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Defining “privacy” has proven akin to a search for the philosopher’s stone. None of the numerous theories proposed over the years seems to encompass all the varied facets of the concept. In considering the meaning of privacy, it can be fruitful to examine how a great artist of the past has dealt with aspects of private life that retain their relevance in the Internet age.

The post A Chekhovian view of privacy for the internet age appeared first on OUPblog.

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“Don’t discuss the writer’s life. Never speculate about his intentions.” Such were the imperatives when writing literary criticism at school and university. The text was an absolute object to be dissected for what it was, with no reference to where it came from. This conferred on the critic the dignity of the scientist. It’s surprising they didn’t ask us to wear white coats.

The post The question of belonging appeared first on OUPblog.

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My name is Matthew and I am a Norton Critical Edition addict.

Hardly a term has gone by without my assigning students at least one NCE, both when I was a high school teacher and especially now that I'm teaching college students. (This term, it's The Red Badge of Courage.) I have been known to change syllabi each term just to try out new NCEs with students. I have bought NCEs for myself even of books that I already owned in multiple other editions. I have all four editions of the NCE of Heart of Darkness because the changes between them fascinate me. (I've been meaning to write a blog post or essay of some sort about those changes. I'll get to it one day.)

Anton Chekhov is my favorite writer, a writer whose work I've been reading and thinking about for all of my adult life. The Norton Critical Editions of Chekhov's stories and plays published in the late 1970s remained unchanged until Laurence Senelick's Selected Plays came out in 2004, and then, finally, last year Cathy Popkin's Selected Stories. Senelick's collection is good, and probably all that the average reader needs, though I'm more partial to Senelick's true masterpiece, the Complete Plays, which is awe-inspiring.

Popkin's Selected Stories is something more again, and easily the best single-volume collection of Chekhov in English. This is the place to start if you've never read Chekhov, and it's a great resource even for seasoned Chekhovians. I'll go further than that, actually: Because of the critical apparatus, this is a great resource for anyone interested in fiction, translation, and/or writing; and it is one of the most interesting Norton Critical Editions I know, almost as impressive as my favorite NCEs, Things Fall Apart and The English Bible.

Popkin made the interesting and valuable choice to not only include stories from multiple translators (including new commissions), but to foreground the act of translation by including helpful descriptions of each translator's approach and methodology, as well as short passages from multiple stories in numerous translations for comparison:

sample of the Comparison Passages section

Further, Popkin frequently offers a perspective on the translation of an individual story in the first footnote for it, and sometimes in subsequent footnotes that point out particular choices the translator made.

The foregrounding of translation allows Popkin to bring in essays in the critical section that focus on Chekhov as a stylist, something Ralph Matlaw, editor of the previous edition, specifically avoided because he thought it made no sense to talk about "since the subtleties of Chekhov's style are lost in translation." Popkin's contention is that this no longer needs to be true, if it ever was.

What we have here, then, is not only a book of Chekhov stories plus some biographical and critical material, but a book about aesthetics and writing. One of the critical disputes that Popkin highlights, both in her introduction and in her selection of essays, is a longstanding one between critics who believe every detail in the stories has a particular purpose and function, and critics who believe that Chekhov's art (and philosophy) resides in the very extraneousness and randomness of some of his details. There is, as Popkin notes, no solution to this question, and plenty of readers (I'm one of them) believe that in a certain way both interpretations can be correct — but the value here is that Popkin is able to make the critical dispute one that is not only about Chekhov, but about writing, realism, and the reader's experience of the text. Attentive readers of this Selected Stories will thus not only gain knowledge of Chekhov's work, but will also participate in the exploration of aesthetics: the aesthetics of the stories as well as the aesthetics of translation.

Inevitably, I have one complaint and a few quibbles. The complaint is that the physical book is terribly bound — the binding of my copy broke when I opened it, and continued to break whenever I opened to anything in the middle of the book. No pages have yet fallen out, but they could soon. This is unusual for a Norton book — The English Bible is huge and only one year older than Selected Stories and its bindings (2 big volumes) are very strong; my copy of the 1979 NCE of Chekhov's stories, purchased at the earliest 15 years ago, seems unbreakable. I hope the problem with this new book is an anomaly.

My quibbles are purely those of anyone who has their own particular favorites among Chekhoviana. I detest Ronald Hingley's imperialist atrocities of translations, and though I know they're necessary for this volume because they offer such stark contrast to other translations, why why why did Popkin have to include Hingley's translation of perhaps my favorite Chekhov story, "Gusev"?! At least she could have included somebody — anybody! — else's translation alongside it. (Indeed, I think it would have been helpful for the book to choose one complete story to offer in multiple translations. "Gusev" is probably too long, but Chekhov wrote a number of quite short stories that have been translated numerous times.)

