How to think like Chekhov or Turgenev

I recently met an A-level English student who had never heard of Pontius Pilate. How is it possible to reach the age of 18 — to be applying to university to read English and European Literature — and never to have come across the man who asked the unanswerable question: what is truth?

This student had completed a course in theatre studies, having read hardly any Shakespeare, nor any of his contemporaries, none of the Greeks — Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides — nothing from the Restoration, no Ibsen, no Shaw, and certainly no Schiller — though he had been given the role of Hippolytus in a school production of Phaedra’s Love, which had to be cancelled when the head teacher came across a copy of the script lying on the staffroom table. Phew!

I asked what novels he’d read. Answer: nothing earlier than D.H. Lawrence. And Kes. I felt profoundly sorry for him. I have a vision of an old wooden bridge to past literary glories being slowly demolished by educationalists with hatchet, bar and crow from above as its props are loosened by axe-wielding teachers and examiners below. Way off his novel radar were the Russians. No Tolstoy, no Dostoevsky, no Gogol, no Chekhov — certainly no Turgenev. It came as a shock. There was a time, not so very long ago, when few self-respecting literary teenagers dared admit to not having read, at the very least, War and Peace. I mean, the Russians, with their ability to burst into tears in the middle of laughter, their peculiar blend of innocence if not naiveté, their obsession with burgeoning sex, the beauties of nature, the vastness of the world, and the unfairness of everything in life is the very stuff of the teenage years, is it not?