Thursday, July 19, 2007

Chelkash ....a sketch ....

chelkash is a famous story by MAXIM GORKY. chelkash as a character is quite interesting and the sketch below is how i imagined him while reading the story .

"The universe is not made of atoms........but of stories."


















An extact from the story " Chelkash ".

Darkened by the dust of the dock, the blue southern sky is murky; the burning sun looks duskily into the greenish sea, as though through a thin gray veil.

When the dock laborers, knocking off work, had scattered about the dock in noisy groups, buying various edibles from the women hawking food, and were settling themselves to dinner in shady corners on the pavement, there walked into their midst Grishka Chelkash, an old hunted wolf, well known to all the dock population as a hardened drunkard and a bold and dexterous thief. He was barefoot and bareheaded, clad in old, threadbare, shoddy breeches, in a dirty print shirt, with a torn collar that displayed his mobile, dry, angular bones tightly covered with brown skin. From the ruffled state of his black, slightly grizzled hair and the dazed look on his keen, predatory face, it was evident that he had only just waked up. There was a straw sticking in one brown mustache, another straw clung to the scrubby bristles of his shaved left cheek, and behind his ear he had stuck a little, freshly-picked twig of lime. Long, bony, rather stooping, he paced slowly over the flags, and turning his hooked, rapacious-looking nose from side to side, he cast sharp glances about him, his cold, gray eyes shining, as he scanned one after another among the dock laborers. His thick and long brown mustaches were continually twitching like a cat’s whiskers, while he rubbed his hands behind his back, nervously clenching the long, crooked, clutching fingers.
p.s
The idea behind the whole exercise is to translate one form of creativity into another .

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant quote and sketch!
Thanks for the link. Would you mind updating it to say "Sesquipedalist" (with the final 'st') please?
Many thanks.
The Sesquipedalist :)