SparkNotes: The Cherry Orchard: Context The Cherry Orchard Table of Contents Plot Overview Anton Pavlevich Chekhov was born on January 17th, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia. His father Pavel was a shopkeeper the town, which was small, provincial, and on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia, and his grandfather was Egor Chekhov, a serf. Serfs were the legal property of the landowners who owned the property on which they resided; it was thus a form of slavery. In 1841, Egor bought freedom for himself and his family at the price of 875 rubles. Russia had been changing ever since the early 18th century, when Tsar Peter the Great carried out a series of reforms with the intent of modernizing Russia in Western Europe's image. European styles in fashion and art were imported, the Western canon was widely read among the nobility, and French was adopted as the language of cultured discourse. A large government bureaucracy was created; the achievement of rank became an obsession of Russian life.

During Chekhov's childhood, in the time of Tsar Alexander II, a second wave of reforms was underway, reforms that further liberalized the country and its economy. The most important of these was the Emancipation Declaration of 1861, which freed the serfs from bondage. These reforms caused great controversy, as they introduced what was, in effect, the beginning of a free-market economy, undermining the power of the nobility, and sometimes even impoverishing them. The situation displayed in The Cherry Orchard, of a wealthy landowning family forced to sell their estate in order to pay their debts, was thus a familiar one in the Russian society of Chekhov's day. Chekhov himself had a relatively quiet childhood. He attended the local Russian grammar school, worked in his father's store and occasionally wrote small pieces for the amusement of his family. Taganrog was not a typical provincial town; it was a multicultural port, with Italians, Greeks, and Turks residing in the wealthier sections of town and Russians such as the Chekhovs living in comparatively poor suburbs. It had a theater, which the young Chekhov would often visit.

When Chekhov was sixteen, Pavel's store failed, and the entire family had to move to Moscow—the entire family, that is, except for Anton. A merchant (and friend of the family) had helped the Chekhovs with a loan, but insisted on keeping Anton with him in the house as a kind of collateral. As soon as he could, he left Taganrog in order to pursue medical studies in Moscow in 1879 at the age of 19. That year, Chekhov began to write comic stories in order to pay his medical school tuition. By the time he was twenty, he was employed by The Spectator magazine as their regular humorist. Over ninety percent of Chekhov's published work appeared in magazines before he was twenty-eight, and, by this age, he had already established himself as a premier writer of short stories. As he developed as a writer, his stories began to take on deeper and more profound themes, as he moved away from his comic roots. To this day, Chekhov's literary reputation primarily rests with his short stories, and Chekhov's early plays, written primarily in his early 20s, are not well-remembered.

It was only in 1896 that he began to turn his attention back to drama; in the eight remaining years before his death, he managed to complete four plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. The first performance of The Seagull was nearly laughed off the stage; it was criticized as dull, unimaginative, and lacking any sort of dramatic tension (a critical undercurrent that has survived in Russia to this day). Only gradually did Chekhov's new form of drama, emphasizing characterization, detail and symbolism instead of plot development and incident, gain acceptance. Chekhov was the in-house playwright for the Moscow Arts Theatre, which had been founded by his friend Vladimir Nemirovich-Davchenko. During this time, he fell in love with one of the Theatre's leading actresses, Olga Knipper, and would marry her in 1901. Chekhov wrote his last two plays after he had been diagnosed, in 1898, with tuberculosis.

The Cherry Orchard itself was written over a period of more than two years, from early 1901 to late 1903, during which Chekhov was often in doctor-imposed exile from his wife and friends in Moscow, on the Mediterranean island of Yalta, in order to spare his ailing lungs. The germination of The Cherry Orchard probably came from numerous and diverse sources, over a longer period of time than that for any of Chekhov's other works. Chekhov had known cherry trees from his childhood days in Taganrog, before they were all cleared as a result of Alexander's liberal economic policies which encouraged development of the Russian hinterland. Also, Chekhov had himself planted a cherry orchard on an estate in Melikhovo that he purchased in 1892; he lost the estate a short while later, and the new owner cut down the cherry trees. Much of the intellectual discussion in The Cherry Orchard is distinctly influenced by Chekhov's wide reading in literature, philosophy, and the natural sciences, especially Darwin's Origin of the Species (first published only some forty years earlier) and Marxist and socialist philosophy (though Chekhov himself was not himself a member of any revolutionary movements).

Chekhov had initially intended his last play to be a comedy, a vaudeville in fact, and though he may have given up that last idea he still subtitles his play A Comedy in Four Acts. Unfortunately for Chekhov, the most common reaction to the play was typified by his wife: "by the fourth act I burst out sobbing". Stanislavsky, the play's director, decided to interpret the play as a drama, against Chekhov's wishes. The debate over whether the play is in fact a comedy or a drama still goes on to this day. The initial reception of the play ranged from the indifference of Maxim Gorky, who thought the play's story to be completely insignificant, to the loathing of Ivan Bunin, who attacked the play for being unrealistic in its depiction of both the central aristocratic family and the outrageously oversized cherry orchard. But it was also praised as one of Chekhov's best works, and possibly his best play. The Russian Symbolist poets saw the play as a narrative poem mourning the loss of beauty in the world, and thus saw Chekhov as a kindred spirit.

The Bolsheviks would interpret the play as a harbinger of the 1917 revolution, because of Trofimov's speeches (many of which were censored by the Tsarist regime for the 1904 perfomance). Many noticed and applauded its new formal innovations in terms of the use of the empty stage, lost dialogue and its mixing of comic and tragic elements. But many saw the play as undeniably tragic, focusing on Ranevsky's downfall as the important element of the story. Chekhov's critical reception outside of Russia was mixed, partly due to translation problems and the play's unique "Russian-ness", which Chekhov himself foresaw as being impossible for any foreign audience to overcome. Many foreign readers and viewers faulted the play for being unheroic, negative, and devoid of plot. But no less a figure than George Bernard Shaw said that "hearing Chekhov's plays make me want to tear up my own", and Chekhov's drama has gained increasing acceptance and praise over the course of the last century.

Chekhov managed to attend The Cherry Orchard's opening night gala at the Moscow Arts Theatre on January 17th, 1904, his forty-fourth birthday. The night was also intended to celebrate his 25th year in literature; but the sight of the ill, dying Chekhov, now in the last stages of his disease, was not a cause for celebration. He remained in Moscow for the last few months of his life, finally succumbing to tuberculosis on July 1st of that same year, a few days after the The Cherry Orchard's first publication. More Help The Seagull : Anton Chekhov : 9780868198989 Add to basket Add to wishlist Description In a letter to his friend Alexei Suvorin, in 1895, Chekhov wrote that he was working on a new play: "A comedy -- three females, six males, four acts, a landscape (a view of a lake), much conversation about literature, little action, and five tons of love".

"The Seagull" is Chekhov's extraordinary gathering of a group of bruised and incandescent dreamers who cannot, no matter how they try, get what they want. It is also one of the masterpieces of theatre about theatre; an exploration of how telling stories and coining symbols interacts with life. Benedict Andrews' adaptation brilliantly reawakens the spirit of Chekhov's great play. Set in a world which is at once Russia then and Australia now, this new version is charged with all the good faith and natural poetry of Chekhov's original. (6 male, 3 female). show more Product details 134.62 x 205.74 x 7.62mm | 90.72g Publication date taganrogcity.com | Chekhov Legacy Chekhov Legacy Theater Chekhov Legacy Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), was a Russian playwright and short-story writer. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia. In 1879, Chekhov moved to Moscow, where he studied medicine.

