Chekhov's Love Life Was Far More Complicated Than the Saintly Myth
Anton Chekhov played at love most of his life
A personal reflection on Anton Chekhov's life and work challenges the long-held image of the writer as a sexual ascetic devoted only to medicine and literature. Drawing on recent biographies and the Chekhov-Knipper correspondence, the piece reveals a more complex, red-blooded man, and questions whether his marriage to Olga Knipper was truly a great love story or a relationship marked by distance and misunderstanding.
It is possible to argue that Chekhov gave us modern tragicomedy.
- vessenes
This article sent me to Joyce's letters to his wife (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/02/james-joyces-...) which are ... dirty. Amazingly so. Inspiring use of English.
- paimapi
Chekhov had such an influence on me as a young, hyper-insecure teen. Chekhov's craft is powerful and widely taught but it's his thematic elements that I really loved. he made a habit of setting up a deeply unlikeable character in the first act, slowly revealing their tragedies and traumas that led them to their insecurity, and the selective love they put into the world so by the final act you're weeping for someone who you scoffed at at first impression. for someone who was so convinced that people disliked or hated him, it was a real balm to know that there were those advocating for the strongest form of compassion as the default mode and not just an occasional, extraordinary act
- Mikhail_Edoshin
Well, I can only quote Pushkin's letter to Vyazemsky (used Google AI to translate; in the letter Pushkin wrote about Lord Byron's lost personal memoirs):
"The crowd greedily reads confessions, memoirs, etc., because in its baseness it rejoices at the humiliation of the high, the weaknesses of the mighty. At the discovery of every vice it is in raptures: 'He is small like us, he is vile like us!' You lie, you scoundrels! He may be small and vile—but not like you—differently!"