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Ephebes and Precursors in Chekhov's The Seagull

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

James M. Curtis
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Extract

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence takes the Freudian concept of an oedipal relationship between father and son as a model for the relationship that exists when one artist, the father figure (or precursor, as Bloom calls him), influences another artist (the ephebe, in Bloom's terminology). Bloom's work provides a desirable redefinition of standard treatments of influence and stylistic change in that it offers a dynamic, rather than a static, paradigm, and denies any simplistic dissociation of the artist as historical figure from the poet as poet. Furthermore, it denies that literary influences can occur as purely verbal processes, and it affirms that the creative process is emotionally charged, like so many other important human experiences.

In Anxiety of Influence Bloom states, in typically absolute terms, “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets,—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.“

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , Fall 1985 , pp. 423 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1985

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References

1. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 30.Google Scholar

2. Polansky, Steve, “A Family Romance—Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom: Study of CriticalInfluences,” Boundary 2, vol. 9, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 238.Google Scholar

3. Bloom, Harold, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 12.Google Scholar

4. Martin, Loy D., “Literary Invention: The Illusion of the Individual Talent,” Critical Inquiry, 6, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 667 Google Scholar.

5. Quoted in Kotov, Anatolii, ed., Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 2nd ed. (Moscow,1954), p. 55.Google Scholar

6. Anton Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh (hereafter PSS), I:2,V V. Ermilov et al., eds. (Moscow, 1964), p. 148.

7. Turgenev's A Month in the Country (1850), the most important play written in any Europeanlanguage in the middle of the nineteenth century, had its premiere only on January 13, 1872 and wasstaged only occasionally during the 1870s and 1880s. Chekhov does not seem to have seen a performance;on March 23, 1903, just over a year before his death, he wrote to his wife Ol'ga Knipper, “I've read almost all of Turgenev's plays. I've already written you, I didn't like A Month in the Country” (Chekhov, PSS, 1:12, p. 487). Chekhov did not like A Month in the Country because herecognized in it some of the elements of his own work which derive from Turgenev, such as theatmospheric quality and the delicate psychological tensions.

8. Chekhov, PSS, I:12, p. 52.

9. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 14–15.

10. Quoted in Nikolai Gitovich, Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (Moscow, 1955),p. 186.

11. Quoted in ibid., p. 187.

12. Liudmila Nazarova, Turgenev i russkaia literatura kontsa XlX-nachala XX v. (Leningrad, 1979), p. 35.

13. Ibid., p. 41.

14. Chekhov, PSS, II:2, p. 243. All quotations from “In the Landau” come from this pageexcept the last one, which is on p. 244.

15. Page numbers after quotations from The Seagull refer to Chekhov, PSS, II:12–13 (Moscow,1978).

16. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 94.

17. Chekhov, PSS, 1:12, p. 79.

18. Bicilli, Petr M., Anton Čechov. Das Werk und sein Stil (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966),p. 28.Google Scholar

19. Chekhov, PSS, II:17, p. 243.

20. Ibid., p. 34.

21. Chekhov, PSS, 1:12, p. 78.

22. Ibid., p. 79.

23. Ibid., p. 86.

24. Ibid., p. 90.

25. Ibid., p. 79.

26. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 32.

27. Quoted in Rowe, Eleanor, Hamlet: A Window on Russia (New York: New York UniversityPress, 1976), p. viii.Google Scholar

28. See Curtis, James M., “Spatial Form in Drama: The Seagull ,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 6, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 13–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Chekhov, PSS, II:16, p. 21.

30. I have used the Cambridge Edition text of Hamlet as it appears in The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Garden City: n.p., n.d.).

31. See Gitovich, Letopis’ zhizni, pp. 36–37.

32. Turgenev, Ivan, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii ipisem v dvadtsati vos'mi tomakh, I:8 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), p. 187.Google Scholar

33. Ibid.