Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 5 of 13

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
The Seagull. Uncle Vanya. The Cherry Orchard. Three Sisters.
Interior Drama Takes the Family Stage
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 2, 1984

Transcript:
(00:00):
Today is August the second, 1984. This is the Roger Ware lecture on checkoff who lived 1860 to 1904. The seagull uncle Vanya, the cherry orchard, three sisters and terrier grandma takes the family stage
(00:19):
To bring in somebody else. I mean, how do you follow Kierkegaard and nature and Lavansky and Tolstoy, but actually the perfect way to follow them is by bringing checkoff on the stage, Chaka would have loved being chosen for the anticlimactic fifth. You know, the fifth business in the theater as always the mysterious element checkoff is very much the mysterious element in Western literature, checkoff, revolutionizes literature. He changes the forms by which the short story and the drama present themselves. And with Chekhov comes the first real experiences of the 20th century check off. If he had lived to be an old man would have lived to the 1940s as it was, he died in 1904, but that's a date that gives us a misconceptions, very contemporary. It's difficult to present check on because he is almost invisible and his work alone discloses his elusive personality. And so I have to choose a different tack from other lectures, which you've had.
(02:01):
And I have to go immediately to a four page story by checkoff in order to deliver you insight into his personality, the story is called an image versions, and this is pure checkoff and has all of the characteristics, which he is a human bear and his life as a man and his position as a revolutionary in consciousness has for us. So this is a perfect example of what the personality of checkoff is like. It's called an inadvertent. Forgive me for reading this, but this is the only way to introduce this elusive prey. Checkoff has been missing by more people, more critics, more political predicts, literary critics than almost any other author is very, very difficult to approach.
(03:09):
So here's his short story and inadvertent. Yeah. Petrovich Streisand, the nephew of Madam Ivan off the kernels widow, the man whose new galoshes were stolen last year, came home from a christening party at two o'clock in the morning to avoid waking the household. He took off his things in the lobby, made his way on tiptoe to his room, holding his breath and began getting ready for bed. Without lighting a candle, Streisand leads a sober and regular life. He has a sanctimonious expression of face. He reached nothing but religious and edifying books, but at the christening party in his delight that Lou Bova Spiridonova had passed through her confinement successfully. He had permitted himself to drink four glasses of vodka and a glass of wine. The taste of which suggested something midway between vinegar and castor oil, Spiritus liquids are like seawater and glory. The more you imbibe of them, the greater you thirst.
(04:25):
And now as he undressed dries and was aware of an overwhelming craving for drink, I believe de Shanka has some vodka in the cupboard in the right hand corner. He thought if I drank one wine glass full, she won't notice it. After some hesitation overcoming his fears. Streisand went to the cupboard cautiously, opening the door. He felt in the right hand corner for a bottle and poured out a wine glass bowl, put the bottle back in its place. Then making the sign of the cross, drank it straight off and immediately something like a miracle took place. Streisand was flung backwards from the cupboard to the chest with a fearful force, like a bomb. There were flashes before his eyes. He felt as though he could not breathe and all over his body. He had a sensation as though he had fallen into a marshal of leeches.
(05:28):
It seemed to him as though instead of vodka, he had swallowed dynamite, which blew up in his body, the house and the whole street has had his arms. His legs all seem to be torn off and to be flying away somewhere to the double into space. For some three minutes, he led on the chest, not moving and scarcely breathing. Then he got up asked himself, where am I? The first thing of which he was clearly conscious on coming to himself was the pronounced no of Harrison, holy saints. He thought in horror, it's perfect. I have drunk. Instead of vodka, the thought that he had poisoned himself, threw him into a cold shiver then into a fever that, that it was really poisoned that he had taken only approved, not only by the smell in the room, but also by the burning taste in his mouth, the flashes before his eyes, the ringing in his head and the clock, any pain in his stomach, feeling the approach of death and not blowing himself up with false hopes.
(06:37):
He wanted to say goodbye to those nearest to him. He made his way tradition cause bedroom being a winter. He had a, sister-in-law called the Shanka, an old maid living in the flat to keep house for him. The Shunka, he said in a cheerful voice, as he went into the bedroom, dear does Shanka something grumbled in the darkness and uttered a deep side that shank a what a woman's voice articulated rapidly is that you prior Petrovich, are you back already? Well, what is it? When has the baby been Christian? Who was the godmother? The godmother was Natalia, Andre via and the godfather Paavo Evanovich I, I believed as shank. I am dying and the baby has been Kristin olimpiadas in honor of the kind patroness. I, I have just drunk Paris and the Shanka. What next? You don't say they gave you a pair of in there.
(07:37):
I must own, I wanted to get a drink of vodka without asking you and the Lord chastised me by accident in the dark I took parafin. What am I to do to Shanker hearing that the copper had been opened without her permission grew more wide awake. She quickly lighted a candle, jumped out of bed. And in her nightgown, a freckled bony figure and curl papers padded with their feet to the cupboard who told you, you might, she asked certainly. And she scrutinized the inside of the cupboard was the bot could put in there for you. I haven't drank vodka, but tariff and the Shanka, moderate stress and mopping the cold sweat on his brow. And what did you want to touch the paraffin for? That's nothing to do with you as it, is it put there for you or do you suppose paraffin cause nothing.
(08:31):
And do you know what paraffin is now? Do you know, dare does shake a monster eyes. And it's a question of life and death. And you talking about money. He's drunk himself tipsy. And now he pokes his nose into the cupboard, cried to Shanka angrily slamming the cupboard door. Oh, the Munsters, the tormentors. I'm a martyr and miserable woman. No peace are night Vipers. Basketball is a curse. It Harrods. May you suffer the same in the world to come. I am going to tomorrow. I am maiden lady. And I won't allow you to see stand before me in your underclothes. How dare you look at me when I undressed. And she went on and died, knowing that when the Shanker was enraged, there was no moving her with prayers or vows or even firing a cannon strives in wave. Just hand in despair, dressed, made up his mind to go to a doctor.
