Chekhov Passage from "ABOUT LOVE," Read in the Korean Film, "ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE"

The above scene from the Korean film, "On the Beach at Night Alone" (2017), shows the character of the married film director, reading a passage from a book to his former lover, the girl with eyes downcast sitting opposite from him. This girl, played by Min-hee Kim,  is the central character in the movie.

Obviously he himself, the actor playing the director, as well as his lover and all the others sitting at the table are deeply moved by this passage about love. They, as well as the spectators, those watching the film, are left in the dark about the provenance of the passage, but I, having taught Chekhov in my classes at Miami University recognized it at once--even though it was read in Korean, with English subtitles.

In an interview that he gave later, the director of the film, who also wrote the screenplay, Sang-soo Hong, admits that the passage is from Chekhov's third story in his "Little Trilogy," the story titled "About Love." He mentions that the passage had moved him. Then again, that's what the movie is about: about love.

I have written at some length on this blog about "The Little Trilogy" ("Man in a Case," "Gooseberries," and "About Love") It is probably the best little trilogy of short stories ever written in world literature.

But Chekhov can be a devious trickster of a writer. Below I repeat what I said when discussing "About Love" previously, which calls into question the reaction of the Koreans to the passage quoted.

At the end of the story, after the woman he loves has left his life forever, after he has just admitted to her for the first time that he loves her, here is how Alyokhin, the narrator and main character, sums things up. This is the passage read in the movie.

“I confessed my love for her, and with a searing pain in my heart I understood  how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceitful was everything that had hindered our love. I understood that when you love, then in your reasoning about that love you need to proceed from the highest principles, from something more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin, or virtue in their usual sense, or there’s no need to reason at all.”

Readers sometimes take such summary statements on the part of Chekhov’s characters as Chekhov’s ways of getting important truths into the story. Most frequently that is a mistake. Chekhov seldom speaks directly through his characters, and when a character expatiates at length on life’s truths you can almost always take it for granted that the character is a blowhard. Such is Ivan Ivanovich in “The Little Trilogy.” 

Alyokhin is not a blowhard, but if you take a good look at the passage quoted above, you can’t help thinking that he is saying not much of anything coherent. The fact is that he has fallen in love with his best friend's wife. There are children involved. Of the choices he has, none is good. He chooses not to disrupt his best friend's family. As a result the woman he loves, who also loves him, descends, by the end of the story, into neurasthenia. Sometimes there are simply no good choices, and I do not believe that Chekhov is saying in the cited passage, as some readers believe, that love should transcend other matters, such as virtue, sin, the very fact of happiness or unhappiness. 

Earlier in the story Alyokhin says that the only thing you can really say about human love is that love is a great mystery. That is more to the point. That line, I can believe, came right out of the mouth of the author directly to the reader. But not Alyokhin's emotional ramblings in the quoted passage. No.

In taking off on Chekhov’s “About Love”—in his wonderful story titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”—the American writer Raymond Carver ends up at the same place Chekhov did: with characters encased in love and wondering what love is. We’re talking really out our backsides when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.

Chekhov’s «Пари» (“The Bet”), A Weak Story in Amidst Some Gems

Chekhov’s «Пари» (“The Bet”), first published in the newspaper New Times (Jan. 1, 1889), under the title «Сказка» (“A Fairy Tale”).

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While studying to be a doctor in Moscow, Anton Chekhov had the additional burden of supporting his whole impoverished family—father, mother, and many siblings. He managed to do this by publishing little anecdotal pieces in the popular press. These slice-of-life fictions have no pretentions to being of literary value. They were written for unsophisticated readers, to make money. But they did give him the writing practice that enabled him to later develop into a great writer.

Around 1883 or 1884 it began dawning on Chekhov that he was capable of writing genuine literary fiction, and from that point on some of the real gems of short stories began appearing. But the transition was not immediate, and he still went on writing some of the earlier-style anecdotal pieces. The story titled “The Bet” is one of these.

Aesthetically speaking, the story is not very good. It has the feel of something just dashed off, not long considered, not well written. For example, the original bet is supposed to involve whether the young man can tolerate fifteen years of imprisonment, but by the time the rules are laid down on the next page the idea of solitary confinement is added. I doubt Chekhov was aware of this in 1888, but modern psychology has determined that solitary confinement is one of the absolute worst punishments inflicted on an inmate. Anyone who is put through even a few years of total isolation from the world will go insane.

I’m surprised that Chekhov saw fit to include this flawed story in his collected works. At the time he was editing it for the collected works he decided to cut the whole third (last) chapter. The story in its final form now ends with the voluntary prisoner’s losing the bet on purpose and thereby rejecting the money he could have won.

Whether read with the third chapter included or not, the story is still weak. The third (cut) chapter describes another gathering of the banker’s friends, and once again they are mulling over philosophical issues. They argue about the value of total asceticism, and then one rich man (they all are rich this time) argues that he has never met a man who would turn down a large sum of money. The banker (main character) disagrees and they make a bet, three million this time, that such a man can, or cannot be found.

Of course the banker already knows there is such a man; he still has the note left by the prisoner—declaring his renunciation of the money he had earned through fifteen years of solitary confinement—so he figures on showing the others this note and winning the bet. But then comes a kind of deus ex machina: the original prisoner shows up, asking for money! It seems he has reevaluated his former ideas and now wishes he had won the bet and taken the money. In a word, a whole lot more silliness, but, then again, the whole story is silly.

But during the same time period that Chekhov wrote “The Bet” (1888-1889), he was also publishing some of his best long stories: “The Name-Day Party,” “A Dreary Story,” “The Duel,” and one of the shortest but absolutely unparalleled: “Gusev.”

Simon Karlinsky, and Russian Writers, on THE DOWNSIDE OF DOSTOEVSKY: ДОСТОЕВЩИНА

Simon Karlinsky, and Russian Writers, on The Downside of Dostoevsky

Despite my admiration for Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (FMD) as a psychologist and philosopher, there are things I do not appreciate about his fiction. Far from all Russian writers accept Dostoevsky’s greatness. Well-known figures such as Chekhov, Bunin, Tsvetaeva and Nabokov are often contemptuous in their disdain of FMD.

For a thorough account of objections to Dostoevsky’s writings, a good place to start is the article by Simon Karlinsky, “Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test” [originally published in "The New York Times," June 13, 1971; reprinted in The Norton Critical Edition of Crime and Punishment, p. 629-36]. Here are a few quotations from that article.

“All accepted standards of literary criticism and textual analysis tend to break down when applied to Dostoevsky. His prose has always been a magnet for the kind of reader (and commentator) who does not give a hoot about the art of literature, who mistrusts sober observation of reality, and who primarily looks for a reflection of his own self and for a possible vehicle of self-expression in every book he reads.”

Often “neither his biography, nor his general views are familiar to those who modishly bandy his name about. Someone ought to translate the set of disgustingly chauvinistic, jingoist and anti-Semitic poems (yes, poems) that Dostoevsky wrote in the late 1850s, urging that Russia conquer other countries, calling down God’s blessing on Russian conquests and denouncing the Jews as leeches who torture Russia; copies of these poems should be handed out to all the starry-eyed champions of the progressive, revolutionary Dostoevsky. Of course, a simple reading of The Possessed [The Devils] and of The Diary of a Writer might also help.”

“There somehow has to be room for a more balanced appraisal that takes into full cognizance Dostoevsky’s obscurantist, reactionary ideology, the excessively nagging and hysterical tone of his narrators, the cheap and flashy effects with which he stages some of his dramatic confrontations, and the occasional but undeniable sloppiness of his plots and of his Russian style.”

