Anton Chekhov and the Catastrophes of Teaching
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| Title: | Anton Chekhov and the Catastrophes of Teaching |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Ross Collin |
| Source: | Educational Theory. 2025 75(3):514-530. |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 17 |
| Publication Date: | 2025 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Descriptive |
| Descriptors: | Ethics, Educational Practices, Philosophy, Moral Issues, Teaching Methods, Authors, Russian Literature |
| DOI: | 10.1111/edth.70002 |
| ISSN: | 0013-2004 1741-5446 |
| Abstract: | In this essay, Ross Collin offers ethics-focused readings of Anton Chekhov's popular short stories "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature." Chekhov shows in the two stories how teaching can inhibit teachers' flourishing. That is to say, teaching under bad conditions can draw teachers into moral "catastrophe," to use Cornel West's term for an idea central to Chekhov's work. In "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature," Chekhov compares the catastrophes of teachers' lives to the catastrophes of the lives of nonhuman animals trapped in an eternal present of toil or display. Confined in lives they do not control, the teachers in Chekhov's two stories cannot link their pasts, presents, and futures into narratives they might live out and steer in different directions. Here, Collin shows how works of art can attend to particularities of moral experience, including teachers' moral experience, that are difficult to recognize and address productively using general concepts in philosophy. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2025 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1472031 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwHp2idWryrnTt6Dz20UoA1nAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDBTZdo9O50fjZMyrJgIBEICBm2h8yJkiPO8Pbg-RCQEG6Q87HIZPY6hz6IAmLypO0c9YI8w6-emT3aE5IbM1sqIyAs1O4eGoeNXvcvP_pT4OzlClZrObjyletZsgt0fivj_cw8_pFx4BJPmDr-TwHscXWUExyr5LgLHroBaaqBQvOVUBdYA4FTwi3m_brkdXNo6zewJnI3scRkMdBxqTRYWEnxq2gfZ7ICfcgsHO Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0185398661;ety01jun.25;2025May27.05:27;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0185398661-1">Anton Chekhov and the Catastrophes of Teaching </title> <p>In this essay, Ross Collin offers ethics‐focused readings of Anton Chekhov's popular short stories "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature." Chekhov shows in the two stories how teaching can inhibit teachers' flourishing. That is to say, teaching under bad conditions can draw teachers into moral "catastrophe," to use Cornel West's term for an idea central to Chekhov's work. In "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature," Chekhov compares the catastrophes of teachers' lives to the catastrophes of the lives of nonhuman animals trapped in an eternal present of toil or display. Confined in lives they do not control, the teachers in Chekhov's two stories cannot link their pasts, presents, and futures into narratives they might live out and steer in different directions. Here, Collin shows how works of art can attend to particularities of moral experience, including teachers' moral experience, that are difficult to recognize and address productively using general concepts in philosophy.</p> <p>Keywords: Anton Chekhov; teachers; flourishing; eudaimonia; ethics</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-2">Introduction</hd> <p>"This is the age of Chekhov," writes Cornel West, because Chekhov is "the poet of catastrophe."[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>] West, inverting Aristotle's concept of flourishing,[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>] sees human catastrophe as an inability to develop and employ one's faculties to live a full life with others. Catastrophe, West writes, is not a problem philosophers can sort and solve with general theories. Rather, it is a reality we human beings must endure in the particular forms it takes in our lives. Thus, for West, catastrophe is best contemplated in works of art that, unlike many works of philosophy, attend to what is particular in life without seeking to file all particularities under a general concept. To paraphrase Chekhov's friend Lev Tolstoy, every catastrophe is catastrophic in its own way.</p> <p>In several of Chekhov's works, including <emph>The Seagull</emph>, <emph>Three Sisters</emph>, and "The Man in a Case," teachers endure the catastrophes of teaching in a world focused less on education and more on tests, money, and hierarchies. Working under such conditions, teachers see flourishing as a dream detached from the realities of their schools (the more things change...). Crucially, as West would argue, if we are to understand the catastrophes of teaching, we must attend to the lives of particular teachers, real or fictional, and explore the challenges to flourishing in their specific circumstances. Below, I consider the experiences of two teachers in Chekhov's popular short stories "The Schoolmistress"[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref3">3</reflink>] and "The Teacher of Literature."[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref4">4</reflink>]</p> <p>I present an ethics‐focused reading of Chekhov's stories in that I ask how Chekhov and his teachers imagine the limits to flourishing amid catastrophe. In taking this tack, I follow Cora Diamond, Sophie Grace Chappell, Martha Nussbaum, and other philosophers who engage literature to conduct moral inquiry. For Diamond and Chappell, moral questions about the good emerge in life's particularities, so philosophers must stay close to specific accounts of life, real or fictional, if they wish to say anything true and meaningful about ethics.[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref5">5</reflink>] Nussbaum recognizes the importance of the particular in moral inquiry, but she also argues that general and flexible moral concepts, such as Aristotle's concept of flourishing or West's concept of catastrophe, can help us draw tentative outlines around certain areas of life that we must then fill in with details of specific situations.[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref6">6</reflink>] I take this particularist‐Aristotelian approach in the following discussion.</p> <p>To see how Chekhov's stories invite readers to imagine the good and the catastrophic in the lives of teachers, I consider not only characters' direct statements (e.g., "I am surrounded by vulgarity and vulgarity" [<emph>TOL</emph>, 283]), but also the stories' figures of speech, patterns of imagery, and ways of relating characters. Specifically, I follow the philosopher Alice Crary in asking how Chekhov, in relating human and nonhuman animals, construes the ways of flourishing and the moral fellowship of creatures of different kinds.[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref7">7</reflink>] In "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature," I show that Chekhov offers views of teachers whose schools trap them like animals[<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref8">8</reflink>] in an eternal present[<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref9">9</reflink>] of toil or display in which they lack the freedom to integrate their pasts, presents, and futures on their own terms. Chekhov suggests in these stories that if teachers are to escape catastrophe and then flourish as human beings, they must be freed and free themselves to use the core human capacity of imagining and living out new stories in new ways. At the end of this essay, I describe how rural teachers in Chekhov's day banded together to work toward this very goal. I conclude by asking how the efforts of teachers in late Imperial Russia might inform the efforts of teachers facing catastrophe today.