|
annotation Williames, Lee J. Anton Chekhov: The Iconoclast. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1989. Distilled to its essence, Lee J. Williames' Anton Chekhov: The Iconoclast is all about image. Although the book strays for considerable length into tangential territory of obvious interest to the author if not especially applicable to his premise, Iconoclast ultimately serves to fill a gap in the Chekhovian critical repertoire with an insightful analysis of how the playwright's image and legacy fluttered and blew in the shifting Russian and Soviet political winds. Curiously, Williames never offers a definition of the word "iconoclast", apparently assuming there is only one definition of the word and all of us everywhere know what that is. In fact, while the meaning of the word can range from "critic" to "heathen", "non-conformist" seems most apt to the author's application here, and is hereby anointed The Definition, at least for the purposes of this annotation. More importantly, although Williames presents a clear and well-defined delineation of Chekhov's varying public personas, and repeatedly claims that a "corrective for the distortions" is forthcoming (as late as 62 pages into the text), the fact is, when all is said and done, it is left to the reader to extract and impose his or her own definition of Chekhov's true legacy. Williames' study is an example of defining who someone is by showing what he is not. Still, when Williames finally does lock on to his premise, the results are on-target and compelling. His thesis is that every critic in Russia has an agenda, and Chekhov's image was manipulated to fit that agenda. Subsequently, at certain times Chekhov was a saint, at others, a demon. Williames divides his analyses into three schools of thought, the Populists, the Reductionists, and the Orthodox Soviet. First were the Populists. Active in the failed revolution of 1905, the Populists did not look kindly upon the recently-deceased playwright, largely because Chekhov resisted succumbing to the overt political diatribes as did, for example, his good friend Maxim Gorky. A decade earlier, "significant Populist critic" Alexander Skabicheviskii even went so far as to predict that Chekhov was "a mindless literary clown who would eventually die drunk under a fence, forgotten by everyone" (56). Fellow Populist N. K. Mikhailovskii took Chekhov's objective, observational literary style to task for its lack of "moral judgement", recognizing Chekhov's talent but claiming it to be "lost in vain" for its non-judgmental stance (56). Replying to this school of criticism in a letter to a colleague, Chekhov in the spring of 1890 noted that "you would have me say, in depicting horse thieves, that stealing horses is an evil. But then, that has been known a long while, even without me. Let jurors judge them, for my business is only to show them as they are" (57). Following the failure of the 1905 revolution, the Populists fell out and the Reductionists moved in. From an apolitical "clown" of the present day, the Reductionists (Williames also never defines the origins or meaning of this moniker) reduced Chekhov to a "poet of ultimate gloom" drifting off into oblivion with a passing age. Interestingly, Williames claims that it was through this warped image that Chekhov first got his lingering reputation as a purveyor of doom and gloom that persists among the uninformed even to this day. During the 1920s, the Soviets again retooled Chekhov's image to fit their own propaganda machinery. This retooling, Williames states, led to a gross oversimplification of the writer's work. "All of [Chekhov's] effort to show the complex, contradictory and confusing nature of life is shelved in the name of revolution," the author laments. "This is particularly true in the post World War II period when only one side of his work, the positive, optimistic and teaching side, is stressed" (59). Williames further quotes Soviet critic B.I. Aleksandrov as proclaiming that "...Chekhov belongs to us, to the people of the revolution, and not the old bourgeois society overthrown by its forces" (59). Although Williames' own conclusions tend towards the abrupt and elliptical ("this study draws on the grains of truth and provides a corrective for the distortions" ends one section, with unsubstantiated confidence), Williames extracts and presents his three arguments well and with clarity. Then come the peasants. Beginning with a variation upon his thesis, Williames lurches down a spur line of analysis of Chekhov and Russian peasantry that consumes a full third of his book and threatens to derail his promising "image is everything" premise. The opening is promising and on-target: Chekhov's short story, "The Peasants" painted a picture of the Russian underclass as it most likely really was -- a petty, animalistic world of horrific squalor and early death. "Yes, to live with them was terrible," concludes the character Olga in the story. "Yet all the same, they were people; they suffered and wept as people do; and in their lives, there was nothing for which excuse might not be found" (Oxford Chekhov, 8:210). Chekhov's story shattered the myth created and upheld by the contemporary Russian literati and intelligentsia of the pure and noble peasant, backbone of the idealized worker's Russia. "The intellectuals sought to give the peasant meaning in terms of what the intellectuals saw as the key problem of Russian society. They did not seek the peasantry on its own terms but theirs" (67). Chekhov's story was immediately censored. His colleagues were in an uproar. Tolstoy condemned the story as "a sin against the common people" (68). Williames initial foray into "The Peasants" and Russian peasantry as an extension of Chekhov's iconoclastic nature is well-taken, but the author is soon out of control, delving into an entire subsection that dissects the minutiae of 19th-Century Russian peasant life: "The Family", "The Village", "The Hut", etc. By the time this is over, Williamses' exhausted reader is hard-pressed to remember what came before and what the author's study is ostensibly about. Likewise, Williames' rather hasty conclusion leaves more open to the reader's speculation than I would have preferred. For example, Williames' conclusion on Chekhov and censorship states that, "the publication of his views provoked immediate government censorship, but it helped open the eyes of the Russian public and undoubtedly contributed [italics added] to the spontaneous, broad-based revolution from below against the Tsar in 1905" (157). Contributed, how? Especially with a "below" most certainly largely if not completely illiterate. Like many a premise set up in this book, it's an intriguing one, but also one sorely lacking in any cited corroboration or even informed speculation. It is simply just stated, and abandoned. Throughout, Williames approach is not sloppy or slipshod, it is merely incomplete, diluting a promising premise and making for a sporadically informative if overall spotty reading experience. Copyright © 2001 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |