![]() ![]() ![]() Chekhov likes his ladies-his Lydias-of the capital sometimes he goes out with Lydia Yavorskaya, and sometimes Lydia Avilova. This isn’t a sodden aberration when no one is looking. No, he has taken the long way home: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, about which he has written, to a patron and friend, “When I have children, I’ll say to them, not without pride: ‘Hey, you sons of bitches, in my day I had sexual relations with a black-eyed Hindu girl, and you know where? In a coconut grove on a moonlit night. But neither is he a brow-furrowed Marxist scribbling a manifesto as his train races back to the capital. He’s no rake on a grand tour-he’s just completed a journey that would be arduous even today: a humanitarian visit to a penal colony in the Russian Far East. ![]() I think of an 1890 photograph of a 30-year-old man returning by steamer from Asia. This isn’t the person I think of when I think of Chekhov. We wouldn’t want this kind of writing today-too un-ironic, too free with emotion, too un-relativist, too naive in thinking that the Big Questions have resolution at all. The picture lasts because it’s what we want from our 19th-century Russians: gravity, fatalism, melancholy, minds wracked by the Big Questions. Everything you know about Anton Chekhov is wrong.Ĭhekhov the downcast tubercular writing magnificently mournful plays about the declining aristocracy on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, the king of the country whose national anthem is the minute-long sigh. ![]()
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