BOREDOM.

BOREDOM. We went to see an excellent performance of Turgenev’s A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY last night at the Town Players of New Canaan. In the course of it I was struck that the characters spoke of being bored. Turgenev wrote the play from 1848 to 1850. some 40 years before a lot of Chekhov’s writing. I am a great fan of Chekhov’s plays and Chekhov’s stories. I encounter many grumblings about how Chekhov’s characters are always complaining about being bored, and have to acknowledge that they often do. Coincidentally with yesterday’s Turgenev performance, Frederic Raphael in the Wall Street Journal for November17-18 quoted from a letter of Flaubert’s: “The problem is not to look for happiness, it’s to avoid being bored. It can be done, if you stick at it.” Boredom was apparently a major problem in the 19th Century. This seems strange to me because I rarely hear people today complain of being bored—rather they see themselves as frantically busy. Of course many of us have world-class entertainment available to us, but I don’t think that people in earlier centuries complained about boredom in the same way that 19th century characters seem to.