(09:30):
But the doctors only readily found when he is not wanted. After running through three streets, bringing five times at doctor chapter chaplains and seven times at Dr. Bill younguns strives and raised off to a chemist shop thinking possibly the chemist could help him thereafter. A long interval, a little dark and curly had chemists came out to him. If, when the dressing ground with drowsy eyes and wise and serious face, that was positively terrifying. What do you want? He asked in the tone in which only very wise and dignified chemists of Jewish persuasion can speak for God's sake. I didn't create, you said strikes and breathlessly. Give me something I have just accidentally drunk paraffin. I am dying. I beg you not to excite yourself and to answer the questions I'm about to put you the very fact that you are excited, prevents me from understanding you, you have drunk parafin yes, yes. Doesn't bleed say the chemist when Cooley and bravely to the desk opened a book and became absorbed in reading. After reading a couple of pages, he shrugged one shoulder and then the other, but a contemptuous grimace. And after thinking for a minute, went into an adjoining room. The clock struck four. And when it pointed 10 minutes past the chemist came back with another book and began reading again. Hmm. He said, there's no puzzle. The very fact that you feel unwell shows you ought to apply to a doctor, not the camera,
(11:11):
But I have been
(11:11):
To the doctors already. I could not rang them up. You don't regard as chemist, as human beings and disturb arrested at four at the night, every dog cat can arrest peace. You don't try to understand anything into your thinking. We're not people. And our nerves are like Cortes Streisand listened to the chemist, heaved aside and went home. So I am faded to die. He thought, and then his mouth was a burning and a taste of paraffin. And there were twinges in his stomach and the sound of boom, boom, boom. In his ears. Every moment seemed to him that the end was nearer, that his heart was no longer beating. So returning to her home, he made haste, right? Let no one be blamed for my death. Then he said his prayers laid down and pulled the bedclothes over his head. He lay awake till morning, expecting death.
(12:04):
All the time kept fencing that his grave would be covered with fresh green grass and how the birds would Twitter over it. And then the morning he was sitting on his bed saying with a smile to the Shanka, one who reads leads a very regular religion. Your sister is obviously unaffected by any poison. Take me if, for example, I am on the verge of death. I was dying at an Egney got now I am all right. There's only a burning in my mouth, the soreness in my throat, but I am all right all over. Thank God and why it is because of my regular release. It just life, no sent a Shanka. It's because of the inferior paraffin. The man at that shop would not have given me the best quality. I am a merger of miserable woman monster mean you suffer the same in the world to come. And she went on and on.
(13:08):
So a character, he was born in a very small town, almost a village on one of the coasts of the black sea. There is a, um, a huge bay called the sea of Esau that, uh, juts up to, um, if you're looking at a map, usually it's on the right of the Crimea and the dumb comes flowing down from and empties. Then from, uh, roast off there and talking wrong is about, uh, 50 miles or so from Rostov on the coast of the CFA's often the black sea, very provincial town. There were many children. The father and mother did not particularly get along. The father was really a tyrant around the house. And in the 1860s, when a checkoff was born in January, Russia was just about to undergo a huge change. The SERPs were freed by the czar the next year, and the whole social structure of feudal aristocratic, Russia was undermined in one fell stroke.
(14:27):
It would take a generation for that to filter through, but the whole labor monumental structure that had kept Russia, aristocratic and prosperous was gone overnight and slowly as the serfs took their place in the Russian, the aristocratic superstructure saying, and almost dissolved into this new solvent that had been frayed. The last tip to survive was the czar himself and the Russian revolution of 1905 and 1917, where the final combination of that whole movement of peoples rising from the bottom to occupy the top. So checkoff flight takes place within this huge Ching actually the young Anton checkoff survive because he was a quick witted mimic. They was such a doll, boring city. The family bickering was just endless, but young Anton distinguished himself because he could always mimic individuals who would put on little pantomimes and people would say, oh, that's terrible. Do it again. Um, he would write a little vignette for the humorous things and people would say, don't let anyone see this and they'd be reading it again. And again, his father went bankrupt. He was a small time grocery clerk and fled from his creditors to Moscow, taking his wife and children, except for Anton leaving Anton at age 16 to finish up school and fend for himself. So at the age of 16, checkoff began to look out for himself.
(16:30):
He developed those qualities that a young man must under those circumstances develop a practical sense of what am I going to do today? And am I doing something today that will help me again next week? And the month after he began to build conscientiously a sense of life for himself, he took to the study finally of medicine and checkoff would become a doctor. And, um, eventually it would become quite a credible doctor, but at the same time, in order to let off steam, he would write little vignettes, little descriptions, that'll humorous things. Um, enlarged gags. If he had lived in Hollywood in the forties or fifties, he would have been a gag writer for Bob hope. He was that sort of a person, but at the same time dedicated to providing for himself. And so checkoff developed a very strange, um, subtle personality. He was extremely practical where it came to himself and rather like a secular night, he took care of everything around himself.
(17:45):
He made sure that the money coming in was going to be sufficient, no matter how small it was, you would cut his living down to those expenses. He never really had too many close friends. He never developed the sense of, um, of, uh, sexual attractive ness, um, with the ladies, although he had his share of affairs and eventually towards the end of his life even became married, check off was a, self-sufficient like a professional alive in a state of troubled times and trouble populations. So we became rather what we imagined. The stereotype gunfire in the old west would have been somebody who always is looking over his shoulder, covering his tracks and preparing what he's going to do. So this sense of attentiveness to a subtle kind of patterning, which one can interpret in retrospect as structure, but actually is not structure, but is a sense of design in motion now in a sense of, of a plan, but a sense of getting to know an Explorer kind of landscape of life and willing to go here and there.
(19:11):
And so checkoff becomes someone who carries a compass within himself without ever checking it. That kind of sense of, um, design. He finally put himself through school and at the age of 20 found himself in Moscow and fell in love with the grades city, Moscow 1880 had its share of slums, but at all, so had a highlight and a fine life that checkoff had not seen it before. He began in fact to write little vignettes and send them to newspapers and send them to magazines. And pretty soon checkoff was earning as much money from this as all the rest of the members of the family, including the father who somehow had fallen apart through the bankruptcy and through seeing one of his own sons sort of start to outdo him, even though he was young and the father took to reading Greek Orthodox books to dressing up himself in religious costumes, he became, uh, focused upon an attempt in his clumsy.
