The last book I loved didn’t love me back. Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories (Norton Critical Edition), coolly waltzed and sledded and glanced superciliously right past me, despite my greedy gaze, the pinch of my page-turning fingers. With each tale, as always when I read Chekhov, I couldn’t get enough of his lucid and elusive voice, his subtly drawn yet distinct characters, his discreet placement of details, some symbolism and some not, a peach on the bureau, a hand of cards lost, a bird call in the trees like someone blowing into a bottle. And adding to my longing were those painterly descriptions of the poplar-laned Russian countryside.
“It’s loutishness!” I reproached myself, not unlike the young schoolteacher does, for my brutal handling of the material. Chekhov isn’t the type of reading you can grope after, I chided myself. You must be patient; you must reread; you must want very badly the thing without fumbling it away. For Chekhov’s Realism is the kind of stuff one must sip to taste, or hold to the sunlight of close reading in order to observe any color in it’s vodka clear depths. But when its potency hits you, and it will, like a surprise kiss in the darkness, you’ll feel the tingle all the way deep to your soul.
