Have you ever read something – it might be a poem or a history book, almost anything – and encountered a phrase or sentence so self-contained and dense with meaning, in words so perfectly arranged, that you stop reading, ponder and write it down? You may not even continue with the remainder of the work. It happens to me not often enough. The passage stands as a discrete creation, sufficient unto itself, aphorism-like, even out of context. You’ve sifted from the surrounding text a nugget you commit to memory and wish to share with others. Consider this, by Dana Gioia:
“One purpose
of literature is to register the complexity of our response to people, ideas,
and events.”
Dana has
sent me a copy of his latest book, Poetry
As Enchantment and Other Essays (Paul
Dry Books, 2024). It includes “Class Struggle: Donald Davie at Stanford,” a
profile of the English poet and critic befriended by Dana. “My intention,” he
writes, “is to portray him accurately. He would have flinched at a sentimental
or platitudinous memoir. ‘Speak of me as I am,’ he would have said, ‘Nothing
extenuate,’” followed by the excerpt transcribed above.
The writer I
thought of immediately was Anton Chekhov, who was nagged in his day by
critics, editors and common readers for not writing ideological tracts. He was
accused of being morally irresponsible. In his well-known letter to Aleksey Pleshcheyev on Oct. 4, 1888, Chekhov writes:
“The people
I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and
are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither
liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I
would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given
me the strength to be one.”
Further
evidence of Chekhov’s anti-ideological bent is supplied by the Russian painter Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939),
who wrote a brief memoir, “My Encounters with Chekhov,” published in English in
1973 (trans. Tatiana Kusubova) and included in The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972
(1977), edited by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel Jr. The scene is a Moscow
hotel room in 1883. The players are Korovin, Chekhov (twenty-three and studying
for his final exam to become a doctor) and other students. The exchange could
have been recorded this morning on an American college campus:
“The
students were different from Anton Pavlovich. They loved to argue, and they
were in some peculiar way opposed to just about everything.
“’If you
have no convictions,’ said one student turning to Chekhov, ‘you can’t be a
writer.’
“No one can
say, ‘I have no convictions,’ said another. ‘I can’t understand how anyone
could not have convictions.’
“’I have no
convictions,’ replied Chekhov.
“‘You claim
to be a man without convictions, but how can you write a work of literature
without any ideology? Don’t you have an ideology?’
“‘I have no
ideology and no convictions,’ answered Chekhov.
“These
students had an odd way of arguing. They were apparently displeased with Anton
Pavlovich. It was clear that they could not fit him into the didactic turn of
their outlook or into their moralizing ideology. They wanted to guide, to
instruct, to lead, and to influence. They knew everything. They understood
everything. And Anton Pavlovich was plainly bored by it all.
“‘Who needs
your stories? Where do they lead? They don’t oppose anything. They contain no
ideas. The Russian Bulletin, say,
would have no use for you. Your stories are entertaining and nothing else.’
“‘Nothing
else,’ answered Anton Pavlovich.”
Karlinsky’s introduction
to Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected
Letters and Commentary (trans. Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973) and his
comments throughout are the best place to start learning about Chekhov’s
resistance to ideology and politics generally.
The
essential word in Dana’s sentence quoted above is “complexity.” Ideologues and
other busybodies aren’t interested in complexity. Their understanding of the
world is quite simple, thank you.
Yet you cannot escape from your "followers". Maurice Baring in his autobiography A Puppet Show of Memory recalls, at the time of the Russo-Japanese war, this curious event.
ReplyDeleteI only stayed a short time in St. Petersburg, and then I went to Moscow, to the house of Marie Karlovna von Kotz, a lady who took in English pupils, mostly officers in the British Army, to teach them Russian. She lived in an out-of-the-way street, on the second story of a small house, and gave one or two lessons every day. She was a fine teacher, and a brilliant musician; an energetic and extremely competent woman, and an example of the best type of the intelligentsia. One day, a friend of hers, a young married lady, came in and said she was starting for the Far East, as a hospital nurse. She seemed to be full of enthusiasm. She was a young and charming person, bristling with energy and intelligence. The sequel of this story was a strange one. A year later, she reappeared at Marie Karlovna’s house—I think she had been to the war in the meantime—and said: “I am now going to the Far West,” and she went to Paris. She stayed there a short time, and then came back to Moscow and went to the play every night, bought jewels, went to hear the gipsies, and then quite suddenly shot herself on Tchekov’s tomb. The explanation of her act being her disgust with public events and her wish to give her land to the peasants. She left her estate to them in her will. In the normal course of things it would go to her brother, but her brother was a fanatical reactionary, and she killed herself rather than he should have it. But, as it turned out, she had reckoned without Russian law, which said that the wills and bequests of those who committed suicide in Russia were null and void, and so the property went to her brother after all. Suicides at the tomb of Tchekov became so frequent that a barrier was put round it, and people were forbidden to visit it.
An interesting story. Thanks for taking the time to type it.
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