ANTON CHEKHOV: A POST-POST-MODERNIST WAY AHEAD OF HIS TIME

Peter Constantine in Literary Hub:

I have been translating Anton Chekhov for over 20 years, bringing into English more than a hundred stories that are lesser-known, unknown, or untranslated. I have been asking myself throughout these two decades: What is Chekhovian? We hear of Chekhovian situations, Chekhovian despair, Chekhovian resolutions. There is Nabokov’s famous take on “Chekhovian” in his novel Pnin:

Ten years before, she had had a handsome heel for a lover who had jilted her for a little tramp, and later she had had a dragging, hopelessly complicated—Chekhovian rather than Dostoevskian—affair with a cripple, who was now married to his nurse, a cheap cutie.

But is Chekhovian really something “dragging and hopelessly complicated?” There is the deep and elusive quality of his plays, which so many directors throughout the world try to fathom every year, and there is also the complexity of the stories he wrote in the last years of his brief life—he died at the age of 44, in 1904—but there is much more to Chekhov’s work than that.

More here.