</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-3">Chekhov and Education</hd> <p>In 1891–1892, a few years before Chekhov published "The Schoolmistress" (1897) and "The Teacher of Literature" (1894), Russia was struck by famine and cholera. Among the hardest‐hit regions were Russia's provinces. When the scope of the crisis came into view, Russians were shocked to see not only how hard life was in rural areas, but also how difficult it was to coordinate relief efforts in regions where government was often corrupt and dysfunctional, and where many people were illiterate and distrustful of modern methods of agriculture and health care. Debating how to respond, many Russians argued that better‐supported schools could bring some of the benefits of modernity to the provinces.[<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref10">10</reflink>] Some advocates for education held up the rural teacher as the figure who would enlighten the countryside. At the time, however, rural teachers often were seen not as skilled professionals, but as "zemstvo rabbits," a reference to the government unit that employed them and the meek, fearful demeanors they often developed from working under tight administrative control.[<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref11">11</reflink>] If you picture rabbits living not together in a den, but alone in cages, you can understand the isolation and constraint the term connotes. Although Chekhov did not, as far as I know, use the term "zemstvo rabbits," he compared teachers to other animals to ask how one person, let alone an entire nation, could flourish under conditions unfit for an animal.</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-4">"The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature"</hd> <p>"The Schoolmistress" follows Marya Vassilyevna on a cart trip from a small town where she shops to the even smaller town where she has taught for thirteen years. Bored on this routine trip and dreading her return to the drudgery of her work, she thinks of her happy childhood in Moscow before her parents died. Further in her journey, Vassilyevna sees a handsome, unmarried landowner she knows from his support of her school. For a moment, she wonders what it would be like to marry him. The next moment, she thinks of the social distance between them, and she despairs of her dull life as a teacher whose work has little to do with "serving the cause of enlightenment" (<emph>TS</emph>, 392). She is, Vassilyevna thinks, just a "silent, patient cart‐horse" (<emph>TS</emph>, 392) like the animal pulling her along the rutted road. At the end of her journey, as she is about to enter the small town where she teaches, the cart stops at a railroad crossing and she gets out to stretch her legs. Just then, the sun reflects off the crosses on a church and the windows of the train. In this moment of illumination, she sees her happy past drawn together with a happy present and future with the handsome landowner. Her reverie dissolves, however, when the train pulls away and the peasant driving her cart orders her back to life: "Vassilyevna, get in!" (<emph>TS</emph>, 395).</p> <p>"The Teacher of Literature" follows Sergey Vassilitch Nikitin, a young man from a poor background, who has the relatively prestigious job of high school teacher in what he considers "one of the best provincial towns" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 275). The story begins with and returns to descriptions of animals and their hierarchies, including the horses, pigeons, cats, and dogs kept by the wealthy family of Nikitin's fiancée, Masha. At Masha's house, her older, unmarried sister Varya tends the hierarchy of human animals, teasing and arguing with guests, as when she tells Nikitin he should change the test he is about to give his students because the test misidentifies Alexander Pushkin as a great psychologist. Nikitin, upset at being challenged in front of others, defends the test without saying much about Pushkin. Later, Nikitin's disconnection from teaching grows apparent as he daydreams through his classes and thinks only of marrying Masha. Once he and Masha marry, Nikitin reflects with satisfaction on making his way from poverty into a secure provincial life. He begins to feel unsettled, however, when he sees Varya break down over her demotion to the standing of a woman whose younger sister married before she did. Nikitin begins to see that in his town, the hierarchy is everything and he stands only somewhere in the middle of it. He seems like one of the animals confined in the pecking order of his in‐laws' house. Moreover, Nikitin admits to himself that he never really cared about literature or philosophies of education, and he pursued his career mostly to escape the poverty of his past. Now, however, Nikitin sees that the position he has achieved closes him off from a meaningful present and future. At the end of the story, Nikitin writes in his diary, "I must escape from here, I must escape today, or I shall go out of my mind!" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 283).</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-5">Animals and Their Hierarchies</hd> <p>To foreground the limits to Vassilyevna's and Nikitin's flourishing, Chekhov compares them to animals. Halfway through "The Schoolmistress," Vassilyevna reflects on her life as a "cart‐horse" toiling patiently and thanklessly for her school (<emph>TS</emph>, 392). Here, Vassilyevna identifies with a central yet unnamed character in the story: the horse pulling the cart back to her village. Besides going without a name, the horse is not even mentioned until the third page of a barely‐ten‐page story about a trip in a cart drawn by a horse. Moreover, the other cart in the story, the cart carrying the handsome landowner, travels the same rutted, worn‐down road as Vassilyevna's cart, yet it is pulled by four horses. Thus, the lone horse and, by extension, Vassilyevna, appear as animals who perform hard, necessary work, but who go without the support or basic recognition they deserve.</p> <p>Chekhov tightens the connections between Vassilyevna and the horse by showing how Old Semyon, the peasant driving the cart, shouts commands at her just as he shouts commands at the horse:</p> <p>"Hold on, Vassilyevna!"</p> <p>Again a sharp ascent uphill... (<emph>TS</emph>, 392)</p> <p>"Vassilyevna, get ready," Semyon called to her.</p> <p>They set off. And again they went at a walking pace. (<emph>TS</emph>, 393)</p> <p>"Vassilyevna, get in!" (<emph>TS</emph>, 395)</p> <p>Notice in the first two passages the vagueness of the language Chekhov uses to describe the actions that follow Semyon's commands. The vague language makes it sound as if Vassilyevna were the animal making the "sharp ascent uphill" and pulling the cart "at a walking pace." Here, the teacher merges with a beast of burden following commands.</p> <p>Toward the end of the story, Chekhov further tightens the connection between Vassilyevna and the horse. At this moment, the horse draws the cart up to a river of cold, muddy water and strong currents. The horse hesitates, but Semyon drives it through:</p> <p>"Go on!" shouted Semyon angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the reins and jerking his elbows as a bird does its wings. "Go on!"</p> <p>The horse went on into the water up to its belly and stopped, but at once went on again with an effort, and Marya Vassilyevna was aware of a keen chilliness in her feet.</p> <p>"Go on!" she, too, shouted, getting up. "Go on!" (<emph>TS</emph>, 394)</p> <p>Here, when the horse wades into cold water, its twin feels the "keen chilliness in her feet." And just as the horse forces itself forward through pain — it walks into the river and "stop[s], but at once," without hearing a command, goes "on again with an effort" — Vassilyevna orders them forward even though cold water is seeping into the cart and soaking her feet. Both the horse and Vassilyevna have internalized commands to push through pain.