#188 Easter Night- Anton Chekhov
Yesterday’s author Mavis Gallant’s simple advive to new
authors was to “Read Chekhov.” Here, as
well as many of his stories, we see the brilliance of that advice. This is such a delicate and touching story, balancing joy-sorrow,
life-death, light-dark, past-present, gentry-impoverished. A Gentlemen crosses
the river to get to an Easter service. The ferryman is a novice who is grieving
the loss of a brother, a brother skilled at writing outlaw religious texts
known as Akathists.
Like the poetry of Walt Whitman, or the music of Charles
Ives, Chekhov strives to capture humanity at its most pure moments, not lofty,
or quaint, sarcastic, or judgmental, but truthful and lovingly. The following
passage I found to be a perfect capture of a common shared public experience .
He has tapped into the emotion of such a scene with a genuine eye.
Notable Passage: “One would have liked to see this restlessness and
sleeplessness in all of nature, beginning with the night’s darkness and ending
with the slabs, the graveyard crosses, and the trees, under which people bustle
about. But nowhere did the excitement and restlessness tell so strongly as in
the church. At the entrance an irrepressible struggle went on between ebb and
flow. Some went in, others came out and soon went back again, to stand for a
little while and then move again. People shuttle from place to place, loiter,
and seem to be looking for something. The wave starts at the entrance and
passes through the whole church, even disturbing the front rows where the solid
and weighty people stand. To concentrate on prayer is out of the question.
There are no prayers, but there is a sort of massive childishly instinctive joy
that is only seeking an excuse to burst and pour itself out in some sort of
movement, be it only an unabashed swaying and jostling.”
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