Who’s afraid of realism?

‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and the ways in which each seeks to curb the judgment or expectations of the reader to foreground the experiences of his characters, even beyond death. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Further reading in the LRB: John Bayley on Chekhov's stories: https://lrb.me/realismep401 Donald Rayfield on Chekhov's love letters: https://lrb.me/realismep402 Joseph Frank on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep403 James Wood on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep404

‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing. In the second part of his analysis of ‘Madame Bovary’, James Wood considers the major episodes leading to Emma’s death and argues that what made Flaubert’s realism dangerous was not its depictions of infidelity, but its use of cliché to expose French bourgeois lives constructed entirely of received ideas and second-hand emotions. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Further reading in the LRB: Julian Barnes on translations of ‘Madame Bovary’: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep201⁠ Michael Wood on ‘Sentimental Education’: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep202⁠

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood looks at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike. James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from the episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Books featured in the series: Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Three stories by Anton Chekhov (UK: Bravo Ltd., from Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; USA: same edition, Modern Library) Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Mariner Books Classics) Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Norton) Saul Bellow, Seize The Day (Penguin Modern Classics) Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Vintage) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Dag Solstad, Shyness & Dignity (Vintage, trans. Sverre Lyngstad) Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag (UK: Faber and Faber, USA: New York Review Books Classics) Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (UK: Granta Books; USA: New York Review Books Classics)