</p> <p>How exactly does Vassilyevna suffer like an animal? Consider the paragraph in which Chekhov, channeling Vassilyevna's thoughts, calls her a "cart‐horse":</p> <p>She had become a schoolmistress from necessity, without feeling any vocation for it, and she had never thought of a vocation, or serving the cause of enlightenment; and it always seemed to her that what was most important in her work was not the children, nor enlightenment, but the examinations. And what time had she for thinking of vocation, of serving the cause of enlightenment? Teachers, badly paid doctors, and their assistants, with their terribly hard work, have not even the comfort of thinking they are serving an idea or the people, as their heads are always stuffed with thoughts of their daily bread, of wood for the fire, of bad roads, of illnesses. It is a hard‐working, an uninteresting life, and only silent, patient cart‐horses like Marya Vassilyevna could put up with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked about a vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up the work. (<emph>TS</emph>, 392)</p> <p>The life Vassilyevna lives is a life of drudgery, like a horse pulling a cart along the same path day after day. Notice, beginning in the first sentence above, how the repetition of <emph>and</emph> and <emph>always —</emph> a pattern that began a half‐page earlier — heightens the sense of one thing after another, and always the same thing, forever: "<emph>and</emph> she had never thought ... <emph>and</emph> it <emph>always</emph> seemed.... <emph>And</emph> what time had she ... their heads are <emph>always</emph> stuffed...." Vassilyevna contrasts teachers' concerns about material realities of bread, fire, roads, and illnesses with the lively people's concerns about vocation, enlightenment, and the idea. These lofty notions are left unexplained in the story, as if Vassilyevna knows nothing about them, or knows something about them, but finds them so irrelevant to her life that she does not spell them out. Why would a horse learn or reflect on philosophies of education when what really matters is its ability to pull a cart through cold, muddy water day after day?</p> <p>Finally, note how Vassilyevna calls herself a <emph>silent</emph> cart‐horse. The image here is of a social animal, such as a horse, employed for its superiors' gain and kept from others of its kind. Chekhov begins to sketch this picture a half‐page before the paragraph quoted above, when Vassilyevna sees the handsome landowner, wonders what it would be like to marry him, and then quickly thinks of how ill‐matched their lives are. Concluding a series of "<emph>And</emph> ..." statements describing her dull, routine life, the narrator reflects,</p> <p>And she used formal, deferential expressions when she spoke with any one of [her superiors at school]. And no one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances. How awful it would have been in her position if she had fallen in love! (<emph>TS</emph>, 391)</p> <p>She cannot talk as an equal to her superiors; the lively people do not stay long at her school; she does not think much about her students; she lives among peasants, but is not of the peasants; and she cannot imagine loving and being loved by a landowner. So she lives in silence like a horse alone in a barn.</p> <p>Thus far, I have shown how Chekhov construes the catastrophe of Vassilyevna's life as the catastrophe of an animal stuck in a lonely life of toil. In the following paragraphs, I show how Chekhov construes the catastrophe of the life of Nikitin, the title character of "The Teacher of Literature," as the catastrophe of an animal stuck in a life of display. I then argue that the two teachers' lives are catastrophic not because they are like animals <emph>per se</emph>, but because they are like social animals held captive in an eternal present that they do not control and they cannot integrate with meaningful pasts and futures. Further below, I describe how rural teachers of Chekhov's day resisted their subjugation by banding together, sharing their stories of struggle, and petitioning to take control over their working lives.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>If Vassilyevna is like a lonely horse, Nikitin is like an animal confined in its pack. "The Teacher of Literature" begins with a description of a "long picturesque cavalcade" of young people in courtship riding "magnificent, expensive horses" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 260). On the ride, Nikitin's well‐off love interest, Masha Shelestov, ranks the horses — and, implicitly, their riders — by their beauty, while Nikitin, a social climber from a poor background, worries that he looks less natural in the saddle than the officers in their party. They arrive back at Masha's grand home, a "menagerie" filled with cats, dogs, and caged pigeons (<emph>TOL</emph>, 279). As a frequent guest at the Shelestov's house, Nikitin is treated by the other animals as an entrant to their hierarchy. Mushka, a "spiteful and spoiled" little dog (<emph>TOL</emph>, 263), hates Nikitin and menaces him with her repeated growl, "Rrr ... nga‐nga‐nga ... rrr!" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 263). Som, another dog, accepts that Nikitin holds a position higher up the chain and begs food constantly from him at the dinner table. In "The Teacher of Literature," then, animal behavior, from the courtship of humans to the begging of dogs, is shaped in large part by animals' desires to defend or improve their positions in a hierarchy.</p> <p>Fixed in a social order, characters at the Shelestovs' house speak in routines determined by their positions. That is, just like Mushka's "Rrr ... nga‐nga‐nga ... rrr," humans' utterances are parts of their routines of performing their roles and defending their territory. Chekhov highlights the routine quality of characters' speech by noting what characters <emph>usually</emph> or <emph>always</emph> or <emph>would</emph> do <emph>every</emph> time. For instance, Chekhov presents Masha's father as follows:</p> <p>[O]ld Shelestov was sitting with friends, officials in the Circuit Court, and, <emph>as usual</emph>, he was criticizing something.</p> <p>"It's loutishness!" he said. "Loutishness and nothing more. Yes!" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 263, emphasis added)</p> <p>Old Shelestov continues this pattern across the story, bemoaning the "loutishness" he sees everywhere (<emph>TOL</emph>, 265, 283). Further describing the house's routines, Chekhov notes,</p> <p>It was <emph>always</emph> [Masha's older sister] Varya who started the arguments over tea; she was good‐looking, handsomer than Masha, and was considered the cleverest and most cultured person in the house, and she behaved with dignity and severity, as an eldest daughter should who has taken the place of her dead mother in the house ... She <emph>used to</emph> speak of herself as an old maid — so she was certain she would marry. (<emph>TOL</emph>, 264, emphases added)</p> <p>Social position — Varya's status as queen bee and unmarried eldest daughter — shapes the routines of her speech, and she feels free to argue with others and to joke about being an old maid. Notably, when Varya criticizes Nikitin, a guest in the house she commands, for preparing an examination that misidentifies Pushkin as a psychologist, Nikitin responds with, "If you like, I'll give you examples" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 265). Then, like a schoolboy performing for his examiner, he recites parts of Pushkin's <emph>Eugene Onegin</emph> and <emph>Boris Godunov</emph>. Unsatisfied with Nikitin's performance, Varya demands a clear explanation of Pushkin's psychological insights. Instead of presenting Nikitin's reply, Chekhov writes:</p> <p>When Nikitin had to argue against anything that seemed to him narrow, conventional, or something of that kind, he <emph>usually</emph> leaped up from his seat, clutched at his head with both hands, and began with a moan, running from one end of the room to another. <emph>And it was the same now</emph>: he jumped up, clutched his head in his hands, and with a moan walked round the table, then sat down a little way off. (<emph>TOL</emph>, 265, emphases added)</p> <p>By noting Nikitin's typical response to a challenge — his bodily, not his verbal, response — and then saying simply "it was the same now," Chekhov says Nikitin's words are not terribly important. What is more important is his position in the hierarchy and his habitual ways of occupying his position and performing his role. How funny for a teacher of literature to have his words waved away as unimportant!</p> <p>At school, Nikitin's words matter little more. After he marries Masha and thereby raises his status, he rests content in his classroom and settles into lazy routines:</p> <p>In the senior classes they were reading aloud Gogol or Pushkin's prose works, and that made him sleepy; people, trees, fields, horses, rose before his imagination, and he would say with a sigh, as though fascinated by the author:</p> <p>"How lovely!" