The Cure For Stupidity: A Reading of Chekhov's 'Cherry Orchard'

Last night I read Anton Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard'. Today I read the first two plays of the Oresteia of Aeschelus, 'Agammemnon' and 'The Libation Bearers' and the book length essay on the trilogy by Robert Fagles, and would've finished the third play 'Eumenides' were the first two of the trilogy not so depressing. But I want to share my impressions of the Chekhov here, not the Greek.

'Cherry Orchard' was frustrating. Having a fair idea of what Doctor Chekhov's on about now, I found many of the ideas in the stories tucked away out of sight in the play.

But what am I to make of it, after all?

I feel that I watch Dr Chekhov dissecting something which gives every indication of being a cherished and valuable living family system. If I were to discover this is an illusion I would be mollified, but I do not: the family and the world the Doctor dissects for our delectation is revealed for nothing more than entertainment and a night at the theatre. Human fables and follies are clinically exposed. It is perfectly barbaric.

I kept saying aloud to myself as I read "Oh my God these people are so STUPID!" Their stupidity, which Chekhov courteously justified by grief, madness, alienation, loose morals, and a variety of other straw men, is the salient feature of the play. Everybody is irredeemably stupid.

Robert Anton Wilson once asked if there is a cure for stupidity. Anton Chekhov presents, no not a cure for stupidity, but a purgative. Here is Doctor Chekhov's presciption:

An ordinary middle class life, free from slavery, lived for the sake of some basic common ideas - say, dignity, cheerfulness, liberty and productive work - this life, this life alone, in itself without any dogma, afterlife, metaphysics or creeds, this life is enough.

It may be that the cure for stupidity is found in the audience of a Chekhov play, if they only remember, and laugh - and then remember to laugh when they themselves commit the same follies, believing in the same ridiculous fables, as Chekhov's characters do.

Barbarians in the Cathedral

I read a summary of the critical reception of Anna Karenina today.

What these critics miss, except for D.H. Lawrence who overstates the case from pagan zeal (and he has Raskolnikov's axe to grind), is that Anna Karenina sets the consciousness of the reader ringing like a bell! Anna Karenina resonates in precisely the same way a grand cathedral filled with constant plainsong might. I mean this very literally. It is sacred.

Who cares what the book means? What does 'means' mean?! In the face of the cathedral purity and aesthetic primacy of the book, intellectual criticism is flat out inadequate.

Yes, the words might be critiqued, but only by aesthetic illiterates; Anna Karenina exists as a transcendent and Platonic solid, a symbolic and timeless space of play, a temenos, an ideal realm - the reader who knows this must revere, then, and keep his head's mouth fast shut.

Laughter of the Devil: Re-reading Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov

I've had an eventful month. I haven't posted here for a while: having a broken computer really lends itself to getting quality reading done.

Last night I finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's a remarkable book. I love it; I really do. Maxime Gorky said Fyodor proves in it that he is a sadist. Karamazov is not a cruel book - it is a funny book. Gorky missed the joke
A hard joke, a difficult and passionate joke, but still - Dostoyevsky is bullet-to-the-head humor. If it doesn't knock you down like it did Gorky, do you think you even have a soul in you?

Penguin translator David McDuff pinpoints the main characteristic of Brothers Karamazov: it is the work of the devil. He falls short: the real devil in Karamazov is Dostoyevsky. The outrageous humour of the Evil One himself dressed as the teacher and sage of Tzarist Russian peity and patriotism is not to be missed.

Brothers Karamazov also reads forward in time to Kafka, Nietzsche, Gide, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, providing a context and critique to the future. It is prophetic if you suppose the horrors of the future can only be endured by horrible mockery. Dostoyevsky is a nasty insect, and to read him is to shed a carapace made from the purest hysterics and mocking laughter. What remains is the Devil himself.

