The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, January 29, 2024

Notably: Today is or ought to be one of those international or interplanetary holidays: it’s Chekhov’s birthday. 1860, the year of his birth, is not that long ago at all: it is the year our country capsized into Civil War, the year of Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the year Maronites and Druze massacred each other in the Chouf Mountains above Beirut–every pine tree was a Sumter–before Napoleon III imperiously intervened. Chekhov wrote to support his family. He wrote fast, often unseriously, wittily, until he realized he was onto something. He was inventing the short story: “In me is being fulfilled what was written in Holy Scriptures, that in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. But my children are not Yegor, nor Vladimirchik, but tales and stories, which I cannot even think about now. Writing is repugnant to me.” He wrote that in 1887. He’d get over it and take us with him. His early output is forgettable. It’s one- or two-page slapstick, sketches that hinge on a lame joke that’s hard to understand across time and space, but then the masterpieces of despair begin, this ability to read a human being’s heart, or even dog’s heart, better than Jack London could (London was reputed to know dogs’ minds), or even a tree’s mood, an ability to sum up the tragedy of being human in a single gesture, a single contrast: “Thoughts of the darkness of the grave did not prevent me from giving busts and legs their full due.” Or: “And it was not because I tried to make it longer, more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of one’s study and communes with one’s own day-dreams while the spring night looks in at one’s window.” Or these enigmatic lines: “to dream of a stove is a sign of sorrow.” There is a scriptural quality to reading Chekhov: every line is a fraction of what it implies, the style so deceptively simple and unassuming. Reading Hemingway, your muscles tense at the number of times when you feel he’s trying too hard. You never sense that with Chekhov, who always seems to be net to you, if not in you, sharing his story as intimately as if he were telling it for the first time. The re-reading of Chekhov has that effect, too. It never goes stale. Less known about him is his cross-country journey to Sakhalin, the Russian penal colony in the far east, and his great advocacy for prisoners’ rights–and against corporal punishment. He was, after all, a physician by profession.

—P.T.

 

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Domestic animals play a scarcely noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part in the education and life of children. Which of us does not remember powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkeys, mild old tabby cats, who forgave us when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonising pain? I even fancy, sometimes, that the patience, the fidelity, the readiness to forgive, and the sincerity which are characteristic of our domestic animals have a far stronger and more definite effect on the mind of a child than the long exhortations of some dry, pale Karl Karlovitch, or the misty expositions of a governess, trying to prove to children that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.”

–From Chekhov’s The Cook’s Wedding and Other Stories.

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