(20:27):
I hate to use a designation like lower middle class, but it carries the fetus. He was a failed minor businessman who took the religion and did it very badly. Eventually the way the father would live apart for many years from the family. And they would only be brought after checkoff became able to buy a huge country estate of some 475 acres outside of Moscow, but checkoff trained himself assiduously through those early years, finishing medical school. He in fact became a very credible surgeon and, uh, handled some very tough cases, but checkoff through his literary contacts handle a lot of free patients, artisans, um, writers, painters, and so forth, which send friends to him and then he would not charge them. In fact, he noted once in one of his letters that he had made only four or five rubles in a whole month of practicing medicine, but that he had made, uh, many times that from his writing.
(21:40):
So life went on like this for a checkoff. He graduated from medical school in 1884 and in 1886, this very interesting minor life was suddenly changed. He received a letter from an old major writer, a man named Gregorio [inaudible] letter to toll a, to check off, made him aware of the fact that he had within himself, an uncanny talent for understanding human life in regards to a vet. She was an old man at this time, white hair distinguished. He was from the golden age of Russian writing. He was up on a par at one time of Turgenev and Tolstoy checkoff wrote back to DV, Rick ROV, rich in March of 1886, your letter, my kind ardently beloved bringer of good tidings struck me like a Thunderbolt and nearly crying. I got all excited to. Now. I feel that your message has left a mark on my soul.
(22:54):
If I have a gift that should be respected, I confess before the purity of your heart, that hitherto, I had not respected it. I felt that I might have talent, but I had got used to thinking of it as insignificant. And his letter goes on to say how he had just simply felt that he was living a life and meandering through doing the best that he could, but great. Guravich his letter had shown him that there was a quality of understanding and perception available to check off that penetrated through to the very interior core of the human personality and that he had begun to evolve a writing style, which was able to lay bare this, not by drawing outlines, but by creating ambiances moves almost impressionistic style whereby the reader became committed in his emotional feeling to the experience of the reading. And in this commitment began to use his own perceptive apparatus and experience to probe through these misting colors and contours that checkoff was delivering and to reconstruct in himself the outlines and the shapes of understanding your garbage said, this is a very great talent and one which has godsend do not waste it.
(24:30):
And so checkoff letter to him said that he would no longer write mediocrities. He said it was like a bolt from the blue to receive your letter, excuse the comparison. But it had the effect on me of a governor's order to leave town within 24 hours. I suddenly felt the urgent need to hurry and to get out of the hole in which I was stuck. I will stop, but not too soon doing work that has to be delivered on schedule. It is impossible to get out of the rut. I am in all at once. I don't object to going hungry. had said, even if you have to go hungry to learn your art, devote yourself to it because you are developing here a God-sent talent, and this is a gift for mankind and not a personal possession, which you may squander on your own entertainment.
(25:31):
So he writes all my hope is pinned to the future ham only 26, perhaps I shall succeed in achieving something though time flies fast, send me your photograph, a deep, deeply, and respectful and grateful a checkup. So in 1886, in the early spring, he began to sense that he had a major talent and that he was committed then for the rest of his life to developing this talent medicine began to take more and more a backseat. And in fact, almost curiously at the time that this was happening, checkoff began to experience the ill health in the pattern, which he, as a physician knew very well, what it portended. He was to suffer from tuberculosis and die from it at a very early age, 44 years of age. So justice checkoff received this encouragement and the star of his destiny rose over the horizon. He also saw that he was in effect a doomed man, how long he had to live was simply a question of actually probably years.
(26:56):
He was fortunate a lot to live for another 18 years. So checkoff began them to contribute heavily to literary journals. One called in Russian, no Bovie viremia. The new times he contributed his first really, uh, find stories. In fact, the first story of any size that he contributed contributed was called the step. And it was a story of about 90 pages long, and it was a impressionistic tour of the Ukrainian Russian step through the eyes of a nine year old boy. So that the protagonists over the point of view, uh, through which the reader was looking was that of a nine-year-old child who was not able to shape his impressions. Exactly like an adult would be. And there were not many associations. So all of it was an interesting excursion and impressionistic writing, giving the natural settings. There were storms and night adventures in daytime adventures all through the eyes of this nine-year-old this story.
(28:14):
The step began then to prepare him for trying his hands at other aspects. And he wrote in 1887, his first real play Ivan, which is still incidentally performed in theaters around the world. He had written a large four act play called Platano, which had been shelved. And wasn't found until the 1920s. And I think it wasn't translated into English until probably the late 1950s, early 1960s. But for all intents and purposes, I have an office, his first real play he'd written one act comedy sketches, but I have an offer. Finally brought everything out. The play's main character is a landowner who is about 30 years old, uh, Nicholas Ivan off who has, uh, a Jewish wife, Sarah. And, uh, she has been cursed and abandoned by her family because she gave up her religion to marry Ivanhoe, a Greek Orthodox Christian. I have an off in the meantime falls, madly in love with another woman, Sasha, the daughter of a rich neighbor.
(29:35):
And finally, as he is busy seducing Sasha a lot in his mind. And then once in fact, in a physical reality, as he is plotting this, his wife is ill and then, uh, dies. I have an all Mary's Sasha. Okay. But just as this marriage is about to be celebrated, a doctor who has been following this entire story comes in and confronts him and can friends him with the total immorality of his life, the murder of a beautiful person who loved him through tow. Yeah, correct. And the total. Okay. Um, so do seeing of this woman who really shouldn't have belonged to him and Ivan off is confronted by his own meanness. One of the endings that checkoff had was that I have an off shoots himself for a checkoff. This became the beginning of a very serious concern with the theater, which was probably to be the hallmark of checkoffs greatness, but it would be some years before checkoff with have another play produced. He became aware by 1888 that he was in fact, a very sick man.
