russian literature

Podcast • April 3, 2014

Reading Chekhov V: “The Teacher of Literature”

We're reading and gabbing about a Chekhov story called "The Teacher of Literature," published in 1894; Chekhov was 34 years old. It's a story about a young man in love, at a crisis in his young marriage. I'd put this one in the folder of Chekov stories that ask essentially: "Should I stay or should I go?" Can I get out of the village, out of a loving relationship, so as to fulfill my dream and satisfy the mysterious urgings of my soul? The protagonist Nikitin in the story here might be teaching today in Lincoln-Sudbury High School out in the leafy western suburbs of our very own Boston.

Why, again, are we reading Anton Chekhov — the doctor, playwright, story writer, model man who died young in 1904? He’d been the toast of twilight Russia before the revolution, and as we keep discovering again, he was a modern in so many ways, a contemporary of ours, really. I begin this living-room session around a master-story, “The Teacher of Literature,” with a fragment from great Vladimir Nabokov. In his lectures at Cornell in the 1950’s on Russian literature in general, the great Vlad goes elegantly overboard. First, on what Chekhov did and then how he did it:

It is not quite exact to say that Chekhov dealt in charming and ineffectual people. It is a little more true to say that his men are charming because they are ineffectual. But what really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov’s heroes he recognized the type of the Russian intellectual. The Russian idealist, a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets. Chekhov’s intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action. A man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe but unable in his private life to do anything useful, frittering away his existence in a haze of utopian dreams, knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a hum-drum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything, a good man who cannot make good.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, page 253 in the Harcourt paperback edition, 1981.

And how did he do it? Nabokov was at pains to say that Chekhov was not a great stylist, not a man of effects like Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. He dealt in plain, man on the street language. Nabokov says:

The magical part of it is that in spite of his being quite satisfied with man in the street among words, the word in the street so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud. The variety of his moods, the flicker of his charming wit, the deeply artistic economy of characterization, the vivid detail and the fade-out of human life, all the peculiar Chekhovian features are enhanced by being suffused and surrounded by a faintly iridescent verbal haziness.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, page 253 in the Harcourt paperback edition, 1981.

Why do we read Chekhov aloud? Mainly because, as we’ll discover again today, something comes alive in the spoken word, specially in the voices of actors, that you don’t read on the page. We’re reading and gabbing about a story called “The Teacher of Literature,” published in 1894; Chekhov was 34 years old. It’s a story about a young man in love, at a crisis in his young marriage. I’d put this one in the folder of Chekov stories that ask essentially: “Should I stay or should I go?” Can I get out of the village and chase my dream in Moscow? Can I leave — and Chekhov writes about women and men in this dilemma — the one I’m with for my soul’s sake? The protagonist Nikitin in the story here might be teaching today in Lincoln-Sudbury High School out in the leafy western suburbs of our Boston metropolis.

March 6, 2014

Reading Chekhov IV: “The Student”

We're in my living room again with a group of friends drinking wine and reading Chekhov, the great short story writer of Russia and the world. We're reading a famous story called "The Student." It is for me not only the most perfect, postage-stamp little dose of Chekhov's moods, alternately bleak and ecstatic; it also sets a complex reflection on betrayal, hardship, history and hope in an unforgettably beautiful scene.

We’re in my living room again with a group of friends drinking wine and reading Chekhov, the great short story writer of Russia and the reading world. We love him for so many reasons, including the fact that he invites us to digress. We’re reading a famous story called “The Student.” It’s a late winter, early spring night in the 1890s, Easter weekend. A student is coming home from shooting, and he pauses to share a Gospel story — Peter’s denial of Jesus — with peasant women. Chekhov liked to say this was his favorite story; a lot of people disagreed with him, some vehemently. I think he liked to say it because the story ends on an exalted note, as if to answer those who thought he was desperately gloomy and dark and atheistic. He may have said that he loved it as a sort of sop to his critics. It is for me not only the most perfect, postage-stamp little dose of Chekhov’s moods, alternately bleak and ecstatic; it also sets a complex reflection on betrayal, hardship, history and hope in an unforgettably beautiful scene.

Podcast • February 6, 2014

Reading Chekhov III: “Gusev”

Each one of Anton Chekhov’s short stories, like each of Beethoven’s string quartets, can feel like a fresh experiment. They all seem different in size, shape and feeling, each one a reinvention of the form. “Gusev,” the third in our reading-aloud series, is just such a one-off surprise, in 12 dense pages — nothing like our first two, “Vanka” and “Dreams.”

Chekhov wrote “Gusev” on shipboard, returning from his stark study mission to the prison island of Sakhalin in 1890. He was 30 years old, ten years into a concentrated writing career that would end with his death of tuberculosis in 1904. The story is about a peasant soldier, ill and yearning for family and home, on a troop ship ferrying him back from a military assignment in the East. It is full of the sorrows of empire, of loneliness and alienation.

To our chorus of actors, general readers and amateurs in my living room, however, more memorable, more marvelous, more instructively “Chekhovian” was something very like ecstasy in the underwater ending of the story. It reminded me of Sandra Bullock’s return to earth and seawater in last summer’s astonishing film Gravity. Or more precisely, as I watched Alfonso Cuarón’s movie months ago, I was sure that he had learned a lot from Chekhov’s “Gusev”, in the realm of the space-travelers’ spiritual longing and then in the astonishing palette of colors and the vitality of fish and vegetation in the closing scene.

