Laurence Kelly's Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus provides an elegant but concise overview of one of Russia's most influential writers. The book describes Lermontov's rapid ascent to literary stardom in the first part of the 19th century. It covers his amorous and military adventures, and analyzes the growing power and originality of most of his prose and poetry. Kelly is especially interested in Lermontov's fascination with the peoples of the Caucasus. He believes that this interest reflects Russia's rising enthusiasm for empire, but notes that Lermontov was more sympathetic for local peoples than most other Russian conquerors.
A few favorite quotations
...she had undoubted charm for those she loved. Unfortunately, her husband was not one of them.
His widow's only recorded comment was terse: "a dog's death for a dog."
"Who will believe me," he wrote, "when I saw that I knew what love was, at ten years of age?"
Showing posts with label Mikhail Lermontov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mikhail Lermontov. Show all posts
Friday, February 21, 2020
Friday, January 24, 2020
Maurice Valency's The Breaking String: The Plays of Anton Chekhov
Maurice Valency's book, The Breaking String: The Plays of Anton Chekhov, provides a brilliant analysis of Chekhov's overall place in Russian and European theater in general. In early chapters, Valency outlines the entire history of Russian theater. He notes that Russian drama is relatively new, and relatively indebted to French theater, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. He notes that Russian theater took a backseat to Russian novels and short-stories until the end of the 19th century. Further, he explains that a few major authors, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboyedov, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, created plays of lasting value to European culture until the advent of Chekhov, and perhaps Gorky.
Valency's main argument about Chekhov is that he slowly developed a theater that was, paradoxically, anti-theatrical. As Valancy asserts, "In life we see people; we do not see stories, and we do not hear thoughts. In the world, what is ordinarily played before our eyes is not a story, but a scene." According to Valency, Chekhov took up where Ibsen and Strindberg left off by downplaying the importance of speeches, plot devices, entrances and exits, scenes of "high high climax," and other tools of traditional theater. Not all at once, but over time, Chekhov moved from the relatively traditional theater of Ivanov and Platonov to the strikingly modern aesthetic of the Seagull, the Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, and the Cherry Orchard.
The strengths of Valency's treatment of Chekhov are many. First, he acknowledges the long and complicated creative trajectory of Chekhov's aesthetic evolution in order to emphasize the radical nature of his creative breakthroughs. Second, he uses letters and short-stories, as well as the plays themselves, to diagnose Chekhov's changing art. Third, he contextualizes Chekhov's new theater by comparing it to French, German, English, and Swedish theater, in addition to earlier Russian models.
How does Valency characterize the mature Chekhov? He argues that Chekhov was ruthlessly objective, allowing us to sympathize with all of his characters, rather than just some of them. He believes Chekhov created characters who had no dominate trait, but were, like all humans, complex tapestries of differing moods, ideas, strengths, and weaknesses. He maintains that Chekhov maintained a delicate but realistic balance between pessimism and optimism, tragedy and comedy. He declares that Chekhov was elliptical and ever assigned a single meaning to any literary symbol. Indeed, he preferred to allow his audiences to assign their own meanings to these symbols. He writes that Chekhov wrote about the exterior life of people, asking audiences to judge his characters by their often contradictory, and always shifting, actions, words, and exterior properties.
Favorite quotes
Theater history
The Russian stage of the 1860s was not yet ready for subtlety.
Nobody illustrates better than he the disintegration of the system which Ibsen inherited from Scribe, and Scribe from Corneille, and Corneille from Aristotle.
Style
In fact, he did not know, and never learned, how to write a long narrative.
His plays, beginning with The Sea Gull, consist also of a sequence of scenes, arranged in a meaningful way, but conspicuously lacking in the formal development which was in that day considered essential to drama.
Speculation bored him.
For Chekhov whatever was clear, decided, and certain was not in the province of art.
Russia
The squalor of life in Russia filled both of them with disgust, and Chekhov was more squeamish than Gorky.
The Wood Demon is a play about waste. In Russia, it is said, everything is wasted, forests, people, lives, intellect.
It was obviously Chekhov's intention to suggest that it is in the nature of man--at least in Russia--to destroy whatever is beautiful, so that the presence of anything lovely and feminine would affect the Russian character as a red rag, a bull.
Chekhov quotes:
Only fools and charlatans know everything and understanding everything.
There is not or, at least, there is scarcely a single landed Russian gentleman or university man who at one time or another had not boasted of his past. Why? Because Russian enthusiasm possesses one specific quality--it is quickly followed by fatigue.
We all have just enough brains and just enough feeling to ruin our own lives and the lives of others...
Valency's main argument about Chekhov is that he slowly developed a theater that was, paradoxically, anti-theatrical. As Valancy asserts, "In life we see people; we do not see stories, and we do not hear thoughts. In the world, what is ordinarily played before our eyes is not a story, but a scene." According to Valency, Chekhov took up where Ibsen and Strindberg left off by downplaying the importance of speeches, plot devices, entrances and exits, scenes of "high high climax," and other tools of traditional theater. Not all at once, but over time, Chekhov moved from the relatively traditional theater of Ivanov and Platonov to the strikingly modern aesthetic of the Seagull, the Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, and the Cherry Orchard.