(31:07):
He also became aware that he had had a limited background. And so he wanted to expose himself to life, not to the drinking bouts and the petty affairs that people his own age were having in Moscow. Do you want it to open himself up to nature in the grand as possible way? So he took a, um, travel tour to the south of Russia. In fact, he went down to and backhoe the cities in Azerbaijan or the other side of the Caucasian mountains. He came back to Moscow, wrote a few short, um, humorous one act plays, and then conceived of an incredible journey. He decided that he would go to the end of the earth and fixing on a map of Russia, 8,000 miles away. The last piece of Russian land in the world was the island of Sakhalin out in the Pacific ocean and check off in 1890.
(32:16):
He decided that he would go and visit this island. So he began reading up on sarcoma and he found that it was in fact, a penal colony for the Russian czarist police system. And it became interested then in the aspect that these were jailed, people sentenced to life exile sentence, to complete alienation from all life forms, which they had known. And in fact, there were many such people and they were sent as a group to the end of the earth there to colonize this island and to start a new life, to make a new civilization, this captivated checkoffs mind. I mean, why don't you go and, and explore. Now this whole region of the Soviet union had not been traveled very much. Alexander Von Humboldt in the late 1820s at the invitation of the czar had taken an excursion across them. Much of Siberia. The Russian army was as late as the 1860s, 1870s still fighting skirmishes all along the Southern borders of Siberia, Western Siberia, and Eastern Siberia. Both. In fact, there were very few persons outside of a military capacity or outside of a penal prisoner capacity ever traveled in though.
(33:56):
So checkoff the age of 30, feeling his mortality, feeling the tremors, and then this responsibility of having a God given talent to understand human life committed himself to this enormous undertaking. He went north from Moscow by train to Jaroslav. And that by boat made his way down the upper Russian river systems all the way out to perm, which isn't a term from perm. He caught, uh, stagecoach, literally like the American west and began riding all the way out to the lake by call region. Now it took him many, many weeks to make this trip. He left Moscow on the 19th of April and it was thawing mud progressively all the way as he went further out into Siberia, the thought followed him so that he was literally in a sea of mud, almost all the way he describes his journey, just psychology island in a series of letters to friends.
(35:08):
And at one time he suspected that, uh, the station master was trying to, uh, uh, keep him overnight to charge him for another night and told him that the road was impassable because of floods. This was the, um, your Tish river out, uh, uh, outside of Tomsk in the middle of Siberia, checkoff refuse to believe him. And he, he got his driver to go about three miles outside of town when suddenly he saw this enormous lake and it wasn't a river, but it was a river that overflowed its banks, but here and there were strips of land in this river. So they would drive along these strips of land and then plop into the water. And then they would make their way getting out of the carriage and helping push and getting the horses to pull it to another strip of land. And so they made their way, and he said, his pride refused to let him go back.
(36:11):
Finally, they made it to the last strip of land and they realized that they were on what appeared to be the bank of the air Tish river. And there was a little hot there, and this was where the ferry was kept, but that the ferry was on the other side of the river. And so checkoff had to spend the night in this hot and just a little spit of land. And he said, he felt finally completely for Lauren and alienated. He had found the horrific image that he had feared all his life, the image of loneliness, because there was nothing but a little spit of slippery mud in the midst of Siberia himself. And when it's to a peasant companions, went to sleep already was left alone. And so checkoff opened himself up to this most terrifying of all humans feelings, infinite loneliness. You spent the night sleepless taking it down, feeling it, waking up the next morning and going on.
(37:16):
And so finally making his way down to lake bike home. They took a ferry across by call, which is about 80 or 90 miles at that point and took another stage into the Amur river areas. That's just north of the Northern border of Mongolia. I think it's called Saransk. And it was at this stage of the journey that checkoff began then to experience the gorgeousness of nature. It was almost as if he has experienced with abject loneliness. It opened up the pores of his natural affinities, and he said he began to experience a kind of giddy, healthfulness and wholesomeness, and then all around him, the forest, the tiger, the unending forest belt filled with birds and animals and not with men at all was just opening up for him. The possibilities that perhaps human sensibility could in fact exist wide open in nature after all.
(38:23):
And that he had been right and going through this portal, they got to the Amur river and then took a ferry boat all the way down the Amor, as it winds around and moves up towards the Pacific ocean. And there, I can't recall the name of the little Seaport. It's like Nikolai of itch named after one of the czars. He came into his first view of psychology island out in the Pacific, probably 40 miles or so out in the distance. And there was a Paul smoke hanging over a little gray line. And as the boat for SOC Holland left the port port of Nikolai, that's when they got out about halfway to the island, they realized that they could not land because the whole island, as far as they could see, was covered with a series of forest fires. So they went down in between the coast of Siberia down towards a lot of Austin, about a hundred miles or so, and then finally cut in and landed at the port, uh, Alexandra.
(39:40):
But all the way along checkoff was horrified to see a complete perfect picture of hell. Every Ridge was on fire in a thick POL smoke, hell they sky. And as they landed on the court, he realized that the psychology of all the people had changed and this Paul of gloom and this vicious undercurrent had settled on everyone. And he was to spend three months in psychology Ireland. He said it was the perfect image of hell everyone. There was vicious. Everyone was plotting against everyone else. There was no honesty anywhere that the entire population of men had been turned into fiends and that nature had cooperated by just giving them this Paul smoke and fire checkoff. In order to discipline himself, we have our yogis in the west jail, went methodically through the population of sock Holland, Ireland. He took his own personal census and inventory of every single person that was there, noted their circumstances of their lives, how they got there and patiently schooling himself, like a physician who has seen sickness and death and misery so much that he becomes a professional at treating it, check off, look into the face of human heart meanness month after month, that call an island until he could understand.
(41:16):
And in his notes, which were published in 1893 on psychology island, if so, startled and the world by ES portrayal of the depths, to which humanity can sink as a population that it precipitated a great deal of the revolutionary fervor that was to end up just a dozen years later in the Russian revolution, there were prison reform that came out of this much like Melville writing a white jacket. There were reforms, um, on the ships, but checkoff for the first time had chronicled a journey through personal alienation, to a wholesome joyousness in nature into the mouth of hell and had returned to tell about it. He came back by ship. There was a cholera epidemic in Japan, so he couldn't land in Japan, but it came back by Hong Kong, Singapore Ceylon and through the red sea and back up into Moscow. He came back around Christmas time of 1890 and checkoff came back loaded with images of man that very few people had ever seen before with a comprehensive eye persons who had lived in this kind of a minor were individuals for whom it didn't occur to them that there was any kind of a contrast, any kind of a movement at all in their lives.
