Eric The Blue

Authors: Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in January of 1860 at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia.  His father, the son of a serf who had bought his freedom twenty years before the emancipation, rose by hard work to the merchant class and operated a general store.  The children--five boys and a girl--were subjected to the father's harsh discipline and conservative views.  They worked long hours in the store, were forced to sing in the church choir, and were beaten.  The mother was dominated by her overbearing husband.

While Anton was a boy, residents of Taganrog declined to spend money on the bribe needed to extend to their town a branch of the new railroad from a terminal at Rostov-on-Don, a larger port about 45 miles to the east at the mouth of the River Don.  Commerce at Taganrog slowed and the elder Chekhov's store failed.  When a loan was foreclosed, he fled to Moscow.  Instead of pursuing legal remedies to the extent allowed by law, the creditor took possession of the house and store and let the family members join the father in Moscow--except for Anton, age 16, who stayed behind as a form of security and as a cheap tutor to the creditor's son. 

If this event seems in retrospect like less of a catastrophe than, say, Dickens's time in the blacking factory, that is probably to be attributed to the intelligence and maturity of young Anton.  He attended school, read widely, tutored additional students besides the son of his father's creditor, sent money to Moscow.  From this time forward, the family leaned on him.  His letters to his brothers offer advice that often sounds parental.  Considering what he would do with his life, the scraps of literary criticism are also interesting.  Harriet Beecher Stowe was popular in Russia and one of the brothers had written to Anton expressing admiration.  Still a schoolboy, he replied:

I read her once, and six months ago read her again with the object of studying her--and . . . I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants.

Upon graduating, in 1879, from the high school in Taganrog, Chekhov joined his needy family in Moscow and enrolled in the medical department of the university.  To make money, he began furnishing comic papers with humorous sketches and stories.  These were crude publications, but Chekhov's work, though not out of place in them, was at least sometimes augmented by hints of social criticism and a sharp eye for human weakness.  He completed his studies and, while continuing with his writing, began practicing medicine in 1884.  Medicine, he was fond of saying, was his lawful wife, and literature his mistress.

By 1886, Chekhov had acquired a following and a publishing home in the pages of Novoe Vremya ("New Time"), a journal of reactionary political opinion edited by Aleksey Suvorin.  Chekhov's impulses were liberal, but he did not hesitate to publish in Novoe Vremya, and he formed a warm relationship with Suvorin that lasted till the Dreyfus affair.  On more solid financial ground, he began to take more care with his writing.  The long story "The Steppe" appeared in 1888.  His tuberculosis had by this time begun manifesting itself, and to his fifteen remaining years belong the many fictions on which his reputation as the world's finest author of short stories rests.  Are you looking for a reader's guide?  I would suggest reading through these: "Enemies" (1887), "A Boring Story" (1889), "Ward 6" (1892), "The Student" (1894), "Peasants" (1897), three linked stories from 1898 ("The Man in a Case," "Gooseberries," and "About Love"), "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), and "The Bishop" (1902).  If these please you, there are many others.  Such collections as The Portable Chekhov and the Norton Critical Edition of Chekhov's Short Stories are useful but do not include most of the great longer stories.  In this regard, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, translated and introduced by David Magarshack, which includes both "Ward 6" and "A Boring Story," helps fill a gap.

I've referred to the youthful Chekhov's opinion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is in line with some advice he once gave a fellow writer: "When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder.  It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief."  Lionel Trilling, noting Chekhov's profession, said that his fiction might put you in mind of the bedside manner of a very good physician:  intelligent, objective, and, somehow, simultaneously detached and suffused with humane sympathy.  There are few fireworks, linguistic or otherwise.  The adjective, "restrained," is often deployed.  Read the stories if you want to find out what I'm trying to describe.

Chekhov was a man of progressive views and generous instincts.  Despite being financially responsible for his family, he gave away a lot of money, including, at his death, to the administration for public education in Taganrog.  He donated his time as a physician, worked indefatigably on various relief efforts, went door-to-door soliciting contributions to build schools and improve hospitals, and, most famously, made an arduous journey, notwithstanding his own poor health, to the penal colony at Sakhalin, where he interviewed convicts, saw patients, advised on public health, and documented conditions for The Island of Sakhalin; travel notes, a sober report that appeared in 1895, five years after the three-month excursion ended.  He worked on it alternately with his fiction during the first half of the 1890s.

