Anton Chekhov (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

199 Pages·2009·0.99 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom (Editor)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
African-American Geoffrey Chaucer Nathaniel Hawthorne
Poets: Volume I George Orwell Norman Mailer
African-American G.K. Chesterton Octavio Paz
Poets: Volume II Gwendolyn Brooks Paul Auster
Aldous Huxley Hans Christian Philip Roth
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Andersen Ralph Ellison
Alice Munro Henry David Thoreau Ralph Waldo
Alice Walker Herman Melville Emerson
American Women Hermann Hesse Ray Bradbury
Poets: 1650–1950 H.G. Wells Richard Wright
Amy Tan Hispanic-American Robert Browning
Anton Chekhov Writers Robert Frost
Arthur Miller Homer Robert Hayden
Asian-American Honoré de Balzac Robert Louis
Writers Jamaica Kincaid Stevenson
August Wilson James Joyce Salman Rushdie
The Bible Jane Austen Stephen Crane
The Brontës Jay Wright Stephen King
Carson McCullers J.D. Salinger Sylvia Plath
Charles Dickens Jean-Paul Sartre Tennessee Williams
Christopher Marlowe John Irving Thomas Hardy
Contemporary Poets John Keats Thomas Pynchon
Cormac McCarthy John Milton Tom Wolfe
C.S. Lewis John Steinbeck Toni Morrison
Dante Aligheri José Saramago Tony Kushner
David Mamet J.R.R. Tolkien Truman Capote
Derek Walcott Julio Cortázar Walt Whitman
Don DeLillo Kate Chopin W.E.B. Du Bois
Doris Lessing Kurt Vonnegut William Blake
Edgar Allan Poe Langston Hughes William Faulkner
Émile Zola Leo Tolstoy William Gaddis
Emily Dickinson Marcel Proust William Shakespeare:
Ernest Hemingway Margaret Atwood Comedies
Eudora Welty Mark Twain William Shakespeare:
Eugene O’Neill Mary Wollstonecraft Histories
F. Scott Fitzgerald Shelley William Shakespeare:
Flannery O’Connor Maya Angelou Tragedies
Franz Kafka Miguel de Cervantes William Wordsworth
Gabriel García Márquez Milan Kundera Zora Neale Hurston

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
ANTON CHEKHOV
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Anton Chekhov—New Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For more information contact:
Bloom’s Literary Criticism
An imprint of Infobase Publishing
132 West 31st Street
New York NY 10001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anton Chekhov / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.—New ed.
p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-576-3 (acid-free paper) 1. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904—
Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold.
PG3458.Z8A523 2009
891.72’3—dc22
2009018267
Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk
quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our
Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967–8800 or (800) 322–8755.
You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at
http://www.chelseahouse.com.
Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi
Printed in the United States of America
MP BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of
publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have
changed since publication and may no longer be valid.
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
The Cherry Orchard: Chekhov’s Last Testament 9
Savely Senderovich
Re-examining the “Coldly Objective” Point-of-View
in Chekhov’s “The Bet” and “A Trifle from Life” 29
Maggie Christensen
Constance Garnett’s Chekhov
and the Modernist Short Story 37
Adrian Hunter
The Paradox of Melancholy Insight: Reading the
Medical Subtext in Chekhov’s “A Boring Story” 55
Jefferson J. A. Gatrall
Chekhov’s Stories: Effects or Subtexts? 77
Kerry McSweeny
The Masculine Triangle in Uncle Vania 91
Kjeld Bjørnager
Two-timing Time in Three Sisters 99
Cynthia Marsh
vi Contents
Translating and Mistranslating Chekhov 109
Robin Milner-Gulland and Olga Soboleva
Against Narrative (“A Boring Story”) 123
Pekka Tammi
Greek Tragedy, Chekhov, and Being Remembered 143
Oliver Taplin
A Blind Spot: Chekhov’s Deepest Horizons 153
Stuart Young
Chronology 169
Contributors 171
Bibliography 175
Acknowledgments 181
Index 183
Editor’s Note
M
y introduction admires Chekhov’s plays for their skill in humanizing
change, and so in rendering us more humane.
The Cherry Orchard is interpreted by Savely Senderovich as Chekhov’s
tonal farewell to his art and to his auditors and readers.
Four essays examine the Chekhovian short story. Maggie Christensen
stresses Chekhov’s offering of shared meaning with his public, while Adrian
Hunter describes Constance Garnett’s achievement as a translator and its
wide influence. Jefferson J. A. Gattrall and Kerry McSweeny center upon the
role of subtexts.
Uncle Vania, in Kjeld Bjørnager’s view, is a drama of masculine intersec-
tions, after which Cynthia Marsh analyzes the subtle temporal pattern of
Three Sisters.
Mistranslating Chekhov intrigues Robin Milner-Gulland and Olga So-
boleva, while “A Boring Story” receives another reading from Pekka Tammi.
Oliver Taplin juxtaposes Chekhov with Greek tragedy, after which Stu-
art Young concludes this volume by urging a theatrical restoration of Che-
khovian skyscapes and vistas.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
anton chekhov (1860–1904)
I
C
hekhov’s best critics tend to agree that he is essentially a dramatist, even
as a writer of short stories. Since the action of his plays is both immensely
subtle and absolutely ineluctable, the stories also are dramatic in Chekhov’s
utterly original way. D. S. Mirsky, in his helpful History of Russian Literature,
rather severely remarks upon “the complete lack of individuality in his
characters and in their way of speaking.” That seems unjust, but a critic who
reads no Russian perhaps cannot dispute Mirsky, who also indicts Chekhov’s
Russian:
It is colorless and lacks individuality. He had no feeling for words.
No Russian writer of anything like his significance used a language
so devoid of all raciness and verve. This makes Chekhov (except
for topical allusions, technical terms and occasional catch-words)
so easy to translate; of all Russian writers, he has the least to fear
from the treachery of translators.
It is difficult to believe that this helps account for the permanent
popularity of Chekhov’s plays in the English-speaking theater, or of his
stories with readers of English. Chekhov, as Mirsky also says, is uniquely
original and powerful at one mode of representation in particular: “No writer
excels in conveying the mutual unsurpassable isolation of human beings and
the impossibility of understanding each other.” Mirsky wrote this in 1926,
presumably in ignorance of Kafka, before the advent of Beckett, but they
1