#104 The Death of a Clerk- Anton Chekhov
“In the five years I spent hanging around newspaper offices,
I became resigned to the general view of my literary insignificance…” This
quote by Chekhov was in response to a letter written to him by his time’s most
revered critic, Dmitri Grogorovich. He was being chastised by the critic for
wasting his talent, and not taking himself seriously.
Thankfully Chekhov took this to heart and developed his
craft. There are many parallels in style, form, and historical importance
between Chekhov in Russia and O. Henry in America.
Chekhov believed that good stories should follow six
principles (as copied from Richard Peaver in the into to Selected Stories of
Anton Chekhov):
1 1.) Absence
of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature.
2 2.) Total
objectivity
3 3.) Truthful
descriptions of persons and objects
4 4.) Extreme
brevity
5 5.) Audacity
and originality
6 6.) Compassion
These sound like a good technical compliment to the six
verities that Faulkner says we should write about: Love, Honor, Pity, Pride,
Compassion, and Sacrifice. I like that both urge compassion.
The Death of a Clerk is the first of this collection. It’s a
funny little scene. Like many Chekhov works it plays on the absurdities of
polite society. How far can one take a slight? Apparently you can actually die
of embarrassment.
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