Books, Arts & Manners: Uncle Anton

Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, by V. S. Pritchett (Random House, 235 pp., $17.95)

To the casual or sentimental tourist, the Russian literary and historical landscape seems dominated by tragedy on an epic scale: whole volumes have been written about the “Slavic soul.” Actually, as the last five centuries of Russian history amply illustrate, the Slavic tone owes at least as much to farce as to tragedy. There is a strong strain of the absurd in everything from the surreal, pathological criminality of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin to the spiritual vaporings of the aging Tolstoi (and, to a lesser extent, of the once-heroic Solzhenitsyn) sentimentalizing about a lost Russian past which, in reality, had always been dominated by a lower-case orthodoxy of the most rigid and nasty sort.

AB

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, by V. S. Pritchett (Random House, 235 pp., $17.95)

To the casual or sentimental tourist, the Russian literary and historical landscape seems dominated by tragedy on an epic scale: whole volumes have been written about the “Slavic soul.” Actually, as the last five centuries of Russian history amply illustrate, the Slavic tone owes at least as much to farce as to tragedy. There is a strong strain of the absurd in everything from the surreal, pathological criminality of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin to the spiritual vaporings of the aging Tolstoi (and, to a lesser extent, of the once-heroic Solzhenitsyn) sentimentalizing about a lost Russian past which, in reality, had always been dominated by a lower-case orthodoxy of the most rigid and nasty sort.