Word: chekhovisms
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...Singer's view, absurdity, chaos, the irrational, all the fashionable preoccupations of contemporary life, are at best apocrypha, not canon. In a world of prose experiment and cool media, Singer, virtually alone, works in the metaphysical tradition. Behind him are the contiguous works of Kafka, Chekhov -and Gogol, with whom the reader of A Friend of Kafka must agree: "Say what you like, but such things do happen -not often, but they do happen." These 21 miraculous creations are, in the highest artistic tradition, true stories. · Stefan Kanfer
Tolstoy said that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Theatrically, unhappy families do have something in common: they are the breeding grounds of durably vital plays and of great playwrights. From the Greek tragedies through Ibsen and Chekhov, the unhappy family recurs as a dominating theme. Similarly, it is almost a catalogue of the best American plays. Think of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Edward Albee...
...Like a Chekhov character, Stravinsky has "a positive intellect. Can't stand mystics, fantastics, the possessed, lyrical people, bigots." More seriously, he strikes out against the increasing stridency and publicizing of our time, against the mentality which demands that every new work of art be apocalyptically, original, which precludes germinal innovations, and that these doomsday products shatter the benighted with all the force Madison Avenue can summon. Eventually we would need a cathedral to house properly a concert which consisted of one hundred amplifiers tidally shoring up our ruins with the unforgettably moving sound of a single human hair being...
...emotional aridity, a charge which is beneath contempt. One has only to listen to Persephone, the slow movement of the Piano Concerto, Apollo, Orphcus, or the lullaby of The Rake's Progress. But every bar of his music is lyrical in the highest sense, that of selfless restraint. Chekhov, a similar artist in this and other respects, once wrote to a friend, "The more sensitive the matter in hand, the more calmly one should describe it-and the more touching it will be at last." Stravinsky has composed in the belief that feeling is deepest when least pitiable. "Pleasure...
...life. He saw that much had stagnated, but not everything; that much needed replacing, but not everything; that even as much good was created, much good would be lost. Perhaps he would have agreed with Nietzsche (in this only) that the voice of beauty was a quiet one. Chekhov was a poet who made beauty without violence; poets today must make beauty out of violence. His plays are comedies because their people suffer not from external evil or forces, and not from a mixture of nobility and tragic error leading through suffering to transcendental knowledge and sympathy, but only from...