|
|
Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me. — Eudora Welty
Chekov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer. —
Ernest Hemingway
Chekhov! Chekhov! Chekhov! —
Tennessee William, asked to name his favorite authors
I have a secret race with Chekhov, who is the greatest short-story writer
of all time. He published five hundred sixty-eight stories. Of course, a
third of them were vignettes. They don't count as stories. I've published
something like four hundred, four hundred twenty. He died when he was
forty-four. I'm well past that. He won the race, let's say. But it's still
something to work for. — Stephen Dixon
If I have to choose between Chekhov and most hip-hop, I'll go with
Chekhov. — Cornel West
Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through.
Admit that you understand nothing
of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and
look at the world. — Francine Prose,
"Learning from Chekhov"
"Art tells the truth," Chekhov says; according to
Tolstoy, art tells the truth because
it "expresses the highest feelings of man." These
may well be two statements of the
same thing, but whether they are or not, what do
they mean? How do we apply them?
A group of people from all over the world, all of
whom describe themselves as artists
and therefore may be, converge in Paris to chop
apart an automobile and spread wet
spaghetti on a woman who has taken all her
clothes off. Is it true? What is the nature
of the lofty feeling? Is this alleged happening
less true, the feeling less lofty, than what
we get out of the nearly impenetrable odes of Pindar,
the comic quotation of the
William Tell Overture in Shostakovich's
Symphony No 15, the stern Christianity
of Njal's Saga or Gulliver's Travels,
or the godless terror of John Hawkes'
The Beetleleg? — John Gardner, On Moral
Fiction (Harper, pp 150-51)
For another thing, thanks partly to certain
movements in modern philosophy, the art
of fiction, like all the arts, has become
increasingly self-conscious and self-doubting,
artists repeatedly asking themselves what it is
they're doing. Chekhov and Tolstoy
could say with great confidence that the business
of fiction was "to tell the truth."
Contemporary thought, as we've seen, is often
skeptical about whether telling the
truth is possible. ... Telling the truth in fiction
can mean one of three things: saying
that which is factually correct, a trivial kind of
truth, though a kind central to works
of verisimilitude; saying that which, by virtue of
tone and coherence, does not feel like
lying, a more important kind of truth; and
discovering and affirming moral truth about
human existence — the highest truth of art. — John
Gardner, The Art of Fiction (Vintage, p 129)
[Reading his stories] "from a very early age was just electrifying." —
Eudora Welty
Who better to learn from than Chekhov, who is here plainly in front of us
to teach, as we can be plainly in front of him to learn. — Romulus
Linney, Story Quarterly, 37, 2001.
I love, for example, the fables that Tolstoy made up for the serfs on
his estate. Stories such as "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"
that end with the flourish of an O Henry story. At the same time I
like the openness of Chekhov's stories, and most of the stories in
Joyce's Dubliners.
In great fiction we are moved by what happens, not by
the whimpering or bawling of the
writer's presentation of what happens.
That is, in great fiction, we are moved by
characters and events, not by the emotion of
the person who happens to be telling
the story. Sometimes, as in the fiction of Tolstoy
or Chekhov — and one might
mention many others — the narrative voice is
deliberately kept calm and dispassionate,
so that the emotion arising from the fictional
events comes through almost
wholly untinged by presentation; but restraint
of that kind is not an aesthetic
necessity. A flamboyant style like that of Faulkner
at his best can be equally
successful. The trick is simple that the style must
work in the service of the
material, not in advertisement of the writer. — John
Gardner, The Art of Fiction
(Vintage, p 116)
Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story:
first, he said, throw out the first three pages. As a young
writer I figured that if anybody knew about short stories, it
was Chekhov, so I tried taking his advice. I really hoped
he was wrong, but of course he was right. It depends on
the length of the story, naturally; if it's very short, you can
only throw out the first three praragraphs. But there are
few first drafts to which Chekhov's Razor doesn't apply.
Starting a story, we all tend to circle around, explain a lot
of stuff, set things up that don't need to be set up. Then we
find our way and get going, and the story begins ... very
often just about on page 3. — Ursula LeGuin
Chekhov was a very humane writer, and the kinds of ways he would be most influential would be through those features
in his stories that illuminate our complexity. His formal view of his own stories was quite undoctrinal and various.
