#216 Sleepy- Anton Chekhov

#216 Sleepy- Anton Chekhov

The Masters are asleep and the thirteen year-old nanny, Varka, is tending to their child. She is exhausted, cannot keep her eyes open, but she must. The child needs care and if she sleeps, the masters will beat her. All night, she falls into half awake half dreamlike states, never getting enough. When the morning comes, even without sleep, she is expected to work:

-Varka, light the stove.

-Varka, set up the samovar.

-Varka, clean the master’s galoshes.

-Varka, wash the front steps.

-Varka, run and fetch the bottles of beer.

-Varka, rock the baby.

Night after day after night, reality is a myth. The baby is the enemy and must go. Then she can get sleep. Chekhov does a great job creating tension and anxiety. You really feel tired and angry and want this poor girl to get some rest.

Rating: 7-8-9-7 Total= 31

#188 Easter Night- Anton Chekhov

#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.

 “There should be softness, gentleness, and tenderness in every little line, so that there’s not a single coarse, harsh, or unsuitable word. It has to be written so that the one who is praying will rejoice and weep in his heart, but shake and be in awe in his mind.”

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.”

Rating: 10-8-8-9 Total= 35

#161 My First Fee- Isaac Babel

#161 My First Fee- Isaac Babel

Babel is one of many brilliant artists that suffered under the dark cloud of Stalin. Believing him to be a Trotskyite, he was tortured and forced to confess to treason before being executed. The heavy oppressive culture killed off thousands of talented writers, but such adversity often creates its own art, deep meaningful and serious art.

Just reading some of these passages, you can tell immediately they came from that pace during that period:

“Since childhood, I had invested every drop of my strength in creating tales, plays, and thousands of stories. They lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. Possessed by demonic pride, I did not want to write them down too soon, I felt that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy. My stories were destined to survive oblivion.  Dauntless thought and grueling passion are only worth the effort spent on them when they are draped in beautiful raiment.”

“I was a dreamer but did not have the knack for the thoughtless art of happiness.”

“Other people’s lives bustled in the hallway with peels of sudden laughter. Flies were dying in a jar filled with milky liquid. Each fly was dying in its own way—one in drawn-out agony, its death throes violent, another with a barely visible shudder.”

Can’t you just feel that this is Russian?

Notable Passage: “I had no choice but to look for love.”

Rating: 9-7-7-8 Total= 31

#160 Panikhida- Anton Chekhov

#160 Panikhida- Anton Chekhov

This could be both a satire of religion and conformity or one on the conformity of religion. Andrei Andreich gets in hot water with Father Grigory when he misuses a passage in the bible about Mary Magdalene.

“Don’t get too clever! Yes, brother, don’t get too clever! God may have given you a searching mind, but if you can’t control it, you’d better give up thinking…Above all don’t get too clever, just think as others do.”

He has just lost his daughter. They were separated for most of her life and do not know each other. When she visited once as an adult he was embarrassed to find she had become a low-moral actress, a famous actress so far removed from his religious life that he likened her to the harlot in the bible needing redemption upon her death.

“Terrified though he was of going for a stroll with his actress daughter in broad daylight, in front of all honest people, he yielded to her entreaties…”

The Father and the Deacon help perform a ritual, a Panikhida, for his daughter, but it is actually him that needs redemption.

Notable Passage: "Bluish smoke streams from the censer and bathes in a wide, slanting ray of sunlight that crosses the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the church. And it seems that, together with the smoke, the soul of the departed woman herself hovers in the ray of sunlight. The streams of smoke, looking liker a child’s curls, twist, rush upwards to the window and seem to shun the dejection and grief that fill this poor soul.”

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#146 The Malefactor- Anton Chekhov

#146 The Malefactor- Anton Chekhov

A poor man stands before the magistrate. He stands accused of defacing public property. He unscrewed a nut from the train track. He admits to the deed and says his people use the unscrewed nuts as sinkers for fishing.

What ensues in the hearing is a string of nonsense and circular arguments. There is a little humor here but not much else.

Rating: 7-5-5-5 Total= 22