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 277)</p> <p>This banal remark, hardly a strong effort from a teacher of literature, aligns Nikitin with his friend Ippolit Ippolitich, the school's geography and history teacher who only ever "remained silent or talked of things which everybody knew already" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 269). Indeed, right after the scene in Nikitin's class where he says, "How lovely," Chekhov cuts to a scene of Nikitin eating lunch with Ippolitich, who says only, "Men cannot live without food" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 277). Ippolitich is clearly a dullard with nothing important to say, but Nikitin is not much better. However, having secured a position at the school and status in the Shelestov family, Nikitin need not worry about his lack of ability in the classroom.</p> <p>The one thing Nikitin must worry about is his relationship with those above him in the hierarchy. When Ippolitich dies — his last words are, "Horses eat oats and hay" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 278) — Nikitin plans to speak at the funeral, as one might expect of a friend and a teacher of literature, but Nikitin thinks better of it. He writes in his diary, "I wanted to say a warm word at my colleague's grave, but I was warned that this might displease the director, as he did not like our poor friend. I believe that this is the first day since my marriage that my heart has been heavy" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 279). Note the passive construction of "I was warned" — with no agent identified as the one who warned Nikitin against speaking, it reads as if the warning just emanated from the social order itself. It is a warning you do not need to hear to receive loud and clear. Or, as the old saying goes, the dog who is truly trained is the dog who does not need to hear his master's command to perform his trick.</p> <p>Nikitin's complacence in the social order is first unsettled, but not shaken, when Varya collapses after her sister's wedding, crying, "My God, nobody can understand!" Nikitin writes in his diary, "But every one understood very well that she was four years older than her sister Masha, and still unmarried, and that she was crying, not from envy, but from the melancholy consciousness that her time was passing, and perhaps had passed" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 276). Lowered in status, Varya speaks no more in the story. Later, as they prepare for bed, Nikitin and Masha argue about the honor of an officer who spent time with Varya in the Shelestovs' house, but who left her behind to take a post far away. Nikitin says, "As far as I know, he made no proposal and gave [Varya] no promises." Masha replies, "Then why was he so often at the house? If he didn't mean to marry her, he oughtn't to have come." She settles into bed and Nikitin stews and mutters, eliciting a rebuke from his nemesis, the little dog Mushka: "Rrr ... nga‐nga‐nga...!" "'So then,' he ask[s], restraining himself, "'since I went to your house, I was bound in duty to marry you?'" Masha replies, just before falling asleep, "Of course. You know that very well" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 281). Put in his place and reminded that it is convention and status that drive his life, not his own words or choices, Nikitin goes to his study, lies down, and tells himself, "What nonsense it is ...! You are a teacher, you are working in the noblest of callings":</p> <p>But almost immediately he told himself with conviction that he was not a real teacher, but simply a government employee, as commonplace and mediocre as the Czech who taught Greek. He had never had a vocation for teaching, he knew nothing of the theory of teaching, and never had been interested in the subject; he did not know how to treat children; he did not understand the significance of what he taught, and perhaps did not teach the right things. Poor Ippolit Ippolitich had been frankly stupid, and all the boys, as well as his colleagues, knew what he was and what to expect from him; but he, Nikitin, like the Czech, knew how to conceal his stupidity and cleverly deceived every one by pretending that, thank God, his teaching was a success. (<emph>TOL</emph>, 282)</p> <p>Like Vassilyevna in "The Schoolmistress," Nikitin admits he knows nothing of the vocation, theories, or content of teaching. Nikitin also admits he deceives others into seeing him as a successful teacher and thereby protects his comfortable position as a government employee. The next morning, he tries to shake off his doubts, but he sees that the routines of the social order, the routines he learned well enough to live his lie, are still firmly in place. Masha, now queen bee of the house, looks after the guests; her father complains about the loutishness of others; and horses are readied for a riding party of the kind described at the beginning of the story. Nikitin takes in the scene and writes in his diary, "Where am I, my God? I am surrounded by vulgarity and vulgarity. Wearisome, insignificant people, pots of sour cream, jugs of milk, cockroaches, stupid women.... There is nothing more terrible, mortifying and distressing than vulgarity. I must escape from here, or I shall go out of my mind!" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 283). Like the horse he will soon mount and ride through the countryside, Nikitin is comfortable and cared for in his material needs, but it seems he cannot escape.</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-6">Past, Present, and Future</hd> <p>In "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature," the life of a teacher is not catastrophic because it is like the life of an animal. Chekhov, a medical doctor and man of science, knew that humans are one kind of animal among others, so it is unremarkable for him to compare a human to a nonhuman animal.[<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref12">12</reflink>] Rather, Vassilyevna's and Nikitin's lives are catastrophic because they are like social animals such as horses or dogs held captive and kept from flourishing with others of their kind. The two teachers are kept in an eternal present of toil (Vassilyevna) or display (Nikitin), and their pasts and futures fade from view.</p> <p>At the beginning of "The Schoolmistress," Chekhov uses repetition to describe Vassilyevna's endless present:</p> <p>She felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for ages and ages, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Her past was here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other future than the school, the road to town and back again and again the school and again the road ... (<emph>TS</emph>, 387–388)</p> <p>Here, the repetition in Vassilyevna's life is echoed in the repetition of Chekhov's language: "ages and ages ... every ... every ... here ... here ... the road ... the road ... again and again ... and again." Stuck in her present toil, Chekhov continues, "She had got out of the habit of thinking of her past before she became a schoolmistress, and had almost forgotten it." Vassilyevna then thinks of her happy childhood in Moscow before her parents died, "but of all that life there was left in her memory only something vague and fluid like a dream." She thinks of the only possession connecting her to her past, a photograph of her mother that "had grown dim from the dampness of the school, and now nothing could be seen but the hair and the eyebrows" (<emph>TS</emph>, 388). In a literal sense, Vassilyevna's job, carried out in her damp and dreary school, is erasing her past. And the routines of her job erase any picture of her future outside of the school. Like the horse pulling her cart, she lives in an eternal present of trudging through the same ruts on the same road.