Join the Slavic Literature and Culture Forum for a lecture by Dr. Carol Apollonio (Duke University). Dr Apollonio will present "Chekhov’s Religion: Coded Texts and the Ekphrasis of Gesture” (abstract below).
**All members of the University community are invited to attend.
Abstract:
In all sensitive matters, Chekhov is elusive, and no more elusive than in matters of religion. Given that “the soul of another is darkness” (чужая душа потемки), any quest to discover his (or in fact anyone’s) personal beliefs is doomed to failure. But the Russian Orthodox religion into which Chekhov was born provided him with a rich store of texts, images, and rituals that served as raw material for his artistic writing. Scholarship has developed many illuminating lines of analysis: the roots of the writer's stoicism in Ecclesiastes (Swift); the Marian imagery at work in his depiction of saintly or sinful women (de Sherbinin); the centrality of the Fall in early and late works (Jackson); coded retellings of hagiographies (Senderovich); and artistic transformations of Orthodox concepts such as hierophany (Pahomov). Moving beyond an indexing approach (linking motif to Biblical source), this paper explores the workings of dynamic religious vision in the plots of two short stories-- “Vanka,” “Gusev”—and one long one--“Peasants.” This reading of Chekhov’s narratives takes into account the writer’s fundamentally dramatic sensibiity: gesture and setting bear as much weight as the lines a character speaks. Chekhov’s narrator bears the burden of conveying this message through stage directions and descriptions of setting and gesture that duplicate church ritual (“ekphrasis of gesture”) and quote scripture (“coded texts”). This approach offers a challenge to readers willing to pay more attention to setting than to character or plot in Chekhov’s works, and to consider the masks behind which narrators may be hiding, and amply rewards them for doing so.
