It is a literal part of the person whose finger does the smudging. The smudge of a finger on a screen, like the one you’re using to read this story, is more than a blurring annoyance. And as a result historians accustomed to poring over rare manuscripts and aging artifacts may soon have new tools with which to study the intimate details of the daily lives, dietary habits, diseases, and manner of death of people long past. By combining sophisticated analytical chemistry with historical interpretation, scientists are beginning to illuminate not only what happened in the past but how it happened. When we hold an object, cough or sneeze on it, we imbue that item with evidence of our illnesses, our habits, our meals. That’s because the work is grounded in a poignant truth: everywhere we go we leave traces of ourselves. This molecular analysis of Chekhov’s final moments, which began as a passion project among a few curious scientists, may dramatically change the way historians study valuable artifacts. But it would be 100 years and take the pioneering work of a team of 21st-century chemists to conclusively demonstrate what exactly killed the famed author. His biographers suspected he died, at age 44, of tuberculosis-related complications. These materials would later tell the molecular story of his death.Ĭhekhov, the author of theatrical masterpieces including The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and The Three Sisters, had suffered from tuberculosis for two decades before his death in 1904. Carver doesn’t describe what happens to Chekhov’s body and possessions, but someone that day had the foresight to preserve the shirt he was wearing as well as the letters and postcards he had been writing during his stay. In the decades that followed, Chekhov’s death became, in the words of journalist and biographer Janet Malcolm, “one of the great set pieces in literary history.” Raymond Carver fictionalized it in his final short story, “ Errand,” published in 1987. The stillness was interrupted by a huge black moth, “which kept crashing painfully into the light bulbs and darting about the room,” she wrote. “Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said, ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne.’ He drained it and lay quietly on his left side, and was soon silent forever.” The playwright’s wife, actress Olga Knipper-Chekhova, later remembered, “He awoke in the early hours of the night, and for the first time in his life himself requested that the doctor be sent for.” When the German doctor arrived, “Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly in German (of which he knew very little): Ich sterbe (‘I’m dying’).” The doctor ordered a bottle of champagne be brought up. Despite the champagne the mood was somber.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |