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CHEKHOV'S COMIC SPIRIT AND THE CHERRY ORCHARD All wisdom is mournful. Therefore the wise love the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall find poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad grin before 'a row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because all's dark at home. The stage is the pastime of great minds. - Chapter VI, The Ordeal of Ricllard Feverel I "ALL's DARK AT HOMEn-for young Anton Chekhov. 11,e son of a grocer, he watched the store after school. His father taught him to use his finger in weighing merchandise, and he beat him for trifles. Later, his father lost his store and his money. When Anton was a student of medicine in Moscow, his mother did not let the boy study: she came to his room with questions and comments, the questions being about laundry and dinner and the comments about the necessity for study. When Anton begged to be allowed to prepare for his exam, his mother cried. By his twenties, Anton was the hreadwinner of the family. His sister Masha helped in the house, his older brother Alexei took to drink, his younger brother Michael went to school and his father Pavel sat around.... Anton was powerful enough to warn his parents not to tell lies, ineffectually of course. He knew that for ordinary people lying and self-deception come easily. He knew that he must purge his soul of deception. To his publisher Suvorin, Chekhov described his growth toward honesty, telling of a young man reared in a world of lies: "... could you write a story of how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop, and .how, ·on waking up one morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is real blood, not the blood of a slave?" Mter his purgation, Chekhov told his brother Alexander, "I myself am afraid of nothing." Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 and died in 1904. On December 3, 1886, he wrote to Mme. Kiselyov: "In Russia there are two unattainable heights: Mount Elborus and myself." Later he told her: "I am getting as popular as Nana." With this success, Chekhov gave advice to his older brother. In his most famous letter, Chekhov, combining comic examples with serious thought, called Alexander ill-bred. The man of "culture; the good man, adheres to the following conditions. 01 92 NORMAN SnNERSTElN September He has respect for man, never creating a rumpus about a lost hammer or a lost eraser, never saying to a man with whom he is living, '1t's impossible to live with you." He forgives noise, cold, overdone meat, caustic remarks, and the presence of outsiders in the home. He not only feels compassion for beggars and cats but also respects other people's property, and so he pays his debts-a wise crack against Alexander. He does not humble himself in order to arouse sympathy and to be made a fuss of, not saying, "Nobody understands me" or ''I've wasted all my efforts." Developing an aesthetic taste, he does not fall asleep in his clothes; he cannot stand a crack in the wall with bedbugs in it, or breathe foul air, or walk across a floor that has been spit on, or eat straight off a kerosene stove. The "cultured" man strives to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct, not requiring in a woman on!y physical relief or a mind that expresses itself in the ability to prevaricate tirelessly, but rather requiring freshness, charm, human feelings, the ability to be not a bitch but a mother (the Tolstoyan motif). Knowing that he is not a swine, he does not guzzle his vodka nor sniff at cupboards. This scheme of culture is followed by the Soviet Union, which continues to call a man nikultyarni, uncn!tured , who wears his hat indoors. For Chekhov, this scheme was a moral code by which the will was strengthened, the letters of Anton Chekhov revealing the growth of the mind and the morality which animate his stories and plays. In the ordinary, mundane, and unheroic life about him, Chekhov found material...

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