The selection of stories in this edition is almost completely superior to Matlaw's, but it's unfortunate to lose the 1886 story "Dreams", which seems to me a perfect encapsulation of Chekhov's style between his early humorous sketches and his later, longer stories ... but it's easily available elsewhere.

One significant improvement Popkin makes over Matlaw's previous edition is the inclusion of some of Chekhov's longer stories, most significantly "Ward No. 6" and "In the Ravine", two of his most important works. The book is already almost 700 pages, so obviously novellas such as "My Life" and "The Steppe" — hugely important, original, difficult, complex, breathtaking works — wouldn't fit without bumping out a lot of other worthwhile material, but still I pine. Perhaps Selected Stories will be successful enough that Norton will consider a Critical Edition called Chekhov's Novellas...

Finally, it might have been nice to include something on the adaptation of Chekhov's stories to theatre, film, and television — though of course his plays are more frequently adapted, some of the better adaptations are of the short stories, and there's been at least a little bit of critical attention to that. Adaptation is another form of translation, and it would have been interesting to consider that further within the frame that Popkin set up.

But really, these are the inevitable, unimportant quibbles of the sort that any anthology causes in a reader familiar with the territory. Popkin's edition of the Selected Stories is a book to celebrate and savor, and it gets so many things right that it is churlish to complain about any of it. Even the cover is a smart, appropriate choice: a painting by Chekhov's friend Isaac Levitan.

This book is clearly the result of lots of love for Chekhov, and as such I can only love it back.

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By Andrew Robinson

In the early 21st century, talent appears to be on the increase, genius on the decrease. More scientists, writers, composers, and artists than ever before earn a living from their creative output. During the 20th century, performance standards and records continually improved in all fields—from music and singing to chess and sports. But where is the Darwin or the Einstein, the Mozart or the Beethoven, the Chekhov or the Shaw, the Cézanne or the Picasso or the Cartier-Bresson of today? In the cinema, the youngest of the arts, there is a growing feeling that the giants—directors such as Charles Chaplin, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles—have departed the scene, leaving behind the merely talented. Even in popular music, genius of the quality of Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix, seems to be a thing of the past. Of course, it may be that the geniuses of our time have yet to be recognized—a process that can take many decades after the death of a genius—but sadly this seems unlikely, at least to me.

In saying this, I know I am in danger of falling into a mindset mentioned by the great 19th-century South American explorer and polymath Alexander von Humboldt, ‘the Albert Einstein of his day’ (writes a recent biographer), in volume two of his five-volume survey Cosmos. ‘Weak minds complacently believe that in their own age humanity has reached the culminating point of intellectual progress,’ wrote Humboldt in the middle of the century, ‘forgetting that by the internal connection existing among all the natural phenomena, in proportion as we advance, the field to be traversed acquires additional extension, and that it is bounded by a horizon which incessantly recedes before the eyes of the inquirer.’ Humboldt was right. But his explorer’s image surely also implies that as knowledge continues to advance, an individual will have the time to investigate a smaller and smaller proportion of the horizon with each passing generation, because the field will continually expand. So, if ‘genius’ requires breadth of knowledge, a synoptic vision—as it seems to—then it would appear to become harder to achieve as knowledge advances.

The ever-increasing professionalization and specialisation of education and domains, especially in the sciences, is undeniable. The breadth of experience that feeds genius is harder to achieve today than in the 19th century, if not downright impossible. Had Darwin been required to do a PhD in the biology of barnacles, and then joined a university life sciences department, it is difficult to imagine his having the varied experiences and exposure to different disciplines that led to his discovery of natural selection. If the teenaged Van Gogh had gone straight to an art academy in Paris, instead of spending years working for an art dealer, trying to become a pastor, and self-tutoring himself in art while dwelling among poor Dutch peasants, would we have his late efflorescence of great painting?

A second reason for the diminution of genius appears to be the ever-increasing commercialisation of the arts, manifested in the cult of celebrity. True originality takes time—at least ten years, as I show in my book Sudden Genius?—to come to fruition; and the results may well take further time to find their audience and market. Few beginning artists, or scientists, will be fortunate enough to enjoy financial support, like Darwin and Van Gogh, over such an extended period. It is much less challenging, and more remunerative, to make a career by producing imitative, sensational, or repetitious work, like Andy Warhol, or any number of professional scientists who, as Einstein remarked, ‘take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes when the drilling is easy.’

