Chekhov and the Poetics of Memory by Daria A. Kirjanov (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

MLRy 97.4, 2002 1043 formed, and the last ten years have seen a long and continuing debate in the public realm about the shape of the mould in which this identity should be cast. Far from receding from the public realm, awareness of the Nazi past has been as present as ever as intellectuals struggle to work out the place of memory in any definitions of the national. Equally, the nature of united Germany's relationship to the West and to the East, as a result ofthe geopolitical shifts of 1989-90, is regarded as a renegotiable factor in the evolution of national identity. This is a trulyoutstandingbook. It is a slow read, and the style does at times become rather ponderous, sufferingfrom an over-Germanic use of syntax and grammar. But this is a small price to pay for Miiller's deeply rewarding, highly differentiated, and perceptive analysis and presentation of positions and debates. Miiller's book, unsurprisingly, returns continually to the factthat the issue of the national forauthors and cultural philosophers was experienced as one ofthe tensions between the arts and politics, aesthetics and the 'cult of the pragmatic', or between an uncorrupted private realm and a public realm dominated by instrumentalization in the interests of rightwing or left-wing politics. But as Miiller convincingly shows, Bohrer's calls for a depoliticization of literature and a de-aestheticization of politics were contradicted by his hopes that reunification would produce a 'higher culture' of politics, while Walser's expressions of disgust at the public realm and his advocacy of a pure realm of 'language' are undermined by the fact that his most explicit articulation of these sentiments itself took place in the public realm, namely in his controversial 1998 speech on receipt of the 'Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels'. When striving to be unpolitical, it seems, German intellectuals were at their most political. The Nottingham Trent University Bill Niven Chekhov and the Poetics of Memory. By Daria A. Kirjanov. Cambridge and New York:Lang. 2000. 193 PP- ?33In recent years Chekhov studies have experienced an increasing trend towards the questioning of established notions of the writer's agnostic, relativist values and detached , ironic method. Instead, leading Chekhov scholars such as Robert Louis Jackson have attempted to resituate Chekhov fairly and squarely within the Russian aesthetic tradition, emphasizing the deep ethical concerns of his work, and his affinitywith Orthodox spirituality and with writers like Dostoevskii. Daria Kirjanov's new volume makes a worthy contribution to this long overdue corrective in Western readings of Chekhov. Kirjanov's own revisionist reading of Chekhov owes a large debt to Jackson, who, in Kirjanov's words, formulates what is essentially the view of this study (p. 7). The reading is accomplished through the prism of Chekhov's approach to memory, both as a theme in his stories and as a restructuring tool. She draws on an impressive array of sources ranging from Plato, through Bergson and phenomenology, to Gaston Bachelard's work on the poetics of space. Kirjanov applies her carefully thought-out paradigm in extended readings of a number of key Chekhov texts, including 'The Bishop', 'The Lady with the Little Dog', 'Rothschild's Fiddle', 'The Student', 'A Boring Story', 'The House with a Mezzanine', and 'The Black Monk'. She makes judicious use of biographical sources, establishing, for example, that Chekhov was quite conscious of the role of memory as a 'filter' of human experience. Kirjanov structures her book around the various aspects of memory that she wishes to highlight: memory as journey, the memorability of place, and static and dynamic modes ofremembering. This makes foran eminently coherent monograph, although it has to be said that there is as a result a somewhat diminished sense ofthe chronological 1044 Reviews development of Chekhov's approach to these issues through the course of his oeuvre. Moreover, such a structure can sometimes leave the impression that a single abstract model derived from philosophy and theology is being imposed on a writer who changed considerably during his career, yet always assiduously avoided philosophical templates. None the less, the argument put forward is generally very persuasive. By focusing on Chekhov's consistent use of the pattern of the...