Beyond Any Tale...

I've been reading a volume of Chekhov short stories - one of these books, in fact - which contains the longest of them all, My Life. This I had never read before. Needless to say, it is a masterpiece, sharp-eyed and honest in that unique Chekhovian way, with moments of joy balanced by an ample, lucid sense of the absurdity and randomness of life, its 'weirdness and vulgarity' (as Stanislavsky put it). It is also, at times, very - and very darkly - funny. Unusually for a Chekhov story, it is in the first person, and, though it certainly isn't any kind of autobiography, it touches on many of Chekhov's preoccupations and those of his time. Despite the first person, most of the time the narrator seems to have only a hazy and imperfect idea of who he is, what is happening to him, and how he can communicate any of it to anyone else. As so often, the great and wise V.S. Pritchett captures the essence of this: 'What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate was something positive and precious: the private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude. We live, as his characters do, beyond any tale we happen to enact.' Perhaps that is why Chekhov is always and essentially comic. Anyway, if you haven't read My Life, do.