The vamp vamps up.
Here's a little quizzy thingy. It’s fun and pleasant. Quizzes make me feel like I’m being interviewed:
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Oscar Wilde club and Revue_Blanche present:
*Writing in the Margins*
“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Alice in Wonderland would say: “I think you might do something better with the time, than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answer.” “Who is in need of Chekhov?” I ask. This riddle has an answer. The answer is nobody. Nobody in your country, which is not so surprising, since nobody is in need of him in his homeland, as his 100 anniversary has shown in 2004.
Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov. I don’t know whether anybody tried to compare them. On the face of it, there is no need to do it. But I’ll try to, because, when you come to think of it, the biographies of these two great writers have at least several details in common which is much, in my view.
First and most, both of them lived at the same historical period. Confer: Wilde (1854-1900), Chekhov (1860-1904). Wilde’s essays, dedicated to Dostoevsky novels are known, and most likely he heard of other Russian writers as well as of the new writer of the name of Anton Chekhov. Undoubtedly, Chekhov knew of Oscar Wilde, though we can’t find any mentions of Wilde in his Letters. But the Wilde trial had reverberations at some levels of Russian society, especially at the literary set and in the midst of intellectuals. According to Professor of Russian literature at Princeton Nina Berberova (co-author of the article Death of Tchaikivsky), the most part of the Russian civic newspapers regarded the trial as an “example of a hypocritical persecution”, and reading the newspapers Chekhov thought of the writer of the name of Oscar Wilde, though he never shared his thoughts on the subject with his younger brothers and sister, therefore they could not leave their evidence of that.
Both Wilde and Chekhov were tall and handsome men. Looking narrowly at their photos, we can see the eyes of Chekhov and Wilde’s bear resemblance, merely Chekhov’s eyes, these screwing up, myopic eyes are smaller than Wilde’s, yet they are the same all-understanding and all-forgiving. Both of them succeeded in the career of a writer; both of them wrote plays; both of them mingled in the theater circles; both of them lived a life of a super-star. Anton Chekhov was my first literary love. I read his all works and his Letters (if I did not want, nobody in the world could make me do it), and I don’t believe his stories or plays are boring--if my reader read his early writings, all the humorous stories of his early period, then the reader would understand Chekhov’s attitude towards life, his views and tastes much better, as much as I know him. Soon after I read his all works, I had got access to the works by other great writer, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nabokov had become my supreme authority of good literary taste, true, slightly snobbish. Then I learned of the works and life of Oscar Wilde, and Wilde still is my idol--one of my idols, godfather and saint patron of all of us, the aesthetes. My reader knows all about Wilde’s life and death, therefore let’s talk of the life of Anton Chekhov.
With all my acceptance of his person, I’d like to ask the question that I don’t believe to be detractive or improper: does my reader know that Chekhov was a morphine addict for the last four years of his life? He was seriously ill; it was tuberculosis. Morphine could be prescribed by a doctor, because doctors diagnosed tuberculosis on the upper part of his lungs--but Chekhov was a doctor himself. He took morphine to sleep and to relive pain (he suffered a major haemorrhage of the lungs). Fairly soon he became a drug addict. Without morphine he could neither sleep, nor eat nor breathe. His last portraits, which show him as a well-dressed gentleman and famous writer at his mature age, were portraits of a morphine addict.
His sexual orientation is obvious, and yet something odd I find in his relationship with women. As a super-star, he had a lot of friends, men and women; sexually, he is said to prefer swift liaisons, and one day, he turned down the love of one uncommonly beautiful and well-educated young women of noble birth. Her name was Lyka. The young lady was his sister’s friend. His sister introduced her to the Chekhovs. His brothers and parents dearly loved Lyka, and all his friends and relatives intended her as his wife. As a representative of the new generation of women, who wanted to continue their study, to work and to live independently, she seemed Chekhov’s ideal, if we come to think of it. Was she too sublime? Not enough sublime? Too sexy? Showing too much exaltation? I don’t know. Her heart was broken by Anton’s frigidness to her love, and shortly soon she went abroad along with other writer, other handsome man who was married and who broke his heart too. After she buried her dead baby, in Paris, she began taking lessons of singing being about to start a career of opera singer. As for Chekhov, the story of the young woman, who loved him to distraction, had become a small plot for his new play The Seagull, no more. That’s an oddest episode of his sexual life in my view. He settled down to married life much later, 2 years before his death.
Once he wrote in a letter to his older friend: “I shall get married, if you wish. But on the following conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto--that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the countryside, and I will come to see her… Give me a wife who, like the moon, won't appear in my sky every day.” In 1901 he married Olga Knipper--quietly, owing to his horror of weddings--she was the young actress and rising star, whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull, and the letter cited above proved to be prophetic of Chekhov's marital arrangements with Olga: he lived largely at Yalta, she in Moscow, pursuing her acting career. The more I am looking at her photos now, the more I am surprised how much she looks like Wilde’s wife Constance. The same boyish features; the same slender, boyish body. Amazing. In 1902, Olga suffered a miscarriage; and Donald Rayfield has offered evidence, based on the couple's letters, that conception may have occurred when Chekhov and Olga were apart.
