ANTON CHEKHOV

(1860-1904)

BACKGROUND

• Russian
• father of the modern short story
• father of the modern play
• grandfather = serf, bought his freedom & his sons’
• mother = Yevgeniya, excellent storyteller
  • --> gift of narrative
  • --> learned to read & write
• father = Pavel, grocer, religious zealot, tyrant (at least to older children)
  • Anton = 3rd of 6 children
  • terrorized by his father
• 1868-76: 8+, sent to local grammar school
  • average student, mischievous
  • attended provincial theater
  • wrote short comedic stories
  • wrote serious play (Fatherless)
• 1875/6: 16, father goes bankrupt, threatened w/debtor’s prison, moves to Moscow to find work
  • mother, younger children, Anton = left behind; loses home to local bureaucrat posing as a family friend (major theme)
  • 1876: she & children leave for Moscow
  • Anton remains to finish grammar school
    • supports himself through tutoring
• 1879: passed final exams, moved to Moscow, med. school scholarship (Moscow University Medical School)
  • supports self & family by writing short comical pieces for sub-literary magazines
    • Peterburskaia gazeta (from 1885) & Novoe vremia (from 1886)
    • 2 full-length novels during this time (The Shooting Party, 1884)
      • mostly trash, some gems
      • BUT development of common themes
         

 BACKGROUND

• 1880-83: 1st published pieces, under various pseudonyms
  • Medicine = #1, Literature = #2
  • literature = “my mistress”
  • planned to use his real name for future medical publications
• 1882: meets & begins to write for the owner (Nicolas Leykin) of the best St. Petersburg comic weekly
  • (Fragments) -->Chekhov’s better work
• 1884: was graduated from medical school
• 1884-92: practiced medicine
• 1885+: better, more serious writing
  • The Petersburg Gazette & New Times
  • publishes under his own name
  • regular contributor to St. Petersburg respectable daily newspaper (Novoe vremya)
  • material = better
    • that which was rejected by other comic weeklies
    • no restrictions in length OR tone
• 1886-87: most productive years of career
• 1887: needs vacation (Steppes & city of youth) b/c of increasing family debt (brothers’, which he covered), bad health (TB), the effort of writing to keep pace with family expenses; returns refreshed, inspired
  • marks artistic maturity
  • Ivanov
• 1888: Pushkin Prize, for In the Twilight (collection of stories)
• 1888-90: more plays
  • flop = The Wood Demon (1889)
  • popular successes = four one-act farces, The Bear, The Proposal, A Tragic Role, The Wedding
• 1889: elected a member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature (same year brother died of TB)
• 1889-92: surveyed 10K prisoners on Sakhalin Island penal colony (north of Siberia) & traveled Asia, Middle East, India
• 1892: full-time writer
  • his better, more memorable stories
    • “Neighbors” (1892), “Ward Number Six” (1892), “The Black Monk” (1894), “The Murder” (1895), and “Ariadne” (1895)
    • so-called "trilogy" of stories
      • “A Hard Case” (1898)
      • “Gooseberries” (1898)
      • “Concerning Love” (1898)
  • theme: a failure to grasp the essential joys of life by not taking advantage of opportunities that come only once in a lifetime, for fear of making a mistake (CA)
  • The Seagull (1895 play)
    • too much symbolism (dead gull = hopes betrayed; too much Henrik Ibsen)
    • flouts literary conventions
      • --> no starring role, no increasing (but decreasing) action, no climax, no intense emotions
• 1897: tuberculosis (TB) begun in 1884
  • moved to Yalta
  • wrote his more famous stories
    • “The Man in a Shell,” “Gooseberries,” “About Love,” “Lady with the Dog,” & “In the Ravine”
• 1900: The Three Sisters
• 1901: marries Olga Knipper, actress who had performed in his plays
• 1902: The Cherry Orchard = “represents the perfect embodiment of that exquisite balance of tragedy and farce with which Chekhov so skillfully imbued his mature plays” (CA)
• 1904: dead 3 years after marriage
• * unknown internationally during his lifetime
  • post-WWI, when his works were translated in to English
  • 1920’s: big on English stage (Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare)
     

THEMES

• b/c of personal experience

  • --> the loss of a home to a conniving middle-class upstart

  • -->“Late-blooming Flowers” (1882 short story)

  • & The Cherry Orchard: A Comedy in Four Acts (1904, last play)

• the obsequiousness and petty tyranny of government officials

• the sufferings of the poor as well as their coarseness and vulgarity

• the vagaries and unpredictability of feeling

• the ironical misunderstandings, disillusionments, and cross-purposes that make up the human comedy in general

• (more serious themes of mature works)

• starvation (“Oysters”)

• abandonment (“The Huntsman” 1885)

• remorse (in “The Misfortune” 1885)
   

THEMES

later works:

• life’s meaninglessness & a healthy skepticism

  • (but never cynicism)

  • toward the possible fulfillment of human hopes

• Chekhov = doctor in A Dreary Story?? (denied by AC)

  • professor's pessimistic & cynical opinions on life, on the academic professions, and on the theater

• in AC’s works: “a rare occasion in his fictive universe when expectations of happiness--especially in matters of the heart--are fulfilled” (CA)

• AC’s least likeable characters:

  • “indifferent to deeper human feelings, or else so benumbed by suffering and privation as to have died emotionally” (CA)……“MISERY”

• pragmatist, scientist/doctor:

  • belief in scientific progress

• the major themes of Chekhov's career placed in unresolvable but organic tension:

  • the intrinsic value of opening oneself up to the beauty of the world and the love of others

  • and the foolishness of such openness in the face of the inevitable destruction of beauty and love

