Animal Farm - Short Story Supplement - Anton Chekov
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Animal Farm - Short Story Supplement - Anton Chekov
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Hi, My name is Christy Shriver.
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And my name is Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love lit Podcast.\\xa0 Today we are going to take a very small dip into the vast sea of what has been called the Golden age of Russian literature.\\xa0 It\\u2019s going to be an unusual episode today because we\\u2019re going to try to tackle a different genre .\\xa0 We\\u2019ve done novels, plays, non-fiction memoirs, a political document and poetry, but today, we look at our very first short story.\\xa0 \\xa0\\xa0Christy, what are we getting into?
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Yes, stories in general, are comprised of certain elements and are for the most part, like novels\\u2026except for the obvious- much shorter: they have characters, settings, develop plots, use symbols,. reveal attitude through tone and are delivered with a very intentional point of view, and like novels all these things contribute to lead a reader to a specific theme- or universal truth, insight on life, perspective, however you want to define it.\\xa0 Short stories are unique in that they must be concise and extremely focused- it\\u2019s not just a shorter sequence of events.\\xa0 Lots of times they involve an epiphany- some moment of insight, discovery or revelation by which a life is changed. \\xa0They are usually set in only one place.\\xa0 Often the plots are not are not complex and perhaps may not be very important to the story.\\xa0 \\xa0In Chekov\\u2019s case- he really focused a large part of his work on characters.\\xa0 He used precision of details, dialogues, inner-monologues, sometimes even reversals (when the result of the action is the direct opposite of the character\\u2019s intentions) to say something, make an observation or just maybe even pose a question about who a person is and vicariously who we all are as people.\\xa0 You will see, because it\\u2019s exemplified in these stories, that he\\u2019s not just saying the same old thing- in some sense, I\\u2019m not exactly sure what he\\u2019s saying about people.\\xa0
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Tell all that stuff you learned about Chekov\\u2019s not developing heros.\\xa0 And\\xa0 the Russian era in general not being all about the heroic.
-Russia\\u2019s golden age writers focused on the opposite of heroic
-they focused on emotions and internal processes and futile behavior
-less about story lines and more about introspection
-literary critics pummeled this perspective
-these writers were detailing human behavior as serfdom was dying out and Russia was increasingly focused on becoming westernized
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Yes, the 19th century is definitely the Golden age of Russian literature, and there is not very many people who have not heard of Leo Tolstoy\\u2019s masterpiece- War and Peace- but you never see the Russian writers being compared to the Odyssey for its adventure of Mark Twain for his wit and satire.\\xa0
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Talk about how they were actually criticized as a whole for the direction of their writing- its phiolosphic nature and of course being famous \\xa0for being long.
- Heavily philosophic on the meaning of life
- Borderline nihilistic on the futility of man
- Will heavily influence every renown writer up to this day
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Of course, Matthew Arnold, the poet, who wrote Dover Beach, the very first poem we ever analyzed on this podcast, famously said that \\xa0a work by Tolstoy is not a piece of art but a piece of life.\\xa0 He\\u2019s probably the most famous Russian writer, with perhaps Dostoyesky coming in second.\\xa0 They are both famous for writing those big thick books that scare everyone.\\xa0 Maybe, we\\u2019ll be tackle one their books one day, I really like Anna Karenina, but our day today is going to be devoted to another very significant Russian writer, who I like to teach for one reason because he\\u2019s manageable- Anton Chekov.\\xa0 If you\\u2019ve ever heard of him, you may have heard of his play the Cherry Orchard.\\xa0 That was the first thing I ever read by him, but what he wrote most of and what he really perfected to competitively being one of the best in the entire world is actually the short story.\\xa0 He wrote literally more than 400 of them.\\xa0 He has no equal in terms of quantity.\\xa0 He wrote about everything: life in big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, small towns and peasant villages from every part of Russia from the south all the way to Siberia.\\xa0 He wrote about aristocrats, industrialists, small town merchants, writers, painters, religious people, secular people, servants, bad people, good people even crazy people- all of it.\\xa0 Someone counted over 8000 different types of characters in his works.\\xa0 He wrote, of course, about a lot of themes, but his favorite theme was the freedom of the individual- he hated inauthenticity and really tried to look for what people were actually like and the circumstances that created and defeated individuals.\\xa0 And this is a very modern aspect of his writing, in my view- in a very real sense, he seeks to be non-judgemental. His stories, at least the ones I\\u2019ve read are not moralistic.\\xa0 They are not hinting that man should be a certain way or maintain a certain view.\\xa0 They just are..as people are..and that seems to be what he is wanting to accomplish.
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Just to drop him into history, he was born on January 29, 1860 and died in 1904.\\xa0 In terms of what was happening in America, that means, he was born \\u2026\\u2026\\u2026\\u2026tell us a little about what was going on in the US.\\xa0 But life in Russia was very far away and very different.\\xa0 His life was sadly cut short and, of course, he missed most of the turmoil that would plague Russia starting with the Russian revolution just a few years after his death.\\xa0 But getting back to his early years, and something we, in the West can in no way understand except through the African American slave experience, is that he did not come from a legacy of freedom.\\xa0 His father, actually had to purchase his own freedom from serfdom- which is something we in the United States can\\u2019t imagine.\\xa0 We, had our own scourge of human bondage, but it\\u2019s hard for us to imagine how human bondage has plagued every corner of this globe.\\xa0 We certainly don\\u2019t understand it the way the Russians understood it- almost everyone was a slave or one generation removed- The Romanov dynasty ruled the Russian empire from 1613-1917 80% of the people were poor, illiterate serfs- Czar Alexander II who ruled Russia during Chekov\\u2019s lifetime tried to make Russia more open.\\xa0 He relaxed censorship which, of course, affected the production of the arts during this time.\\xa0 But in 1861, he freed the serfs and established a parliament he called the Duma.\\xa0 The freedom he gave the people did not have the exact desired affect because instead of making them happy, it made them ore discontent and wanting more.\\xa0 There were actually at least two attempts on his life.\\xa0 One time they dissenters actually put dynamite in the dining room in the palace.\\xa0 In 1881, a terrorist group called People\\u2019s Will killed him by throwing a bomb at his carriage.\\xa0 I guess it isn\\u2019t all that surprising the Alexander the 3 decided enough with freedom and ended the duma experiment..eventually all of this led to the events we described in episode one and the Russian Revolution,\\xa0 But all of this would have been very impactful to Chekov and everyone coming out of this very primitive form of existence to a first generation of educated people, a first generation of people with a shot a improving their lives.\\xa0 Chekov\\u2019s family made a great effort to educating Chekov, and eventually he would graduate from medical school, but, they themselves were very poor.\\xa0 Chekov\\u2019s father NEVER had a job that could support his family and by the time Chekov was in college he was the the defacto head of the family because he financially supported his family who had all moved from the interior to Moscow.
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It\\u2019s interesting that the reason he started writing at all was because he could write for publications short pieces and sell them for money while he was in school in order to support his family.\\xa0 The financial incentive was really his motivation.\\xa0 It was something he could do fairly easily.\\xa0 In 1883 alone he published over 100 items- lots of them were supposed to be funny because these were written for sale and put in these little local publications.\\xa0 But the unintended consequence of all that money grabbing was that he got really really good at this craft.
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Before, we get into the stories and I know we need to, I do think it\\u2019s interesting to close out this little brief intro by saying that Anton Chekov\\u2019s brief life was spent mostly with his parents and his brother and sister.\\xa0 He married only when he was dying.\\xa0 He was a practicing doctor, but his heart must have been big because he almost never charged for his medical services-in fact, it is said he spent as much time treating the sick- his relatives and the peasantry as he did writing.\\xa0\\xa0\\xa0 He did achieve fame in Russia as a writer and enough success to allow him to buy a farm and care for his aging parents.\\xa0 His fame in the West, however, only came years later- mostly after WW1 when they were published in the West.\\xa0 Okay, Christy, this is the first set of short stories we\\u2019ve ever done, so tell us what we\\u2019re looking at or looking for.
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Let\\u2019s do it- but Before we get into the analysis of the stories.\\xa0 We do need to mention that all of these were written in Russian, I know that is obvious, but sometimes there are different translations and have different titles in English.\\xa0 We are going to analyze just one of his stories.\\xa0 One called \\u201cThe Bet\\u201d.\\xa0 I\\u2019m not sure exactly what is the best way to do this, so what I think I\\u2019d like to try is we\\u2019ll read it piece by piece and as we go, we\\u2019ll take a minute from time to somewhat analyze it down to its basic parts.\\xa0 Then when we get to the end, we\\u2019ll try to look at it as a whole.\\xa0
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If you want to just listen to it straight through, there are many youtube videos that do just that. On the website, we\\u2019ll link you to one just to be convenient.
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Okay, how do we start?
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This story will start like every other story- with the exposition, if you remember fraytag\\u2019s pyramid.\\xa0 We referenced this at length in the episodes on Lord of the Flies.\\xa0 Fraytag created it in 1863 to explain the plots of tragedies, but since then we apply it to everything and if you\\u2019ve ever taken any literature class at almost any level, you\\u2019re familiar with it.\\xa0
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The exposition of a story is the beginning BEFORE the inciting incident, or the event that will start off the sequence of events that will in turn be the plot.\\xa0 Because story is so short and so non-plot centered- almost half of our entire story is exposition.\\xa0 In the exposition we will meet the characters, will we see our setting, the point of view will be established and the mood will be set.\\xa0 In our story, we\\u2019re even going to have a fairly complex flashback and inner-monologue.
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Let\\u2019s begin\\u2026.
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