Chekhov with a squint?

Chekhov by Serov

 

I never realised Chekhov had a squint.

I've always had a soft spot for people with a squint, especially in women.  'What else did she want, that witch with a very slight squint in one eye?' (from Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, tr. by Michael Glenny).

But Chekhov! The great playwright and humourist, the master of short story who is always portrayed, in paintings and photographs, hiding behind his trademark pince-nez on!

In this portrait dated 1903 (watercolour, paper), Valentin Serov, a great portraitist (he is famous for the portrait of Shaliapin among others), removes the pince-nez and tucks it inside Chekhov's waistcoat at the bottom of the picture, as though saying, there, he is not a sad narrator of decline, doom and gloom, look, he is a bubbly, fun loving man.

Serov met Chekhov in 1900 and immediately started asking him to sit for a portrait. He even tried to ambush him at home, sending a visiting card saying that he will drop by with some paper and pencils. It didn't happen and Chekhov agreed to sit only months later.

Although the portrait is usually dated as of 1903 Chekhov actually sat for Serov in the Spring of 1901. After a few sittings the writer left for Crimea and never had a chance to pose for the portrait again. Serov considered the work unfinished, a study, but apparently had to give up of ever catching Chekhov again. "Chekhov is elusive," admitted Serov.

In 1904 the writer died.

(source: article by T.Yu.Novoselova, teaching scholar, Chekhov Central Public City Library, Taganrog, Russia)

Every time Putin opens his mouth...

...America gets five students of Russian

Alexander Genis, a Russian-American writer, has been to the Summer meet of the language students and professors at Middlebury College, Vermont. Novaya Gazeta published his thoughful report on what is going on with Russian studies in America. 

He has a word or two to say about Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Russian who had lived in Vermont, and many more on Robert Frost, much loved and translated in Russia.

I found two passages from Genis’ article especially interesting, and amusing too.

At one of the workshops Genis asked postgarduate students to name their favourite Russian ‘book.’

...I cautiously walked into an auditorium to see postgradute students, who didn’t look at all like philologists. The girls were pretty and none had glasses, the boys were big and muscular.

“What is your favorite Russian book,” I asked, to open the discussion.

“The Lady with the Dog,” said one girl.

“The Lady with the Dog,” echoed another.

“The Lady with the Dog,” agreed a boy.

“Geopolitics of Russia,” coldly said another, with a crew cut.

“OK,” I said. And, realising I have used an English borrowing, quickly added an awkward Russian “Ladnen’ko.”  (Note: ладненько, from ладно)

I wholeheartedly support the majority choice. Chekhov’s short story is my favorite too, even if it’s not quite a ‘book.’ The force of what Genis is saying is revealed in another striking passage on President Putin’s contribution to the promotion of Russian abroad.

I haven’t been here for ten years and immediately noticed the change for the better. In the number of students, Russian summer school outshone both Chinese and Arabic. 

When I complimented one of the professors, he replied: “What do you want? Every time Putin opens his mouth we get five more students. The tide changed at the time of the Georgian war and grows stronger with each, so to speak, exotic law or, shall we say, judicial trial.

“Slavonics," we sighed, "is the daughter of the cold war. We should be glad that it’s only cold.”

The Russian version of this article is here,

The Novaya Gazeta article is here, 

Read The Lady with the Dog by Chekhov here (Constance Garnett translation), 

Wikipedia article about Alexander Genis here, 

Middlebury College summer language programmes here.

The Chekhov Bonanza

Anton Chekhov's 150th anniversary (born 17 January 1860), is marked by literary and theatre events throughout the world. BBC's Radio 4 has selected five short stories, possibly the best ever written, for the brilliant dramatisation by Martyn Wade. They were broadcast as a series 'About Love' even though the short story which gave the series its title, itself, sadly, is not included in the five. 

The BBC has a Listen Again feature which allows a replay of programmes for seven days. They are available as I write, but I do hope the series would also be available as podcasts or downloads. 

My personal favourite is Rothschild's Violin, and The Lady with the Little Dog a close second. Here are the links to Radio 4 Chekhov dramatisations.

  

About love, Anton Chekhov, five short stories dramatised by Martyn Wade. 

Read "О любви" in Russian here

Rothschild's Violin ("Скрипка Ротшильда", text in Russian)

The Lady with the Little Dog  ("Дама с собачкой",  русский текст)

The Huntsman ("Егерь", русский текст)

The Black Monk ("Черный монах",  текст на русском)

The Man in a Case ("Человек в футляре", русский текст)

A few years ago the Russian avant-garde theatre director Kama Ginkas from Moscow staged three of the five stories at Yale University theatre - 'Black Monk', 'The Lady with the Little Dog' and 'Rothschild's Violin'. He gave the cycle a different title: 'Life Is Beautiful'. (A review in the 'Chayka/Seagull' magazine)

A group of British actors and Chekhov experts are raising funds to help repair and conserve the famous White Dacha - Chekhov's house and garden in the Crimea. Go to their web-site Yalta Chekhov Campaign for details of events and how to help. I posted about the campaign in "Тетрадки".

