The Seagull, Anton Chekhov - James M. Curtis (essay date fall 1985)
James M. Curtis (essay date fall 1985)
SOURCE: Curtis, James M. “Ephebes and Precursors in Chekhov's The Seagull.” Slavic Review 44, no. 3 (fall 1985): 423-37.
[In the following essay, Curtis reviews the literary predecessors of The Seagull and their influence upon Chekhov.]
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence takes the Freudian concept of an oedipal relationship between father and son as a model for the relationship that exists when one artist, the father figure (or precursor, as Bloom calls him), influences another artist (the ephebe, in Bloom's terminology). Bloom's work provides a desirable redefinition of standard treatments of influence and stylistic change in that it offers a dynamic, rather than a static, paradigm, and denies any simplistic dissociation of the artist as historical figure from the poet as poet. Furthermore, it denies that literary influences can occur as purely verbal processes, and it...
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