Golomb, Harai. A New Poetics of Chekhov's Plays: Presence through Absence (review)

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 744 In her discussion of Dostoevskii, Khapaeva pays special attention to the discursive aspects of his texts. Since his characters exist in a confused, nightmarish state, they are unable to articulate their feelings by means of coherent speech. Instead, they mutter obsessively or fall back on ‘tonguetwisters ’(p.150),asinglesenselesswordoraphrasethattheyrepeatmechanically until it turns into ‘pure sound’ (p. 173). The presence of such a locution signals the escalation of the hero’s inner tension and represents a moment of special horror (cf., bo-bo-k in Bobok): ‘Dostoevsky dismantles the logic of the plot in order to reconstruct with care […] the complete degradation of meaningful discourse into the nightmare’ (p. 141). Khapaeva identifies these meaningless utterances as the ‘extra-linguistic nature of the nightmare’ and the ‘non-verbal experience of pre-verbal emotions’ (pp. 144–45). A highly original feature of this study is its critical discussion of Mikhail Bakhtin’s reading of Dostoevskii. Khapaeva argues that neither Bakhtin’s famous concepts of polyphony, dialogue and discourse, nor his influential treatment of menippean and carnivalesque forms is applicable in the case of characters who lack the ability to express themselves clearly and are psychologically unstable: ‘Dostoevsky was not primarily concerned with dialogue and discourse (slovo) of his characters, but rather with the pre-verbal emotions contained in their nightmares’ (p. 161). Khapaeva also addresses Pelevin’s idea of the ‘void of absent memory and selective amnesia’ (p. 80) and Mann’s notion of ‘the nightmare temporal horizon’ (p. 202). This lucidly written and well-structured book will greatly appeal to academic specialists in literature, culture and linguistics. Slavic Languages and Literature A. Y. Arkatova University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Golomb, Harai. A New Poetics of Chekhov’s Plays: Presence through Absence. Sussex Academic Press, Brighton, Chicago, IL and Toronto, 2014. xxiv + 411 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. £75.00. Critical response to Harai Golomb’s monumental Book (self-referentially capitalized thus throughout) suggests that Chekhov Studies has found its English-language Bakhtin, or even its Supreme Legislator, descended from Mount Anton bearing something more significant than mere tablets of stone. However, given the theme of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, one can imagine some Chekhov specialists, absent from the otherwise comprehensive bibliography, who might be less than enthused by the largely self-generated critical methodology, the sophisticated theorizing, and a linguistic prolixity suggestive at worst of a stylistic detour through a Dickensian Circumlocution Office. REVIEWS 745 Despite the claims to modesty this is an impressively immodest undertaking, indeed an opus magnum, the 500-plus footnotes constituting a slim volume in themselves. The actual coverage, on the other hand, is comparatively narrow — the four major plays of Chekhov’s final years — but the sheer ambition of a project to provide a definitive lexicon of analytical approaches to his drama as a whole appears both admirable and hubristic. Professor Golomb’s advocacy is passionately partisan but rather self-consciously magisterial in tone, bedevilled by a penchant for intellectual circuitousness, while his confidence in what he believes Anton Pavlovich himself is ‘saying’ on occasion (e.g. about ‘values’ pp. 211–20) is challenged by each play’s possession of its own distinctively ambiguous ‘voice’. Nevertheless, in a Book where beginnings and endings are painstakingly elucidated by such an inspirational author, a reader can faithfully expect that genesis will lead to revelation, concluding with the enunciation of a new gospel of Chekhovian poetics. However, if a poetics of literature belongs to an abstract realm of subjective reception/perception, then a hermeneutics is located in the more prosaic world of work in the literary bone yard where, with a requisite degree of temerity, bones need to be picked. There are too many aspects of the Book to take issue with in the space of a brief review so two examples must suffice. Returning to the theme of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, it is worth noting that The Seagull, for instance, does not begin with speech (see discussion pp. 38–43 ) but with noise — namely, the sounds of people working. At the same time, their source is absent (audible but invisible) while those of speech are present (audible and visible). The antitheses...

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