![]() ![]() Forget that, early on, Chekhov made his living through humor pieces, a Dickens-in-reverse who got paid only if he came in under 100 lines. But just as few could be as funny or bawdy amidst the sobriety because. He is the very picture of joy and vitality.Ĭhekhov was moved by great passions-I can’t think of a Russian great with more skin in the game. He’s grinning like a man who’s just risen from a choice bed, his hair mussed and his rumpled goatee clearly Leonardo di Caprio’s secret inspiration all these years. Chekhov is dressed like a cross between a peasant, an Eastern guru, and a rake: A fedora high on his forehead, an open-necked shirt, loose white pants. In the 1890 photo, the sun seems high, and Chekhov takes shelter on a bench alongside an acquaintance. kept striking me on the hand with her fan and saying, ‘Oh, you naughty man!’” but I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles! One of them. At a rural wedding at which he served as best man, as he wrote to his sister Maria, he “saw a lot of wealthy marriageable girls. Chekhov likes his ladies-his Lydias-of the capital sometimes he goes out with Lydia Yavorskaya, and sometimes Lydia Avilova. ![]() This isn’t a sodden aberration when no one is looking. 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. But neither is he a brow-furrowed Marxist scribbling a manifesto as his train races back to the capital. 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. I think of an 1890 photograph of a 30-year-old man returning by steamer from Asia. This isn’t the person I think of when I think of Chekhov. 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. The picture lasts because it’s what we want from our 19th-century Russians: gravity, fatalism, melancholy, minds wracked by the Big Questions. 6.Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong.Ĭhekhov 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 other is the philosopher type who believes that global change is needed, and until that happens, nothing is worth doing. One belongs to an active, broad-minded person who considers it important to help people, even with minor things (which Chekhov himself believed in as a doctor, he treated sick peasants for free at his estate). In the story, Chekhov pits two natures against each other. She is very industrious, works at a school, teaches peasant children, tries to set up a medical center for peasants… Her hands-on attitude gets under the artist's skin. The elder sibling is the complete opposite. The younger sister, youthful and dreamy, admires the artist’s paintings, and he falls in love with her. One day he meets a widow with two daughters, who live next door in a house with a mezzanine. ![]() The story is told from the viewpoint of an artist who leads an idle life, whose only interests are walking and drinking tea. The House with the Mezzanine, 1896Ī still from 'The House with the Mezzanine' movie Reading the Gospel and church books is boring for him, and it is only through meeting real people and understanding their experiences that the meaning of life can be glimpsed. In the course of this (very) short story, the student undergoes an incredible transformation. And the student realizes that she truly empathizes with Peter’s anguish, and the tale resonates with her despite the passing of centuries… ![]() Out of boredom, he begins to retell them the biblical story of Peter’s denial of Christ and suggests that it must have been a similarly cold and awful night. On the way, the student encounters two widowed peasant women from his village: a mother and daughter. In a gloomy mood, he starts to imagine how the bitter wind must have blown at the time of Rurik and Peter the Great, and has been blowing for a thousand years, during which time nothing has changed, the same poverty, longing and ignorance still abound. When a student of the Theological Academy is walking home, the cold sets in abruptly and a strong wind begins to blow. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |