Chekhov's Short Stories

Synthesis Historical and Cultural Context Chekhov is the unequivocal 19th century Russian master of the short story. He wrote during the second half of the twentieth century and served as the short story and playwright counterpart of novelists Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He worked as a doctor for most of his life and he based many of his writings on his experiences travelling through Imperial Russia investigating daily life. His relationship to writing originated from financial necessity but then blossomed into an artistic passion. He wrote during a time when Russian literacy trailed dramatically behind Western European nations. At the turn of the century, “only slightly over twenty percent of the total population” was literate.” Even during the twentieth century, “sixty percent of the population was illiterate in 1917” which was “more than in mid-eighteenth century England.” The demographics of literate Russians was skewed in the direction of men, who made up the majority of literate adults in Imperial Russia. Russian readers during the nineteenth century mainly lived in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the other major cities of the Imperial Empire.

Chekhov began publishing stories and sketches in Russian literary journals, such as Oskolki and Novoye Vremya. Literary journals dominated the reading circles of Russia and Chekhov gained fame and popularity across Russia. He won the famous Pushkin Prize for his efforts and started inspiring the world of literature with his innovative style and breakthroughs in realistic storytelling. He drew inspiration from the evnts of his life, including his travels, relationships, and family members.

Sources

(http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/stable/41044408?pq-origsite=summon&seq=4#page_scan_tab_contents)

Borny, Geoffrey, Interpreting Chekhov, ANU Press, 2006, ISBN 1-920942-68-8, free download

Chekhov, Anton, Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with Biographical Sketch, translated by Constance Garnett, Macmillan, 1920. Full text at Gutenberg.. Retrieved 16 February 2007.

Finke, Michael C., Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art, Cornell UP, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8014-4315-2

Wood, James (2000) [1999]. "What Chekhov Meant by Life". The Broken Estate: Essays in Literature and Belief. New York, NY: Modern Library. ISBN 9780804151900. OCLC 863217943.

Klawans, Harold L., Chekhov's Lie, 1997, ISBN 1-888799-12-9. About the challenges of combining writing with the medical life.

Chekhov's Letters On the one hand, there is physical weakness, nervousness, early sexual maturity, passionate desire to live and find the truth, dreams of work which, like the Steppe, have no boundaries; edgy analysis and lack of knowledge combined with the irrepressible flight of thought; and on the other hand - endlessly flat land, severe climate, a grey and severe nation with its hard and cold history, the Tatar yoke, bureaucracy, poverty, ignorance, rainy capitals, Slavic apathy, and so forth . . . Russian life beats the soul out of the Russian ... In Western Europe people die because their space is cramped and suffocating. In Russia they die because the space is an endless expanse. (Letters, vol. n, p. 190)4

“It seems to me that had I not had literature, I could have been a gardener”

So many dreams about the spring! I have planted sixty cherry trees and eighty apple trees. I have dug out a new pond that in spring will be filled with six feet of water. (October 21, 1892)

DEAR BROTHER MISHA, I got your letter when I was fearfully bored and was sitting at the gate yawning, and so you can judge how welcome that immense letter was. Your writing is good, and in the whole letter I have not found one mistake in spelling. But one thing I don't like: why do you style yourself "your worth- less and insignificant brother"? You recognize your insignificance? . . . Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intel- ligence, nature, but not before men. Among men you must be conscious of your dignity. Why, you are not a rascal, you are an honest man, aren't you? Well, respect yourself as an honest man and know that an honest man is not something worthless. Don't confound "being humble" with "recognizing one's worthlessness." . . .

"It is a good thing that you read. Acquire the habit of doing so. In time you will come to value that habit. Madame Beecher-Stowe has wrung tears from your eyes? I read her once, and six months ago read her again with the object of studying her and after reading I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants. . . . Read "Don Quixote." It is a fine thing. It is by Cervantes, who is said to be almost on a & level with Shakespeare. I advise my brothers to read if they haven't already done so Turgenev's t4 Hamlet and Don Quixote." You won't under- stand it, my dear. If you want to read a book of travel that won't bore you, read Gontcharov's "The Frigate Pallada."

I agree with what you say about the end of my story which you have cut out; thank you for the help- ful advice. I have been writing for the last six years, but you are the first person who has taken the trouble to advise and explain. . . I do not write very much not more than two or three short stories weekly.

I cannot put my real name on the book because it is too late: the design for the cover is ready and the book printed.* Many of my Petersburg friends advised me, even before you did, not to spoil the book by a pseudonym, but I did not listen to them, probably out of vanity. I dislike my book very much. It's a hotch-potch, a disorderly medley of the poor stuff I wrote as a student, plucked by the censor and by the editors of comic papers. I am sure that many people will be disappointed when they read it. Had I known that I had readers and that you were watching me, I would not have published this book.

