Description
Book SynopsisThis long awaited collection brings together in one volume the definitive essays on Anton Chekhov by renowned Chekhov scholar Robert Louis Jackson, including work that has never appeared in English as well as brand new essays published here for the first time. The volume offers a series of “slow” readings that yield insight after exquisite insight. They also model fruitful ways of discerning the rich complexity of Chekhov’s deceptively simple work. The volume’s introduction by Robin Feuer Miller captures beautifully what Jackson undertakes in his careful scrutiny of Chekhov’s text. The editor’s afterword by Cathy Popkin includes passages from the editorial correspondence in which Jackson reflects on his work and articulates his aspirations; the authorial voice thus resounds in the section Jackson expected to write himself. The editor also outlines the arguments and insights of Jackson’s remarkable unfinished essays. Finally, an appendix provides the full text of his virtually complete but still open-ended treatment of “On Official Business,” the story Jackson returned to repeatedly for decades, the previously unpublished culmination of his life’s work on Chekhov. Essays on Anton P. Chekhov: Close Readings is fully accessible to readers without knowledge of Russian while also providing complete documentation for scholars in the field.
Trade Review“A virtuoso performance by the maestro of Russian literary criticism. This lovingly edited and produced volume, itself a conversation, tells the story of Professor Jackson’s lifelong engagement with the great short-story master. These close readings, many of which will be new even to scholars, focus in on the microscopic elements of a text—the sounds and roots of individual words—and lead from there along inexorable, but previously unnoticed paths to the big questions of justice and faith, good and evil, fate and conscience. Along the way, we realize that Chekhov, too, was in conversation with masters—with the Bible, with Dante, with writers of his time, most notably Dostoevsky, and with others who were to come after. These seemingly disparate essays themselves add up to a majestic, and yet uniquely accessible, body of work. Riches emerge when reader meets text, slows down, and gives it the attention it deserves. It turns out that to understand this, we needed a teacher.”
— Carol Apollonio, Duke University
“Over twenty years ago, Janet Malcolm assessed that Robert Louis Jackson's ‘writing and teaching on the religious subtext in Chekhov's stories have inspired a generation of younger critics.’ With this volume of exquisitely written, penetrating studies—many of which previously appeared in inaccessible venues or in languages other than English, and one that was not quite finished—Jackson's profound influence on the field will endure. In editing Jackson’s work and ushering it to publication, Cathy Popkin has repaid that younger generation's debt, to the benefit of us all.”
— Michael Finke, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Robin Feuer Miller
Editor’s Note
Cathy Popkin
On Chekhov’s Art
Chekhov’s Seagull: The Empty Well, the Dry Lake, and the Cold Cave
“If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem”: An Essay on Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle”
Dostoevsky in Chekhov’s Garden of Eden: “Because of Little Apples”
“The Betrothed”: Chekhov’s Last Testament
Chekhov and Proust: A Posing of the Problem
“The Steppe”: Space and the Journey. A Metaphor for All Times
“The Enemies”: A Story at War with Itself
Chekhov’s “The Student”
The Ethics of Vision: The Punishment of the Tramp Prokhorov in The Island of Sakhalin
Dantesque and Dostoevskian Elements in Chekhov’s “In Exile”
Biblical and Literary Allusions in Chekhov’s “Gusev”
Russian Man at the Rendezvous: The Narrator in Chekhov’s “A Little Joke”
“Small Fry”: A Nice Little Easter Story
Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle”: “By the Waters of Babylon” in Eastern Orthodox Liturgy
Three Deaths: A Boy, A Goose, and an Infant
A Fragment from the Aggregate: Sinai and Sakhalin in Chekhov’s Letters to Suvorin
“Grief”: Once Again about the Ending of the Story
Dogs: Text and Subtext in “Lady with a Pet Dog”
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and Gurov’s Oreanda Meditations in Chekhov’s “Lady with a Pet Dog”
Afterword
Cathy Popkin
Appendix: Robert Louis Jackson on “Po delam sluzhby” [“On Official Business”]
Index
