Chekhov, Part 2

A few more thoughts on Chekhov that I came across while reading Ward No. 6 and Other Stories:

The “point”—and, again, there is no conventional “point”—is that in just a few pages, the curtain concealing these lives has been drawn back, revealing them in all their helplessness and rage and rancor. The point is that lives go on without change, so why should fiction insist that major reverses should always, conveniently, occur?

—Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer 

It seems to me that the writer should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, etc. His business is but to describe those who have been speaking or thinking about God and pessimism, how and under what circumstances. The artist should not be the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased observer.

—Chekhov, in a letter quoted by Prose

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything.

—Chekhov, in another letter quoted by Prose

The plot is the Why. Why? is asked and replied to at various depths; the fishes in the sea are bigger the deeper we go. To learn that character is a more awe-inspiring fish and (in a short story, though not, I think, in a novel) one some degrees deeper down than situation, we have only to read Chekhov. What constitutes the reality of his characters is what they reveal to us. And the possibility that they may indeed reveal everything is what makes fictional characters differ so greatly from us in real life; yet isn’t it strange that they don’t really seem to differ? This is one clue to the extraordinary magnitude of character in fiction. Characters in the plot connect us with the vastness of our secret life, which is endlessly explorable.

—Eudora Welty

Critics of Chekhov in the good old days when the mania for the civic problem flourished in Russia were incensed with his way of describing what they considered to be trivial unnecessary matters instead of thoroughly examing and solving the problems of bourgeois marriage. For as soon as Gurov [in "The Lady with the Dog"] arrives in the early hours to that town and takes the best room at the local hotel, Chekhov, instead of describing his mood or intensifying his difficult moral position, gives what is artistic in the highest sense of the word: he notes the gray carpet, made of military cloth, and the inkstand, also gray with dust, with a horseman whose hand waves a hat and whose head is gone. That is all: is nothing but it is everything in authentic literature…. The unexpected little turns and the lightness of the touches are what places Chekhov, above all Russian writers of fiction, on the level of Gogol and Tolstoy.

—Vladimir Nabokov

Also worth reading is this essay on Chekhov by James Wood, from his book The Broken Estate.