Recluse or gadfly?

Image Source: The Internet

Sometimes, such as right now, I am given to wonder how important or useful it is for a writer to be engaged with, and alert to, his own culture.  Is it better to sequester oneself, monklike, so as to avoid distractions and petty desires and dedicate oneself fully to one's work?  Or is it preferable to fling oneself into the river of crap, in the hope of finding some choice flotsam?

This occured to me today because I just started reading Nabokov's Glory, and found I had to force myself through the first couple of pages.  I love Nabokov and I'm sure I'll get into it soon enough, but I decided to go back and figure out what the problem was.  And it was that the opening pages of this novel are written too narrowly for a particular time and culture (the Russian intelligensia of 1932).  There are allusions, references, assumptions that the young Nabokov expected his readers would understand, and at the time they probably did.  But I don't--not instinctively, anyway.  The pages make sense, of course, but they leave a vague sense of obscureness, of exclusion.

You won't get this with Chekhov.  As Rhian was saying yesterday, he holds up awfully well.  One feels he was writing for the ages, not for his culture.  The work is ostensibly about his culture, but its true subject is universal human emotion.  You don't need a footnote in "The Lady With The Dog" to tell you that Yalta is where Muscovites went on vacation.  It doesn't matter; we get it.  What matters is the bit where the civil servant leans out of the carriage and tells Gurov that the sturgeon was a bit off, and Gurov is for some reason deeply wounded.  He desires a certain kind of succor and instead is confronted by his alienation from other people and their petty concerns.  This is universal--as long as people read short stories, this scene will make sense.

I can't help but feel as though all the September 11th novels we've seen so far will be forgotten very very soon.  The novels of contemporary manners, the novels of urban snark and hip self-consciousness: they are too much about what we think we are, not what we actually are.  When we immerse ourselves in the here and now, we lose sight of the fact that most of our daily worries are about things that will be gone in a century, if not next week.  But it's hard to write about what will be left.  Those are the things that hurt us the most, that make us feel the most helpless.

Which is not to say I'll soon be deleting my Twitter account.  Life in 2011 is too damned much fun.  I think I'll try to lock my cave door a little more often, though.

By the Way...

...Rhian just poked her head over my shoulder to remind me that, on the Julian Calendar anyway, it's the birthday of Anton Chekhov, the man who named this blog. Raise a glass to the good doctor, if you will.

Ivan Bunin's About Chekhov

I was excited to find in the Fall '06 issue of The Paris Review (there's a newer issue out now; I rescued my copy of the fall one from the trash can at the bookstore where I work, sans cover) an exerpt from the newly translated memoir about Anton Chekhov by Ivan Bunin (1870-1953, won Russia's first Nobel Prize). Here's what Bunin says about Chekhov's talking about writing and criticism:

" No writer should be forced to listen to any advice. If a writer has made a mistake, if he has talked nonsense, the mistake will be his alone," he often said. "After the high demands that Maupassant placed on his art, it would be difficult to write anything, but one must work just the same. We Russians must be particularly bold in our work. There are big dogs and little dogs, but little dogs must not fret over the existence of the big ones. Everyone is obliged to howl in the voice that the Lord God has given him."

I love that. Chekhov is probably the only long-dead writer I feel I know -- and like -- as well as some of my friends. The memoir, translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo, will apparently be published some time this year by Northwestern University Press.