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Animal Farm - Short Story Supplement - Anton Chekov Hi, My name is Christy Shriver. And my name is Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love lit Podcast. 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. It’s going to be an unusual episode today because we’re going to try to tackle a different genre . We’ve done novels, plays, non-fiction memoirs, a political document and poetry, but today, we look at our very first short story. Christy, what are we getting into? Yes, stories in general, are comprised of certain elements and are for the most part, like novels…except 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. Short stories are unique in that they must be concise and extremely focused- it’s not just a shorter sequence of events. Lots of times they involve an epiphany- some moment of insight, discovery or revelation by which a life is changed. They are usually set in only one place. Often the plots are not are not complex and perhaps may not be very important to the story. In Chekov’s case- he really focused a large part of his work on characters. He used precision of details, dialogues, inner-monologues, sometimes even reversals (when the result of the action is the direct opposite of the character’s 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. You will see, because it’s exemplified in these stories, that he’s not just saying the same old thing- in some sense, I’m not exactly sure what he’s saying about people. Tell all that stuff you learned about Chekov’s not developing heros. And the Russian era in general not being all about the heroic. -Russia’s 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 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’s 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. Talk about how they were actually criticized as a whole for the direction of their writing- its phiolosphic nature and of course being famous for 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 Of course, Matthew Arnold, the poet, who wrote Dover Beach, the very first poem we ever analyzed on this podcast, famously said that a work by Tolstoy is not a piece of art but a piece of life. He’s probably the most famous Russian writer, with perhaps Dostoyesky coming in second. They are both famous for writing those big thick books that scare everyone. Maybe, we’ll 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’s manageable- Anton Chekov. If you’ve ever heard of him, you may have heard of his play the Cherry Orchard. 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. He wrote literally more than 400 of them. He has no equal in terms of quantity. 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. 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. Someone counted over 8000 different types of characters in his works. 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. 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’ve read are not moralistic. They are not hinting that man should be a certain way or maintain a certain view. They just are..as people are..and that seems to be what he is wanting to accomplish. Just to drop him into history, he was born on January 29, 1860 and died in 1904. In terms of what was happening in America, that means, he was born …………tell us a little about what was going on in the US. But life in Russia was very far away and very different. 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. 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. His father, actually had to purchase his own freedom from serfdom- which is something we in the United States can’t imagine. We, had our own scourge of human bondage, but it’s hard for us to imagine how human bondage has plagued every corner of this globe. We certainly don’t 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’s lifetime tried to make Russia more open. He relaxed censorship which, of course, affected the production of the arts during this time. But in 1861, he freed the serfs and established a parliament he called the Duma. 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. There were actually at least two attempts on his life. One time they dissenters actually put dynamite in the dining room in the palace. In 1881, a terrorist group called People’s Will killed him by throwing a bomb at his carriage. I guess it isn’t 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, 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. Chekov’s family made a great effort to educating Chekov, and eventually he would graduate from medical school, but, they themselves were very poor. Chekov’s 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. It’s 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. The financial incentive was really his motivation. It was something he could do fairly easily. 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. But the unintended consequence of all that money grabbing was that he got really really good at this craft. Before, we get into the stories and I know we need to, I do think it’s interesting to close out this little brief intro by saying that Anton Chekov’s brief life was spent mostly with his parents and his brother and sister. He married only when he was dying. 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. 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. His fame in the West, however, only came years later- mostly after WW1 when they were published in the West. Okay, Christy, this is the first set of short stories we’ve ever done, so tell us what we’re looking at or looking for. Let’s do it- but Before we get into the analysis of the stories. 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. We are going to analyze just one of his stories. One called “The Bet”. I’m not sure exactly what is the best way to do this, so what I think I’d like to try is we’ll read it piece by piece and as we go, we’ll take a minute from time to somewhat analyze it down to its basic parts. Then when we get to the end, we’ll try to look at it as a whole. If you want to just listen to it straight through, there are many youtube videos that do just that. On the website, we’ll link you to one just to be convenient. Okay, how do we start? This story will start like every other story- with the exposition, if you remember fraytag’s pyramid. We referenced this at length in the episodes on Lord of the Flies. Fraytag created it in 1863 to explain the plots of tragedies, but since then we apply it to everything and if you’ve ever taken any literature class at almost any level, you’re familiar with it. 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. Because story is so short and so non-plot centered- almost half of our entire story is exposition. 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. In our story, we’re even going to have a fairly complex flashback and inner-monologue. Let’s begin….