and showed off. And why just them? Didn't Pushkin and Gogol show off themselves? By their writings one can reconstruct the details of their personal life. Chekhov instead didn't want to show off at all. In 1890, when he got enough money, he makes a long trip. Not to Europe, but a long and hard trip through Siberia to Sakhalin, (when there was no Transsiberian railway yet - Sib.). There, in 3 months he alone made a census of the whole population of this Russian island, then de facto a big jail. This was enough to put him among great discoverers, still he himself tried to shade the scale of his deed. Till his last days he didn't quit medical practice, even when earnings let him buy estate. In early morning, when his family yet slept, he saw men from Melikhovo, and presented this to his family as a hobby. But this wasn't Tolstoy's show-off, it was a natural way of life he built consciously. Once he said: "you have, to drop by drop, squeeze a slave out of yourself". Rarely is quoted the preceding paragraph of 29-years-old Chekhov's letter of January 7th 1889:
These words don't sound like those of a young man, nor his stories make an impression of a young author, despite that his best years were his 30-s. At the same time it explains why his books are still being read and played. Edited by Siberiano on 31 January 2010 at 5:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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