Back to Blog
Chekhov a visit to friends text5/25/2023 ![]() ![]() I wonder if Joyce was similarly inspired. This is one of the key Chekhov stories that Mansfield used as models for her own stories. It’s interesting to compare this to Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” (1922), as well as to James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914) – as it is a kind of precursor for both, at least it feels to be. The momentum of this story is interesting it starts so oddly, for a story of this length, and then the day has caught you up before you know it, very much as days do, and you are swept along very much like Olga Mikhaylovna is, and the “interminable conversation” that’s dismissed at the start comes back to get you again and again. ‘The Name Day Party’ by Anton Chekhov (1888) Seeing the protagonist get so thoroughly caught in so tawdry and shallow a way, caught by himself so knowingly and laughably, yet so completely – well, the fact it’s so convincing is a salutary lesson to us all. But for all that, this reputed advice of Chekhov, sells Chekhov horribly short, certainly in masterful stories such as ‘The Steppe’, but in stories such as this too, where one may be impressed by the sheer ‘craft’ of it, but there’s more to writing a good story than editing. ![]() If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.’ And it is in stories such as ‘The Kiss’ where such advice would seem to most clearly apply: it’s tight, beautifully structured, sharp. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. Most people will know Chekhov through such quotations as this, ascribed to Chekhov and quoted and quoted ever since: ‘Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. ‘The Kiss’ by Anton Chekhov (1887) – Turning the love story on its head, or turning it inside out, or… If “utility” is an odd word to use around literature, one might well wonder at it especially when used about such a story as this: getting us roped into this protagonist’s thinking and feeling so that we are utterly trussed up by the end, caught, pinned down, exposed… one might as well ‘gaze at the lamp for a long, long time’, then shake your head and start packing. If one were ever to ask, what is literature for, you might be well advised to refer the questioner to this story, and simply say: “This.” Could you ask: how might it be improved? In which ways, exactly, does it fall short? What does it do, after all, for the reader? There must be, of course, stories by Chekhov which don’t amount to much, which don’t achieve what Chekhov sets out to achieve (which is what exactly?) however, ‘Verochka’ is not one of these stories. To take an early story such as ‘Verochka’ when, supposedly, Chekhov was still some way from ‘mastering his art’, and to wonder at how good it is, does seem to miss the point. …if this piece of fiction doesn’t have ‘utility’ in buckets then how can fiction be said to have a use at all?
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |