To the Editor:

Joseph Epstein has done a wonderful job in his essay on boredom [“Duh, Bor-ing,” June]. He disturbed my own blessed boredom by prompting laughs that, hearty as they were, caused me no lasting harm. But, granting that he could not have invoked every possible reference, I still demand an answer to this: Why, oh why, did he not contemplate the plays of Anton Chekhov? If this was merely an oversight, it was a particularly strange one because, although Mr. Epstein examined boredom through French, English, Italian, and German prisms, he repeatedly cited Russians. In fact, he concludes by discussing one. With respect to the subject matter, are they not the masters? And was Dr. Chekhov not the master’s master?

Steve Kalkstein
El Cerrito, California

_____________

To the Editor:

Thanks for another marvelous essay by the wonderfully entertaining Joseph Epstein.  Through all the years I’ve read his books and articles, I’ve definitely never been bored.

Joan Austin
Upper Marlboro, Maryland

_____________

Joseph Epstein replies:

Mr. Kalkstein’s is an irrefutable point. Chekhov, in his plays, is one of the major chroniclers of boredom. Another reader, who did not write a formal letter to the editor, noted the absence in my essay of any mention of Schopenhauer—“My nights were sour,” wrote Ira Gershwin, “spent with Schopenauer”—who was one of its major anatomists. My only defense is that the subject of boredom, like the condition itself, is bottomless, or nearly so. But to say too much about it is of course to risk boring, which in an essay on boredom would have been a serious mistake.