In the second half of the 1890s, Chekhov turned his attention increasingly to the drama.  His play The Gull had been virtually hissed off the St. Petersburg stage in 1896, but, revived by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, it achieved a popular and critical success.  Uncle Vanya was performed for the first time the next year, and it was followed by Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard.  The plays are thematically continuous with the stories but exhibit great originality in construction and technique.  Had he never written a story, the four plays of his maturity would have secured for him a reputation, with Ibsen and Strindberg, as one of the fathers of the modern drama.  Cherry Orchard is included in The Portable Chekhov but I think the longer Three Sisters is his best play.

In 1898, Chekhov met the actress Olga Knipper during rehearsals of The Gull at the Moscow Art Theatre.  They were married in 1901.  Chekhov's failing health meant they were often apart, he in the Crimea while she pursued her acting career in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but it appears to have been a happy match.  Before meeting Knipper he had always turned away, usually with jokes, the attentions of female admirers.  V.S. Pritchett, author of Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, from which I am drawing many of the biographical details, speculates that Chekhov's "sexual temperature was low."  I think it is possible that he knew he would not live long and therefore jealously guarded his freedom.  With his end in sight, he consented to marry a professional woman with her own career who would not cramp him.  He attended the premier of Cherry Orchard in January of 1904.  On the advice of his doctor, he travelled with his wife in June to the spa at Badenweiler in Germany.  He died there a month later at the age of 44.
  

Netflix: Nurse Jackie

Edie Falco plays a tough, able, partly jaded emergency room nurse with a taste for Percocet, which she conceals by performing delicate operations on packets of artificial sweetener.  I think the show is supposed to be "realistic" but it really works, if it works, by taking everyone's conception of "emergency room nurse" and multiplying by 3.  Among the incongruities: How is it that the Falco character ever hooked up with the large hunk of milquetoast who is her husband?  She has one cell phone for him and another for her boyfriend, the hospital pharmacist, and I've said enough for you to guess what she sees in him. 

Our disc from Netflix for the second set of episodes was defective and I think we've decided just to skip ahead in our queue.  Still, almost everything else on TV is worse.  I love watching Falco, and Merritt Wever, as a nursing student, is a revelation, a word all professional reviewers work into their favorable reviews, along with luminous.

Krauthammer v. Kinsley on the so-called "Ground Zero mosque"

Charles Krauthammer weighs in on the Islamic Center near Ground Zero, Michael Kinsley responds, and Krauthammer responds to Kinsley's response. 

I think it's sporting of me to give Krauthammer two swings, because I'm on Kinsley's side.  This whole notion that Muslims have a right to build their Islamic Center within a couple of blocks of Ground Zero, but should be turned down anyway, since there are "sensibilities" and "sensitivities" to consider--how lame is that?  It's like saying you have a right to free speech, so long as it doesn't offend too many sensibilities.  Are our constitutional freedoms actual or theoretical?

All the talk about "sensitivity" and "hallowed ground" is a way of not talking about the real reasons for opposition to the center, which, as Kinsley indicates, are pretty clearly bigotry and political opportunism.  Ground Zero is sacred territory, like the Gettysburg battlefield, and, therefore, Islamic community centers, but not strip clubs, must find another place to operate.  The argument is so weak that we are entitled to attribute the viewpoint to less respectable sources.   The wingers have put aside their usual distaste for sex-oriented businesses, which evidently are not up to Islamic community centers in the sacrilege department, and abandoned the principle of "local control" in order to win the votes of Billy-Bobs two thousand miles from Manhattan. 

The principle underlying the phrase "defining deviance down" applies.  It's bad enough that Republicans so casually trash the Constitution.  Worse yet is that no one should be surprised.

Chekhov v. Tolstoy

Have I mentioned that I love Chekhov?  Yes, I have--here, for instance.  In the last couple of weeks I've read Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard, and most of the stories collected in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, which is edited by Richard Ford, meaning that he decided which ones are "essential."  The choices are half-eccentric: Ford includes several stories that are familiar to anyone with any interest in Chekhov, or even just the short story ("The Kiss," "Gooseberries," "About Love," "The Darling," "On Official Duty," and, of course, "The Lady with the Dog"), a couple of others that are great but less known on account of being too long for inclusion in anthologies and such collections as The Portable Chekhov ("Ward No. 6" and "An Anonymous Story"), and others still that are not very well known at all--these are mostly by the younger, less grave Chekhov, about whom Ford thinks the world is under-informed. 

