Word: chekhovisms
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...Wayne's students are after an education, not prestige or parties (only 5% belong to fraternities and sororities). They pack talks by such visitors as Dame Edith Sitwell and Poet Karl Shapiro, snap up tickets for the touring New York Metropolitan Opera, jam campus productions of Shakespeare and Chekhov. The athletic department (budget: $55,000) is overwhelmed if a football game draws 1,500 spectators. "They seem to think culture is part of their education, and not just something they should do," says one faculty member. "They're paying their way through college, and they want their money...
Aristocracy, like fine cheese, is usually at its most interesting in an advanced state of decay. Chekhov demonstrated this in prerevolutionary Russia, William Faulkner in post-Civil War America. Theoretically the decline of the Austro-Hungarian nobility before and after World War I ought to make equally pungent fiction. Unfortunately this is only sometimes the case in Author de Born's new novel, the second installment of a trilogy (the first, Felding Castle, published early last year, was set in 1900 and carried a nostalgic remembrance of that time of sunlit lawns, masquerade balls and respectful peasants...
...Soviet Russia, the commuter is called a dachnik. In Chekhov's day he was strictly a summer bird, flitting back and forth to a rustic cottage in the city's fringing forests. In modern, jampacked Moscow, he is more and more a year-rounder, living in the country because he has no place else to live, and commuting, like the U.S. suburbanite (see BUSINESS), by train-the 8:02 elektrichka...
...only wins the bread but brings it home. Even if there is a store near by, his wife firmly believes that food brought from town is better and fresher. Every night after work the "dacha husband" (as Chekhov called him) goes shopping, list in hand, and patiently queueing. Then, laden like a pack mule, he must wedge his way into a crowded train. His worst problem: kerosene, still the main cooking fuel in outlying places. The railroad bars it as dangerous, and if the dacha husband is caught carrying it, he will be put off the train and fined...
Despite its manifold wit and moments of wisdom, the plotless Heartbreak House drifts along with its people, and at times reflects their languor. This is partly because Shaw's ante-bellum England is not in itself a theme, but only a framework for one. Where Chekhov portrayed something dramatic, the death-indeed the suicide-of a class, Shaw caught, at most, the malaise of a country. Moreover, his characters are all so busy explaining what they suffer from that though they convey a forcible sense of diagnosis, they give off only the most feeble sense of disease...