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The Chekhovian Intertext Dialogue with a Classic The Chekhovian Intertext Dialogue with a Classic n LYUDM il A P A R T S THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PREss • COLUMBus Copyright © 2008 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parts, Lyudmila. The Chekhovian intertext : dialogue with a classic / Lyudmila Parts.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8142–1083–3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8142–9162–7 (CD- ROM) 1. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904—Influence. 2. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860–1904—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Russian literature—21st century—History and criticism. 5. Russia (Federation)—Intellectual life—1991– 6. Russia (Fed- eration)—Civilization—21st century. I. Title. PG3458.Z8P37 2008 891.72’3—dc22 2007045611 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978–0–8142–1083–3) CD-ROM (ISBN 978–0–8142–9162–7) The author expresses appreciation to the University Seminars at Columbia Uni- versity for their help in publication. Material in this work was presented to the University Seminar: Slavic History and Culture. Studies of the Harriman Institute Columbia University The Harriman Institute, Columbia University, sponsors the Studies of the Harri- man Institute in the belief that their publication contributes to scholarly research and public understanding. In this way the Institute, while not necessarily endors- ing their conclusions, is pleased to make available the results of some of the research conducted under its auspices. Cover design by Jenny Poff Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Palatino Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To the memory of my mother CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix CHAptER 1 Cultural Memory, Myth, and Intertextuality: The Intersection 1 CHAptER 2 The Pushkin Myth at a Time of Discontent 25 CHAptER 3 The Chekhov Myth and the Mechanics of Centennial Return 52 CHAptER 4 The Chekhovian Intelligent: The Burden of Being a Hero 77 CHAptER 5 The Cherry Orchard: Paradise Abandoned 109 CHAptER 6 The Lady with a Dog: No More Illusions 139 AFTERWORD Chekhov without Borders 166 Notes 175 Bibliography 197 Index 211 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS While working on this book I received help and support from many people, including Catharine Nepomnyashchy and Cathy Popkin of Columbia University and Ronald Meyer, editor of the Studies of the Harriman Institute. I am grateful to Laura LaKopp, Nadya Peterson, Valeria Sobol, and Angela Brintlinger for their most helpful comments. And, of course, the biggest credit goes to my family: Vladimir, Yuliya, and Adele Parts. vii CH A P T E R 1 Cultural Memory, Myth, and Intertextuality The Intersection Culture is memory. —Yuri Lotman, Conversations about Russian Culture Culture is what one remembers after one forgets all the books one has read. —Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura S DEFINITIONS of culture go, Charles Newman’s is better than most. It goes straight to the heart of the matter, bringing together A texts (books), memory (remembering and forgetting), and the individual consciousness of the reader. Culture, indeed, is a totality of texts. It is an enormous field, since semiotics understands the text as a broad phenomenon limited neither to written documents nor to strictly literary texts. Yuri Lotman’s definition of culture as a “non-inherited memory of a collective” posits culture as a system of texts and symbols, whose function is to maintain its own continuity.1 An encyclopedia definition of culture includes “language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, ceremonies, and symbols,”2 all of which serve to accumulate and transmit knowl- edge through generations. Culture is, therefore, information in all of its various forms, and it is shaped and preserved through memory. Here, I will limit the discussion of culture to its literary form, and of memory to cultural memory. 1 2 Chapter 1 The division of texts into literary and nonliterary is not self-evident. In Russian literature, for instance, where do we place medieval chroni- cles and Karamzin’s History of the Russian State, Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, and Tolstoy’s literary articles? How do we treat journalism and writers’ speeches and letters, philosophical treatises, the contemporary essay trend? Perhaps we should simply acknowledge that these exam- ples are misleading because in Russia literature effectively included and/or substituted for journalism, history, philosophy, and sociology. All of the above works have been treated as belonging to the realm of literary texts. But however peculiar the Russian case may seem, it does not go beyond the bounds of contemporary cultural theory. To a certain extent this blurring of borders between literary and nonliterary genres is evident in most cultures, which leaves us with a very vague notion of literary texts as all texts that employ the aesthetic function of language and explicitly work within the space between the signi- fier and the signified. Russia’s difference, then, lies in the paramount, if not unique, importance in Russian culture of the role of literature in constituting cultural memory and national identity. The term cultural memory requires clarification. Sociologists, anthro- pologists, and historians address memory as individual, group, social, national, collective, public, narrative, cognitive, body, and so on.3 The terms seem to alternatively overlap and contradict each other. Memory is a container, and it is a process. It is both objective and subjective, rooted in the past and yet outside of historical time. It is a function of the individual brain, and it is controlled by society and ideology. An individual’s memory, however private and unique, exists within and is formed by the surrounding culture. Each of us is a part and a product of a group: family, school, profession, religion, ethnicity, race, or nation. Each group in turn combines individual experiences to form cultural narratives and pass them on to new individual members.4 Col- lective memory provides a group with material for forming a group identity. Only the material that is most important for that self-image is preserved and is shared by the collective throughout a historical period. At the level of national collective memory, the mechanism of group identity is more complex but essentially the same. Nations need the discourse of the past as a constitutive element for their present col- lective identities,5 but not every past will do—only that which upholds the already existing national image. Cultural memory, as a part of col- lective memory, operates with the totality of culture’s texts available to Cultural Memory, Myth, and Intertextuality: The Intersection 3 an individual—encompassing national and world literature—but it is not the same as literature, nor is one merely a container for the other.6 Just as memory in general involves both the storage of information and the process of retrieving it, cultural memory acts as a repository of literature and the active force in its production.7 However, it still remains to be explained how cultural memory performs this function. Just as the collective memory of a people sorts through past events to privilege those that support the current national identity, cultural memory allots the highest value to texts that confirm and advance this image. Maurice Halbwachs’s analysis of the concept of collective memory stresses its reconstructive function. “The past,” he writes, “is not preserved but is constructed on the basis of the present.”8 The cultural past, I must add, as well as the historical past in general— economic, military, technological, and ideological—is also constructed according to the needs of a society in each given era. In other words, society chooses the cultural heritage that supports its current self-per- ception. National literature plays a paramount role in sustaining this vision. Since society’s self-perception denies discontinuity, in order to support its validity it needs to establish a lineage with the historical past, and to do so it must “forget” those texts and events that do not support the contemporary perception and promote those that do. New texts all perpetuate to some extent the existing self-image of a culture by drawing on the valued texts as their intertextual sources. Cultural memory serves the crucial function of selecting and clas- sifying the texts that form a national literature. It preserves and sorts out the multitude of texts into smaller systems governed by a certain hierarchical order. The active role of cultural memory in producing new texts makes it a central force of cultural production: it receives, arranges, and creates texts by providing the literary community with a set of techniques and with extraliterary material. Moreover, memory ensures cultural wholeness by creating self-descriptive discourses, or cultural models. Such discourses may take the form of a canon or of a myth. While a canon is usually legitimized and fixed by metastructural descriptions, that is, written histories of literature, myth is an elusive but nevertheless powerful presence in cultural memory, ensuring its unity. Myth has long been a fixture of literary studies in at least two of its forms: as a type of story and as a mode of
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