He looked with emotion at his friends, admired and envied them. Here is a taste of what Nabokov is talking about, from one of my personal favorite Chekhov stories, “An Attack of Nerves”: Those who did not were not the right sort. It was quite a game among Russians to divide their acquaintances into those who liked Chekhov and those who did not. The person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of… or universal art. The trouser crease of his phrase! Chekhov didn’t mind because he had higher-order concerns: When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks. Nabokov acknowledges that Chekhov was not a stylish writer but decides in this case style would be trivial: Chekhov knew he was talented, but in his private notebooks he wrote that his only real legacy would be the schools he started. Early in his writing career he was accepted into the elite, and he hectored them to take on his philanthropic inclinations. That’s a lot, to be a doctor people travel across a country to visit! Chekhov founded four schools and regularly visited remote prisons to offer medical care and keep an eye out for abuses. Chekhov will arrange lodging for us, and a dining room, and treatment’ (Chukovski). Of Chekhov’s medical practice, Nabokov writes:ĭuring the cholera epidemic he worked all alone as a district doctor without any assistant he took care of twenty-five villages…Many tubercular people came to Yalta at that time, without a copper in their pockets, and they came all the way from Odessa, Kishinev, and Kharkov just because they had heard that Chekhov was living in Yalta. 4.Chekhov was born in 1860 and became a doctor to support his family.3.5 – How do we make Non-Fiction ‘Compelling’?.3.3 – Writing: Dead Metaphors to Irony – Year 9.2.5 – Unseen Poetry – Approaching Unseen Poetry for GCSE.2.4 – The Sound & Rhythm of Power & Conflict Poetry (AQA).2.3 – Lyric Poetry Scheme of Work – Year 9.1.4 – The Why of Fiction – A Year 9 Scheme of Work.1.3 – The How of Fiction – A Year 8 Scheme of Work.1.2 – What of Fiction: Ghost Stories – A Year 7 Scheme of Work.1.1 – Favourite Fiction – Year 7 Book Review.0.0 – 10 Lesson Scheme of Work to Introduce Debating at Key Stage 3/4.…it’s as though for once, in late Chekhov, the ‘working-out’ is on show, and the effect is undermined: the ambiguity and the beauty of Chekhov exists in his ability to give us just enough of a character or a scene to render it, where he goes too far, as he does here, how well he does it in his other stories is all too clear. This one does feel a little ‘ploddy’, a little tired, a little not-bothered – witness: “The tower’s black shadow stretching over the earth, far into the fields… all this was just like a dream.” Or “He felt annoyed and his only thought was that here, in a country garden on a moonlit night, close to a beautiful, loving, thoughtful girl, he felt the same apathy as on Little Bronny Street: evidently this type of romantic situation had lost its fascination, like that prosaic depravity.” And when one is looking for reasons to dislike… ‘A Visit to Friends’ by Anton Chekhov (1898) Knowing this, it’s rather easy for the reader to take a dislike to it. For some reason Chekhov took a dislike to this story – “rather poor I think” – and refused to include it in his collected works as he was compiling in the final years of his life.
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