The strengths of Valency's treatment of Chekhov are many. First, he acknowledges the long and complicated creative trajectory of Chekhov's aesthetic evolution in order to emphasize the radical nature of his creative breakthroughs. Second, he uses letters and short-stories, as well as the plays themselves, to diagnose Chekhov's changing art. Third, he contextualizes Chekhov's new theater by comparing it to French, German, English, and Swedish theater, in addition to earlier Russian models.
How does Valency characterize the mature Chekhov? He argues that Chekhov was ruthlessly objective, allowing us to sympathize with all of his characters, rather than just some of them. He believes Chekhov created characters who had no dominate trait, but were, like all humans, complex tapestries of differing moods, ideas, strengths, and weaknesses. He maintains that Chekhov maintained a delicate but realistic balance between pessimism and optimism, tragedy and comedy. He declares that Chekhov was elliptical and ever assigned a single meaning to any literary symbol. Indeed, he preferred to allow his audiences to assign their own meanings to these symbols. He writes that Chekhov wrote about the exterior life of people, asking audiences to judge his characters by their often contradictory, and always shifting, actions, words, and exterior properties.
Favorite quotes
Theater history
The Russian stage of the 1860s was not yet ready for subtlety.
Nobody illustrates better than he the disintegration of the system which Ibsen inherited from Scribe, and Scribe from Corneille, and Corneille from Aristotle.
Style
In fact, he did not know, and never learned, how to write a long narrative.
His plays, beginning with The Sea Gull, consist also of a sequence of scenes, arranged in a meaningful way, but conspicuously lacking in the formal development which was in that day considered essential to drama.
Speculation bored him.
For Chekhov whatever was clear, decided, and certain was not in the province of art.
Russia
The squalor of life in Russia filled both of them with disgust, and Chekhov was more squeamish than Gorky.
The Wood Demon is a play about waste. In Russia, it is said, everything is wasted, forests, people, lives, intellect.
It was obviously Chekhov's intention to suggest that it is in the nature of man--at least in Russia--to destroy whatever is beautiful, so that the presence of anything lovely and feminine would affect the Russian character as a red rag, a bull.
Chekhov quotes:
Only fools and charlatans know everything and understanding everything.
There is not or, at least, there is scarcely a single landed Russian gentleman or university man who at one time or another had not boasted of his past. Why? Because Russian enthusiasm possesses one specific quality--it is quickly followed by fatigue.
We all have just enough brains and just enough feeling to ruin our own lives and the lives of others...
Friday, February 28, 2014
Fatalism
As avid readers of Soviet Roulette will recall, I recently launched a Russian history reading club at a center for troubled teenagers. I wanted to use the book, Russian Short Stores from Pushkin to Buida, tell the story of modern Russian history to this group of young people. On the way to my first session of the club, I called a friend to ask her what I might expect on the first day of class. This friend had a lot of experience teaching the language arts to diverse groups of people. But I forgot that she also had very specific experience teaching students who were ordered by one governmental agency or another to live away from home. I asked her: Was I being overly ambitious? Would my students be able to relate to Russia? Would they be able to handle difficult readings? My friend gave me a lot of good advice. She told me it would take some time to build up trust with a diverse community of learners. Some were very gifted learners, others had severe learning disabilities: but almost all would have issues related to abandonment, loss, betrayal, or victimization.
How bad off were some of these kids, I wondered? She said I could expect to see children with all levels of reading ability, and all sorts of emotional and behavioral dispositions. What was the worst I could expect from these students, in terms of the difficulties they had encountered before they arrived at a center such as the one I was getting to know? She gave me this story to tell me about the kinds of kids she would sometimes encounter in her work twenty years previously. She said that in one particular culture, children frequently made "suicide pacts." I started to express my horror but she interrupted me. This wasn't the heart of the tragedy. The fact was that the local society shunned anyone who didn't follow through with a suicide pact. The survivor would inevitably be isolated, abused for having failed to meet his or her obligations to the lost friend. And so it was that one young person was her a friend when that friend shot herself. Worse was to come. After witnessing the death, the traumatized teenager waited for adults, parents of the dead girl, to return. When they did, they were so angered by what they perceived to be the betrayal their dead daughter that they locked the survivor away for a weekend, to share a room with the murdered girl for two days. While this was perhaps an extreme form of tragedy, my friend said this was the type of experience some of her charges had experienced, either immediately prior to their arrival at a group home, or at some point in their troubled biographies.
Knowing all this, I wondered whether I wasn't being overly ambitious, and accordingly I prepared to modify my lesson plan for the evening. On the first day of class, I tried to demonstrate my interest in them by asking them open-ended questions about their interests, about their experience with reading, and about their existing knowledge of Russia. The conversation was revealing insofar as I had not (but perhaps should have) guessed at the extent to which each of them bore some level of antipathy for school, and for reading in particularly. Although the conversation was lively, and the students intelligent, very few of them could admit to any level of interest in history or literature. Trying to broaden the conversation, I asked if people had ever learned something important from somebody who was different from them. Perhaps my students didn't understand the question, but few expressed any interest in getting to know new people. Moreover, almost nobody had even been out of the county.