There is no evidence and nobody suspected Chekhov was homosexual, but he was a doctor and a man of letters who was able to understand and understood much as well as homosexuals and other victims of nineteenth-century materialism and moral self-righteousness, therefore, I submit, he was straight but not narrow-minded. Like Wilde, he was an aesthete, true, at heart. “A human must be beautiful…”--these words is his small timid bow to aestheticism--timid and perhaps the only, because he did not dare to declare himself as an aesthete openly; he feared to do it. What or who did he fear? The contemporary Russian newspapers and public opinion that accused him and his writings of lacking both principles and ideas. “The more refined one is, the more unhappy,” he said, and it sounds as though he told about himself. The undiscovered Chekhov could say it. Wilde wrote the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism. Chekhov wrote: “Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death as market-women’s…”--and so forth, and so forth. In short (this will be brief and to the point, for “brevity is the sister of talent”, as my reader knows) everyone can find yet more evidence for the fact that Anton Chekhov has essentially much in common with Oscar Wilde and other fin-de-siecle aesthetes, at least in some respects.
A little more about the similarity. Chekhov’s books were and are loved by British readers. In his turn Wilde, soon after he was sentenced, had become most popular in Russia, and even more: he had become a national Russian writer in a way. How so? Because he had become a martyr, a true martyr in the view of Russian aesthetes, and they in old Russia loved martyrs. Thus, the epoch-making literary exchange took place: Britain gave as a present Oscar Wilde--Russia gave as a present Chekhov. For really, Tchaikovsky’s music and Chekhov’s stories and plays is all that Russia has to take pride in (we won’t mention of Nabokov’s brilliant works in this regard, because they belong rather to the whole world, it’s rather a cosmopolitan phenomenon, and Nabokov is a great American writer rather than Russian).
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more essays
Homosexual Culture and Nabokov:
http://www.geocities.com/larisabee/homoerotic_nab.doc
The Darling of Fortune love story:
http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/06/26/love_story~2520121
I saw the Night… this is my view of the story of Hadrian and Antinous. The essay was first published on the Net in 2006:
http://www.geocities.com/larisabee/night2.rtf
Mystery of Antinous this is my view of the death of Antinous. The essay is an excerpt from my novel The Ageless Man; it was first published on the Net in 2005:
http://www.geocities.com/larisabee/mystofA.rtf
The Obituary of my kitty who died in 2006:
http://www.geocities.com/larisabee/mykitty_eng2.doc
humor:
http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/04/27/sundries~2173391
translation:
http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/06/16/a_little_bit_of_gay_literature~2466104
The Needs of the Navy by Aleister Crowley:
http://www.geocities.com/larisabee/navy.rtf
This poem is for a very special person who really makes my life most enjoyable. He is a vital part of my life and I cannot imagine my days without him, the man of the name of Anthony Blanche:
I am at the mercy of your imagination.
It is beautiful.
You’ll live in my novels for ever.
And I am dissolving
in streams of the world and my consciousness,
and in madness of gaudy flowers of eloquence
thrown about.
2005
*Kiss Yourself! Kiss!*
Your image is triune, and it is always on my mind. It consists of the image from Evelyn Waugh’s book, Nickolas Grace’s performance in the TV series, and the image, which I hymn in my writings. Harold Acton, the prototype of Evelyn Waugh’s personage was born in 1904, the personage came into the world in 1945, the English movie was made in 1981, and the first vision of yours I saw in 2003. Anthony. Your image is not my second self, though yes, I’d say that it is my second self, if I were not afraid to be too daring. One day I’ve been enthralled, and now there is no need of disenthralling.
Next time, when I’ll meet you in reality or in my dream, I’ll embrace your knees and say:
“Help me. I’ll make you immortal. You are immortal as you are. Help me. Save me. For I fear.”
And your silent presence will cure me relieving my ache. And Jocelyn, one of the most beautiful boys in the world will be sitting near by and looking at us, for he knows whatever is going on, whatever you did in the past, and whatever happens to both of you in the future, “in that bewitched place on the top of the forest a little boy and his teddy-bear will always be playing.” Knowing I know of that you will permit me to worship you. I have nothing to ask my deity about. I have all I want; if I have no anything then I’m not in need of it, and at the same time none of mortals can help me but a supernatural power, hitherto unknown to me and dangerous to know.
Have I ever told how wonderful you are? Many times. Your heart contains a quality of charm from an era long gone, which makes your heart impenetrable and impassive to anybody here below. An entire male and true gentleman that shines like a rare gem enough to adorn a cloud of crimson roses in bloom--I’m ready to show to the world how much I love you, how much I adore you. Your soul is not that of an angelic moonflower with the odd impression of spirited cherubs. One day I’ll look into your eyes and will be bestowed a gracious kiss of content showing your love and telling about your fiendish essence that consumes my being. I never laid my head upon your chest to sleep forever in your arms, but I know the fervid temper of your manhood. I am at impasse and yet my every thought is yours. You are my life--my glandules and hormones and my sad, indomitable heart love you.
I am at impasse and yet happy because I am with you or rather because you are on my mind. An unapproachable man, who has been initiated in many mysteries, you have the supernatural power and irresistible charm, one and only, which the floating time can’t change, and you know that I am crying at times because I am hurt and frightened--but I don’t think you care--though you care about me as your devotee and a votary of your tribe, and you appreciate all the things that I do in your name. So I exist in your life. And you need me; I know it and I can feel it, and you may not let me know. I want something. Love for me? Not at all. All I want is a little care.
2007
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kiki2u
I'l see these links, thanks for share them,
xx
KK