"Chekhov, prime fare of the Soviet schoolroom"

[Andrey Shcherbenok]

I think it is important to remember that the "procrustean bed" to which list members refer has rather limited application -- it was, indeed, found in standard high-school textbooks or newspaper clichés, although even they changed significantly over time. However, we cannot reduce Soviet interpretation of Chekhov to these textbooks -- as every Chekhovian scholar knows, there were many "Chekhovs" in the twentieth century -- Silver Age Chekhov, Chekhov of the 1920s, Chekhov of the 1930s - 1940s, "ottepelnyi Chekhov" (you can easily see it in excellent screen adaptations -- my favorite one is Iosif Heifits's Lady with a Lap Dog (1960)), etc. - of course, these divisions are not absolute. Soviet theatre productions of Chekhovian plays were also quite diverse, not all of them following in Stanislavsky's footsteps. Soviet Chekhovian scholarship was remarkably varied, both diachronically and at any given time -- just compare works of Chudakov, Tsilevich, Sukhikh, Kataev, Berdnikov !
 or Eikhenbaum, for example. Only radically religious interpretations of Chekhov like Zaitsev's were taboo in Soviet scholarship (they were mentioned but criticized), pretty much everything else existed.

Now, this scholarship is not high school curriculum, of course, but school teachers studied it at universities and pedagogical institutes, and better ones among them went far beyond dull textbooks in their high school teaching. It is true that a lot of children learned to dislike classical literature after mandatory high school courses -- but the same is the case in the 1990s or today, when hardly much of a "Soviet procrustean bed" is in place, so the phenomenon probably has other reasons. 

As far as truncated Tiutchev is concerned, it is important to remember that Tiutchev himself removed "vetrennaja Geba" and other mythological endings from some of his poems, so Soviet educators had a choice of which edition to use -- and, of course, they used more "realistic" ones. I do not know of any cases, however, where they would themselves cut nineteenth century Russian poetry to make it fit their interpretations -- the curriculum was selective, of course, but, to my knowledge, they did not edit what they did include, except maybe for primary-secondary school abridged versions.

Andrey

----
Dr. Andrey Shcherbenok
Royal Society Newton International Fellow
 
Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies
University of Sheffield, Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover St, Sheffield S3 7RA
United Kingdom
 

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Olga Meerson
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 6:33 PM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] "Chekhov, prime fare of the Soviet schoolroom"

I agree with Vika, and Katerina Clark as well. whole-heartedly. Of all the Russian classics poisoned by Soviet education, Chekhov took me the longest to start rediscovering after that education. admittedly, what helped with Pushkin and Gogol was Siniavsky's books on them, but then I just started loving them on their own. Otherwise, the process was very similar to what you, Robert, know about Platonov, and can be known about anyone else: the Procrustean Bed. Or perhaps a cipher grid of sorts? Whatever fits is OK but then that would be the only thing known about the author by Soviet school-students. Another excellent example is the last stanza of Tiutchev's "Люблю грозу в начале мая":

Ты скажешь: ветреная Геба,
Кормя зевесова орла,
Громокипящий кубок с неба,
Смеясь, на землю пролила.

This stanza, is we know, was so important for Russian futurists, yet it was totally unknown to Soviet children who, otherwise, were obliged to memorize the poem and recite it with mechanical "expression". There are tons of other examples of such truncated and castrated classics. When I taught poetry at Hunter College to a class of predominantly ex-Soviet schoolchildren (that was in the late eighties, and they were recenyt comers to the US), those who excelled in the class knew all Mandel'stam by heart but none of his Tiutchev subtexsts! They all were hopelessly repressed as something that belongs and pertains solely to the huge brain-washing machine of the Soviet school.
I don't think Chekhov was ever banned from the soviet canon--just as the Stanislavsky theater never was. Of course, both existed in these, Procrustean guises but as such, they were thoroughly acceptable--and therefore seemed uninteresting to young people who all considered their cultural life to exist despite their schooling, not because of it. I am still having problems with Chekhov: cannot entirely detach myself from that prism, instilled in me at a very tender age! All of his characters' intonations sound "phoney" to me--especially the optimistic monologue of Sonia from "Uncle Vania". Of course, "The Cherry Orchard" could be read as a slapstick comedy (in my eyes, as in those of many of my school-mates, a redeeming feature!), but it is so difficult to actually READ these works after the pre-fabricated opinions instilled in us!
o.m.  

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