</p> <p>Living in an endless present filled with material challenges, "[W]hat time had she for thinking of vocation, of serving the cause of enlightenment?" (<emph>TS</emph>, 392). And even if Vassilyevna had one moment to think about enlightenment, it is unclear what big "E" or small "e" enlightenment ideas could mean in her life. If enlightenment, on a broad definition,[<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref13">13</reflink>] assumes that through the use of reason, people can free themselves from the grip of tradition, see the world in truth, and make better presents and futures, then enlightenment looks useless to a teacher living in an eternal present of toil directed by others. What time has Vassilyevna for enlightenment? She has no time — she does not have the kind of past, present, and future required for enlightenment to dawn in a human life.</p> <p>At the end of the story, a different reality flashes before Vassilyevna's eyes. Standing next to her cart at a train crossing, she sees the late‐day sun flash on the crosses of the church and the windows of the station and the train. In this moment of illumination, Vassilyevna sees a woman at the station who looks just like her mother, and she has a vivid recollection, her first in years, of her life with her family in Moscow:</p> <p>And she began crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov [the landowner] drove up with his team of horses, and seeing him she imagined happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded at him as an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had awakened. (<emph>TS</emph>, 395)</p> <p>Here, Vassilyevna has a vision of a flourishing life, a life with a happy and integrated past in Moscow, a present away from the school, and a future at Hanov's side as his equal and friend. To picture this life, however, Vassilyevna must distort reality — she imagines her parents are alive and she dreams she never worked as a teacher. Vassilyevna, in other words, cannot picture in reality a life for herself with a happy and integrated past, present, and future. The only happiness she can imagine is imaginary. She is snapped back to reality by Semyon, who calls to her like he would command an animal: "Vassilyevna, get in!" (<emph>TS</emph>, 395). Back to an eternal present of toil.</p> <p>Nikitin's life is more comfortable than Vassilyevna's, but it is no less routine. As Chekhov indicates by describing what characters usually or always or would do every time, Nikitin's world is a field of rigidly‐defined positions and practices. Indeed, when Nikitin asks Masha if he was "bound in duty" to marry her simply because he went to her house, she replies, "Of course. You know that very well" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 281). In this world, your social role and the conventions of your role override your own desires and erase your unique past and your own ideas about the future.</p> <p>When Nikitin sees that he is trapped in a world of comfortable routines, he dreams of escaping into another world "to work himself at some factory or big workshop, to address big audiences, to write, to publish, to raise a stir, to exhaust himself, to suffer.... He wanted something that would engross him till he forgot himself, ceased to care for the personal happiness which yielded him only sensations so monotonous" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 281). Although earlier in the story, Nikitin congratulates himself for escaping the poverty of his past and securing a comfortable position as a teacher, he now wants to discard routine happiness for an all‐consuming struggle that might give his life meaning. Here, Nikitin sees how the superficial happiness of his comfortable life conflicts with the deeper, more meaningful happiness of a flourishing life that involves effort and sacrifice. But having tried for so long to escape his past and establish himself in society, Nikitin has no specific memories of struggle to guide him. Rather, he has only a vague sense that he wants "to exhaust himself, to suffer." And having never really tried to learn about literature or philosophies of education, Nikitin can say he wants "to write, to publish," but he cannot say about what he wants to write, to publish. Cut off from his past and unable to form a clear picture of a better future, Nikitin is stuck in the routines of the present. And although, at the end of the story, Nikitin declares he must escape "vulgarity and vulgarity" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 283), this vague, repetitive lament echoes his father‐in‐law's routine objections to "loutishness" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 283), suggesting Nikitin is not about to escape his present world and is simply on his way to replacing Shelestov as the old man sitting in the corner who complains about everything, but who never leaves and never does anything about vulgarity or loutishness. Or, to cite the other creature who repeats herself, Nikitin is on his way to joining Mushka the dog in growling at others — "Rrr ... nga‐nga‐nga ...!" — but staying put in his comfortable position where today is just like yesterday and tomorrow.</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-7">Catastrophes of Teaching</hd> <p>For both Nikitin and Vassilyevna, the conditions of their schools and broader society keep them from integrating their pasts, presents, and futures. Each is trapped in an eternal present: Vassilyevna, a present of toil, and Nikitin, one of display. The moral catastrophe of an eternal present is indicated in Alasdair MacIntyre's statement, "I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"[<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref14">14</reflink>] Vassilyevna and Nikitin cannot see their lives as stories if stories require some kind of temporality, whether linear, cyclical, or otherwise. They cannot join up their pasts, presents, and futures in narratives they might live out and steer in different directions. Thus, neither Vassilyevna nor Nikitin can answer the question <emph>What am I to do?</emph> in ways that might conduce to their own flourishing. Trapped in a present they do not control, what they are to do today is what they did yesterday and what they will do tomorrow.</p> <p>Giving up their pasts, presents, and futures was, for Vassilyevna and Nikitin, the price of becoming teachers. Vassilyevna pays the price reluctantly, seeing few other ways of making a living in nineteenth‐century Russia as a woman without financial means or familial support. She knows her dull, routine work is wearing her down and making her unfit for a flourishing life outside her school, but she is too poor to join the lively people in leaving the school for some better future. Nikitin, orphaned and impoverished as a child, worked his way up the ladder, through school, and into the position of teacher in a high school in "one of the best provincial towns" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 275). Given how Nikitin admits he never really learned anything about literature or philosophies of education, it seems his strategy of ascent was to forget his past and to focus his present and future on playing the game of school and mid‐to‐high society, internalizing the norms of these fields, and winning the prize of mid‐level status. That is, Nikitin worked in school to amass what Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital,"[<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref15">15</reflink>] such as a degree and (superficial) knowledge of literature, that he could later use to secure better positions in the world. However, having worked to learn only what he needed to know to advance up the ladder — Nikitin can recite Pushkin, but he has nothing of interest to say about him — Nikitin finds himself holding capital he can use only for limited purposes in limited fields. He knows how to play the game of advancement in school and mid‐to‐high society, but he knows little else. Nikitin's strategy of ascent has led him into a semi‐gilded cage that he can circle but not escape.