A Trove of Faulkner Recordings

Wall Street Journal
July 26, 2011

William Faulkner will be forever linked to Mississippi, but he was also the first writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, arriving on that campus in 1957.

As it happens, many of his readings, speeches, classes, and Q & A sessions in Charlottesville were recorded. (He’d won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, so there was no question about his place in the canon by that point.) Very Short List today points to a trove of recordings from that period.

One section of the website “Faulkner at Virginia” is organized by novel. You’ll find the usual fare of author’s-talk questions: What’s your favorite book? Which novel of yours should a reader begin with? But also lots of questions about authorial intent, and plot points.

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Memories of Chekhov

New York Review of Books
July 5, 2011

Memories of Chekhov, from which this excerpt is drawn, is the first documentary biography of Anton Chekhov to be based on primary sources: the letters, diaries, essays, and memories of Chekhov’s family, friends, and contemporaries that I collected from Chekhov archives in Yalta and Moscow, as well as the New York Public Library, the Russian State Library, and the Library of Congress. All of this material appears in English translation for the first time. My favorite discovery was a rare editorial by Chekhov dedicated to the life of Nikolai Przhevalsky, a famous Russian geographer. At the very end of the nineteenth century Chekhov wrote, “Reading this biography, we do not ask: ‘Why did he do this?’ or ‘What did he accomplish?’ but we say, ‘He was right!’” These words also describe Chekhov’s own life.

—Peter Sekirin, Editor, Memories of Chekhov

I got to know Chekhov in Moscow at the end of 1895. I remember a few specifically Chekhovian phrases that he often said to me back then.

“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.


I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”


“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”


And then, without any discernible connection, he added, “It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end. We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible.”


Sometimes Chekhov would tell me about Tolstoy: “I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it’s because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child’s play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare… For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does.”

Ivan Bunin, “Chekhov,” from The Russian Word (1904)

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