Word: chekhovisms
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...only who knows the truth about you." But the candor of detached analysis is only more sophisticated romantic illusion. Self-revelation is a mist of uncynical dream and deception. And this leads to the main reason why the audience feels depressed rather than exhilarated by a Chekhov comedy. The audience can rarely indulge in detached laughter at the characters' expense, because there is no comic spectacle of abstracted human follies on stage, only a concentration of suggestions and perceptions of errors which the audience understand no more clearly than the characters themselves. Or Chekhov...
...part of Chekhov's comic irony that audience detachment is impossible since such a feeling of lucid superiority is itself comic in its self-deception. His realism, then, does not say "All men are like this; therefore, take note and beware"; but rather, "All men are like this, mysterious and deluded; as you cannot understand, so you cannot judge by laughter; but remember that it is a comedy; if you start lamenting about despair, you become part of the comedy...
...Martin Decoud is just as implicated in the comedy for his patronizing sobriety, as for his previous secure elevation. Conrad, like Chekhov, is a master of the comedy of ironic detachment. And this seems to me to be a modern comic technique in this time of self-accusation and self-justification...
...Chekhov is often disliked because he seems indifferent. I think his comic sense is hard to understand because we live in a period so much like his. We more or less feel that everything is wrong, that society has ossified, and that major change is just around the corner. We divide society into a calcimined majority and a vigorous, youthful vanguard. And no one is particularly delighted by art which says that his most serious hopes and fears are in some way comical. So we recreate Chekhov in our image, make him either a prophet of apocalyptic change, a critic...
WHAT DOES Chekhov give us that is positive? Of course, he hardly owes us anything positive. But I think that, like Johnson, he places great value on getting the mind off the mind through work. Johnson used to quote Burton, "Be not idle, be not solitary," and write to himself, "Despair is a sin." But once religious comfort, however rational, gives place to "the work ethic," the solution takes on the appearance of romantic oversimplification. Work, like everything else-socialism, democracy, love-was to Chekhov only a preconceived notion which could not renew life by itself, and which, if clung...