Russian Literature and Culture

Anton Chekhov: Text Interpretation

 

A.P. Chekhov
About the course
Course materials
Thursday
A. Chekhov links
  Course description Stories: English and Russian versions Fall 2004
Introduction to Selected stories
Curriculum and timeline (2004) Russian culture: commentary 10.10-11.30  
by Shelby Foote
Grading Text interpretations Russian Literature class
NY University resources
    Picture gallery Pushkin-Room, VolSU, 3-03b
Russian texts at Lib.Ru

 

"On reading Chekhov, we first grow ecstatic, and then we grieve. For he is one of those writers whose spiritual and literary intelligence (they are one thing with him) is so powerful that for a moment we are seduced by our pleasure into believing in human progress, in the moral evolution of the species; then, a moment later, we see that he is in fact only a giant, an anomaly, possibly an angel, and that we may not have another like him for a thousand years."

- Russel Banks

"What really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the Russian Idealist ... a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worth while living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything - a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes - in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, amyn other professional people - all through Chekhov's stories."

- Vladimir Nabokov

"Twentieth century consciousness didn't begin on the stroke of midnight 1899, but in the minds of the outriders of human society - the artists - some time before. As early as 1886, when Chekhov wrote 'Anyuta' out of his daily experiences as a medical student, he showed that in the apparently inconsequential lie the enformities of that human behaviour; in ellipsis - if the writer is good enough to convey this - is what people feel and leave unsaid.... Those of us who write short stories - could we, of there had been no Chekhov? Without him, I believe the short story would have become an archaic form."

- Nadine Gordimer

"The short stories of Chekhov are an inexhaustible treasury of humanity and wisdom. The naturalness of their form and the luminous simplicity of their turning away from the forced conclusions defined a large part of the modern tradition in short fiction."

- Elizabeth Hardwick

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