The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The theme of the three major plays I have suggested is human wastage. His characters, the provincial intelligentsia, the petty aristocracy, the small landowners and bureaucrats of prerevolutionary Rъssia, are in effect functionless. Essentially they have nothing to do except to contemplate their unsatisfac- tory lives. They are talkers, not doers. And they sense their own weakness. They know, as Yeliena Andryeevna puts it in Uncle Vanya that "things have gone wrong in this house," and we cannot but feel that the house is Czarist Rъssia. In Three Sisters Baron Toozenbach says, "The time's come: there^ a terrific thundercloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up!" (Three Sisters premiered sixteen years prior to the Revolution.) In the same play Olga offers the vague consolation: "Our suffering may mean happiness for the people who come after us."

But we must not think of Chekhov as a leftist, much less a revolutionary. He would not have welcomed 1917. His mind was not political, only contemplative.

That contemplation is pessimistic; perhaps melancholy is a better word. Chekhov^ exposure of the provincial middle class is sad rather than indignant. And even that sadness is qualified by humor; he once wrote to a friend that The Cherry Orchard (which to most readers seems so downbeat) was "not a drama but a comedy: in places almost a farce."

The mood of many Chekhovian characters is one many of us have felt. It is expressed by Chebutykin in Three Sisters: ^<4What difference does it make?"

Yet Chekhov is no nihilist. His own life was marked by gen- erosity, adherence to traditional moral values, and a persuasive compassion. He has no fixed or comprehensive view of life.

What interested him was detection of the almost unseizable reality of human behavior. Few dramatists have done this more successfully. To his friends he would say, "Let the things that happen on the stage be as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life."

The social world of his plays is rather restricted. To per- ceive the full extent of his understanding of other Russian types, including the peasant, we must go to his short stories. In this field he is one of the few great names. He helped revolu- tionize the short story as he helped revolutionize modern drama.

C.F.

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EDITH WHARTON

1862-1937

The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth

Born into an upper-class but only moderately wealthy New York family, Edith Jones spent her early years as a shy and bookish young woman who was much more comfortable as an observer of high society than a participant in it. Her rigorous intelligence took note of the pretensions of the "Old New York" families guarding their dwindling wealth and clinging to the prestige inherited from their Dutch forebears, and of the social climbing and vulgar display of the new millionaires who were jostling to replace them. In the drawing rooms of Fifth Avenue mansions and in modest side-street brownstones, in elegant hotйis and shabby rented rooms, in fashionable sum- mer resorts, she found material that would serve her well dur­ing a lifetime as one of the most successful and admired novel- ists of her era. Soon after her death her reputation went into decline, and she was dismissed as merely a "popular writer"; in recent years her work has enjoyed a well-deserved revival.