Photo from Yandex: Chekhov visits Tolstoy in the Crimea, 1901. Photo by Sofia Tolstaya, the writer's wife, was made into a post-card. 2010 also marks one hundred years since Tolstoy's death.

Maugham on Tolstoy: what to do with unwanted chapters

War and Peace ( War and Peace (Vintage Classics)) is, probably, a Russian classic with the highest world-wide reference ratio. Not just because it is a great read, but also because it has become a metaphor for 'difficult' literature - too long, too serious, too many characters, too many historical or philosophical digressions.

Languagehat, the brilliant American blogger, reports that he has just finished reading War and Peace (over a year since he'd started) - and grumbles that philosophical chapters are amateurish, unnecessary and spoil the novel.

Many desperate readers agree. Here is what Andy K from Australia writes in an Amazon.com review of War and Peace:

I have tried War and Peace several times since I was a teenager, and each time I have enjoyed it UNTIL I get to the same bit. This is the bit where Tolstoy decides it's time to give us all a little lecture (say, a mere hundred and fifty pages) on his theory of history. I think this is in an inexcusable flaw in a story, book, or epic. Worst of all, it makes poor Leo Nicholayevich into precisely the pretentious git which he didn't want to be remembered as. Because of the pretentious and boring quality of the classic War and Peace, I quit reading this book. But I felt like I had failed when I was a teenager. Now I am a mature adult and I know better: Tolstoy was being a pretentious bore.


Well, ask Tolstoy's good friend and follower Gandhi, he would agree - Tolstoy is some work. But that work helped Gandhi change himself - and the world.

A lot of writers can't help but moralize. Few are ready to admit that it may be boring for the reader. In fact, I only know one, W.Somerset Maugham, a younger contemporary of Tolstoy, who honestly advised his readers to skip the next chapter, where he was going to philosophise, if they wanted just the story. Here is what he writes in the first paragraph of Part VI of The Razor's Edge:

I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.

I suspect Maugham envied Chekhov for his ability to construct a gripping story without a real plot - and diguised it as a critique of Russian 'verbosity' in general. Even though compactness is one of the most striking features of Chekhov's style. Maugham digresses into a whole chapter of criticising Chekhov for his lack of narrative in 'Ashenden', supposedly a spy thriller based on Maugham's own experience on Her (sorry - His) Majesty's secret service while trying to stop the bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917. In another chapter Maugham implies that the revolution only happened because the people who could have stopped it spent too much time talking.

I think Tolstoy also envied Chekhov for the same reason - and also criticised him. But Tolstoy hated his own 'verbosity' and worked hard to make his language compact. I agree, we Russians are famous for our 'verbosity', but, in fact, we generally hate it too. We have a huge thesaurus of hate phrases for it, including many expletives.

And Maugham is one of our favourite English writers.


A note: if you think it's not fair to pay for a book which contains hundreds of pages you know you won't read, get ECCO Press 2007 version of War and Peace translated by Andrew Bromfield (War and Peace: Original Version) - it's Tolstoy's own abridged 'hollywood' version of the epic novel, half the size and with a different, happy ending. Read comments on Amazon.com here.

Please read a small review
of the two new (2007) translations
of War and Peace on the Normandy Review of Books.

Susan Sontag: who would I be without Dostoyevsky?

The very first time I raised to myself the problem of a poor translation was when I started going to the opera, in Chicago, when I was sixteen. There I held in my hands for the first time an en face translation – the original language on the left (by this time I had some French and Italian) and the English on the right – and I was stunned and mystified by the blatant inaccuracy of the translations. (It was to be many years before I understood why the words in a libretto cannot be translated literally.) Opera excepted, I never asked myself, in those early years of reading literature in translation, about what I was missing. It was as if I felt it were my job, as a passionate reader, to see through the faults or limitations of a translation – as one sees through (or looks past) the scratches on a bad print of a beloved old film one is seeing once again. Translations were a gift, for which I would always be grateful. What – rather, who – would I be without Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov?

from The World as India (London 2002)
St Jerome lecture on the nature of translation

The nature of translation was a central subject of interest for Susan Sontag, both in the narrow sense of interpreting a text in the one language into a different language and in the wider, philosophical sense of how reality is interpreted in a work of art.

The Russian version of this post is here, the lecture in full (highly recommend to all professional translators!) is here