Nadezhda Peterson - Chekhov's Children and the Anxiety of Ignorance

Join us for another 19v seminar!
Chekhov’s Children describes the evolution of Chekhov’s literary model of childhood in its connection with the prevalent views on the child in his time. This talk focuses on “the anxiety of ignorance” as the predominant feature connecting Chekhov’s society to the writer’s fictional representations of children. Chekhov’s time, the mid-nineteenth century era of the Great Reforms and its aftermath, was a period of self-questioning and reaching for solutions to the problems of past decades. The previously unmatched exploration of childhood by Russian educators, psychologists and physicians in the 1860s to 1880s was the result of the great need to educate newly liberated peasants, of ongoing modernization, and of the rapid rise of a middle class. All made child rearing and schooling one of the most important societal issues of the era. The hoped for transformation of the nation was viewed as dependent on educating its children right. First, however, Russia had to overcome its anxiety of ignorance on the issue by educating itself. The argument proposed here is that learning as the engine of change, embraced by Chekhov’s compatriots in various scholarly fields, is also at the core of the writer’s fictional portraits of children.