He wasn't a writer who, as say Hemingway, would bias young writers toward a certain way of putting a story on the page
or of writing sentences. Chekhov's writing is so various that he wouldn't affect you very much as a writer in any one
way. He is often said to be the master of irresolute endings, but that isn't always true. His endings are not open-ended;
many are quite conclusive. I think most of the ways Chekhov would be likely to affect a writer would be ways he or she
would want to be affected. That is to say, he would encourage a writer to be more searching in his analysis, more humane
in his view of people readers might otherwise in a conventional way be likely to dismiss. He would be encouraging in
asking a writer to write about people who might not ordinarily seem natural subjects. He would encourage writers to
pay attention to landscape. He would teach writers all kinds of intensities: the intensity of notice, of sustained
analysis, of the intensity needed to imagine human motive. He would teach someone that writing is a high calling,
but not necessarily sober-sided, which would make him a good influence. And we are also reading his stories translated
into English, so we don't have them in their original language, only in that buffer zone of English, which may (if Ms
Garnett was any good) stress larger thematic matters and stress less matters of surface style and local effect.
— Richard Ford
I just like seeing the situation where everything seems chaos and
only a little is revealed or resolved. But enough is revealed and
resolved to give shape and form to the story.
I do not like the pseudo-Chekhovian "trailing away." — E Annie
Proulx
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel]
and be
excused for it. In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every
word has
got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless
but in the short
story you can’t. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote.
That’s why I rate that second — it’s because it demands a nearer
absolute
exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless.
There’s less room in it for trash. — William Faulkner
What they [James, Chekhov, Joyce] are really
asking is that all general commentary,
unrelieved by irony, should be eliminated.
The narrator must not say "bleak walls"
or "vacant eye-like windows," or "black and
lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre."
The walls and windows and tarn should be
dramatically portrayed in order to be
made visually alive with their bleakness and
vacuity and luridness shown to the
reader rather than merely told.
This seems to me a demand that springs from the
prejudices of an age desiring effects basically
different from Poe's. For Poe's special
kind of morbid horror, a psychological detail,
as conveyed by an emotionally charged
adjective, is more effective than mere sensual
description in any form. ... Those of us
who can remember a time when Poe was effective
known how indispensable the heavy
adjectives are. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of
Fiction (U of Chicago P, pp 202-03)
The "short story" is a highly elastic term, after all.
Poe's remarks are inappropriate
to our time, and in fact to the marvelous modern
tradition of the story that begins
with Chekhov, Joyce, Conrad, and James. — Joyce
Carol Oates, Studies in Short
Fiction, XVIII (1981), 240.
Poe required that everything the writer put in
the story be directed
toward the unified effect, whereas Chekhov, along
with the other
"moderns" Oates names, was concerned with what
was left out of the
story and its effect on the outcome. In his letters,
Chekhov reiterates
the short story's necessary incompleteness:
"Long detailed works have
their own peculiar aims, which require a most
careful execution regardless
of total expression. But in a short story, it
is better to say not enough than
to say too much." In the interest of compression,
a certain amount of
subjective activity must be left to the reader,
who participates by supplying
what the author leaves out. Although this activity
helps reinforce the
concentration of the reading experience, at the
same time it involves a reach
outside the story itself for a moment. — Robert M
Luscher, "The Short Story
Sequence," Short Story Theory at a Crossroads,
ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo
Ellyn Clarey (Louisiana State UP, p 152)
Unity of effect is the organization of all a story's
elements so that they interact
and enhance each other, resulting in a total effect
on the reader. Chekhov
said, "A shotgun introduced on page one must go off
before the end of the story." Pattern, or design, the
repetition through complications of the central
incident or idea, contributes to unity of effect.
As we sense the pattern or
design of the story we feel that it is moving forward
at the same time that the
main line of interest is being sustained. Pattern or
design has to do with the
organized relationships between the various elements
or aspects of the story.
Each part functions in its relationship to the whole.
The effectiveness of a
pattern is that the reader follows it to its completion.
Through a careful concern
with these elements, form evolves and we have a sense
of unity when we have
finished the story. ... Some experimental writers strive
to create a work free of
pattern, design, and unity, but the nature of all
writing is that it is inherently
patterned in defiance of any willful imitation of chaos.
Chaos on paper is order
merely impersonating chaos. A so-called nonunified story
may have powerful
isolated effects, but unity intensifies each effect by
relating each to all
others. — David Madden, Revising Fiction (Plume,
pp 235-36)
Chekhov made one of the remarks that is most frequently
quoted about plot.