(42:54):
So when checkoff came back in 1881, in order to get rid of the after effects of this tour to help, he took himself to the west. He went to Venice, he went to roll, he went to Italy. He became, uh, um, one of these European travelers from the north for whom Italy was like a south on his feelings. All the time. Writing checkoff wrote some 400 short stories, about 250 of them are world class quality and curiously enough in his writing style, they would come out in clumps three or four at a time. And he began publishing in the late 1880s volumes of short stories. And by 1891, he had a number of volumes of short stories. Some of the stories had won prizes, the Pushkin prize, the highest literary award that Russia had went to one of his stories, a tedious life, and the stories checkoff never gave the standard clot, never gave the picture from a beginning to some culmination.
(44:17):
He changed the whole structural mode by which the short story is written. Instead of giving us the story, he puts us into the most crucial event in the life of someone and gives us just enough so that we have to Intuit and feel along with them to find out what significance this had, what really this turned out to be after checkoff. The masters of the short story would be like James joyous and Katherine Mansfield, um, totally different way of delivering literature. Instead of telling the story, they presented the reader with a chance to explore through his own feelings and intuitions an event in the life of someone else that had a reverberation for themselves because checkoff believed that there was a science of literature, just like there was a science and medicine, and that there were definite qualities of shared life. Remember, this is the Soviet union, the Russia rather, uh, uh, Vladimir Solvia, who is religion of the holy spirit, said that all men are part of one vast structure.
(45:35):
We are rising from one shared reservoir. This was the Russia of Tolstoy's wonderful developments in ethical exploration and religious insight. This was a great age in Russia, but for checkoff, he had simply seen too much meanness, too much misery. And for him, the great message of the age Tolstoy's message that man's salvation lies in understanding the intricacies of non resistance to violence for Tolstoy. As we saw last week, it was the place within man's character where we can finally put the finger and say, it is upon this issue that we make illusion, or we make wholeness of life. If we resist violence, we're adding fuel to it and give it substance and shape from ourselves. If we do not resist it, if we conscientiously build so that it doesn't occur, we explore patterns of wholesome, I suppose, to Tolstoy's understand checkoff who love Tolstoy as a person isn't that he could not stomach the idea of non-resistance to evil in nameless, that man should put himself up young resistance to it, but that the human personality was not some thing which has handled, which you could just move and push around like a pawn on a board that the human personality was a rather vague and ambiguous inner penetration of tones and memories, imaginations expectations.
(47:34):
And that it was this floating pastel mass. That was a person. And the only way in which this could be ground was through a comprehensive assessment of one's own experience again and again, hundreds of times. So that one built up the sense of the science of feeling one belt up, a sense of understanding the themes and the motifs of the composition of human life and stopped looking for the illusory qualities, which could be labeled. It was to this effect that checkoff began writing stories like ward six, ward six, and we'll just have this. And then we'll take a break word. Sex is one of his long stories, almost a novel word, sex as a mental ward, the doctor in charge of wards sex believes that, okay, we should let people go crazy. They should not be treated. So he is a Tolstoy in protagonists not to resist the evil Dr.
(48:57):
Andre [inaudible] of whom we show here. Again, prescribed cold compresses for his head, ordered him to take drops of bay, Rob and went away saying that he would come no more as it was not right to prevent people going out of their minds. But as the novel progresses, Dr. Reagan becomes more and more a party to the feeling tones of the inmates and finds that he himself is going crazy on beknownst to him, but notice by his staff and more and more of this enormous shift from being the doctor to becoming one of the inmates in ward six, Andrei Dre, a vet, she felt that the crust had risen to his throat, his heartbeat, painfully, this is absurd. He said, rising suddenly, and going over to the window, is it possible? You don't understand that you are talking nonsense. He wished to speak to you as visitor, softly and politely, but could not restrain himself and against his own.
(50:03):
Well clenched his fists and raised them threateningly above his head. Leave me. He cried in a voice which was not his own. His face was purple and trembled all over. They gone. Both of you go Michael Aaron [inaudible] rose and looked up to him first in astonishment than in terror for they realized that he crossed the line and they would have to commit him. It was already Twilight. I haven't done Mitrovich laying on his bed with his face, varied in the pill. The paralytic sat motionless and wet softly and twitched his lips, the fat music and the ex sorter slept. It was very quiet. Andre Yammer Fitch sat on Ivan Demetra. Vich his bed and listened half an hour passed by, but Cobra talk did not come. Instead of Cobra talk came to Kita, carrying in his arm, addressing gum, some Lennon and a pair of slippers, please, to put on these, your honor, he said, calmly, there is your bed this way, please.
(51:08):
He added pointing at a vacant bed. Evidently only just set up and don't take on. And with God's will, you will be well sinned, Andre, your feminine vetch understood without a word. He walked over to the bed, indicated by Nikita and sat upon it. And then seeing that Nikita was waiting. He stripped himself and felt ashamed. He put on the hospital clothing, the flannels were too small. The shirt was too long and the dressing gown smelled the smoke fish. You will be all right, God granted repeated Nikita. He took up Andre, Yemen, fetches clothes and went out and locked the door. And later, of course, there is a horrible death. Dr. Reagan dies of an apple uptick fit in the midst of the map. And the last thing he is aware of is a green film clouding over the world. And he realizes he will never be cured. And that for him, there is no God, I hate on this note to take a break
(52:19):
[inaudible].

