Abstract
We have analyzed the plight of the nihilistic writer as he attempts to portray what he considers the hopeless human condition with a mixture, varying with temperament and outlook, of irony and pity. There is no incongruity in his doing so. All the greater is the need for compassion if the writer believes, as do Chekhov and O’Neill, that life is a senseless spectacle and that there is no redemption beyond this mortal span. But if man dies and if he knows that in the end the race is destined to perish, he can still live his life and meet his death with some degree of courage and fortitude. Perhaps men need the pipe dreams to which they cling so tenaciously; perhaps the heroic spirit manifests itself in this very determination to go beyond illusion to “the truth” that man is the sole God, the maker of history, the Promethean builder of society and civilization. Perhaps, as Chekhov seems to say, there is no solution, the fate of the dreams and ideals men cherish is to be shattered, but then all the more reason for a show of compassion and for belief in what E. M. Forster calls “the importance of personal relationships.”1
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References
E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951, p. 53. E. M. Forster rejects all panaceas, love, politics, the brotherhood of man, liberalism, the proletarian revolution, but he believes in the individual. “He seems to me a divine achievement and I mistrust any view which belittles him.” Ibid., p. 57.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, pp. 40–41.
One psychiatrist calls religion “the hope of the hopeless.” (Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961, p. 287n.) Chekhov shows that so long as his despairing characters go on living, they are sustained by some measure of hope. As Thomas S. Szasz says: “The completely, utterly hopeless man.... is a psychological impossibility.” (Ibid., p. 288.)
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© 1969 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1969). Chekhov’s Naturalistic Irony. In: The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0977-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0977-0_9
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