“I have seen and experienced a great deal, and it has all been very new and interesting to me not as a literary man, but as a human being,' Anton Chekhov, who was born on this day in 1860, wrote from the road.
In the winter of 1897, when the consumptive Anton Chekhov was living in Nice on doctor’s orders, he was asked by a Russian editor to write a story “on a subject taken from life abroad.” Chekhov declined, explaining, “I am able to write only from memory, I never write directly from observed life. I must let the subject filter through my memory, until only what is important and typical in it remains in the filter.
A year later, Chekhov was no longer so comfortable with his artist’s freedom. At the end of 1889, he abruptly dropped literature and began to make preparations for the six-thousand-mile journey to Sakhalin, at the easternmost end of the continent.
Chekhov arrived at Sakhalin on July 11th, and remained there for three months, travelling all over the island and using the device of a census to gain entrance into prisons and settlers’ huts. Chekhov set about his work with characteristic energy and zeal. He managed to interview thousands of people; along with the convicts and settlers, he interviewed the indigenous Gilyaks and Ainus. By October, he was more than ready to leave.
Chekhov’s decision to write a book of nonfiction about his journey to Sakhalin, instead of allowing the trip to develop into fiction in his interior darkroom, may have been influenced by the fact that he had already written a masterpiece of fiction about a journey. This was the long story “The Steppe” , the first Chekhov story to appear in a literary journal , and the work that catapulted him into the ranks of major Russian writers.
had never all his life been conscious of anything which could, like a boa-constrictor, coil about his soul and hold it tight. In all the numerous enterprises he had undertaken in his day what attracted him was not so much the business itself, but the bustle and the contact with other people involved in every undertaking.
Yegorushka remembered that when the cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white tombstones and crosses were dotted with splashes of red like bloodstains. Under the cherry trees in the cemetery Yegorushka’s father and granny, Zinaida Danilovna, lay sleeping day and night. When Granny had died she had been put in a long narrow coffin and two pennies had been put upon her eyes, which would not keep shut.
There is a kind of anthropomorphism within anthropomorphism here. As the writer attributes words to the boy that the boy would not utter, the boy attributes thoughts to the grass that the grass could not “think.” In rendering the boy’s excruciating empathy with the grass, it is almost as if Chekhov were mimicking his own act of sympathetic imagination.
In the short story “The Schoolmistress,” written nine years later, we see how the compression that made Chekhov so uneasy in 1888 was now his modus operandi. It is another emblematic story of a journey, but this one is the mere return day trip of a spinster schoolteacher, Marya Vassilyevna, from the town where she goes to get her monthly salary. The teacher is one of the pathetic drudges who taught in Russia’s district schools in the nineteenth century .
a man of forty with a listless expression and a face that showed signs of wear, who was beginning to look old, but was still handsome and admired by women. He lived in his big homestead alone, and was not in the service; and people used to say of him that he did nothing at home but walk up and down the room whistling, or play chess with his old footman. People said, too, that he drank heavily.
Hanov turns off, and Marya’s obsessions once again take over her thoughts. Her bare life, Chekhov notes, “was making her grow old and coarse, making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she were made of lead. . . . No one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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