80

Chekhov could never write a long novel - he was a sprinter, not a stayer. He could not, it seems hold long enough in focus the pattern of life that his genius perceived here and there: he could retain it in its patchy vividness just long enough to make a short story of it, but it refused to keep bright and detailed as it should keep if it had to be turned into a long and sustained novel.

p 251-2

Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.

p 252

Russian critics have noted that Chekhov's style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial -

81

the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hot-house adjective, the crème-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. He was not a verbal inventor in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase; he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks. Chekhov does not mind, not because these matters are not important - for some writers they are naturally and