McDuff translates as 'crack-ups' the chapter where all the main characters go mad. It's as good a word choice as any. For Dostoyevsky, then, we all crack up when shame and guilt makes us act in a hateful way - and for him this crack up is the only thing that has the power to bring you to accept God's Will. That's how I read it: Dostoyevsky's Devil is the guide to God, and his frightening laughter lights the way.

Practically speaking, for those considering reading Karamazov, I recommend skipping these chapters as tedious:

- Book One, part three - 'Voluptuaries' tediously demonstrates the Karamazov vileness which part one describes in fewer words.
- The entire Public Procurator's speech is just a wasteland.
- The Chapters on the life of the Elder Zosima; they are merely background color to render the monks more ridiculous. Since they already are silly, it can be omitted.

For a first time reader I suggest you start at the moment the family visits the monastry, and then return to the long introductory chapters on Fyodor Pavlovich's life, which are less interesting material. I am re-reading these chapters now, for the fourth time, just for the pleasure of Alyosha's childhood and Fyodor Pavlovich's amusing life.

The most remarkable chapters in the piece, for which the greatest attention should be preserved, are the Onion, the Wedding at Cana, the Grand Inquisitor, the entire hilarious Crackups Section, "It's always interesting to speak with an intelligent man" (this requires the most precise attention, and the outrageously black and funny three talks between Ivan Fyodorovich and Schmerdyakov, and "For a moment the lie becomes truth", which is the only sublime chapter untainted by satanic hilarity.

I read Karamazov as a teen and in my mid-twenties. Reading it now at 34 years of age, I finally get the joke. It's a comedy of the sweetest and most sacred kind, and to be approached in a reverent way. I had little realized how profoundly it had influenced my own book, Savage Things. Now had I realized the effort it must have taken Dostoyevsky to utter his book - enmeshed in the absurdly uptight society of the time, he managed to utter a few free words. Compared to his, my own Savage Things exists in an existential void where the upmost freedom of choice is available to all characters, but like Gide's Michel, no guide or signpost as to what actions are right or proper to a free man.

As it happens, I am reading Chekhov's stories and plays pretty constantly this last month and the next, so many of these questions find original answers in the generation after Dostoyevsky. I cannot wait to read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Even now, reading Chekhov has cast an incredible light onto Isaac Babel in explanation. I love and take a lot of joy in Russian literature at the moment; they seem to me the natural inheritors of the Greek Enlightenment (6 century BCE) and French Enlightenment of the 17th century.

This must be my heaven.

It's 11 at night - I just got home - some basmati rice is cooking on the stove, and a Mozart violin concert is playing on the radio.

Ah. This must be my heaven.

I know every note of the Mozart concert, but the solo musician and director has filtered it through some utterly alien sensibility and produced something at once more subtle and oddly disturbing of the familiar tones. It is as if I hear the Mozart in a dream and wake and have it all at once present in waking experience, but with the echo of rememberance overlaid like the eerie moan of the ocean at midnight, a sound so like that of woman crying in pain or ecstacy that it reminds me in its resonance of the frightful and profundly disturbing moment of my own birth.

I have had Marcel Proust at hand all day, reading it in snatches of five to ten pages. His book brings me great happiness today.

These opening pages of Temps Perdu are a synctium of the whole work. It is as if the first 45 pages of The Way By Swann's are a homeopathic ticture giving the bittersweet curative and purgative flavor of the entire work. I will quote the most striking sentence in another entry, but for now I am content to let it settle deeper into my consciousness and fill me with pleasure at the insight of this master of human relationships.

This morning I heard the Pathetique Symphony of Tychaikovsky on the radio, movement one and two. This is what I wrote, somewhat in a hurry to go out:

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ON AUSTRALIAN CULTURE.

I was listening to Tychaikovsy on ABC radio today. Listening to the first part of his Pathetique, it is so obvious to me now how the view of life as essential a tragic drama of spiritual redemption underlies the Russian worldview. The feeling-water element and the intuition-fire element meet and ahniallate one another in the first part of this symphony, creating thereby a world of ideas and sensations - that is, of air and earth. What I am not prepared for, however, is the insight this casts into the Australian psyche.