END OF SIDE ONE

(00:00):
What we're doing in this series, perhaps I should make it a little clearer. This series is a part of an ongoing pattern. And in this series, we're trying to broach the 20th century. We're trying to get a feel for the roots of our own time. And the stipulation here is that grew almost unable to appreciate the present moments in which we live, because they're very unusual. And in fact, there's kind of like an infinite regression problem. If we understand the beginnings of the 20th century, then we'd have to go back in time and back in time and so forth. And we overcame that difficulty four years ago because we started a process, which for lack of a better name, and it's like a yoga of civilization to take a disciplined approach, keeping free of ideas as much as we can free of the ideological patterns, which we all know too well and keep our feet on those existential rocks called human beings and try and walk ourselves across the ocean of time, moving from person to person, to person and not touching anything in between.
(01:34):
So acrobatic tight rope walk, and we've come all the way from homework to check off. And we found unbroken lineage of human beings like ourselves, living lines like we're living, trying to in their honesty and excellence, deep balls for whoever was able to see what value they found. And we've known it incidentally in passing along that very few of these people have ever been appreciated in their own. Right? When we did the series on the 19th century, we found that every single major figure of the 19th century has been misunderstood in the 20th century, Marx Wagner, you name it, Darwin, all of them.
(02:30):
We haven't wanted to draw any lines and sum this up, but we began to get the implication that if our time has misunderstood all of the previous century, maybe there's something wrong with our term. Could we have gone on a skew so far that we are no longer able to review our own origins, our own experience with honesty. It's a possibility we can't dismiss it because itself surreal. We're talking about maybe our civilization is mad and has no longer any rational history at all available to it, but we're willing to accept whatever discoveries come our way, because we have all the methods and capabilities and possibilities that human beings have given us to work with. We have a huge repertoire.
(03:36):
We can explore unknowns with nothing. We have even that capacity. So in an undaunted way, we're trying now simply to review for ourselves major figures, who in a very direct line sweep into our own time. And so we find ourselves now with the fifth person in this particular pattern, check them. And we find ourselves at a time in checkoffs life, where he realized that his time was indeed extremely limited, but that he had a field of human experience, which he had to explore and that he hadn't been able to thus far, he had never had a real home. He'd lived in apartments all his life. He had taken rooms with his mother and his sister, and one of his brothers, Michael, not the Michael checkoff, who was the actor. That was a nephew of checkoff, the son of one of his brothers, incidentally that, um, life of Latin mere Sylvia that we sell in the PRS bookstore is dedicated to that Michael checkup.
(04:54):
So check off, wanted to experience a home life where everybody was brought back together. He settled upon a, a farm in the Ukraine and everything went up to the very close of the escrow and it fell through on the very day that it should have been consummated and almost in rebound without looking at it. He bought an enormous plot, almost 500 acres. He bought it when it was covered with snow. He'd never seen it. Nobody had ever seen the land that belonged to an artist who was carrying some paper on it. Checkoff got a loan from his publisher, Superman. He had saved quite a large backlog of rooibos, but even so this farm cost 13,000 rubles in 1892, which was a mountain of money, but he wanted to experience having all of his, all of his brothers and sisters, his mother, and his father, his friends, the peasants who lived on the land.
(06:05):
He often said, I have peasant blood in me, myself. I have to have this contact with the country life. So he wanted to bring the entire carnival of life into one focus. This estate was called Malik Whoville. Now they call them the south of Moscow, little west, probably 50 miles, 30 to 50 miles. And in 1892, they went there and began. He was hungry for the experience of, of the whole mess of a life experience with all the family and friends and all the land and everything brought together. His shopping list for restocking. This farm was like 50 cherry trees, a hundred, uh, beaches and Oaks and seeds of every kind flowers of every time, roses and dahlias and animals of every variety. In other words, it's the list of a man who wants to see the fullness of life. What does it look like? I've seen the emptiness of life. I've seen the horror that we are prone to the meanness, to which we can sing. What about the falseness? What about the wholesomeness of life that too must be seen?
(07:32):
And somehow now, like Volvo for eight years was to be checkoffs home and he stocked it the best he could. He became Chand and bronze. He was physically very fine looking man, very handsome. It was just his lungs. The tubercular, as they were, were decay. He was Keating in upon himself, physically the increasing bouts with coughing up blood, increasing shortness of breath, the nausea, the strange taste that would come in his mouth, the queasy feelings that went inhabit his body from time to time, all these were recognized by Dr. Checkoff as symptoms of an approaching. Yeah. And yet his responsibility, which he felt had been given to him, the responsibility, the portable checkoff gives the quote right in the beginning. My holy of Holies is the human body. How intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom, freedom from violence and false said, no matter how the last two manifest themselves, he ended a letter to a very dear friend of his said, I don't want to be a radical. I didn't want to be a conservative. I didn't want to be anything, but as complete an artist as is possible for a man to be, I want to have the freedom to live life as fully as I may and the talent to write it out, as clearly as it can be not to sell any bill of goods, not to establish any point, not to draw any shapes and understanding so much as to re present, to recreate the science of artistic perception of human quality.
(09:37):
Tell me Mon, towards the end of his long life in an essay on checkoff said that he was a young man when checkoff died and he doesn't didn't remember, anybody's saying very much at the time. It was only as the impressive, his work settled in the century that they began to realize how great he was. And mom says, and check off what were the reasons for this ignorance of him? In my case, it may be partly explained by my admiration for the great work, the long wind, the monumental epic sustained and completed by the power of unyielding patients, by my worship of the mighty creators, like Balzac Tulsa and Bachman for them, it was my dream to emulate. If I could. And checkoffs like Tom whose work incidentally, I knew much better expressed himself in the more restrictive form in the short story, which did not require years or a decade of heroic perseverance, but could be charged up by literary lightweights. In a matter of days or weeks for this medium, I felt a certain scoring, little realizing what inner depth, the short and concise can acquire in the hands of the genius, how gravity by embracing the whole fullness of life can rise to a positively epic level.
(11:06):
If you put enough value in an experience, the simple beating of the heart, and it's moment to moment occurrence can choreograph the universal vision. So he says, my men Mon writes, if in later life, I understood this fact better than in my youth. It was due mainly to my preoccupation with checkoffs narrative art, which is unsurpassed in European literature, the narrative, not telling us the story, but delivering the interior moods and feelings of those events directly to us. So that, that story occurs in us, not in mind, but it begins to occur to us in our feeling Jones and lingers lingers today, lingers next week, it lingers for years. And we begin to realize that we have achieved a very esoteric communication transformation of self and someone else to us communion itself, checkoff is very much like this kind of a universal priest administering to a flock who mostly he didn't ever meet, not giving sermons, but giving the feeling challenge, interchanges that go up to make the subtle movements of life.
