THE GREAT AUTHOR AND DRAMATIST ANTON CHEKHOV WAS born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Rostov Oblast, Russia. A hundred years later to the day, in Philadelphia, came the birth of the model Gia Carangi, who would later be memorably portrayed by Angelina Jolie in the HBO original movie Gia.
Coincidence? Not unless you let it be. As Chekhov said, “Only entropy comes easy.”
Chekhov is well-known for his plays: his towering quartet of late works, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, have ensured that he is second only to Shakespeare among Western dramatists. But his short stories make an equally persuasive case for his genius as a writer. During his lifetime, Chekhov wrote more than two hundred stories, earning a reputation as one of the most incisive and skilled practitioners in the history of the form.
What makes his stories so compelling? The question has preoccupied scholars and critics, as well as everyday readers, for more than a century. Most of Chekhov’s adherents arrive at a version of the same answer: that Chekhov understood people particularly well, and specifically that he understood their weaknesses. With a minimum of flamboyant effects, he demonstrated the ways in which ordinary life is always colored by predictable but consequential personality flaws such as doubt, pride, and fear. In a story like “Tall and Short,” for example, he wasted no time in delineating the complex circuit of envy and aggression that exists between two old friends who meet after a long interval. In “An Enigmatic Nature,” he sketches a portrait of a woman on a train with brief, almost imperceptible strokes that nevertheless reveal a tremendous amount about sex, power, identity, aging, and regret.
Chekhov drew his characters from all levels of Russian society in his time: peasants, aristocrats, intense young clerks, disappointed wives. Today, in America, we have a simple way of identifying these flawed specimens of humanity ruled by ego and insecurity. They are called “celebrities.” Here we have the young film star who has been in the spotlight since she was a teenager and whose sense of herself is at once inflated and imploded. There we have the talk-show host who conducts clandestine relationships with members of his staff. And over there we have the reality-show star who is famous primarily for her appearance in a particularly intimate home movie.
We need not name these three celebrities, but we can certainly speculate. Lindsay Lohan? David Letterman? Kim Kardashian? And, having speculated, we can perhaps find analogues for these characters in Chekhov’s stories—and wonder, perchance, what would happen if his original characters were replaced by these new characters, whose travails hit so much closer to home for us. If we should trap these celebrities inside Chekhov’s stories, is it possible that their insides—the inner lives that are elided by the tabloids, paparazzi, and the Internet—might be liberated? That a story of straying husbands and nervous wives like “Bad Weather” might move us more as an accurate, even revealing portrait of a contemporary golfer named Tiger rather than the tale of a lawyer named Kvashin? That a tragicomedy of young love like “At the Barber’s” might be enhanced if it starred the singer, actor, and stage parent Billy Ray Cyrus rather than the locksmith Erast Ivanitch Yagodov? It should be specified—stressed, even—that the famous personages transplanted into these pages are in no way intended to reflect the actual lives of the actual talk-show hosts, actresses, golfers, and singers whose names they share. No celebrities were harmed in the making of this book. Rather, they are ideas: the notion of “David Letterman,” for example, carries with it an expectation of wit, professionalism, and faux-churlishness. How do those expectations bloom, or wilt, in these stories? Turn the page and see.
Some may wonder whether the presence of modern celebrities in these stories could prove distracting rather than illuminating, whether the subtle beauty of Chekhov’s insights might be drowned in a tide of pointless associations. At first we shared that concern. We met in several conference rooms, each adjacent to the next, to discuss the matter. In the end we cast our lot with science and commissioned the research arm of the publisher to conduct an in-depth survey. The results, when they came in, suggested that these new celebritized stories will appeal to a wide variety of readers: young and old, literary or obsessed with celebrity, cynical or idealistic. Or, perhaps, that they will not appeal to them. The graph is difficult to read, and it is possible that we are holding it upside down.
Ben Greenman
General Editor
May 2010