Personally, I think the wide world is under-informed, in a general sort of way, about Chekhov, who, besides being a major figure in world literature, was an exemplary human being.  Now that I've said that, some Ph.D. candidate will probably reveal that he (Chekhov) pursued a sexual interest in marsupials--in which case I think I shall take a second look at the kangaroo.

So you see that Chekhov strikes a chord in me.  I think it is largely the thoroughgoing rejection of the heroic mode.  In the post linked to above, I noted how the story "Anna on the Neck" invites comparison with another Russian Anna who steps out on her husband.  The biblical epigraphs are missing in Chekhov, and tragic consequences fail to develop.  It sometimes seems to me that Chekhov had read all of Tolstoy and made notes on every false enthusiasm.  You know how Tolstoy sometimes idealizes the Russian peasants, whose simple purity is a rebuke to the dissipated aristocrats?  The Chekhov story "Peasants," which I read a few days ago in Ford's collection, will have none of that sentimental nonsense.  From the opening:

In his memories of childhood he had pictured his home as bright, snug, comfortable.  Now, going into the hut, he was positively frightened; it was so dark, so crowded, so unclean.  His wife Olga and his daughter Sasha, who had come with him, kept looking in bewilderment at the big untidy stove, which filled up almost half the hut and was black with soot and flies.  What lots of flies!  The stove was on one side, the beams lay slanting on the walls, and it looked as though the hut were just going to fall to pieces.  In the corner, facing the door, under the holy images, bottle labels and newspaper cuttings were stuck on the walls instead of pictures.  The poverty, the poverty!  Of the grown-up people there were none at home; all were at work at the harvest.  On the stove was sitting a white-haired girl of eight, unwashed and apathetic; she did not even glance at them as they came in.  On the floor a white cat was rubbing itself against the oven fork.

"Puss, puss!" Sasha called to her.  "Puss!"

"She can't hear," said the little girl; "she has gone deaf."

"How is that?"

"Oh, she was beaten."

By the way, Ford includes "Kashtanka," told from the perspective of a lost dog who is taken in, then trained, by a circus clown whose act includes performing animals.  Chekhov was plainly fond of animals.  Showing someone mistreating a dog or a horse is in his fiction a kind of shorthand for "a-hole."

Tom Emmer shouts, makes no sense (again)

We had a primary election here in Minnesota yesterday.  The drama was all on the Democratic side, where in the governor's race Mark Dayton (boosted by Amanda's vote) edged Margaret Anderson Kelliher, whom the DFL party (and Amanda's husband) had backed, by around 4000 votes.  Meanwhile, Crazy Tom Emmer, running unopposed for governor on the Republican side of the ballot, celebrated his "victory" at one of St. Paul's more well-known watering holes.  I'm not sure the venue helped Emmer, who has been hammered in TV ads recounting his two arrests, ten years apart, for driving under the influence and his more recent efforts, as a legislator, to lighten penalties for drunk driving.  For crimes Emmer hasn't committed, his views are presumably more in line with lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key, 3-strikes-and-yer-out Republican boilerplate. 

"Will you help me take back our state?" Emmer roared.  On the radio, the assembled did not sound very eager.  "Take it back from whom?" I imagined them to be thinking.  Minnesota has not had a Democratic governor for 20 years and has been led, for the last eight, by a Republican, Tim Pawlenty, who is probably not as crazy as Emmer but, being a Republican and ambitious, is obliged to act as if he is. 

Nothing Emmer says makes any sense.  I wonder whether either of the officers who arrested him for drunk driving looked in the glove box.  It might have been Emmer's last chance to develop an enlightened opinion.

Paul Mirengoff is embarrassed (but not enough)

You know it's bad when, over at Power Line, Paul Mirengoff, citing this column by Stephen Bainbridge, wonders aloud whether It is now officially "embarrassing to be a conservative."  Bainbridge gives ten reasons why conservatives ought to be embarrassed, and Mirengoff, in his post, chooses to highlight these three:

1. A poorly educated ex-sportswriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a -- if not the -- leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination.

5. Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to oust Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?

6. The anti-science and anti-intellectualism that pervade the movement.

Three out of  three sound . . . --you know, "elitist."  It is enough to make you wonder whether Mirengoff reads the blog of which he is a co-author.  Anti-science?  Here's his friend and fellow Power Line blogger John Hinderaker lecturing on 19th-century intellectual history:

Modern leftism has always been anti-religious at its core. The three great intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, founded by Marx, Darwin and Freud, were all rebellions against the European religious tradition. Marx sought to secularize history, Darwin to secularize biology, and Freud to secularize human nature. All three movements pretended to be scientific, but in reality were pseudo-science. Hostility to religion was their essence and their motivation.