(12:48):
And Melika coachable. It became apparent to him that he had his great works yet to write. And he produced towards the end of that period. Two amazingly fine plays. And one which became sort of the emblem of checkoffs breaks. The first one, the emblem of his breakthrough was that up the secret, the seagull was commission and produce. And it was the unfortunate first production. In 1896, they brought a very famous aging comic actress into the production and then decided that she couldn't be in the production because she would not be right for the play, but the whole audience had arrived there. They were young people looking for a comic play and they realized their star for whom that cam wasn't even going to be at. It. She'd made a confession that she was not in the play before the play started. And then the whole evening started off wrong.
(13:57):
And the esoteric movements of the seagull just completely went over everyone's head. It was booed and has caused a huge uproar, but there were some individuals who understood that the seagull had broken ground. It presented plays within play. It presented feeling tones that had never been experienced before in the stage or in European weather. To that point foremost among those was a man named Stanislavski who was a very great actor. And he had just gotten together with another friend of his and had in fact with the Dan Chenko form number of itch, Dan Chenko had formed the Moscow art theater, which is still going at first. It was called the Moscow art and popular and Stanislavski and, and Marinovich gin Chenko together. The one doing the business, the other, the artistic direction made theatrical history. And in fact, the emblem for the company is a seagull, which is on the curve.
(15:10):
Anytime it pulls apart, the seagull fly sounds slop. Ski went to check off and said, we understand a little of what you were doing. We want you to be free to write in this mode. You're broaching as a pioneer feeling challenge, which we have never been able to experience before, right. Something more. And so check off who had just sold the rights to all of his works, Joe publisher named, uh, marks AAF marks. He sold them for 75,000 rubles, a mountain, but the publisher, his new publisher wanted to bring out a collected edition of checkoffs works by that summer. So check-off had just six months in which to collect all of his written works. And they were just all on these little journals, everything was obscure. So he had people working to trace down everything and copy them and send them to his home. And they began piling up and checkoff began to spend some of his time away from his mistake.
(16:30):
His health was deteriorating. He went down to the Crimea, he went down to Yalta and they're trying to hold himself together. He rented a little place. And then he decided finally, he was going to buy a Villa down there. And then a little cabin perched on the top of some rocks also came up for 2000 rope bulls and he bought that. And all of these changes, checkoff having to review his entire life's work up to that point, began taking a play that he had written called the wood demon and redoing it. You re-read it to put it in this collection. And because he was open, he was like an open, sensitive field, the field, one of the finest east or west. And it occurred to him that he had missed the theme that he had focused upon a dramatic structure. And that what was real in there was not the dramatic structure, but it was a presentation of reality.
(17:36):
And so he redid the what demon, and it became uncle Don and uncle Vanya. When it came out in 1897 was so far about the theater of its time that it was almost on appreciatable only somewhat of the genius of Stanislavski could have, could have seen him and understood uncle Vanya. One of the really great players of all time. I don't have time to go into it. Wholly. You'll have to read it for yourself. Go Vanya. Poynette ski on his estate. He has a sister who is now dead, had married a man, a professor, and he is remarried and taking a young wife and he's coming to live on the wife's the stage Vanya playing Netscape. Can't stand this. And he says, I pity the paper. He writes on. He'd do better to work on a autobiography. What a subserved subject, a retired professor, an old fossil.
(18:47):
If you see what I mean, a sort of academic stuff, trout, you suffers from gout, rheumatism, migraine and liver trouble. And he's almost bursting with envy and jealousy. The old also lives in his first wife's estate. Not that he wants to live here, but he can't afford to live in town. He's forever moaning about his misfortunes though. As a matter of fact, he's been pretty lucky, just lucky. He's had the son of an ordinary parish clerk educated at a church school. He's collected academic degrees and a university chair become a person of consequence, Mary, the senator's daughter, and so on and so forth. None of that matters though, but you note the next point for precisely 25 years, the man's been lecturing and writing about art. And what does he understand about art? Nothing for 25 years, he's been chewing over other people's ideas on realism, naturalism, and every other kind of tomfoolery for 25 years.
(20:06):
He's been lecturing and writing about things, which every intelligent person has known all along and which don't interest fools. Anyway, in other words, he spent 25 years chasing his own shadow at all the time. What gas lake conceit, what presumption now he's retired here, not a living soul knows who he is totally obscure. In other words, for 25 years, he's been on the wrong job. And just you watch him start about is if you were God almighty. And the doctor says, I think you're a bit envious. I most certainly am. And what success with women Casanova himself couldn't have done better. He's working himself up.
(21:01):
His first wife, my own sister, a beautiful genital creatures, purists, the blue sky above us. I find generous girl who had more admirers than he had pupils. She loved him as only angels in heaven can love beings as pure and lovely as themselves. My own mother, his mother-in-law is still idolizes. Him still goes in awe of him. His second wife, she just came through here is a beautiful, intelligent woman. And she married him when already an old man and gave him her youth, her beauty, her freedom, her radiance, whatever for why the doctor says is she faithful to him? Yes. I'm sorry to say, uncle Vanya works himself up and finally pulls a pistol on the man and misses no better symbol, his own rage front tree of this man, having everything in life and not deserving. One thing. Hey, I showed him and it just collapses into sort of a silence. The professor and his young wife, who does in fact, love him, decide to leave.
(22:34):
And uncle Vanya takes its place with an incredible portrayal of the way in which life doesn't really end. It doesn't really pan out one way or another. It sort of slides along in a glacial way and not some thread of meaning as discoverable, but a whole Moraine of experience keeps emerging and going on and everything changes a little and somethings don't right away. And so this feeling mood, which needs an extraordinary company to play in the criticism, often the checkoff places, nothing happens well, but everything is going on. Every word, every gesture is just C, not with meaning so much, but with rebel Chari, poignancy, and the characters in checkoffs emerge as wind in this motion, uncle Vanya and the next play, the three sisters just raised there to a level that it simply had not been before. He fell in love with one of the actresses. Ken, in fact, married, Olga kept her.
