A List--Chekhov--Three Sisters........................................................................53/70
B List--Dostoevsky--The Bros Karamazov...................................................294/940
C List--Stanley Gordon West--Amos............................................................191/231
"D" List--(Special Guest Book) Zena Hitz--Lost in Thought........................36/210
It's always exciting on the B List when we come to one of the major signpost books in the whole enterprise. We have the multiple Russians at the same time this month (really just this week), just as we had the multiple Scots a few months back. It is maybe not the ideal time to have come around to Chekhov after waiting for several decades for him to turn up, though maybe some aspects of him are amplified in having him alongside Dostoevsky. I saw the ca. 1970 film version in English that Laurence Olivier made of Three Sisters a couple of years ago, which was very handsomely made, but I had trouble following the spoken dialogue and missed a good deal of what it was about, namely the depth of all of the sisters' unhappiness and dissatisfaction and the impotence and lack of gravitas of all of the men. The writing in both of these books is of course wonderful in its particular details and turns of thought, even in the expression of the deepest despair, it is why people undertake studies in the first place, to encounter such lively and interesting minds.
Just before Chekov I had to read Mrs Warren's Profession by Shaw (the A list is running through a set of plays right now). I had this play in the old Norton Anthology, the numerous volumes of which for both the English and American sides I have been carrying around since my Annapolis days, and have relied on enormously while doing this list, especially with regard to poems, as they contain most of the ones that have come up. I took them with me to Prague in the pre-internet era, I bought one of them in Washington on one of my first "dates" with my eventual wife. But I might be getting near the age where I won't be able to read the small print in those books any longer. I had to make an extra effort on several occasions, adjust the light. They're rather clunky and unattractive books, but I'm attached to them and like the idea that even after all this time I can still go to them for new things.
Compared with these other books, Amos cannot really measure up, and it is incredibly depressing to boot (it's about inmates in a nursing home being abused and robbed of their insurance money, etc, by the staff). However I am near enough to the end now that I am going to stick it out and see what happens.
I picked up the Zena Hitz book because, in addition to being a tutor at my alma mater, she was actually a classmate of mine and therefore her memoir and intellectual points of reference I figure will be of particular interest to me. I think I may still be in the prologue. I started this in the break between Thornton Wilder and Dostoevsky while I was writing the Thornton Wilder post, but since I started Dostoevsky I've been kind of busy and haven't gotten back to this in a couple of weeks. I think I will be able to dip in and out of it and keep the narrative pretty straight even if I can't get to it every day.
