Word: chekhovisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
POOR, isolated, shy, genial, tubercular, counting winters and declining tapers, ruminating over the households revolving in his mind, diffidently putting them to paper, Anton Chekhov wrote four of the most wonderful comedies in world literature. Few people find Chekhov comical. Most read about these lugubrious, slow, heavy houses full of people protesting their happiness, lamenting their misery, incapable of action, occasionally incanting a vision of the future. We search for themes, ideas, directions, and find none unambiguously free from irony. We see only dolorous mansions crackling with nervous expectation, yearning for changes, immobilized by forces vaguely understood, secure only...
...think that these reactions follow primarily from our failure to recognize the implications of Chekhov's realism. His is a compassionate realism, which goes beyond categories of hope, dread, and anger, to study the reticulating recesses of self-delusion, the vicissitudes of the self-circling, sensitive, introspective mind. The technique of his drama is to show how complex people emprison their souls through the processes of self-consciousness, enclosing themselves into half-perceived mausoleums of hope and fear. What renders this so complex is that Chekhov displays his people without reference to idea, but only to the organic progress...
...common theme of Chekhov and of Johnson is the internal conflict between the yearning heart and the self-analyzing mind. Both men study the impossibility of satiety, the evanescence of happiness, the self-consumption of bright hopes; and both men offer only the stern consolation of realism-the uneasy and none too comforting suggestion that the hopes which keep people living are also those which make them miserable. Ambition is fugitive, love is usually for the wrong things-usually only self-love-and the complacence which can come from believing you understand your vanity, is most harmful. Johnson writes...
...CHEKHOV, however, included such self-knowledge among the frustrations of men. He is not able, like Johnson, to wrench some fragile optimism from a faith in man's reason. Like Johnson, he does not moralize about starving the passions. There is enormous passion in his people, but it neither wells up from life or issues outward to life; it wears them out in a world of private conceptions. Yet this may be exhibited to other people in only a misstep, a repeated word, a comment on snow or line, an anecdote, a crazy position of the fingers. The frightful thing...
...Seagull is the funniest of Chekhov's plays, and the only one which ends with a death. Chekhov said, "It's a comedy-a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love." The comedy revolves about various love triangles (Chekhov is the master of the geometry of love) and brisk talk about writing. Konstantin is not the stock young lover-fool. He is richly talented, abundantly sensitive. He cannot come to terms with life only because he has not lived it in any sense except the harmful one of self-created symbols. The act of killing...