| Volume 7, Number 1, January 2010 |
Redefining Macau Melancholy Through
Pushkin and Chekhov
by Tudor Vladescu 都铎·弗勒代斯库 |
Fryderyk Chopin
The Man and the Innovator
by Luca Uggias 卢卡·乌加斯 |
| During a conference on the poetry of Pushkin, who is considered a founding father of Russian literature with no traceable link to Macau, the conclusion reached was that, in all respects, there is nothing more distant to Pushkin’s melancholy than Chekhov’s slightly tragic stories. More than obvious to any reader of literature, this truism bears much more significance when we refer to the reading public of Macau. If we are to consider the act of reading literature as a message-conveying act—a sort of dialogue between the reader and the text—the context of the act of reading is much more significant when we decide to turn the pages of Chekhov’s stories in Macau, 2009. It might seem a little bit of a stretch to apply the “poetic function” of Roman Jakobson, which refers mainly to verbal communication and poetry, to the almost dark stories of Chekhov. Still, poetry does not refer to rhymes, meters or rhythm any more. The poetical meaning migrated from incantation and celebration of sound towards an incentive for emotional exaltation a long time ago, that being at least a century ago.
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A lot has been written about Chopin and throughout the ages the strong emotional drive incidental to his pieces contributed to create in the collective imaginary an often distorted image about this composer, making of him at times a wisplike and bashful dandy, with a too delicate sensitivity to be actively involved in worldly matters, unable to face the «real» world and therefore constantly «self-secluded» between the walls of a high society’s comfortable salon or, metaphorically, between the more suggestive walls of his own musical world. If it’s true that these grotesque deformations rest in some measure upon actual traits of the artist’s personality and biographical sketch, one has to admit, on the other hand, that such a description doesn’t do justice to Chopin’s real features as a man and as a composer, a person whose biographical and artistic vicissitudes show far more forceful and daring traits.
This short essay, on the occasion of the second centenary of the birth of the composer, intends to select and propose some ideas which may contribute to a more... [ Read more ] |
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| Issue 7.1 |
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India’s Peaceful Rise
in World Politics
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