  • (Cherry Orchard)

STYLE

• Tolstoy influence:
  • occasional experimentation with the Tolstoyan philosophy of pacifistic resistance to evil
• ironically comic vein (earlier work)
• early plays = histrionics and verbosity
• later plays = understatement, anticlimax, and implied feeling
• b/c of his grandfather’s serfdom, b/c of the hardships of his youth
  • --> "Chekhov was well-acquainted with the realities of nineteenth- century lower-middle-class and peasant life,
    • an acquaintance that was reflected objectively and unsentimentally in his mature writings” (online-literature.com)
    • realistic portrayal of poorer classes’ conditions
• b/c of his medical school training
  • --> APATHY (“the apathy many of his characters show towards tragic events” -- ibid)
    • medical influence on plays:
    • “clinical study”: stories drawing on Chekhov's medical expertise and depicting psychosomatic illness or the psychological effects of physical disease or distress
    • Oysters, Typhus (not fully developed until later)
    • The Name-Day Party (woman’s miscarriage)
    • --> medical accuracy of his characters’ conditions (such as the woman’s labor pains, above)
    • --> objectiveness
• *dispassionate, non-judgmental, objective, unsentimental author
  • strict authorial detachment
  • “his refusal to pass judgment on even his most despicable characters” (CA)
  • this objectivity = violation of the canons of Russian literary taste
    • should represent bad people as bad (not w/o commentary, as AC does)
    • should show good people as good (not self-righteous, as AC does)
  • AC’s response to criticism @this:
    • “‘To think that it is the duty of literature to pluck the pearl from the heap of villains is to deny literature itself. Literature is called artistic when it depicts life as it actually is.... A writer should be as objective as a chemist’” (CA)
    • “As for trying to instruct his readers, which was the principle task of any great writer according to contemporary critics of Russian culture, he later wrote to Suvorin in a letter printed by Yarmolinsky, ‘You are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct posing of a question. Only the second is obligatory for an artist.’” (CA)
  • lack of social commentary
  • no politics
• * wrote quite quickly (short story in an hour or less)
• * several 100 stories
• b/c of comic weeklies experience (?)
  • --> “first modern master of a spare and economical prose style in fiction” (CA)
• * “‘biography of a mood’” (CA):
  • show more atmosphere/mood by evoking through concrete details the emotions at work in a character's mind
  • esp. in “The Huntsman”:
    • “One of the earliest examples of what D. S. Mirsky in his Modern Russian Literature essay labeled "biography of a mood" appears in "The Huntsman," which presents a roving peasant who refuses to go home with his wife because he prefers the freedom of a sporting life--as a "shooter" for the local landowner--and cohabitation with another woman. Here, as so often in Chekhov's mature stories, there is no real plot, no dramatic emotional flare-up, only a moment of confrontation which radically condenses the life histories of both husband and wife. In this moment nothing changes in their relationship or promises to change. Details of the scene--the heat and stillness, the road stretched "taut as a thong"--reflect both the hopeless stagnation of the couple's marriage and the tension of this encounter.” (CA)
  • “to render life from within the minds of his characters through the registration of significant details and to portray experience without preaching or attitudinizing” (CA)
  • “his use of atmosphere as ‘an ambiguous mixture of both external details and psychic projection.’”
    • influence on Western writers: “In all these regards Chekhov had an immediate and direct impact on such Western writers as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson; indirectly, most major authors of short stories in the twentieth century, including Katherine Anne Porter, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, and Raymond Carver, are in his debt” (CA)

STYLE

• dramatic influence:
  • “With respect to twentieth-century drama, few playwrights with so small an oeuvre have wielded such vast influence over the course of literary history. With Ibsen and Strindberg, Chekhov pioneered what Magarshack in Chekhov the Dramatist called the "indirect action" play:
  • he used understatement and broken conversation, off-stage events and absent characters as catalysts of tension, but retained a strict impression of realism.
  • He went further than his contemporaries in his rejection of the classical Aristotelian plot-line, in which rising and falling action comprise an immediately recognizable climax, catastrophe, and denouement.
  • In Chekhov's mature plays, realism extended to the strict coincidence of stage time with real time, so that it was the elapsed time between acts, sometimes extending over months or years, that showed the changes taking place in characters. Thus, as Martin Esslin pointed out in an essay appearing in A Chekhov Companion, "the relentless forward pressure of the traditional dramatic form was replaced by a method of narration in which it was the discontinuity of the images that told the story, by implying what had happened in the gaps between episodes."
  • At the same time, Chekhov's realism was not a simple transcription of life but a highly structured portrait subtly held together by complex networks of verbal imagery, repeated sounds and phrases, ambiguously suggestive or simply enigmatic props--all of which made up what has come to be known as the "subtext" of a Chekhov play. (CA)
• MORE dramatic influence:
  • George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter
  • (subtext on) Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, William Inge
  • (looks forward to) Bertolt Brecht’s “estrangement technique” & Samuel Beckett’s dramatic stasis and derealization (Th. of the Absurd)
• Chekhov the conundrum:
  • 4 different Anton Chekhovs:
    • “‘optimist, pessimist, decadent, [and] scientific impressionist’” (CA)
  • master ironist
  • “lyricist & realist, comedian & tragedian, ironist & progressive” (CA)

• “MISERY”:
  • “biography of a mood”:
    • vivid description
    • geographic landscape = emotional landscape
  • character = numbed by grief, dead emotionally (reborn as tries to tell grief)
  • clinical study of misery, grief, Depression, loneliness
  • opposition: desperate need to tell story/share grief BUT futility, foolishness of doing so
    • pessimism, meaninglessness