On the second day of class, I came prepared to talk about Pushkin's short story, "Queen of Spades." However, I was not surprised when not a single student had read the story. Fortunately, I had already resolved to focus more on a general discussion of concepts which are related, however loosely, to the story I had assigned so futilely. That is to say, I wanted them to think about the nature of aristocracy but indeed autocracy. The best I could do with this was to ask questions related to power. Who rules in a society, and why? What does the term aristocracy mean? What is a peasant or serf? How do societies change? What kind of classes are there in America? What is a citizen? What is a subject? What rights do citizens have? What rights, if any, does a subject have? What is democracy? The goal, of course, was to contrast modern American society with Russian society in the age of Pushkin. However, the discussion was meant to suggest some similarities as well. If nineteenth century Russian society was undemocratic and unfree, is American society entirely free of surveillance, censorship, and militarism?
In two weeks this reading club with meet to discuss Mikhail Lermontov's "The Fatalist," drawn from his Hero of Our Times. While I don't really expect anybody to have read the short work, I will once again try to get the students to engage in a general discussion which toggles back and forth between their lives, American politics and culture, and the Russian past. In this case, we'll discuss military and aristocratic values in more detail. We'll also some general philosophical questions about predestination and free will. I can only hope that over time the Russian theme will germinate. In the meantime, I am hoping that intelligent conversation about social science will have a value in helping these students to see themselves as citizens rather than subjects of these United States.
How bad off were some of these kids, I wondered? She said I could expect to see children with all levels of reading ability, and all sorts of emotional and behavioral dispositions. What was the worst I could expect from these students, in terms of the difficulties they had encountered before they arrived at a center such as the one I was getting to know? She gave me this story to tell me about the kinds of kids she would sometimes encounter in her work twenty years previously. She said that in one particular culture, children frequently made "suicide pacts." I started to express my horror but she interrupted me. This wasn't the heart of the tragedy. The fact was that the local society shunned anyone who didn't follow through with a suicide pact. The survivor would inevitably be isolated, abused for having failed to meet his or her obligations to the lost friend. And so it was that one young person was her a friend when that friend shot herself. Worse was to come. After witnessing the death, the traumatized teenager waited for adults, parents of the dead girl, to return. When they did, they were so angered by what they perceived to be the betrayal their dead daughter that they locked the survivor away for a weekend, to share a room with the murdered girl for two days. While this was perhaps an extreme form of tragedy, my friend said this was the type of experience some of her charges had experienced, either immediately prior to their arrival at a group home, or at some point in their troubled biographies.
Knowing all this, I wondered whether I wasn't being overly ambitious, and accordingly I prepared to modify my lesson plan for the evening. On the first day of class, I tried to demonstrate my interest in them by asking them open-ended questions about their interests, about their experience with reading, and about their existing knowledge of Russia. The conversation was revealing insofar as I had not (but perhaps should have) guessed at the extent to which each of them bore some level of antipathy for school, and for reading in particularly. Although the conversation was lively, and the students intelligent, very few of them could admit to any level of interest in history or literature. Trying to broaden the conversation, I asked if people had ever learned something important from somebody who was different from them. Perhaps my students didn't understand the question, but few expressed any interest in getting to know new people. Moreover, almost nobody had even been out of the county.
On the second day of class, I came prepared to talk about Pushkin's short story, "Queen of Spades." However, I was not surprised when not a single student had read the story. Fortunately, I had already resolved to focus more on a general discussion of concepts which are related, however loosely, to the story I had assigned so futilely. That is to say, I wanted them to think about the nature of aristocracy but indeed autocracy. The best I could do with this was to ask questions related to power. Who rules in a society, and why? What does the term aristocracy mean? What is a peasant or serf? How do societies change? What kind of classes are there in America? What is a citizen? What is a subject? What rights do citizens have? What rights, if any, does a subject have? What is democracy? The goal, of course, was to contrast modern American society with Russian society in the age of Pushkin. However, the discussion was meant to suggest some similarities as well. If nineteenth century Russian society was undemocratic and unfree, is American society entirely free of surveillance, censorship, and militarism?
In two weeks this reading club with meet to discuss Mikhail Lermontov's "The Fatalist," drawn from his Hero of Our Times. While I don't really expect anybody to have read the short work, I will once again try to get the students to engage in a general discussion which toggles back and forth between their lives, American politics and culture, and the Russian past. In this case, we'll discuss military and aristocratic values in more detail. We'll also some general philosophical questions about predestination and free will. I can only hope that over time the Russian theme will germinate. In the meantime, I am hoping that intelligent conversation about social science will have a value in helping these students to see themselves as citizens rather than subjects of these United States.
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