And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors… A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one… The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.

The close of “Gusev,” p. 121 in Anton Chekhov: Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larrissa Volokhonsky. Bantam, 2000.

We took the story to be a meditation on inescapable death and, just as powerful, the transcendence of life in nature. It brought to mind a conversation with a compleat Thoreau in our time, Bernd Heinrich, and his prize-winning book, Life Everlasting, and his revision of the Ash Wednesday reminder, “dust thou art, to dust thou shall return.” Isn’t it provocatively true to observe, “from life thou art, to life thou shall return.” Which affirms in turn Dostoevsky’s epigraph in The Brothers Karamazov from the Gospel of John 12:24: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

James McConkey of Cornell has written beautifully of “Gusev” along some of the same lines.

Our “Gusev” readers are Luke Salisbury, who teaches literature and writing at Bunker Hill Community College; Sarah Barton, “a librarian by day, an actress by night,” as she put it; Ken Cheeseman, a stage and screen actor and artist in residence at Emerson College; and Donna Sorbello, an actress in Boston. Among the voices heard in our chorus were Dan Pritchard of the Boston Review, actor Nijazi Jusufi and writer Sarah Lydon. We’ve been reading from the Bantam collection of the Stories of Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Thanks to Yo-Yo Ma for his version of the Rococo Variations composed by Chekhov’s friend Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Special thanks to the audio pro on so many stages Jim Donahue, who wired us all for sound.

Listeners out there, we’d be delighted to hear your take on “Gusev” and on our impressions of it. Next up, if you care to read ahead, will be the mini-story “The Student.” Not everybody loves it, but Chekhov called it his favorite.

Podcast • January 14, 2014

Reading Chekhov II: “Dreams”

We’re Reading Chekhov stories again with a crew of actors, school teachers, and friends, learning as we go, sipping wine and nibbling cheese and nuts. The story this time is called “Dreams.” It’s a dense 7-page fantasy of the good life in the far wilds of Eastern Siberia. It’s a dream of freedom that pops full-blown, sharply detailed, from the head and heart of an enfeebled red-nosed tramp, who’s being muscled along by two soldiers. It’s part of the plot – in a story that has no plot, really – that this dream has a reality all its own. When spoken aloud the dream is a life-force that quickly envelops the two soldiers and perhaps the rest of us as we listen. We’ll see. We’re learning also the explicit influence that the great Chekhov has had on story-tellers ever since. Anton Chekov, medical doctor and playwright, born in Russia in 1860, the son of a liberated serf. Died young of tuberculosis in 1904, credited ever after as the father of the modern short story. It’ll be clear, I think, that Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway took a thing or two from this story “Dreams.” I’ll be passing the book along to four other readers; we also have a Greek chorus of friends who are invited to interrupt with a stray thought anytime. It’s part of the fun with Chekhov to digress as the spirit moves any of us.

We’ve been reading from the Norton edition of Chekhov stories. Marion Fell did our translation of “Dreams.” Thanks to Yo-Yo Ma for his version of the Rococo Variations composed by Chekhov’s friend Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Special thanks to the audio pro on so many stages Jim Donahue, who wired us all for sound.

Listeners out there, we’d be delighted to hear your take on the story and on our impressions of it. Next up, if you care to read ahead, will be “Gusev,” the tale from 1890 of a soldier heading home on shipboard from war in the East.

Podcast • January 2, 2014

Reading Chekkov I: “Vanka”

“Reading Chekhov” is the name of this game – a podcast experiment and safe indoor sport with, by all accounts, the greatest short-story writer of them all, the medical doctor who was also the “Cherry Orchard” playwright, Anton Chekhov. It began last summer just for kicks with an Albanian actor and friend, Nijazi Jusufi, who had read Chekhov growing up. It expanded to a circle of a dozen friends passing a book around in my living room. Why? Because Chekhov (1860 – 1904) is ageless and everywhere – “the voice of twilight Russia,” it’s been said, and one of the great pre-revolutionary visionaries – but also a literary influence on Joyce and all the moderns and still a contemporary, almost. For many readers today he has the rare effect his friend Maxim Gorky observed. In Chekhov’s presence, Gorky said, “every one involuntarily felt in himself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one’s self.” The several actors in our group keep discovering, and demonstrating, that Chekhov’s phrases, scenes and lines keep expanding when they’re spoken aloud. For me he has the further peculiar effect of inviting digressions as we go – conversations and asides about all manner of things, philosophical and emotional, and not at all specially Russian. We begin with a tiny tale that has the feel of Dickens, about a 9-year-old orphan in Moscow, pining for his grandpa in the village, his only vestige of family.

Most of us are reading from the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. Listeners out there, we’d be delighted to hear your take on the story and on our impressions of it. Leave a comment please on our new and improved website, radioopensource.org. Next on our list, if you’re inclined to read ahead, is Chekhov’s little drama of a tramp, titled “Dreams.”

Mary McGrath produced and edited this first crack at Reading Chekov. Special thanks to the audio master Jim Donahue who wired us all for sound. And thanks to our chorus of friends and commentators in my living room.

Open Source with Christopher Lydon