“One of the best kept secrets in Western criticism is that Dostoevsky does not happen to be everyone’s cup of tea. Many intelligent, compassionate, sensitive people find his overheated universe of stormy passions, gratuitous cruelty, tormented children and hysterical women definitely uncongenial.”

“Russian dictionaries list a common noun, derived from the writer’s name, достоевщина (dostoevshchina), which is a derogatory term describing an undesirable mode of behavior. A person guilty of dostoevshchina is being deliberately difficult, hysterical or perverse. Another possible meaning of this word is excessive and morbid preoccupation with one’s own psychological processes. The word, incidentally, is part of the normal Russian vocabulary.”

“Tolstoy tried to reread The Brothers Karamazov in 1910, the year of his death. ‘I’ve started reading it,’ he wrote to one of his correspondents, ‘but I cannot conquer my revulsion for its lack of artistic quality, its frivolity, posturings and wrong-headed attitude toward important matters.’”

“First reading Dostoevsky at age twenty-nine, Anton Chekhov wrote to his publisher Suvorin: ‘It’s all right but much too long and lacking in modesty. Too pretentious.’ In Chekhov’s stories and personal letters, the name of Dostoevsky usually occurs in passages condemning some high-strung, hysterical or hypocritical female.”

During his lifetime Vladimir Nabokov qualified Dostoevsky as “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar,” “a prophet, a claptrap journalist, and a slapdash comedian,” and “a much overrated sentimental and Gothic novelist.”

But “it was none other than Nabokov who in Lolita gave the world a full-scale treatment of a subject around which Dostoevsky circled like a cat around a saucer of hot milk in novel after novel, only to recoil from it in horror.” Pedophilia.

CHEKHOV'S LETTER FROM A BROTHEL IN BLAGOVESHCHENSK

During his famous trip to visit the penal settlements in the Far East (Sakhalin Island), Chekhov arrived in the provincial city of Blagoveshchensk (named, apparently, after the Christian holiday of Blagoveshchenie, the Annunciation) on June 27, 1890. The city is located 8000 kilometers east of Moscow, on the Amur River and bordering on China. From there he wrote his friend, the publisher A.S. Suvorin (1834-1912) a letter about his visit to a brothel:

"a nice clean room, sentimental in an Asiatic way, furnished with bric-a-brac. No ewers, no rubber devices, no portraits of generals . . . The Japanese girl has her own concept of modesty. She doesn't put out the light, and when you ask what the Japanese is for one thing or another, she gives a straight answer, and as she does so, because she doesn't understand much Russian, points her fingers and even puts her hand on it. What's more, she doesn't put on airs or go coy, like Russian women. And all the time she is laughing and making lots of tsu noises. She is amazingly skilled at her job, so that you feel that you are not having intercourse, but taking part in a top-level equitation class. When you come the Japanese girl pulls with her teeth a sheet of cotton wool from her sleeve, catches you by the 'boy' . . . and gives you a massage, and the cotton wool tickles your belly. And all of this is done with coquetry, laughing, singing and saying tsu."

English translation from Donald Rayfield biography of Chekhov (Henry Holt, 1997), p. 228. Chekhov's correspondence with Suvorin is amazingly frank and open. In Soviet times many letters between the two were published in censored form or not at all. This is one of those letters in the "not at all" category.

CHEKHOV THE NON-ACTOR

My favorite photograph of Anton Chekhov. Here he sits in the middle of a company of famous actors, each of them acting like crazy for the photographer, striking all sorts of flamboyant poses, while he sits thinking, "I'm not an actor; what kind of pose can I put on?"

Notes on Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" CHEKHOV WINKS AT TOLSTOY: (2) THE GOOD COUNTRY LIFE

CHEKHOV WINKS AT TOLSTOY: (2) The Good Country Life

One of Tolstoy’s obsessions throughout much of his life was his dream of good country living, surrounded by wife and family and in close communion with nature. He exalted this sort of life in both of his two major novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Furthermore, he tried to live exactly such a life himself, on his country estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy hated cities, trains, loved peasants and Mother Earth. But his attempts to find happiness in the good country life were never entirely successful. In the final pages of Anna Karenina the author’s alter ego Levin—despite his having achieved a happy family life and contentment on his country estate—is in constant depression and contemplates suicide on a daily basis.

Chekhov has a lot of fun taking Tolstoy’s themes and circumstances, then making a travesty of them. This is most obvious in the story “Gooseberries,” which depicts how the dream of good country living results in a man becoming a miser, then marrying a woman for her money, then practically starving her to death in his parsimony. All this so that he can buy a paltry little landed estate, where he vegetates out his life, being a pig, eating hard and sour gooseberries.

As if the take-off on Tolstoy were not clear enough, Chekhov makes an obvious allusion to one of Tolstoy’s short moralizing stories, “How Much Land Does A Man Need.” This is a parable about a peasant who is told he can buy very cheaply as much land as he can walk over in a given day. But the peasant is so greedy that he overstrains himself and dies of exhaustion at the very moment he is on the verge of acquiring a huge plot of land. The moral of a story and the answer of the question in the title: a man needs really only six feet of earth to be buried in.

Chekhov has one of his characters, Ivan Ivanovich, reply to Tolstoy. “They say man needs only six feet of earth. But it is a corpse, and not a man, who needs six feet . . . . these country estates are nothing but those same six feet of earth. To escape from the town, from the struggle, from the loud bustle of life, to escape and hunker down on a country estate is not life, but egoism, idleness . . . . It is not six feet of earth, not a country estate that man needs, but the whole globe, the whole of nature, where he will have room to display his personality and the individual characteristics of his free soul.”

Don’t make the mistake, however, of assuming that the above is Chekhov’s own personal reply to Tolstoy. That is not the way Chekhov writes fiction. Everything tends to cut two ways, and the authenticity of the above opinion is undercut, at least in part, by the fact that the blowhard melancholic Ivan Ivanovich is the person voicing it.

As we move on to the next story, “About Love,” the theme of good country living/or the lack thereof moves with us. Alyokhin the landowner in “About Love” is a travesty of Levin the landowner and alter ego of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. One of the most famous scenes in all of Russian literature is the episode that depicts Levin out mowing with his peasants, exulting in the sweat of his brow. He tells his idle half brother that he has found a new therapy, known as Arbeitskur: the work cure.

But Alyokin is bored stiff living in the country. He works like a peasant only because he has no choice, but he finds the work exhausting and stultifying. He “ploughed, sowed and reaped” and felt “like a village cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen garden.” So much for the Arbeitskur.

As for the little pokes at Tolstoy, especially at Anna Karenina, the list could be extended indefinitely. In an important episode in Tolstoy’s novel a man falls under a train at the station and is killed. Anna Karenina is present at this time, and the death haunts her for the rest of the novel. In Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” Ivan Ivanovich tells of a man who fell under a train; his leg was cut off. Taken away for treatment to the waiting room, the bloodied man pleads desperately for someone to find the leg: it had twenty rubles in the boot and he doesn’t want to lose his money.

Why all the literary poking at Tolstoy and his works? For one thing it’s fun. For another it takes Tolstoy’s literary works and subtly rewrites them, showing some of the multivaried possibilites for new works based on the same materials. Finally, it is a way Chekhov has of asserting: “I too am a writer, and I too can show you a thing or two about writing.” This is the age-old business of the competition between literary “fathers” and their literary “sons.”

Notes on Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" CHEKHOV WINKING AT TOLSTOY: (1) ON LOVE AND ADULTERY

Tolstoy, Gorky and Chekhov

CHEKHOV WINKING AT TOLSTOY: (1) On love and adultery.

Throughout nearly all of the years of Chekhov’s writing career the most salient and powerful voice in Russian letters was Lev Tolstoy. Chekhov was in awe of Tolstoy’s talents as a literary master, but not always in agreement with the social stances of the old man.

Time and again, especially in stories of the late 1880s and 1890s, Chekhov uses parodic devices in his fiction, taking subtle pokes at Tolstoy and his socio-political views. He also frequently names his female characters ‘Anna,’ partially in tribute to his favorite novel, Anna Karenina, partly as a way of demonstrating the multiplicity of possible life’s paths for women of that name.

As one critic has pointed out, all three of the stories in The Little Trilogy are about love. “Each of the three stories involves a travesty of the ideal love relationship. Belikov of ‘Man in a Case’ considers marrying Varvara (Varenka) nor because he loves her, but because he feels that he ought to; Nikolai Ivanovich in ‘Gooseberries’ is in love with the dream of a country estate, not a woman; Alyokhin in ‘About Love’ is in love with a married woman” (David Maxwell).

Anna Karenina is probably the best literary work ever written on the theme of love, marriage and family. The novel, has, incidentally, a character named Varenka who does not quite get married. It also has a man, the main hero of the book, Levin, who is obsessed with the good life on his country estate, in communion with nature, and it has a man, Vronsky, who is in love with a married woman.

Throughout a period of a century and a half readers of Anna Karenina have argued over whether Anna really had to die, over why she and Vronsky could not get a divorce and live happily on. In his story “About Love,” Chekhov recapitulates the central drama of Tolstoy’s novel in just a few pages. His short story makes clear that every human situation involving love between men and women is unique in itself. Even more importantly, it makes clear that love triangles create predicaments that are not resolvable.

At the end of “Gooseberries” the overwrought Ivan Ivanovich pleads with Alyokhin to be an altruist, to “do good.” The story “About Love” is about how Alyokhin has in a sense done good. He has refused to commit adultery and betray his friend. But the “doing good,” so it turns out, has led to another sort of “encasement”—not only of him, but of the woman in the three-way situation, Anna Alekseevna, who, tormented by their unconsummated love, becomes a neurasthenic. Such is Chekhov’s brief take on Tolstoy’s broad theme.

Note, by the way, the name, borrowed from Tolstoy. Anna Alekseevna (Annie) in Anna Karenina is the daughter of Vronsky and Anna, but also is, in a sense, the daughter of both Vronsky and Karenin. She is born out of wedlock, but is legally Karenin’s daughter, since Anna is married to him when she is born. Both of her “fathers” are named Aleksey (in Russia children take their second name, the patronymic, from their father: hence “Alekseevna”). After Anna Karenina’s death by suicide Vronsky gives the care of his daughter into the hands of Karenin. At the end of the novel she is living with Karenin, who loves her dearly as his own daughter. She (the little girl) is emblematic in the flesh of Anna Karenina’s predicament: her state of limbo in the three-way that rules her life.

Notes on Chekhov's "Little Trilogy" ANNA KARENINA

What was Chekhov's favorite novel? What was Bunin's, Nabokov's? The answer to all three questions is Anna Karenina. Chekhov once remarked that in comparison to such full-blooded women as Tolstoy’s Anna all of Turgenev’s heroines are bland and insipid.

Once, while rushing by train from the south of Russia to the bedside of his brother Aleksandr, who was thought to have typhus, Chekhov spent the whole long journey reading Anna Karenina, and in a letter he later noted that at this time of emotional turmoil he was consoled on the train by “dear sweet Anna.”

ON CREATIVE WRITING AND CREATIVE WRITERS

U.R. Bowie

Observations on Creative Writing and Creative Writers

“Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation of ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue  his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting.”

                                                     Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2017, p. 84

Most of today’s creative writing in America is highly imitative, lacking the creative spark of originality. Writers imitate other writers: their themes, their literary form, their tone, everything. Much of what is published amounts to bad imitations of bad stories to begin with. The imitators apparently took the bad stories for good ones. A writer writes another bad story imitating a previous bad story. How does a writer avoid such a misfortune? Read the greatest writers who have ever lived. Read Lev Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor, Flaubert, Gogol, Rebecca West, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf,  many many others in the grand pantheon of world literature. If you must imitate somebody, try imitating them. Don’t bother reading ninety-five percent of living American writers, even the ones who have won awards.

Then there is the brilliant young writer who proclaims, “Why do I got to read all them old dead white men (plus a few dead white women)? Me, I got my own ideas!” How do we answer such a proclamation? We say, “Duh, yeah.”

About imitation. One thing that’s ever so hard to be is original. Good writers present something novel in tone or style; a good writer has his/her own voice. When you find your voice you have begun. Some writers never begin.

On The Envy of the Creative Writer

One day a writer of creative literary fiction sits down and writes a masterpiece. Other writers are plunged into sorrowful depression, thinking, “Dang, there are only a limited number of masterpieces to be written, and now this guy has filched another one and run off with it.”

                                                      Paraphrase of James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 50

As for myself I don’t even know what Salter is talking about here. I don’t have any feelings of envy whatsoever. Never have had. What’s wrong with me? I just read the brilliant novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Didn’t feel envious of him; just felt, “Wonderful, how great to have a young writer writing at that level of creativity.” Then again, I don’t know what writer’s block is either; can’t even conceive of not being able to write—unless I go blind or senile. Guess I’m just dumb.

What do good creative writers do? They “make the shape and rhythm of sentences intensely felt” (Salter, p. 56). Yes!

Then there’s the aspiring creative writer who proclaims, “I’m not interested in rhythms of sentences; I want to write about ideas.” Urggh.

Here’s the layman’s image of a writer who teaches creative writing in a university: “… a dramatic figure striking in appearance, wearing boots and jodhpurs, perhaps, with long white hair like a prophet and bearing a kind of literary ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods” (Salter, p. 57).

Can that white-haired prophet teach you to write? No, you have to learn yourself, through years and years of intensive practice, while reading only the best creative writers who ever lived and learning from them.

Salter mentions his friend Saul Bellow, who once remarked on “the sexual heartlessness of women.” As Salter says, “Women were especially on his mind at the time since his ex-wife—his third—was suing him for more money, given that he’d received the Nobel Prize with the six or seven hundred thousand dollars that came with it” (p. 58, 61). No big secret there—that women can be sexually heartless, or even just plain heartless, or mercenary, cruel or meretricious. But so can men. Welcome to the human race.

We Write Ourselves

“In a copy of a book that Colum McCann signed for an auction of first editions, beside the disclaimer that is always printed proclaiming that the book is a work of fiction, the names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, beside this McCann wrote simply, ‘Bullshit’” (Salter, p. 38).

Then again, you don’t want to get sued, do you?

Important Books and Unimportant Books

“Books that are important weren’t written to be important, generally. They became such. By important, I mean so-deemed. Referred to. I can’t think that The Catcher in the Rye was written as an important, life-altering or significant book. I believe that it was simply heartfelt. To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t bear marks of an intended importance although I don’t know what Harper Lee actually felt. Fitzgerald thought all of his books were important. The Great Gatsby was a short book, only 214 pages, and he was insistent that the publisher sell it at the same price as his longer ones” (Salter, p. 42-43).

Speaking of the so-deemed, the above paragraph demonstrates the sometimes dated opinions of James Salter. Read by everyone and his brother in the fifties and the sixties, The Catcher in the Rye is read by practically no one these days. Not only not important, but already moribund, almost dead.  To Kill a Mockingbird is still widely read, its so-deemed greatness still afloat, but it is “a book for children” (as Flannery O’Connor said), and for people who do not or cannot read real literature. As for The Great Gatsby, this book has claims to being the Great American Novel; it should be sold at twice the price of any other book.

Where and When You Write And Who Is Helping You Out

“You don’t do all the writing at your desk. You do it elsewhere, carrying the book with you. The book is your companion, you have it in your mind all the time, running through it, alert for links to it. It becomes your chief companion, in the real sense of the word, you can talk to it quietly. It becomes your sole companion” (Salter, p. 76).

What Salter hints at here is that, unbeknownst to you, the book is writing itself in your mind all the time. Your deepest neurons of the brain work on the writing day and night. As recent studies in brain science have revealed, on a conscious level we have no idea about the decisions those independent neurons are making. Romantic writers used to think of themselves as the amanuensis of the gods, who guided their pens and sent down original ideas. But more likely writers are the amanuensis of their own creative neurons. When your favorite character suddenly does something totally unexpected on the page, it’s not because God so decided. The neurons decided—and they very well may have made that decision at three a.m. in the morning, while you were fast asleep.

“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real” (Salter, p. 77).

Selected Passages from the Writings of Good, and Sometimes Great Writers

[description of a ritual butcher in a Ukrainian shtetl, inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he has butchered] “the glossy brownish organs . . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone—from a mouse to a man—had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin” (David Bezmozgis, The Free World).

“Her light-brown hair was drawn smoothly back and gathered in a knot low on her neck, but near the right temple a single lock fell loose and curling, not far from the place where an odd little vein branched across one well-marked eyebrow, pale blue and sickly amid all that pure, well-nigh transparent spotlessness. That little blue vein above the eye dominated quite painfully the whole fine oval of the face” (Thomas Mann, “Tristan”). [Mann is great at describing human faces, human bodies.]

[description of a delicatessen] “there were glass showcases where smoked mackerel, lampreys, flounders, and eels were displayed on platters to tempt the appetite. There were dishes of Italian salad, crayfish spreading their claws on blocks of ice, sprats pressed flat and gleaming goldenly from open boxes; choice fruits—garden strawberries and grapes as beautiful as though they had come from the Promised Land; rows of sardine tins and those fascinating little white earthenware jars of caviar and foie gras…” (Thomas Mann, Felix Krull) [Mann is also great at describing a scene by accumulating masses of detail; in this he reminds me of Nikolai Gogol.]

“She’d never met a child with beady eyes. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment,

usually in middle age” (Lauren Groff, “For the God of Love, for the Love of God”).

“She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her buttocks” (Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes).

“A vast strand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day” (William Kennedy, Ironweed).

“joyfully gazing out from behind the cobblestone barrier are white crosses and monuments, which hide in the greenery of cherry trees and look from afar like white spots . . . . . when the cherry trees bloom these white spots blend with the cherry blossoms to form a broad seascape of white; and when the fruit ripens the white monuments and crosses are bedizened with specks that are blood-scarlet in color” (Anton Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov’s tone-poem novella, “The Steppe,” full of such brilliant nature descriptions, was much influenced by his friend, the wonderful landscape painter Levitan.]

“You know, I have an uncle who’s a country priest, and the man is such a believer that when, in time of drought, he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes with him an umbrella and leather raincoat, so that on the way back home he won’t get soaked” (Chekhov, “The Duel”).

“there was something wooden about his walk, something like the walk of toy soldiers, the way he barely bent his knees and tried to make each stride as long as possible” (Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov loves describing how people walk. Tolstoy, who loved Chekhov when he met him, marveled at the way Chekhov himself walked. “He has the walk of a little miss of the noble class,” said Tolstoy with delight.]

“In sadness there is some alloy of pleasure. There is some shadow of delicacy and quaintness which smileth and fawneth upon us, even in the lap of melancholy. . . . . Painters are of the opinion that the motions and wrinkles in the face which serve to weep serve also to laugh” (Michel de Montaigne, “We Taste Nothing Purely”).

[Desdemona, reveling in the stories Othello tells her about his adventurous life] “She swore in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange; ‘twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man” (Shakespeare, “Othello”).