Interpreting Chekhov’s Prose

“In this book, different from many other books about Chekhov, the object of analysis becomes not only the well-known masterpieces written by Chekhov in the last years of his life, but the entire body of the writer’s works beginning with the earliest. The book deals with philosophical questions of life and death, crime and punishment, fate and randomness. The last of these oppositions is extremely important for the concept of the entire book: in his analysis of Chekhov’s short stories, Polakiewicz consistently distinguishes between what is out of the hands of the human being (‘fate’) and what depends on his will and efforts and for what he bears responsibility. Precisely by not wishing to justify the passivity of characters, and by stressing activity and will, it seems to me, this is where the important ‘new word’ lies which this book presents for an understanding of Chekhov.

The dominant feature characteristic for contemporary literary studies is an interest in social processes and practices. The author of the book however possesses the almost lost skill in our time of formal analysis—the capacity to ‘to squeeze’ the text like an orange right down to the last drop of thought. He analyzes Chekhov’s stories in a way that poetic texts were analyzed in the golden age of Structuralism—fixating on the subtle back and forth exchanges in the ‘lower’ structural levels of phonetics and prosody, with a demonstration of hidden symmetry and asymmetry, and other peculiarities of the Jakobsonian ‘Poetry of Grammar’ (compare for sure the brilliant analysis of the story ‘Typhus’). In the process of analysis, all formal elements receive a semantic emphasis. In this respect, Polakiewicz’s book is a strong argument in the long- standing dispute of Chekhov’s specialists regarding the concept of the ‘accidental’ organization of Chekhov texts which Aleksandr Chudakov advanced forty years ago. Polakiewicz is on the side of those who consider that ‘everything is not accidental’ in Chekhov. 

If it is permissible to resort to a medical metaphor, Chekhov’s world is similar to the nervous system: It is a labyrinth consisting of many mutually connected characters (neurons) and leitmotifs (dendrites and axons). In order to orient oneself in this diversified system it is extremely difficult, but Polakiewicz demonstrates a superior knowledge of the texts. Only with such a profound knowledge of the text is it possible to analyze the most complex world of Chekhov. Polakiewicz’s book is one of the most serious and deepest studies of Chekhov’s prose.”

— Andrei D. Stepanov, St. Petersburg University (translated by Harold K. Schefski, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Long Beach)

“Polakiewicz’s chapters are really a linked series of essays, which have undergone considerable revision since they were first published: they amount to one of the most substantial studies of Chekhov’s work (and there are many such, in many languages) ever published. Polakiewicz, however, stands out from other critics in two ways. Firstly, he gives in each essay a reading closer and more accurate than most academics are capable of, a reading which is in Chekhovian spirit utterly free of dogma and critical theory, and which is extremely well informed in terms of the Zeitgeist in late nineteenth-century Russia… Secondly, Polakiewicz is attracted to work which most critics (including myself) have passed over too quickly and have underestimated.”

— Donald Rayfield, Professor Emeritus of Russian and Georgian, Queen Mary College, University of London