It is not much fun to be a great writer. To begin with, it's a dreary life. Work from morning till night and not much to show for it. Money is as scarce as cats' tears. I don't know how it is with Zola and Shtchedrin, but in my flat it is cold and smoky. . . . They give me cigarettes, as before, on holidays only. Impossible cigarettes! Hard, damp, sausage-like. Before I begin to smoke I light the lamp, dry the cigarette over it, and only then I tegin on it; the lamp smokes, the cigarette splutters and turns brown, I burn my fingers ... it is enough to make one shoot oneself! I am more or less ill, and am gradually turn- ing into a dried dragon-fly.

There is little good I can say about myself. I write not what I want to be writing, and I have not enough energy or solitude to write as you advised me. There are many good subjects jostling in my head and that is all. I am sustained by hopes of the future, and watch the present slip fruitlessly away.

It is devilishly cold, but the poor birds are already flying to Russia! They are driven by homesickness and love for their native land. If poets knew how many millions of birds fall victims to their longing and love for their homes, how many of them freeze on the way, what agonies they endure on getting home in March and at the beginning of April, they would have sung their praises long ago! . . . Put your- self in the place of a corncrake who does not fly but walks all the way, or of a wild goose who gives him- self up to man to escape being frozen. . . . Life is hard in this world!

You have seen the Caucasus. I believe you have seen the Georgian Military Road, too. If you have not been there yet, pawn your wives and chil- dren and the Oskolki* and go. I have never in my life seen anything like it. It is not a road, but un- broken poetry, a wonderful, fantastic story written by the Demon in love with Tamara.

It is not the public that is to blame for our theatres being so wretched. The public is always and everywhere the same: intelligent and stupid, sympathetic and pitiless according to mood. It has always been a flock which needs good shepherds and dogs, and it has always gone in the direction in which the shepherds and the dogs drove it. You are in- dignant that it laughs at flat witticisms and applauds sounding phrases ; but then the very same stupid pub- lic fills the house to hear "Othello," and, listening to the opera "Evgeny Onyegin," weeps when Tatyana writes her letter.

You and I are fond of ordinary people; but other people are fond of us because they think we are not ordinary. Me, for instance, they invite everywhere and regale me with food and drink like a general at a wedding. My sister is indignant that people on all sides invite her simply because she is a writer's sister. No one wants to love the ordinary people in us.

I bought Dostoevsky in your shop and am now reading him. It is fine, but very long and in- discreet. It is over-pretentious.

Among other things I am reading Gontcha- rov and wondering. I wonder how I could have considered Gontcharov a first-rate writer. His "Oblomov" is not really good. Oblomov himself is exaggerated and is not so striking as to make it worth while to write a whole book about him. A flabby sluggard like so many, a commonplace, petty caricature without any complexity in it: to raise this person to the rank of a social type is to make too much of him.

I have not enough passion; add to that this sort of lunacy: for the last two years I have for no reason at all ceased to care about seeing my work in print, have become indifferent to re- views, to literary conversations, to gossip, to success and failure, to good pay in short, I have gone down- right silly. There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. I explain it by the stagnation in my personal life. I am not disappointed, I am not tired, I am not de- pressed, but simply everything has suddenly become less interesting. I must do something to rouse my- self.

Did you really not like the "Kreutzer Sonata" ? I don't say it is a work of genius for all time, of that I am no judge; but to my thinking, among the mass of all that is written now, here and abroad, one scarcely could find anything else as powerful both in the gravity of its conception and the beauty of its execu- tion. To say nothing of its artistic merits, which in places are striking, one must be grateful to the novel, if only because it is keenly stimulating to thought. As one reads it, one can scarcely refrain from crying out: "That's true," or "That's absurd." It is true it has some very annoying defects. Apart from all those you enumerate, it has one for which one can- not readily forgive the author that is, the audacity with which Tolstoy holds forth about what he doesn't know and is too obstinate to care to understand. Thus his statements about syphilis, foundling hos- pitals, the aversion of women for the sexual relation, and so on, are not merely open to dispute, but show him up as an ignoramus who has not, in the course of his long life, taken the trouble to read two or three books written by specialists. But yet these defects fly away like feathers in the wind; one simply does not notice them in face of the real worth of the story, or, if one notices them, it is only with a little vexa- tion that the story has not escaped the fate of all the works of man, all imperfect and never free from blemish.

There have been disturbances among the students on a giand scale here. It began with the Petrovsky Academy, where the authorities forbade the students to take young ladies to their rooms, suspecting the ladies of politics as well as of prostitution. From the Academy it spread to the University, where now the students, surrounded by fully armed and mounted Hectors and Achilleses with lances, make the follow- ing demands:

1. Complete autonomy for the universities.
2. Complete freedom of teaching.
3. Free right of entrance to the university without distinction of religious denomination, nationality, sex, and social position.
4. Right of entrance to the university for the Jews without restriction, and equal rights for them with the other students.
5. Freedom of meeting and recognition of the students' associations.
6. The establishment of a university and students' tribunal.
7. The abolition of the police duties of the in- spectors.
8. Lowering of the fees for instruction.