United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was he who invented the modern dramatic method of seizing a situation at the point at which it can last be seized, and from there pushing it forward with imperturbable logic and not one divagation. As an artist Ibsen is to a considerable extent the master of Tchekov; but, as art is the last thing to which an English Intellectual pays attention, this fact has been overlooked.
Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life. But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to see the paper; then Mrs. "And now," wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, "I shall have to read her cursed book" her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.
Since Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons, no tale like Metal Worker Schevyrjow has appeared in European literature. In it the bedrock of Slavic fatalism, an anarchistic pessimism is reached. It has been done into French by Jacques Povolozky. The Russian author reveals plentiful traces of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoïevsky, and Gorky in his pages; Tchekov, too, is not absent.
He told her his age, twenty-four; his weight, ten stone eleven; his place of residence, not far away; described his sensations under fire, and what it felt like to be gassed; criticized the Juno, mentioned his own conception of that goddess; commented on the Goya copy, said Fleur was not too awfully like it; sketched in rapidly the condition of England; spoke of Monsieur Profond or whatever his name was as "an awful sport"; thought her father had some "ripping" pictures and some rather "dug-up"; hoped he might row down again and take her on the river because he was quite trustworthy; inquired her opinion of Tchekov, gave her his own; wished they could go to the Russian ballet together some time considered the name Fleur Forsyte simply topping; cursed his people for giving him the name of Michael on the top of Mont; outlined his father, and said that if she wanted a good book she should read "Job"; his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.
He told her his age, twenty-four, his weight, ten stone eleven; his place of residence, not far away; described his sensations under fire, and what it felt like to be gassed; criticised the Juno, mentioned his own conception of that goddess; commented on the Goya copy, said Fleur was not too awfully like it; sketched in rapidly the condition of England; spoke of Monsieur Profond or whatever his name was as "an awful sport"; thought her father had some ripping pictures and some rather "dug-up"; hoped he might row down again and take her on the river because he was quite trustworthy; inquired her opinion of Tchekov, gave her his own; wished they could go to the Russian ballet together some time considered the name Fleur Forsyte simply topping; cursed his people for giving him the name of Michael on the top of Mont; outlined his father, and said that if she wanted a good book she should read "Job"; his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.
With the possible exception of Hogarth in his non-preaching pictures, and Constable in his sketches of the sky, I speak of dead men only, have we produced any painter of reality like Manet or Millet, any writer like Flaubert or Maupassant, like Turgenev, or Tchekov. We are, I think, too deeply civilised, so deeply civilised that we have come to look on Nature as indecent.
She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling stories by Tchekov as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty. The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitable compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it down.
We do not mean to assert that humour has died out altogether in literature, but it is not the special gift of those who write nowadays. Maikov, Nadsohn, Polonski, Garchin, Korolenko, Tchekov were all men of talent; the last in particular, preceptor and friend to Gorky in his days of want, was a novelist of high artistic if morbid powers. He is dead.
There would remain, I believe, for ever those dull Jaeger undergarments in the windows of the bazaar, and the bound edition of Tchekov in the book-shop just above the Moika, and the turtle and the gold-fish in the aquarium near Elisseieff; and whilst those things were there I could not believe in melodrama. And we did not believe.
What the Russian lacks the Englishman has; what the Englishman lacks, that has the Russian. The works of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Tchekov the amazing direct and truthful revelations of these masters has let me, I think, into some secrets of the Russian soul, so that the Russians I have met seem rather clearer to me than men and women of other foreign countries.
Word Of The Day