books

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<p>This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia?</p><p>In his first years as a medical student Anton Pavlovich dashed off these pieces for a few kopecks a line (his father, born a serf, was a bankrupt shopkeeper). Ranging in length from three paragraphs to 76 pages, they appeared under pseudonyms in lowbrow comic magazines that included another Spectator (founded in Moscow in 1881). Unremarkable they may be – but they open a window on provincial Russia in the early 1880s, the tense period before and after revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg. The reader will also enjoy identifying the seeds of the master’s mature style; and indeed some of the stories are worth reading in their own right.</p><p>Chekhov’s world unfurls in these pages. Character types limber up, preparing to emerge fully formed in the later work – among them Trifon Semyonovich, the owner of 8,000 acres of black earth, who enthusiastically fleeces ‘peasants and neighbours’ in the short story ‘On Account of the Apples’. Orioles whistle in the blackthorn; a tarantass rumbles past, loaded with travelling rugs and hunters’ guns; the whiff of salted fish pervades the spring air and everywhere narrators (often first-person ones) perceive ‘a sense of tedium… in people’s faces and in the whining of the mosquitoes’.</p><p>Experimentation with form is less familiar. The volume includes elaborate parody, satire, gothic fiction and sci-fi (in an example of the latter, mischievously attributed to Jules Verne, a fellow from London’s Royal Geographical Society tries to drill a hole in the moon). Chekhov even employs the epistolary form, in part to indulge his fondness for puns. The very first entry consists of a letter written from the village of Eaten Pancakes. The editors have curated this disparate, uneven stuff skilfully. The excellent footnotes explain the abundant wordplay.</p><p>As for the translation, the book is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. Eighty-three individuals from nine countries have each translated a piece and then passed it around for team revision. No individual translator’s name follows any one story, but a group credit appears at the beginning. This cooperative approach, a notable success, achieves a consistency often absent from multi-translator anthologies.</p><p>Returning to the ‘unremarkable’ aspect of the whole: endings do tend to have a dying fall, as though Chekhov were in a rush to get the thing off his desk. The squibs and comic skits are of the schoolboy variety – though I quite liked the Spectator fake ads, one offering sausage-free worms. ‘The Distorting Mirror (A Christmas Tale)’ was the only piece here that Chekhov included in his first Collected Works, and one can see why. The story has a thematic unity lacking elsewhere in this debut spread.</p><p>Chekhov had not found his voice by 1882 – but you can see him searching for it. (One novella foreshadows the theme of his celebrated story ‘The Bet’.) In short, the everyday realism of the later work is on display in this collection, but not its psychological depth. After all, the callow youth had not yet experienced the emotions at the heart of the later great stories and plays. (In Britain he is best known for his stage work; in Russia, for his short stories.) He had not confronted the unfathomable realities of life, nor the ambiguity and nuance that govern human behaviour. We go to the theatre to hear the Trigorins and the Prozorovs express elegiac melancholy – and that is not a young man’s game. On the other hand, the slapstick here humanises the writer whose sense of dramatic economy once caused him to note with approval the effect of placing a pistol on a table in the first act.</p><p>What links should we seek between an author’s early and late work anyway? How many of our juvenile preoccupations still concern us in middle age? The man who conjured Uncle Vanya was once a coltish 20-year-old. The trajectory from the inky youth of this book to the titan we know from the plays might be the most Chekhovian theme of all.</p> <small class="notice" x-post-type-data="None"> Takahe has limited support for this type: <a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/40050684">See Original Page</a> </small>

<p>[Objectionable words have been passwordified; they do not appear that way in the article]</p><p>My fiction was too much for the Starmer government</p><p>By Ben Sims</p><p>In the House of Lords 65 years ago this month, the 6th Earl of Craven reminisced: “It was the day that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was on sale to the public and there, at every serving counter, sat a sremoved of youths. Every one of them had a copy of this book held up to his face with one hand while he forked nourishment into his open mouth with the other.”</p><p>Young people reading novels was scandalous then – but that was the past. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was unbanned, as were Ulysses and Fanny Hill. I grew up with the freedom to think that things said daily in the real world were worthy of written expression. Much of my teenage reading, and likely what made me a writer, seemed to me incorrigibly edgy: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Naked Lunch, The Satanic Verses. It used to be understood that, however disagreeable the content, books deserved to be read if they possessed enough literary merit.</p><p>I therefore took it as a considerable critique when my own fiction was banned this week (2 December). Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, AI filters censored and suppressed one of my short stories, published 277 years after Fanny Hill. All UK-based users would have to prove they were over 18 before reading me. My unremarkable short story, “Nothing Unmediated”, described a Nobel Laureate and Oxford fellow who, on his way to a college dinner, is assaulted by muggers. Admittedly I, a mere gay man, had no right to use the words “p00f” and “f@gg0t” in the quoted speech of criminals in fiction. This was “hate content targeting people based on… sexual orientation” (presumably the terms on which the story was hidden from unverified users).</p><p>The government had a point. Having been called both a “p00f” and a “f@gg0t” many times in real life before the age of 18, I do wonder if I could have handled encountering those words in a short story. Likewise, it would probably have been wise to shield me from another blocked category, “realistic acts of serious violence or injury to people, animals, or fictional creatures”, such as the harpooning of Moby Dick, the duel in Eugene Onegin, or the Crucifixion of Our Lord.</p><p>Many now make their entire living from Substack. Because my writing has less literary merit than Fanny Hill, I do not – but nevertheless I was given no notification or warning that my work would be censored. After profuse whining, “Nothing Unmediated” appears to be accessible again. The principle remains. Fearing a fine of 10 per cent of its revenue, Substack has, sensibly, kowtowed to Ofcom. All sane platforms will.</p><p>This is because of how the law is interpreted by Substack, the incredibly genteel publishing platform, now with 50 million users, including novelists Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Following my august example, these and thousands of writers may become inaccessible without age verification.</p><p>My fiction being gatekept surreptitiously for two days was hardly a Stasi-like outcome. However, AI-automation (the only way anything as huge as the Internet can be policed) means you now have to seek exemption retrospectively. You are guilty until you request and are granted your innocence.</p><p>Perhaps access to fiction might encourage young people to read. But of course, that might cause them, in Lord Craven’s words, “to indulge in a feast of mental, and probably physical, impurity”. Maybe we’re better off keeping them away from challenging literature. Can we expect children to understand something our sensible government can’t?</p> <small class="notice" x-post-type-data="None"> Takahe has limited support for this type: <a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/40051291">See Original Page</a> </small>