Word: chekhovisms
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...Bells. Her parents, she remembers, were "a bit arty-went in for pacifism, vegetarianism, Socialism and all that." At ten, she met Raymond Duncan, who sent her to study dancing with his sister Isadora. At 16, Elsa organized a London theater company, which put on one-act plays by Chekhov and Pirandello...
...admirers of a great writer, even his casual notes and scraps of abandoned work have a fascination; so Chekhov readers will pounce on this new collection of his notebooks, diaries and selected letters with delight. But even those outside the circle of initiates may find much solid pleasure...
From 1892 to 1904 Chekhov, then at the height of his fame, kept a set of unpretentious workbooks. In them he jotted judgments brief and sufficient as a child's ("He who tells lies is dirty"). He sketched ideas for Stories, many of which he never wrote. Readers can wonder for themselves what Chekhov might have done with this synopsis: "A radical lady, who crosses herself at night, is secretly full of prejudice and superstition, hears that in order to be happy one should boil a black cat by night. She steals a cat and tries to boil...
Such notes are by no means as brilliant as those found in the papers of other modern greats, like Henry James or André Gide, but they are remarkable in that they show from what banal themes and ordinary observations Chekhov developed his stories. When he writes, "A young man made a million marks, lay down on them, and shot himself," the reader is in the authentic Chekhov atmosphere. Occasionally, as in the letters, Chekhov drops his attitude of severe objectivity and speaks about himself in that humorously modest fashion that led Tolstoy to call him a wonderful man: "Medicine...
...letters, too, Chekhov expresses himself most explicitly about his writing creed: "My goal is to kill two birds with one stone: to paint life in its true aspects, and to show how far this life falls short of the ideal life." A writer, he insisted, "must be as objective as a chemist ... he must know that dung-heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones." Chekhov...