Word: chekhovs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wrote Anton Chekhov to Solomon Rabinovich. The attraction of disciple and master seemed strange at the time: Rabinovich was an obscure Jew who wrote under the name Sholom Aleichem (literally, peace be unto you). Chekhov was a renowned and worldly physician-writer nearing the end of his life...
...grew more rambunctious in high school-"spraying my hair orange and getting thrown out of movie theaters"-and then, as an acting major at S.M.U., discovered classical drama. Reading Chekhov, Beckett, Shaw and King Lear, "the veils of the mind lifted," she says. "This was alive theater, someone bringing you in touch with a world you hadn't understood before." Once in Los Angeles, she began writing, "almost for pure sanity's sake. I'm like a child when I write, taking chances, never thinking in terms of logic or reviews. I just go with what...
...Nabokov is at his most provocative when he ranks the great Russians. Most of his own emotions, it seems, were poured into his worshipping of Tolstoy, on the one hand, and his vicious debunking of Dostoevsky, on the other. The final ranking is, officially: 1. Tolstoy; 2. Gogol; 3. Chekhov; 4. Turgenev. Dostoevsky is dead last. Nabokov accuses him of sloppy and melodramatic Christianity, reactionary slavophilism (which Nabokov links with both Fascism and Communism), lack of artistic sense or taste, and a hackneyed, long-winded style. He doesn't have much to say about the works themselves, and, in fact...
After Tolstoy, Nabokov serves up a pleasant dessert of Chekhov. Chekhov occupies a distant but secure third place in the official ranking. He is neither poetic nor playful, but his wisdom and good taste capture Nabokov's heart. The survey ends with a small but appetite-killing dose of Gorki. Except for a couple of untranslatable modernists (Blok and Bely), Nabokov says, the future of Russian literature lies with the expatriates...
...already available in an annotated critical edition. Still, there is something missing in all of Nabokov's work. His starchy aestheticism comes through as cold, crystalline, and almost inhuman. We wait in vain for that warm human glow that pervades all the works of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. And his work lacks the psychological or emotional depth that might have compensated for the limited range of characters and situations. Nabokov must have been a fiery lecturer, but somehow the fire chills...