6/1/2023 0 Comments Anton chekhov short stories![]() ![]() Some stories even seem to intentionally stop prior to reaching a projected sense of closure. ![]() While most stories prior to Chekhov reach some kind of climax or epiphany, Chekhov’s stories end with a whimper or a “return to zero”, meaning that the characters are in the same position at the end of the story as they were at the opening-no lessons learned, no life-altering experiences gained, no alteration of existential conditions. It is something of a critical commonplace to discuss the short stories of Anton Chekhov by examining their endings-or what many take to be their “non-endings”. Many commentators discern that contribution to be structural. Besides, life is full of transformations, so their inclusion cannot be a criterion for the distinction between the real and the unreal. The magic of the Chekhov tale cannot be reduced to its proximity to life in its quotidian vestments. One fears that Fishman hereby establishes a rather false dichotomy between the irrealism of stories that depict transformations and the realism of those that do not. In his introduction to a new collection of translations (mostly the revered English translations of Constance Garnett) of selected Chekhov short stories, Chekhov: Stories for our Time (Brooklyn, Restless Classics, 2018), Boris Fishman insists that Chekhov engages in a bid for realism, that his approach is “as radical as it is simple: tell things how they are, not how they should be” (xiii). ![]()
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