Miss Herbert by Adam Thirlwell

Author:Adam Thirlwell [Thirlwell, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter viii

Moscow, 1880: On Style (II)

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that when he thought of Chekhov, ‘all I can make out109 is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth: yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet.’ As a stylist, he was bewildered and confused by his love for Chekhov, who was not a stylist. But perhaps he did not need to be so confused. The paradox is that a writer whose sentences are hardly even sentences, just pale arrangements of words, is still a writer with a style. And Chekhov’s style, like everyone else’s style, is a collection of multiple objects – in his case, it is a fusion of concision, reticence, ventriloquism, and a vicious sense of humour.

Chekhov found things funny which to other people, perhaps, might seem sad. But that is not unusual. Just as when reading Cervantes, or Flaubert, or many other novelists in Miss Herbert, the rattled reader might have to revise his or her sense of humour and become more accepting, more libertine.

It is easy to make another mistake about using minimal means. This mistake is that it is more delicate to use minimal means. Logically, however, this cannot be true. The fewer signs you use, the more efficient they must be. They must, therefore, be blunter.

And Chekhov can be a very blunt writer.

There is an early story by Chekhov, ‘Because of Little Apples’, written in 1880, when Chekhov was nineteen. A landowner finds an engaged couple who are otherwise engaged in eating apples from his orchard. The punishment he comes up with is that first the girl must beat the boy and then the boy must beat the girl. When the boy beats the girl, he cannot stop. He enjoys it too much. So the boy and the girl leave the orchard, their relationship irreparably damaged.

Nothing is missing in this story. It means what it says. It is nasty, and funny, but it is not an allegory, or a parable. It is just a description. All the psychological information the reader needs is there. It is a description of one way in which a couple might break up.

It is important to get Chekhov’s sense of humour: it was not mild; it was implacable. Its central characteristic is a refusal of cliché. So, in 1880, Chekhov (or, as he used to sign himself, diminutively, Chekhonte) wrote a two-page story which is not a story, but a list of elements from other people’s stories: ‘What You Nearly Always Find in Novels, Stories etc.’ This list (like Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas) is full of iciness at the boredom induced by conventional literature.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.