</p> <p>In what sense are the catastrophes of Vassilyevna's and Nikitin's endless presents specific to the lives of teachers? After all, Chekhov says endless drudgery is the lot not only of many teachers, but also of "badly paid doctors, and their assistants" (<emph>TS</emph>, 392). When Vassilyevna and Nikitin reflect on the catastrophes of their lives, they admit they never saw teaching as a vocation: Vassilyevna "had become a schoolmistress from necessity, without feeling any vocation for it, and she had never thought of a vocation, or serving the cause of enlightenment" (<emph>TS</emph>, 392); and Nikitin "had never had a vocation for teaching, he knew nothing of the theory of teaching, and never had been interested in the subject" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 282). By admitting they do not see teaching as their vocation, Vassilyevna and Nikitin admit that their life stories are not stories of being called in the past to train to teach in the present in order to create an enlightened society in the future. What's more, in making these admissions, they show that they believe or are at least aware of social expectations that teachers ought to live out life stories of vocation. However, a range of forces, from material deprivation to the conventions and constraints of their social fields, keep Vassilyevna and Nikitin from living out any kind of story, vocational or otherwise, in which they can unite their pasts, presents, and futures. Therefore, for both teachers, teaching under prevailing conditions is catastrophic because they are called to live out stories they cannot, in reality, live out. To be sure, a doctor might feel unable to embody in her life story all of the ideals she thinks the vocation of medicine calls her to embody. She can, however, still set her patient's broken arm — she can still perform the tasks most central to her work. But Chekhov shows that if a teacher believes vocation is central to her work, yet cannot live out a story of vocation, she can come to see the challenges of teaching not simply as challenges, but as catastrophes.</p> <p>In sum, Chekhov sketches in "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature" a four‐part catastrophe of teaching. First, dire economic conditions make teaching in late Imperial Russia an attractive‐enough option for people like Vassilyevna and Nikitin who are not really interested in teaching, but who see teaching as a way out of hard times. Second, a leading idea of the day is that a teacher's life story ought to be a story of vocation. How, then, are teachers such as Vassilyevna and Nikitin, who went into teaching not for vocation, but for security and status, to understand themselves and their work? Is there no story in which they can teach and flourish? Third, working under conditions of material deprivation and near‐total subordination, it is almost impossible for teachers to join up their pasts, presents, and futures in stories of vocation. Fourth, these same conditions make it nearly impossible for teachers to live out any other kind of coherent life story. The four parts of the catastrophe of teaching are like the four walls of a cage confining an animal and keeping it from living a full life with others of its kind.</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-8">Same As It Ever Was?</hd> <p>Is teaching here and now a four‐part catastrophe as Chekhov shows it to be there and then? Even limiting myself to conditions in the United States where I teach teachers, it is far beyond the scope of this essay to survey the full scene of teaching in one country. Nonetheless, as I show in the following paragraphs, it is instructive to turn the four parts of Chekhov's formulation into questions about US schools and society. Although I sketch possible answers, these questions call for multisided debate.</p> <p>First, are economic conditions decent enough that many people have good options for employment? Even if jobs are relatively plentiful, what is the quality of those jobs in terms not only of pay, benefits, and security, but also of control and meaning in work? Few people in the United States face Vassilyevna's choice of <emph>teach or starve</emph>, but do people thinking about going into teaching, especially people from working‐class and lower middle‐class backgrounds, have a wide variety of decent jobs from which to choose? Perhaps not, if we are to believe Elizabeth Anderson's analysis of the current situation as one in which most jobs involve the exploitation of workers and in which employers have "hijacked" their employees' work ethic to serve the interests of the ownership class.[<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref16">16</reflink>] Thus, a modern‐day Vassilyevna might see teaching as a decent career choice, but largely because most of the other employment options look bad by comparison.</p> <p>Second, do we recognize multiple reasons for becoming and working as a teacher? Are our stories of teachers' lives serious and realistic? In the United States today, a teacher's life story is often told as a story of vocation, although not the vocation of the late Imperial Russian teacher bringing enlightenment to the people. In <emph>The Good Life of Teaching</emph>, Chris Higgins notes how many current stories of teachers' vocation are animated by kitschy ideas of answering the call to change the world one child at a time. Adapting Milan Kundera's and Maxine Greene's concepts of <emph>kitsch</emph>, Higgins writes,</p> <p>What emerges in Kundera's analysis is that kitsch serves the function of keeping the voiceless mute. It accomplishes this not by overt acts of silencing, but by conjuring a world in which there is nothing to say. Political kitsch (for Kundera) and institutional kitsch (for Greene) present a world in which all questions are already answered, all feelings hollow, and all statements tautologous. "Long live life" says the banner at Kundera's grand march; "every child deserves a chance" says the school bulletin board.[<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref17">17</reflink>]</p> <p>Banalized by kitsch, our dominant stories close off ways of addressing complicated questions of teaching and living a full life as a teacher. If a modern‐day Nikitin questions his ability to thrive under bureaucratic control, what good does it do to smile and tell him "every child deserves a chance"? Higgins, adapting ancient and modern ideas of virtue, offers an alternative story of a good life of teaching in which a teacher cultivates virtues necessary for her to flourish through helping students flourish. As attractive as Higgins's story is, we must ask how viable that story and other stories are under material conditions described in the question above and in the final questions below. Moreover, we ought to ask what stories are available to modern‐day Nikitins and Vassilyevnas who find themselves teaching despite their disinterest in building their lives around their work. Are there no stories for a teacher who does not see teaching as a calling, but who might come to see it as a job worth doing well?</p> <p>Third and fourth, do the institutional conditions under which teachers work enable them to join up their pasts, presents, and futures in stories of vocation? Can teachers live out <emph>any</emph> coherent life story? In some schools, usually in wealthy areas, teachers have a degree of control over their work, and therefore a degree of control over the direction of their working lives. In many other schools, usually in less‐wealthy areas, teachers labor under what Wayne Au calls "the New Taylorism of Teaching."[<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref18">18</reflink>] In this regime, curriculum is standardized and scripted, teachers teach to the test, and administrators micro‐manage teachers to keep them focused on test scores. That is, to echo Vassilyevna's thoughts, "it always seemed to her that what was most important in her work was not the children, nor enlightenment, but the examinations" (<emph>TS</emph>, 392). Deskilled and deauthorized from making meaningful decisions about their work, writes Doris Santoro, many teachers grow demoralized and leave the profession.[<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref19">19</reflink>] Put differently, teachers fleeing the New Taylorism see no way of living out and controlling any story of teaching that is morally centered. What they see is catastrophe.</p> <hd id="AN0185398661-9">What Is to Be Done?</hd> <p>Chekhov was suspicious of neat solutions to life's catastrophes. Famously, he remarked, "Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly."[<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref20">20</reflink>] To formulate a problem correctly, however, is no mean feat and can be the first step toward working out a solution. In formulating the four‐part catastrophe faced by Vassilyevna and Nikitin, Chekhov contributed to the debate in late Imperial Russia about rural crises and education reform.[<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref21">21</reflink>] Notably, a significant, if not overwhelming number of teachers in Russia banded together to address the very problems Chekhov describes in his stories.[<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref22">22</reflink>] Through their efforts, that is, teachers ratified Chekhov's formulation of their problems and worked out answers that fit their circumstances. What did these teachers do there and then and what might their actions suggest for teachers here and now?</p> <p>To address their problems, teachers joined together both in informal networks and in formal collectives such as the All‐Russian Teachers' Union. Attending to the material problems Chekhov identified, teachers petitioned governments for better pay and better funding for their schools. Teachers also formed mutual aid societies to offer material, moral, and social support to their colleagues who fell on hard times. Some teachers went further and joined political parties such as the Socialist Revolutionaries to call for a fairer distribution of resources across classes, which would reduce the likelihood of people taking Vassilyevna's and Nikitin's path of going into teaching not to teach, but mostly to escape poverty.</p> <p>Working together, teachers also demanded greater control over their labor and relief from over‐administration. Indeed, among the six key reforms it demanded in its charter, the All‐Russian Teachers' Union called for "the establishment of curricula featuring general education and freedom of teaching."[<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref23">23</reflink>] Teachers, that is, wanted to break out of the set path of teaching and learning to forge different paths that better fit the circumstances of their own lives and the lives of their students.</p> <p>Most relevant to this essay, teachers banded together for the express purpose of banding together. That is, many teachers in late Imperial Russia saw isolation and cultural deprivation as two of their core problems. Living in remote areas, teachers often had few people with whom to share stories of their working lives or to imagine different ways of joining up their pasts, presents, and futures. Faced with this challenge, teachers formed unions, founded journals, established libraries, held conferences and congresses, ran summer teaching institutes, and expanded the mutual aid societies noted above. Through these efforts, teachers not only honed their skills and offered material support to colleagues, but they also created conditions in which they could come together and share their diverse stories of teaching. Teachers could then discover ways of living new stories of, say, social progress, teacher activism, or the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful <emph>through teaching</emph>. Teachers could also share life stories in which teaching is not a vocation but is still a job worth doing well. Upon hearing such stories, might Vassilyevna or Nikitin have seen glimmers of hope and places for them in the profession? Such stories still required material conditions to enable teachers to live them out, but by sharing stories and addressing common concerns, teachers probably reduced the number of teachers who felt trapped in cages and who thought, "I must escape from here, or I shall go out of my mind!" (<emph>TOL</emph>, 283).</p> <p>What, then, can those of us here and now learn from Chekhov's stories and teachers' efforts to address the catastrophe he describes? We should offer better funding for teachers and schools. We ought to support teachers' efforts to band together in unions, professional associations, and other bodies to address common concerns. We should also support policies that enable teachers to make meaningful decisions about their work and their professional lives. We ought to read stories by and about teachers, from Chekhov's stories and plays to the reflections of Frank McCourt to the stories presented in education research, such as Gloria Ladson‐Billings's classic study, <emph>The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African‐American Children</emph>.[<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref24">24</reflink>] These stories can reveal some of the possibilities and limits of teaching that are difficult to see in reports focused on test scores and graduation rates. Those of us who work in education ought to read and discuss such stories with teachers, solicit teachers' own stories, and encourage teachers to learn from the stories they pick up as they work with colleagues. When teachers see a range of viable stories they might live out, writes Santoro, they are more likely to continue and thrive in the profession.[<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref25">25</reflink>] And to conclude with one more material concern, we ought to strategize with teachers and allies about the political efforts necessary to create and protect decent conditions for teaching and learning. Although teacher activists in Chekhov's day won some gains in some regions, many of their gains were squashed or reversed by the political reaction that swept Russia after the 1905 revolution. So, stories alone will not save us, but stories can help us see some of the promises and risks of building better schools and a better world.</p> <ref id="AN0185398661-10"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Cornel West, "Foreword: The Poet of Catastrophe," in <emph>Chekhov in Context</emph>, ed. Yuri Corrigan (Cambridge University Press, 2023), xxvi.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Aristotle, <emph>The Nicomachean Ethics</emph>, trans. J. A. K. Thompson (Penguin, 1976).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Anton Chekhov, "The Schoolmistress" (1897), in <emph>Anton Chekhov: Later Short Stories, 1888–1903</emph>, ed. Shelby Foote, trans. Constance Garnett (Modern Library, 1999) — note that "The Schoolmistress" is sometimes titled "In the Cart." This story will be cited parenthetically in the text as <emph>TS</emph> for all subsequent references.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Anton Chekhov, "The Teacher of Literature" (1894) in <emph>Anton Chekhov: Later Short Stories, 1888–1903</emph>, ed. Foote, trans. Garnett. This story will be cited parenthetically in the text as <emph>TOL</emph> for all subsequent references.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref5" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Cora Diamond, <emph>The Realistic Spirit — Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind</emph> (MIT Press, 1991); and Sophie Grace Chappell, <emph>Knowing What To Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics</emph> (Oxford University Press, 2014).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Martha Nussbaum, "Why Practice Needs Ethical Theory: Particularism, Principle, and Bad Behavior," in <emph>Moral Particularism</emph>, ed. Brad Hooker and Margaret Olivia Little (Oxford University Press, 2000), 227–255.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref7" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Alice Crary, <emph>Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought</emph> (Harvard University Press, 2016).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref8" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Human beings are one kind of animal among others. For ease of expression, however, I sometimes use the term "animals" in place of "nonhuman animals."</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" idref="ref9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> It is not true, as is sometimes assumed, that all nonhuman animals live in an eternal present. Many animals have senses of the past, present, and future that are crucial to their species‐specific ways of flourishing. For more of this argument, see Martha Nussbaum, <emph>Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility</emph> (Simon and Schuster, 2022), 118–153.