He said that if a shotgun hangs on the wall in the
first act, it must go off in the
last act. There is a certain ambiguity about this statement,
but its usually
taken to mean that a plotmaker should never put anything
useless or extraneous
to the plot into his play. (Chekhov violated this rule
frequently and with
great pleasure.) — Robey MaCauley and George Lanning,
Technique in
Fiction, (Harper, p 178)
While I was still at Michigan I wrote a review for
the Daily of the stories of
William Carlos Williams. Since he, too, was part of
the modernist
pantheon, I assumed that his stories were much more
complex than they
seemed and I gave them the exegetical treatment,
as though Williams
were Kafka, ambiguities and paradoxes everywhere,
whereas his stories
were really much more like those of his fellow
physician Chekhov — all
eyes and heart. — Ted Solotaroff, A Few Good
Voices in My Head
(Harper, pp 29-30)
The revolution brought about by the gentle Chekhov
to the short story was in
every sense not destructive but constructive.
By removing the formal plot he
did not leave the story structureless, he endowed
it with another kind of
structure — one which embodied the principle of growth.
And it was one that
had no cause to repeat itself; in each and every story,
short or long, it was a
structure open to human meaning and answerable to that
meaning. It took form
from within. — Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story
(Random House)
I remember an old teacher quoting Chekhov to us:
"Help us walk into someone
else's mind. ... Look how you live, my friend." It's what
I try to get my students
to see. Don't judge your characters. You may want to
set them up for your
readers to judge, but don't savage them and don't
make them look stupid,
because what you're trying to do is understand what
it feels like to be in
their heads. Sometimes students don't want to hear
that because it blunts
their cleverness. It's easier to stand outside; more
fun, too. — Rosellen
Brown, Conversations on Writing Fiction
(Harper, pp 53-4)
Your story, like these other two, is essentially
the presenting of a pathetic
situation, and when you present a pathetic situation,
you have to let it speak
entirely for itself. I mean you have to present it
and leave it alone. You have
to let the things in the story do the talking. ... Chekhov
makes everything
work — the air, the light, the cold, the dirt, etc
Show these things and you
don't have to say them. — Flannery O'Connor, The
Habit of Being (Farrar,
Straus, pp 83-4)
Well, for one thing he didn't do anything called
workshops! As a matter of
fact, the students never saw each other's stories,
nor did he discuss our
stories in class. What we talked about in class
was Chekhov, Chekhov's
stories. I read Chekhov's stories until I was blue
in the face. — Stanley
Elkin on Randall Jarrell as teacher, Conversations
on Writing Fiction
(Harper, p 91)
And we were captivated by the craft of writing and
fascinated by all the
ways people had done it. We were always reading things,
figuring out
how Chekhov had written this sex scene without any
nuts and bolts in it,
and yet it's so wonderful — the one called "The Lady
with the Dog." It's
the way people really are when they're having an affair;
it's those two
people and their reactions. That's the kind of
things we talked about.
How it's done. — Gail Godwin on her time at the Iowa
Writers
Workshop, Conversations on Writing Fiction
(Harper, p 131)
Now, being irrelevant — or apparently irrelevant — for
the moment is
something that has its uses in fiction. Chekhov, for
example, used that
device exceptionally well for comedy, suspense, or
for other effects.
But irrelevancy cannot be piled on irrelevancy.
Something must be
proceeding in the scene, some addition to the pattern
must be
developing. — Robey MaCauley and George Lanning,
Technique in
Fiction, (Harper, p 142)
The Russian writers of the nineteenth century, however,
had avoided an
overdependence on plot, and their influence now rose
considerably.
Chekhov's style of short story was preferred to
Maupassant's, and Tolstoy
loomed larger than Dickens or Balzac in the novel.
The tendency to
minimize plot in favor of other values can be seen
clearly in the stories
of Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest
Hemingway,
and in such novelists as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Today, plot has r
egained a certain respectability, but most serious
fiction writers employ it
with a sense of moderation; they realize that it is
only one of the means
toward their end. — Robey MaCauley and George Lanning,
Technique in
Fiction, (Harper, p 160)
The Russian writers (Turgenev particularly) had
their impact on the generation
of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, but it was not
until the second and
third decades that their whole style became absorbed
by writers in English.
Beginning with Katherine Mansfield, who sometimes
wrote almost direct
imitations of the Russians, it affected decisively
the work of any number of
other short story writers. In the novel, Tolstoy's
and Dostoevsky's influence
was more generalized and not so specific as Chekhov's
was on the short story
in English. — Robey MaCauley and George Lanning,
Technique in Fiction,
(Harper, p 189)
Here’s what I think the basic problem we all face is: We did not become
writers to be Jacqueline Susann. We became writers, in my case, because of
Somerset Maugham, because of Chekov, because of all those guys. You’re not
as good as they are. So your whole fucking life you’re faced with the
failure of your own inadequacies. — William Goldman interview for
Writers Guild of America
There is never a time when I’m not reading or rereading a story or play by
Chekhov. — Cristina Garcia
|
Chekhov on Writing