The only thing missing is the name of the mathematician responsible for having secularized the calculus.  Embarrassed Republicans have begun floating the idea that not all Republicans are embarrassing.  How convenient!  The apt objects of their embarrassment, however, tend to be closer than they imagine.

Kai Erikson and accidental slaughters

It's now been 65 years since the United States, on two out of four consecutive August mornings in 1945, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan, achieving in two instants a six-figure civilian body count and bringing World War II to an end.  I join Amy Davidson in linking to an op-ed, published August 5 in The New York Times, by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe. He recalls how his mother, hearing of the hospitalization of a friend in Hiroshima, traveled there from their home on the island of Shikoku with a small care package.  On her return, she described for her son, the future novelist, what the friend had seen on the morning of August 6:

Moments before the atomic bomb was dropped, my mother’s friend happened to seek shelter from the bright summer sunlight in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall, and she watched from there as two children who had been playing out in the open were vaporized in the blink of an eye. “I just felt outraged,” she told my mother, weeping.

That the atomic bombings are still broadly supported by Americans is not a good advertisement for us.  But whom to blame for these horrific events?  I think the best analysis of the decision to use the atomic bomb is the essay, by the Yale social scientist Kai Erikson (who is the son of psychologist Erik Erikson), "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters."  Erikson's view is that the "decision to drop" was not the result of rational analysis or moral choice but, rather, of bureaucratic momentum.  It was not possible, given all the small decisions already made along the way of developoment, that war-weary leaders would in the end decline to use this awesome new weapon.  The question of whether it is wise to take the last few steps cannot arise if the road already travelled is very far. 

Truman and his war council appear in this light not as monsters but as ordinary blokes.  It is I think a strong argument for disarmament.  We should be very afraid of what we might do without even really thinking about it, if we have the means.  (Alcoholics, if they are really recovering, do not keep liquor in the garage.)  Erikson took the title for his essay from a speech of Horatio's as Hamlet draws to its close:

And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook. . . .

Something like 200,000 people, hardly any of them soldiers, were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Still looking for a good reason to preserve the current system for electing our president

Why must the people who disagree with Eric the Blue be so obtuse?

Last week, when the Massachusetts State Senate voted to award the Commonwealth's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, thereby joining the ranks of the enlightened (along with Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, and Hawaii), Richard Tisei, the Senate minority leader and Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, showed that he is not himself one of the fit and fair:

"We've had a lot of bad ideas come through this chamber over the years, but this is going to be one of the worst ideas that has surfaced and actually garnered some support," said Tisei. . . .

And why is that?

He said the legislation would force candidates to focus on cities, where they can get the most votes.  "They're going to spend all their time in New York City and Los Angeles," he said, "and to hell with the rest of the country."

Whoa!

The legislation would not "force candidates" to do anything, and Tisei advances no reasons for why they would act as he says they would act.  He's running for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.  The winner will be the candidate who gets the most votes.  Will he and the Republican candidate for governor spend all their time in Boston?  If not, why does he think it is inevitable that the major party candidates for president would be obliged, in a national popular vote election, to spend all their time in New York City and Los Angeles?

And why would the outcome he predicts and abhors be worse than what we have?  Is there some reason that presidential aspirants spending all their time in Columbus, Ohio and Tampa, Florida and Des Moines, Iowa, while ignoring New York City and Los Angeles and Houston and Chicago, is superior? 

I think the candidate with the most votes should win.  That's the way all our other elections work.  I do not understand why we need a Rube Goldberg machine to choose the president.

Wait, Tisei isn't done:

Tisei also criticized the proponents for not following the normal procedures to seek a constitutional amendment.

He said, "The thing about this that bothers me the most is it's so sneaky. ...This is sort of an end run around the constitution."

No, the constitution is not being amended, and the electoral college is not being abolished.  That is really the genius of the national popular vote movement.  One of the lousy things about the electoral college, as it currently works, is that ballots cast in sparsely populated states count more than those cast in the most populous states.  It's a lousy thing about the electoral college, but it's not a lousy thing for the thirteen least populated states, which have veto power over any proposed amendment to the constitution.  There is, however, no constitutional requirement that the electors cast their votes for the popular vote winner in their state.  Nor is there anything "sneaky" about open votes, in state legislatures across the country, on the question of whether their electoral votes should be awarded to the candidate who, from sea to shining sea, gets more votes than any other.

I don't think this Tisei fellow can get anything right.