Thirdly, if less obviously, our expectations of modern genius have become more sophisticated and discriminating since the time of the 19th-century Romantic movement

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Chekhov is often cited as one of the greatest of short story writers.  Still, he seems to be an acquired taste, and perhaps not one to whom a reader might go for shoring up a battered psyche, or to seek some uplifting or inspirational energy.  First readings of Chekhov can be heavy affairs.  Characters sometimes seem hugely stoic, and their complications never seem to resolve; indeed, they seem to arrive at the end of the story no closer to a resolution of their conflicts than at the beginning.  The story seems to have no discernible end.  The vast Russian settings, enormous divergence of living conditions between nobility and peasantry, and the absolute power of one over the other, these elements can inject some tensions into the stories, but basically the stories are more about recurrent ordinary human weaknesses and failings than ennobling examples of struggle and triumph.

Whence, then, the acquired taste for Chekhov's stories?  David Jauss, writing in The Writer's Chronicle, Mar./Apr. 2010, offers some insight.  His article, "Returning Characters to Life: Chekhov's Subversive Endings," examines how Chekhov tends to end his stories by returning his characters to life and the problems created either by their change or their failure to change."  In his stories, even when the character changes, "their changes either fail to last, merely complicate the existing conflict, or create a new and often greater conflict."

Today's writers who have had some exposure to degree programs, seminars, or workshops, usually work within the classic model of beginning with a character who faces some sort of major conflict, the conflict intensifies, often interrupted by other sub-conflicts, until there is some climax at which the problem(s) is resolved, or not, leaving the character changed in some conclusive manner thereafter.  Not so with Chekhov:  "But for all of their apparent inconclusiveness, his stories do have endings; they're just not the kinds of endings favored by...the average viewer of The Sopranos."  Nice touch, that, hey?  "They are subversive endings, endings designed to undercut our expectations and, thereby, force us to examine our conceptions about life and human nature."

Jauss cites and examines a wide array of Chekhov stories to demonstrate the various categories of subversive endings used by Chekhov to such powerful effect.  Jauss says "Many of today's writers write as if unaware of some of the possibilities Chekhov opened up, and thus they end their stories in highly predictable and conventional ways."  Jauss's article is suggested as a worthwhile reference for writers to broaden horizons for structuring their stories.  A list of Chekhov's subversive endings as categorized by Jauss will give some idea of the range and depth of analysis provided:

1)  Anti-Epilogues
2)  Reverse Epilogues
3)  Echo Endings
4)  Chiastic Endings
5)  False Climaxes
6)  Omitted Climaxes
7)  External Climaxes
8)  Temporary Climaxes
9)  Complication-creating Climaxes
10) Conflict-creating Climaxes
11) Extended Anti-Climaxes
12) Shifts in Address, Tense, and/or POV

The chance to revisit and appreciate Chekhov's stories will be an added benefit.

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By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, translator, and lecturer, specialising in Russian literature, and translated the best-selling edition of Chekhov’s About Love and Other Stories for the Oxford World’s Classics series. She was also heavily involved in a recent set of events celebrating Chekhov at the Hampstead Theatre in London. In the original post below, to coincide with Chekhov’s 150th birthday, she talks about her campaign to restore his house in Yalta.

Anton Chekhov was born 150 years ago this week, in a little whitewashed house in the southern port of Taganrog. Forty four years later, his life was already over, his body ravaged by the tuberculosis he contracted when he was in his twenties. He could have squandered his talent, like his elder brother Nikolai, and led a dissolute life, but he chose instead to value his creative gifts. He earned his literary stripes the hard way, by writing first for comic journals and newspapers, but he ended up becoming the greatest writer of his generation. He could have rested on his laurels after receiving accolades as both prose writer and dramatist, but he kept on writing, and producing masterpieces, even when he was too sick to prune his roses. He could have happily left his medical training behind after he qualified as a doctor, but he went out of his way to treat the peasants who lived near his country house, and supported efforts to provide community health care. He could have lived off the fat of the land, but provided for his parents and sister, quietly built three schools, planted trees, and undertook a grueling journey to the island of Sakhalin to make a study of its notorious penal colony. He was a consummate artist who went against the grain of Russian tradition by resolutely refusing to act as a moral guide, and a person of rare integrity who preferred to lose his closest friend rather than endure his anti-Semitism. He also never took himself seriously and indeed was cracking self-deprecating jokes until the very last. For all these reasons Chekhov’s 150th birthday is worth celebrating.

