Word: chekhovisms
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...Chekhov, by David Magarshack. A lively account of the short and passionate ife of Russia's greatest playwright (TIME, Sept...
Alexandra, youngest of Tolstoy's daughters, has written the umpteenth story of her father's life, coincident with the publication of a new, grand-scale biography of Chekhov. Author Tolstoy was her father's secretary, and her book is a useful, bulky filing cabinet of Tolstoyana, though empty of literary substance. David Magarshack is a pundit of the Russian drama who has already written a life of Producer Stanislavsky and a study of Chekhov's plays. His huge, valuable Chekhov resembles Tolstoy only in that it, too. is more a receptacle for facts than a vehicle...
...short moment, the two great men of letters stood in alliance. But the breach came soon after Chekhov returned from his Siberian tour, horrified by what he had seen. "How," he asked, "did Tolstoy's theory of nonresistance to evil stand up . . .? Did the convicts' nonresistance to flogging or forced labor or blackmail or prostitution transform them or those who were responsible for them into better men? . . . On the contrary, it turned them into bigger brutes." Soon Chekhov was warring with every Tolstoyan tenet, particularly the idea that "Christian love was incompatible with sexual love." And just...
...Military Ending. When at last they met-the peasant-bloused count and the well-dressed shopkeeper's son-they wanted to like each other. Chekhov tried to forget Tolstoy's views on art, sex and nonviolence; Tolstoy tried to forget Chekhov's atheism and artistic refinement. Then each went his way, Tolstoy to further brooding and writing on man's rejection of his God-given destiny, Chekhov to those triumphs of human vivisection, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard...
Their respective attitudes to life were neatly reflected in their deaths. Tolstoy died in a stationmaster's house when running away to embrace the life of private solitude and renunciation that he had preached so long. For Chekhov, killed by tuberculosis at 44, death staged an incomparable piece of pure Chekhov. The funeral procession became entwined with that of a Russian general. Why, wondered Chekhov's mourners, was the great artist being buried with a military band...