Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong.
Chekhov the downcast tubercular writing magnificently mournful plays
about the declining aristocracy on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution,
the king of the country whose national anthem is the minute-long sigh.
The picture lasts because it’s what we want from our 19th-century
Russians: gravity, fatalism, melancholy, minds wracked by the Big
Questions. We wouldn’t want this kind of writing today—too un-ironic,
too free with emotion, too un-relativist, too naive in thinking that the
Big Questions have resolution at all. But we love the echo.
This isn’t the person I think of when I think of Chekhov. I think of
an 1890 photograph of a 30-year-old man returning by steamer from Asia.
He’s no rake on a grand tour—he’s just completed a journey that would be
arduous even today: a humanitarian visit to a penal colony in the
Russian Far East. But neither is he a brow-furrowed Marxist scribbling a
manifesto as his train races back to the capital. No, he has taken the
long way home: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, about which he has
written, to a patron and friend, “When I have children, I’ll say to
them, not without pride: ‘Hey, you sons of bitches, in my day I had
sexual relations with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and you know where? In a
coconut grove on a moonlit night. . . . ’” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/everything-you-think-you-know-about-chekhov-is-wrong/
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen