Tea at Trianon: Chekhov and Memory

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Chekhov and Memory

From The Reader:

In his stories and plays, Anton Chekhov depicted memory as the vital link that not only keeps people physically and mentally whole, but at a deeper level is the source of having hope not despair, knowledge not ignorance, and kindness not cruelty. Memory is the great sifter of human values. Chekhov was a physician who began writing when young to earn money for his tuition, and then to support his large family — his despotic, bankrupt father, long-suffering mother, devoted sisters, and importunate, feckless brothers. He frequently complained about needing money but on occasion would turn down a commission. While in Nice in the winter of 1897, Chekhov received a request from his editor at Cosmopolis for a story taken from his life abroad. He declined. “I can write only from memory,” he replied, “and have never written directly from nature. I must have my memory process a subject, like a filter that leaves only what is important and characteristic.” That winter, instead of writing about the sunlit pleasures of life on the Mediterranean, he turned out stories about young women and men living deep in the Russian provinces with little prospect of escaping from the tedium of their lives — all this from memory. (Read more.)