CHEKHOV ANNIVERSARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 26

CHEKHOV ANNIVERSARY

‘THE great Russian short story writer and dramatist, Anton Chekhov, died on July 15, 1904. To mark the 50th anniversary of his death a short talk by Professor H. Winston Rhodes, Professor of English at’ Canterbury University College, was broadcast in Book Shop on July 14. Below we print the text of this talk: NTON CHEKHOY, the fiftieth anniversary of whose death falls in this month of July, was the author of a handful of plays which have made stage history and of scores of short stories which have placed him with Gogol, de Maupassant, and Poe,’ as one of the acknowledged masters of this literary form. It was not an accident that Katherine -Mansfield was so attracted to his characteristic manner and craftsmanship. Life was not made easy for Chekhov. He once referred to Tolstoy and Turgeney who "receive from nature as a gift what we lower-class writers buy at the cost of our youth," and recalled that in childhood he had no childhood. As a médical student in Moscow he became the main support of his parents and their five other children. This was the time when he served his apprenticeship, for necessity drove him to write sketches for the comic papers under the name of Antosha Chekhonte. Soon after he graduated the first symptoms of the tuberculosis which shortened his life appeared; but, undeterred, he continued to write and to pay what he called his debt to medicine. Wherever he lived the peasants flocked to him, and he attended to their medical needs as well as attempting to make life less harsh for them. In 1890, against all advice, he set off on ah arduous journey actoss Siberia in order to conduct a one-man investigation into the conditions under which the people were rotting in the penal island of Sakhalin. Yet Chekhov, with his great energy, his zest for living, his humour and immense sociability, his compassion and integrity, is often described as wistful, disillusioned, and overpowered with a sense of futility. Nothing could be fur-

ther from the truth. Chekhov’s stories are like life and filled with~all the variety of life. Taken together, and there are over two hundred of them translated into English, they provide a vivid picture of the Russian world which he loved, laughed at, and wept for; but it is a picture composed of fragments which have been well described as biographies of mood. As he said of his plays, so it can be said of his stories, "People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the time their happiness is being established or their lives are being broken up." He avoided the sensational in subject and the flamboyant in manner, He did not want to stir up people’s imagiriations just to pass the time of day, but to bring them closer to life and its problems. And so, fifty years after he died in Yalta at the age of forty-four, many of us remember with affection and admiration Anton Chekhov, the man, the short story writer, and the dramatist. (A BBC "World Theatre" production of Chékhov’s play, Uncle Vanya, will be heard from 3YC at 7.30 p.m. on Friday, July 30.)