Emile Zola

Reading notes

• Poems and Dubia (school-age and disputed juvenilia) §1518 we have no dealings whatsoever with Monsieur E. Zola

  Disavows any association with Zola's naturalist frankness (implicitly risque by contemporary Russian editorial standards), part of the mock-prospectus's parade of things the journal will NOT stoop to.

• The Alarm Clock's Calendar §154 Zola

  Emile Zola, the French naturalist novelist; grouped here with Shchedrin and Boborykin as stock "great writers" comically threatened with giving up literature for the grocery trade.

• Before the Wedding §12 Zola

  Emile Zola, the French naturalist novelist, whose racy reputation the groom name-drops to seem worldly and to hint at feelings he claims she has never felt.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 24–25 November 1888. Moscow. §2 Writers ought to be suspicious of all gossip and love-epics

  Zola is invoked generically as a cautionary example of a writer relying on secondhand rumor and friends' tales rather than direct observation, apropos of Chekhov's own love-elopement story described in the following section; not otherwise elaborated in this letter.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 24 July 1891. Bogimovo. §5 "If, Monsieur Zola, we're not as talented as you, at least we believe in God."

  Emile Zola, the leading figure of French literary naturalism, named only as the addressee of the mock-pious line Chekhov quotes from Rod's preface -- Rod, recanting his own earlier naturalism, contrasts his newfound piety with Zola's continued (implicitly Godless) commitment to the naturalist program. Chekhov quotes the line to mock its self-satisfied posturing, not to comment on Zola himself.