THE STATE EDITS THE CLASSICS.(The New York State Board of Regents edits Anton Chekhov's work for a public school essay test)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-JUN-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In 1887, Anton Chekhov said in a letter to Maria Kiselyova that the writer "should . . . acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones." Such strength of stomach is not shared by the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees the tests that every New York public-school student must pass in order to graduate. Last summer, the Regents chose to include Chekhov's short story "An Upheaval" on the English exam, requiring students to refer to it in writing an essay on "the meaning of human dignity." The Regents felt it necessary to shovel some of Chekhov's more pungent details out of this story, which concerns the theft of a brooch from an...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.