The Australian weltanschauung would have to be optimistic and naive comedy of commercial imitation turning out better than imagined. Think Balzac's Cesar Birotteau set in a milliner's in Brunswick, Melbourne.

Australia has no historical figures whose names end with the suffix "the Great", and Russia has perhaps too many. Australia's defining catastrophe, the failed storming of Anzac Cove during the Great War, is small scale in comparison to two and a half century string of Russian disasters.

Australia's psyche might be made-for-televsion miniseries about two competing wealthy families, a protestant outback mob and a catholic inner city suburban clan, who over three generations from the first world war to the start of the Vietnam war protests intermarry first with each other, city breeding with country, then with new Australian Italians, then emigrant Singaporean Chinese, and for whom the political and social viccissitudes of their day mean nothing so much as a chance to sneer at the fussy Europeans and make more money from the Americans.

The consciousness of the Australian psyche is characterised by materialism and naivete. The unconscious shadow of the Australian psyche is expressed in physical overcompensation and intellectual self-sabotage. That is to say, Australian's worship sport as a compensation for our consistent failure to pay appropriate attention and funding to independent intellectual discoveries. Bluntly put, Australia bleeds innovation to other nations, resulting in an unfounded goodwill to Australians based not on our actual hard-won cultural eminence, but on our naive and scandalous mismanagement of our own intellectual resources.

The superior function, so to speak, of the Australian consciousness is earth or sensation, and the inferior or supporting function is fire and intuition.

As a result the current and the currency of the life of feeling and intellectualism flows unconsciously to more sophisticated elder nations, who under the pretense of patronage play the role of enabling Australia to remain unaware of itself as an individual culture. This accounts for the strange sense of ill-defined cultural identity in the Australian people. In a nation whose goodwill is based on concealing emotional and intellectual realities, prosperity is dependent on keeping everything undefined and vague.

The lack of definition in the Australian psyche is the main aspect of our shadow. Our shadow side is water, feeling function. Australians are the famed military who die with a quiet "Aw geez!" on the battlefield; Australians are the intellectuals who are valued for their ability to lie low and worship football; Australians are the people who will call you "mate" but steadfastly refuse to define exactly what obligations and responsibilities to one another said mateship might entail; and Australians are the people who make out as if the word "laconic" actually describes a personality trait worth having.

Beneath the shadowy realm of the poorly articulated feeling life of the Australian culture and people lies the hidden gift of Australia to the world. The unobserved and unnoticed treasure of Australian culture is intellectual liberty the likes of which I have seen nowhere else on earth.

This is where Australia's greatest strength lies, then: as a greenhouse to foster intellectual achievement. And instead of daring to define ourselves and expose the overcompensating vulgarity of Australian sporting excellence for the frightened sham it really is, Australia has been a nursery to endless suburban breeding hives since the mid-1940s. Instead of building a vibrant intellectual public life, Australians have managed to fostering only an endless blob of materialistic and naive adults whose entitlement to the fruits of individual intellectual labor and whose unprecedented liberty to explore the life of the mind is taken for granted not simply as a given privilege, but arrogantly as a natural endowment as a result of having been born in Australia. Such is the naive shortsightedness of the average Australian as to their privileges and blessings they are born into. For lack of intellectual and emotional excellence, the mob of opinionated Australians shout out any attempt to clarify the messy shadow qualities of Australian culture with a chorus of ill-informed and vulgar views. And from lacking a clear sense of collective public life, Australians have expressed the need for genuine intellectual excellence by reducing emotional and intellectual development to a materialistic outcome.

To sum up, in Australia the question "What did you learn today?" brings mockery, while the question "How much did you earn today?" inspires respect.

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That is all I wrote this morning.

On re-reading it I would add that it is actually really rude to disrespect the younger culture of Australia from the vantage point of the Old West which I am most familiar with. It is a delicate balance between vaunting the obvious superiority of Western Culture in general, while accepting and valuing the fresh energy of the New West. A criticism is only as effective as it is also kind.