(24:07):
He checked with the doctor beforehand, who just would say nothing to him, threw up his hands and stuff knew himself that his time was extremely limited. And he was open with his wife who be characterized as a decent fine, an excellent companion. So he moved permanently to Yalta to the Crimea, with his new wife and began to move in his mind. Final work, its title is the cherry orchard and it's probably one of the finest literary productions ever done. It's a four act play and he worked on it for two years. It was produced just a few months before he died in 1904 by the Moscow theater, his wife played the lead, right?
(25:17):
Mrs. [inaudible] in the cherry orchard. There is an image of the, this is 1904 by now the service, okay. Then three for several generations and one rich surf. After another has come into possession of the land. They've become a middle class and through their hard work and the, and see if their judgment, they have built themselves. And at the same in time, as they have built themselves up through work, the aristocracy has declined through illusion. He was thinking that these are bad. What do they know? All they do is work. And so the cherry orchard is the last movement comes just one year before the 1905. Right? And show us that poignant moment where there are still compassion between those who are coming up. And those who are going down the oldest state checkoff wrote in his letters again and again, saying, this is a fine house. This is one of those houses that is so fine, that new people coming in and say, it's better to build a new house than try and repair the old one.
(26:41):
What is prime about the estate is that there's a huge cherry orchard. That's been there for generations and of all the family that have been born there and lived there only this, a brother and sister, the sister has two daughters have come back for the event of the sale by auction of this estate. And they arrive in early spring when the cherry orchard is in bloom. So that there's this massive blossoming white and the women in white dresses come in and everything is this pastel. And as the cherry orchard, as a play moves on through it's four acts, there is a quality of cosmic comedy going on. Everything is funny, but not hilarious. Funny. It's just incredibly funny, incredibly chimeras and checkoff call to the cops. But in the midst of all this comic motion, there's the awareness that this is it. This is the end of a whole order, that stretch for a thousand years in history. But it is also the beginning of an order who is future is yet unknown. That may last 2000 years in the future. So checkoff in the cherry orchard shows us that there are no tears to be shed in life. There was a determination, to be
(28:19):
Honest in our living,
(28:22):
To have the experiences which we have, and really be there for them to live as legitimately as we can for other people who are with us in our lives, but that there is no or triumph. There is no fear or hopefulness at all, anywhere, but in the science of life, it is what it is. And we like physicians of our own being have to tend it as best we can and not mistake it through misunderstanding its symptoms, to becoming terrified of possible diseases to miss what wholesomeness there is and to accept what death there is when it comes. So the cheery orchard has this wonderful motion to it. And in the cherry orchard, several of the figures, I'm sorry, I don't have time to go through it all. I had it all outlined for you. One of the figures there named trophy mom, who is a perennial student, he's in his late twenties and he's always been a student with the round clear glasses and the Telus old hair and the ragged clothes and talking already of the revolution. There's the young daughter, Anya, who is just 17. Who's beautiful girl blossom her older sister who was adopted Vario, who expects any moment that she will be asked to be married.
(30:12):
And the man who is supposed to ask her to marry him is a rich peasant who has made his way up little pocket in the pocket. Has in fact, as we discover in the fourth act bought the entire estate and he has bought it because he's going to turn it into plots of housing. And for that, the cherry orchard is going to come down twice during the play. There is a serial listic sound hurt is like the twine of a metal string that is broken. No pocket. One says it must be a cable from one of the mines far off in the distance, but it is that sound of a failure of nerve of an old society, which cannot take technology and work and is experienced by them as a Clarion of the horrible end. But for a low Apokyn is just one of those sounds in the work world and that go on and he pays no more attention to it. The sound that goes with it is the sound of axes chopping down the cherry tree. And in the fourth act, there is from time to time, this airy hollow sound check off in one of his letters when he was almost swamped, uh, crossing one of the rivers in Siberia noted in a letter to a friend that when the horror of death really seizes one, that water has a curious sound to it, that it no longer laughs and sloshes, but sounds deep like coffins knocking against each other under the surface.
(32:08):
And the chopping of the cherry trees has that kind of depth, capital funding and orchestrating. That is the reverberation of this metal twining of some wires, some failure of miracle that snap and the old aristocracy now dispossessed totally or packing, and the estate becomes more and more empty. And there's an old servant who is 87 years old named furs. Like the tree furs. Everyone has left, gone on their way, spread out into the new world. The family will never be together again. Checkoff writes the stage directions. The stage is empty. The sound of all the doors being locked, then a carriage is leaving. It grows quiet in the silence. The dolphin has heard the noise of an ax striking a tree. It sounds lonely and sad. Footsteps are heard first appears at the door, right? He is dressed as always in jacket and white waistcoat and wear slippers.
(33:22):
He is ill. First goes up to the door and touches the handle locked. They've gone, sits on the sofa. They forgotten me. Nevermind. I'll sit here at death. And Mr. It, as in put his fur coat on, I'll be found you'll have gone off in his light, gives a worried side. I should have seen to it. These young folk have no sense mothers, something which cannot be understood. Lights slipped by justice. If I never lived at all, he lines down. I lie down a bit. You've got no strength, got nothing, nothing at all. You are just, he lies motionless. Distance sound is heard. It seems to come from the sky in his, in the sound of a breaking string, dies that when he sadly silence Palos broken only by the thought of an act striking a tree far away in the origin. Kurt Jack died a few months later, he was given curiously by a physician in Germany at one of these health resorts, a glass of champagne, hoping to revive him, check off. I had him evenly cross the champagne. It turned over on the side and die. It's a curious quality to find, not so much courage of facing life and death, but the wholesome penetration of experiencing it exactly as it is, choose a very end to whatever extent it might be. Check off in his dramas. And in his short stories brought this element for the first time to a full boil in Western literature. Well, we'll see a sculpture next week, I guess, wrote down.

END OF RECORDING