Chekhov Becomes Chekhov
The Emergence of a Literary Genius
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory portrait of Chekhov during the most extraordinary artistic surge of his life.
In 1886, a twenty-six-year-old Anton Chekhov was publishing short stories, humor pieces, and articles at an astonishing rate, and was still a practicing physician. Yet as he honed his craft and continued to draw inspiration from the vivid characters in his own life, he found himself—to his surprise and ocassional embarassment—admired by a growing legion of fans, including Tolstoy himself.
He had not yet succumbed to the ravages of tuberculosis. He was a lively, frank, and funny correspondant and a dedicated mentor. And as Bob Blaisdell discovers, his vivid articles, stories, and plays from this period—when read in conjunction with his correspondence—become a psychological and emotional secret diary.
When Chekhov struggled with his increasingly fraught engagement, young couples are continually making their raucous way in and out of relationships on the page. When he was overtaxed by his medical duties, his doctor characters explode or implode. Chekhov’s talented but drunken older brothers and Chekhov’s domineering father became transmuted into characters, yet their emergence from their families serfdom is roiling beneath the surface.
Chekhov could crystalize the human foiibles of the people he knew into some of the most memorable figures in literature and drama.
In Chekhov Becomes Chekhov, Blaisdell astutely examines the psychological portraits of Chekhov's distinct, carefully observed characters and how they reflect back on their creator during a period when there seemed to be nothing between his imagination and the paper he was writing upon.
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Blaisdell (Creating Anna Karenina), an English professor at the City University of New York, delivers a penetrating take on Anton Chekhov's development as a writer. Close readings of Chekhov's letters illuminate his works and artistic growth in 1886 and 1887, when he was in his mid-20s. One April letter from Chekhov to his uncle Mitrofan about their being apart on Easter provides the occasion to examine the story "Easter Eve," published that month, in which a ferryman recounts his late friend's hymns as "harmonious, brief, and complete," qualities that Blaisdell suggests reveal "Chekhov's own principles of writing." The letters chronicle Chekhov's ascent to literary fame, but Blaisdell notes that this success didn't translate into financial stability and contends that the awkwardness felt by the protagonist of "The Descendants" (written in September of 1886) when asking for a loan was a feeling Chekhov knew well. Elsewhere Blaisdell tackles the composition of the play Ivanov, Chekhov's half-hearted engagement to his sister's classmate, and his long struggle with tuberculosis, seamlessly blending biography and critical analysis to offer a bracing look at a formative period in the life of a literary legend. The result is a stirring portrait of an artist coming into his own.
