Living the Tale

Often I find myself on foggy roads with too many arrows pointing in too many directions. The signposts are too vague to make out, and I am lost in the sea of ideas and possibilities. "Which way should I go?" I wonder, rocking on my heels. Many hands are pulling me in several directions, some blocking my eyes, others tugging my wrists. To sort myself from the midst of the mayhem, I remind myself of a story.

The story begins with a tiny child peering over the edge of the dinner table, fascinated with food. It wasn’t any obsession with her own eating habits—after all, she was devilishly picky—but rather a love for the substance, a great interest in the act of eating and drinking itself. She would endlessly flip through her mother’s cookbooks, poring over the glossy shots of rice, beef, pastries, with the starry-eyed wonder that other children reserved for their first trip to the zoo. If there was something that could unlock her world, it was food: cakes and sparkling liquids set up prettily on a glass table, glorious feasts heavily laid on tables that stretched for miles.

That, of course, would be provided in abundance. The residents of Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land were lavish in their edible imagery: from the very beginning Alice would be steeped in potions that tasted of cherry pie, pineapples, and custard; she would nibble on cakes that would make her rise to the ceiling; she would ponder over how different flavors could affect one’s personality. A great feast would be thrown in her honor, with throngs of baffling guests drinking her health, and she would meet fabulous beasts made of buttered bread and sugar cubes. Wonderland was very generous to the food-loving reader, who basked in the glory of meeting a protagonist who also was very interested in matters of eating and drinking and therefore made her adventures so much easier to follow. Already, since the very beginning, Alice strikes a chord within a very young me.

The story continues with a confused girl, unsure of what to do with her changing body and mind, constantly checking herself before the mirror to see if she is the “right size”. Legs too fat! Tummy too chubby! Head too big for her shoulders! Thoughts crammed her head and came out in jumbles, eliciting shakes of the head and a hundred retierations of “that can’t be right”; others downright accused her of making things up, of being an insincere phoney. The awkward girl would then recede in her corner from the rest of the world, to bury herself in her books.

Meanwhile in Wonderland Alice would grow, shrink, bump her head on the ceiling and shut herself up like a telescope, get screamed at by a furious bird and have a caterpillar disapprovingly tell her that her words are “all wrong”. “I can’t explain myself, sir, for I’m not myself, you see,” she tells him, and the reader ponders the meaning of those words: “Am I myself? Was I the same person that I was when I woke up this morning? Will I ever be the right size, will my words ever sort out?” As Alice flails helplessly, her body stuck in a house far too small for her, the reader dreams of bursting the roof off and stomping away into Wonderland Woods, or gleefully fleeing the house in search of size-altering mushrooms which will help her fit in.

The story ends, for now, with a girl on her bed, tossing and turning, her head buzzing with questions. The older she grows the more she realizes that there is so much more to learn—but will she ever learn it all? How fascinating everything is! Even the night before she had spent hours chasing down an elusive problem down a hole, only to see the solution disappear around a corner; tomorrow would be another day to try, but her mind is not yet satisfied. She thinks back to when she was a child, always asking “What’s that? What’s that?” Now, there is less time to ask questions, but she can still wonder about everything, create stories in her mind.

And Alice? Eternally youthful in Looking-Glass Land, immortalized in literature, she continues to carry heavy volumes of text to Humpty Dumpty for him to explain; she chases rabbits into Wonderland, burning with curiosity; “But why?” she continues to ask the residents of her fantasy-land, who may or may not have coherent solutions to her problems but will always be there to answer them. Time to open doors, solve riddles, ask questions! Alice is no longer a flattened figure in my picture-books—she lives within me, has lived with me for as long as I remember. Every year that I have lived, her tale offers me something more. And through her many relatable misadventures, I have also lived through Alice’s experiences, and if there is one thing I have learned from the story, it’s that for now, it "doesn't really matter which way I go--as long as I get somewhere". I just need to take the first step.

Lady With the Dog - RJ #2

The Lady With the Dog, like its stormy compatriot Anna Karenina, touches upon themes of adultery and the appropriate emotions associated with it. Exactly how these emotions, and characters, are treated is the point of interest here, and will be my focus in this journal.
             The central plot driver of Lady With the Dog is the romance between Gurov and Anna. Before examining their relationship, however, a more detailed character study is in order. Anna Sergeyevna remains a rather static character throughout the story (from beginning to end she is portrayed as sentimental, with her passion for Gurov persisting up to the end), and the color gray is often mentioned in her description (her eyes, favorite dress) which further drives this impression of drabness. We know she is lonely from the start, implied by the fact that she has a dog, and this point is reiterated several times by Anna herself, but other than this dimension, she is rather flat and uninteresting. What is interesting about her is, ironically, that she is not described as being exceptional in any way; she is pretty and young, but nothing about her is particularly striking—she does not show much emotional strength, she is not quirky or alluring in personality, nor does she even have a particularly beautiful appearance. The most remarkable thing about Anna is that she, out of all the women Gurov seduced, was the only one who succeeded in keeping his heart, and by the way the story is written, the reader is led to conclude that this was through no virtue of her own but rather a coincidence.
Gurov, on the other hand, is given a clearly defined character from the start, and undergoes an evolution as the story progresses. He begins as an avid philanderer and bon vivant, who views women as lowly due to his own unhappy marriage, and generally has little consideration for the women he romances. His demeanor is described as being charming, which certainly helps his chances with the ladies. His first meeting with Anna does not change him very much outwardly, as he is seen to be irritated by her sentimental outbursts; it is only after they part that he feels a tremble in his soul, like the ripples that follow a stone dropped in water. His blossoming love for Anna changes him, turns him into a lovesick man, to the point where he no longer finds joy in the trivial things in life and even finds himself angered by them. One can say that he has lost in his own game. The two of them, although very different, face the same obstacle: the forbiddance of their love and the various entanglements they must sort out (such as their respective spouses, the moral weight of their actions, etc.).
Their relationship, therefore, is defined by a sense of desperation and frustration, and such emotions are laid clearly out in the open for the reader to see. Yet, the reader feels little passion or sympathy on their part. In fact, the entire story is seen as if from a behind a glass—there is little pathos and flowery language, and everything is painted in straightforward, almost stark brushstrokes that were not meant to evoke much emotional involvement but merely aim to describe. I have mentioned my profound distaste for men like Gurov very vocally in class already, but that is merely my pre-established point of view in play, and was not intended by the author. Chekhov does not seem to agree, or, rather, shows no indication of his opinion whatsoever; in his typical realist style, he leaves us to reach our own conclusions about Gurov and Anna, or, rather, encourages us to not reach conclusions at all and merely see the situation as it is.
There can be several reasons for this. Firstly, one might say that the autobiographical nature of the story might make Chekhov reluctant to lead the reader to any strong opinion. Chekhov’s marriage was also quite unhappy, not unlike Gurov’s relationship with his wife, which might explain why Chekhov himself was a bit of an adulterer. By painting Gurov not as an infidel swine but as a normal man with his reasons for behaving the way he does, the author might have wanted to justify himself to the world. This could also explain why Gurov was more developed than his lover was—the author could identify with him more. A more likely explanation, however, is that Chekhov only wanted to take a snapshot of a scene in the human mind, much like how he captured Ivan’s emotions in The Student. If Ivan’s evolution in the story was from bleakness to hope, the Gurov’s is just the opposite; he begins as a happy man and degenerates into a man miserable in love, albeit with some optimism that he will be able to sort things out. The entire point of Chekhov’s realism is that these emotions, no matter how passionate or despairing, are seen as just another subject to be studied or painted, unlike Romanticism in which they are celebrated and seen as possibly the most important part of the human condition. No exception is made for Gurov and Anna’s relationship, which is more of a case study than anything else. It drives the plot, keeps things interesting, but most importantly it is a complex scenario which the author found convenient to explore (after all, it is hard to escape the adage “write what you know”). Although we cannot know for sure if this almost-flippant realism was intentional, it seems quite clear that Chekhov at least did not intend to insert a moral, or a definite conclusion in his story. The reader is free to take away from the story what she sees.
So if Anna Karenina focuses on the stormy feelings that rage in the titular character’s heart, this Anna is portrayed as a subject in a static painting, and her lover, quite similarly as well. One could choose to love them, or hate them, as I did. Chekhov himself certainly didn’t.