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On famine, cholera, and the education debate in late Imperial Russia, see Scott Seregny, <emph>Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education in 1905</emph> (Indiana University Press, 1989), 10–11. On Chekhov's interest in teachers and their appearances in his stories and plays, see Rosamund Bartlett, <emph>Chekhov: Scenes from a Life</emph> (The Free Press, 2004), 216–219; and also W. H. Bruford, <emph>Chekhov and His Russia: A Sociological Study</emph> (1948; repr. Archon, 1971), 142–174.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> In <emph>Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution</emph>, Seregny writes, "Devoid of power or influence within rural society or the school administration, frightened of their own shadows, and oblivious to burning questions of the day, rural teachers had earned the nickname 'zemstvo rabbits.' Shunned by local elites, including their better educated third element colleagues, they were objects of pity," 2.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Chekhov's nuanced view of human beings as one kind of animal among others, see Michael C. Finke, <emph>Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov's Life and Writings</emph> (Reaktion, 2021), 91.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> For a discussion of the development of Enlightenment ideas in Russia, see Gary M. Hamburg, <emph>Russia's Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500–1801</emph> (Yale University Press, 2016). For a discussion of the development of Enlightenment ideas outside Russia, see Louis Dupré, <emph>The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture</emph> (Yale University Press, 2004).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Alasdair MacIntyre, <emph>After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory</emph>, 3rd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 216.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Pierre Bourdieu, <emph>Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste</emph>, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press, 1984).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Elizabeth Anderson, <emph>Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back</emph> (Cambridge University Press, 2023).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Chris Higgins, <emph>The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice</emph> (John Wiley, 2011), 253.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Wayne Au, "Teaching Under the New Taylorism: High‐Stakes Testing and the Standardization of the 21<sups>st</sups> Century Curriculum," <emph>Journal of Curriculum Studies</emph> 43, no. 1 (2011): 25–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2010.521261.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Doris Santoro, <emph>Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay</emph> (Harvard Education Press, 2018).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Chekhov, quoted in George Saunders, <emph>A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life</emph> (Random House, 2021), 58.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> See Seregny, <emph>Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution</emph>, 10–11. On Chekhov's support of initiatives to strengthen education, see Bartlett, <emph>Chekhov</emph>, 216–219.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> See Seregny, <emph>Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution</emph>, esp. 55–145.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> All‐Russian Teachers' Union, quoted in James C. McClelland, <emph>Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia</emph> (University of Chicago Press, 1979), 32.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Frank McCourt, <emph>Teacher Man: A Memoir</emph> (Scribner, 2005); and Gloria Ladson‐Billings, <emph>The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African‐American Children</emph>, 3rd ed. (Jossey‐Bass, 2022).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Santoro, <emph>Demoralized</emph>, 167–169.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Ross Collin</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> <p></p> <p>ROSS COLLIN is Professor of English Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; email. His primary areas of scholarship are ethics, English education, and curriculum theory.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref24"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref25"></nolink> |
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| Header | DbId: eric DbLabel: ERIC An: EJ1472031 AccessLevel: 3 PubType: Academic Journal PubTypeId: academicJournal PreciseRelevancyScore: 0 |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Anton Chekhov and the Catastrophes of Teaching – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Ross+Collin%22">Ross Collin</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Educational+Theory%22"><i>Educational Theory</i></searchLink>. 2025 75(3):514-530. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 17 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2025 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Descriptive – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Ethics%22">Ethics</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Practices%22">Educational Practices</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Philosophy%22">Philosophy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Moral+Issues%22">Moral Issues</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teaching+Methods%22">Teaching Methods</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Authors%22">Authors</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Russian+Literature%22">Russian Literature</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1111/edth.70002 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0013-2004<br />1741-5446 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: In this essay, Ross Collin offers ethics-focused readings of Anton Chekhov's popular short stories "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature." Chekhov shows in the two stories how teaching can inhibit teachers' flourishing. That is to say, teaching under bad conditions can draw teachers into moral "catastrophe," to use Cornel West's term for an idea central to Chekhov's work. In "The Schoolmistress" and "The Teacher of Literature," Chekhov compares the catastrophes of teachers' lives to the catastrophes of the lives of nonhuman animals trapped in an eternal present of toil or display. Confined in lives they do not control, the teachers in Chekhov's two stories cannot link their pasts, presents, and futures into narratives they might live out and steer in different directions. Here, Collin shows how works of art can attend to particularities of moral experience, including teachers' moral experience, that are difficult to recognize and address productively using general concepts in philosophy. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2025 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1472031 |
| PLink | https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ1472031 |
| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1111/edth.70002 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 17 StartPage: 514 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Ethics Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Practices Type: general – SubjectFull: Philosophy Type: general – SubjectFull: Moral Issues Type: general – SubjectFull: Teaching Methods Type: general – SubjectFull: Authors Type: general – SubjectFull: Russian Literature Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Anton Chekhov and the Catastrophes of Teaching Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Ross Collin IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 06 Type: published Y: 2025 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0013-2004 – Type: issn-electronic Value: 1741-5446 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 75 – Type: issue Value: 3 Titles: – TitleFull: Educational Theory Type: main |
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