Because Chekhov was a writer with such a deep and compassionate understanding of human nature, the problems he deals with in his stories and plays are as relevant now as they were when he was writing about them, and not just to his fellow Russians. Chekhov has insights for anyone who has had a setback in life, or experienced the bewilderment of feeling one thing and saying another. Chekhov’s enduring appeal in England was certainly very clear last week at the Hampstead Theatre where Michael Pennington and I presented a week of story readings, informal performances and discussions to celebrate his anniversary – they were a complete sell-out. The proceeds are all going towards the restoration of Chekhov’s house in Yalta, which was turned into a museum soon after his death, and is unique in preserving its interior just as it was when he left it in 1904. When I visited two and a half years ago, I was shocked to find half the house shut to visitors. The museum’s director Alla Golovacheva showed me the wallpaper peeling off the walls in Chekhov’s study, due to mould, and explained there was simply no money to pay for adequate heating during the cold winter months. It was fine during Sov

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I adore (adore, I tell you!) the stories of Alice Munro, as anybody who's looked at my bookshelves can attest, and I adore (adore, I tell you again!) the stories of Anton Chekhov, who actually takes up considerably more space on my shelves, but that's just because he wrote hundreds of stories, a bunch of plays, and all in Russian, which means, of course, that I absolutely must own every possible translation just to be able to compare.

Anyway, I discovered (via Scott) that  Ruth Gordon over at The New Republic has claimed that Munro just writes about women and Chekhov didn't do this and why won't this Munro woman explain herself, eh?  Writing primarily about men is just fine, everybody does that, no need to comment, but writing primarily about women is ... "not necessarily a flaw".  It would be understandable if she were a lesbian, of course, because what else do they know, and anyway those Canadians are ... weird...  And Chekhov, by the way, was neither a Canadian nor a lesbian, though he was a little bit weird, but he was also Russian, and we know what they're like from James Bond movies, so it all makes sense.

Sorry, I'm being deeply unfair in reductio-ing Gordon's ad for absurdum.  There are lots of things I could say about Gordon's premises about gender and writing, about characters and writers, about seeing what you want to see, or about Chekhov's complicated attitudes toward and relationships with women, but I'm really only in the mood to be facetious.  I haven't read any of Munro's or Chekhov's stories for a little while now, so I'm going to go back to them.  Maybe I'll start with this book:

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Victor Shklovsky, from Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, translated by Shushan Avagyan:

In the long story "My Life", Chekhov wrote about a bad architect who designed buildings so badly, planned the interiors so poorly, the facades were all so hideous that people simply got used to the style of this person.

The style of failure becomes the style of the town.

Chekhov hated expositions and denouements; he is the one who revived the two concepts.

I'll repeat once more about how he wrote to his brother saying that the plot must be new and a story isn't always necessary.

By plot he meant the false theatre, the poetics of that theatre, especially the expositions and denouements of plays -- things that the viewer is anticipating with pleasure.

It's like a shot of morphine.

Literature became a place of false denouements, false expositions, false successes, the successes of individual people.

The young boys -- the fugitive convicts who turned rich and cried on the graves of their comrades who didn't fall under the protection of the ancient plot, the happy ending.

Even Dickens, after his discovery of ancient plot, got so bloated that he resembled an old sunken boat.

Chekhov is the most desperate of all writers, he is the most straightforward one.

He doesn't want to soften, loosen the threads of life, he doesn't want to be capable of bending them to make a false happy end.

For another excerpt, see here.

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At The Valve, John Holbo just posted this cover from the June 1953 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries:
Yes, indeed -- Ayn Rand and Franz Kafka in one pulp magazine together! But it's better than that. Here's the entire table of contents:

Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard
Pendulum by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse
Bernie Goes to Hell by Arthur Dekker Savage
Find the Happy Children by Benjamin Ferris
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Haunted Hostel by Emma L'Hommedieu Frost
Dirge (Aztec) by Louis M. Hobbs
Anthem by Ayn Rand

Yes, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka all in one issue! (All reprints -- I would love to know what went through Mary Gnaedinger's mind as she put it together...) As noted at The Valve, this was the final issue of FFM, "after which the magazine evidently died of confusion."

This is apparently a particularly rare issue -- the least expensive copy I could find on the internet is going for $61, and it usually sells for around $100 or more. If anybody out there has bucks to burn and wants to send me a gift, though, I wouldn't complain... (It's the mix that's appealing; even in high school I thought Anthem was badly written, and I've never had much of a taste for Robert E. Howard, but that contents page is enough to cause the covetous consumerist impulses to stir in even the most mild mannered of us.)

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