He began his literary career writing short humorous stories and sketches for popular newspapers and comic sheets to help support his needy family. Chekhov graduated from medical school and became a doctor. His scientific background and his experiences as a country doctor contributed to the realism of his mature stories. In 1890, Chekhov studied the Russian state prisons on Sakhalin Island in the Pacific Ocean. He described the terrible living conditions there in Sakhalin Island (1893-1894). While practicing as a doctor, he had his first full-lenght play, Ivanov (1887), produced, to a disappointing reception. He took up serious themes with such stories as "The Steppe" (1888) and "A Dreary Story" (1889); later stories include "The Black Monk" (1894) and "Peasants" (1897). He converted his second long play, The Wooden Demon (1889) into the masterpiece Uncle Vanya (1897). His play The Seagull (1896) was badly received until its successful revival in 1899 by K.

Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre. He moved to the Crimea to nurse his eventually fatal tuberculosis, and there he wrote his great last plays, Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), for the Moscow Art Theatre. Books with Anton Chekhov's autographs from the collection of Taganrog Memorial Chekhov Museum In 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress who played leading roles in several of his plays that were staged by the famous Moscow Art Theater. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler , Germany in 1904. Chekhov's plays, which take a tragicomic view of the staleness of provincial life and the passing of the Russian gentry, received international acclaim after their translation into English and other languages, and as a short-story writer he is still regarded as virtually unmatched. Most of his characters are decent and sensitive. They dream of improving their lives, but most fail, victims of their sense of helplessness and uselessness. Scholars believe Chekhov probably was criticizing the backwardness he saw in Russian social and political life under the czars.

But he never preached at his readers or audiences, preferring to present highly individualized characters with specific problems. Chekhov's influence on the modern short story and the modern play was immense. Among his innovations were his economical husbanding of narrative resources, his concentration on character as mood rather than action, his impressionistic adoption of particular points of view, his dispensing with traditional plot, and, as Charles May declared in an essay collected in A Chekhov Companion, his use of atmosphere as "an ambiguous mixture of both external details and psychic projection." In all these regards Chekhov had an immediate and direct impact on such Western writers as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson; indirectly, most major authors of short stories in the twentieth century, including Katherine Anne Porter, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, and Raymond Carver, are in his debt. Among Western playwrights, George Bernard Shaw was the first to grasp Chekhov's intentions and techniques, and he modeled his own "Heartbreak House" (1919) on The Cherry Orchard.

Yet it was not until the mid- 1920s that Chekhov caught on with English audiences, becoming one of the trio of major dramatists regularly performed in British playhouses, along with Ibsen and Shakespeare. His influence on English playwrights other than Shaw, up to and including Harold Pinter, has been less direct, but no less powerful. In American drama the notion of "subtext" that Chekhov originated informs many of the works of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, and William Inge. Chekhov's methods also anticipate Bertolt Brecht's technique of "Vefreundungseffekt" ("estrangement") and Samuel Beckett's dramatic stasis and derealization. Contemporary Writers on Chekhov: There is never a time when I'm not reading or rereading a story or play by Chekhov. - Cristina Garcia In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote.

That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. - William Faulkner I'm crazy about Chekhov. I never knew anyone that wasn't. - Woody Allen Chekhov! Chekhov! Chekhov! - Tennessee Williams, asked to name his favorite authors Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me. - Eudora Welty If I have to choose between Chekhov and most hip-hop, I'll go with Chekhov. - Cornel West Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world. - Francine Prose, "Learning from Chekhov" Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared.

It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote - for few, if any, writers have ever done more - it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish. - Raymond Carver Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer. - Ernest Hemingway Who better to learn from than Chekhov, who is here plainly in front of us to teach, as we can be plainly in front of him to learn. - Romulus Linney, Story Quarterly, 37, 2001 Anton Chekhov, 1897 Chekhov7: The Cherry Orchard: A Play about Nothing | zhiv Posted by: zhiv | March 22, 2009 Chekhov7: The Cherry Orchard: A Play about Nothing So this is another first impressions piece. I wasn’t as focused or fired up reading TCO as I was reading Uncle Vanya, but I did a better job and the play seemed more accessible than Three Sisters.

I’d like to catch up and figure out the timing and response to TCO as late Chekhov, but again, it’s part of the fun around here to record some doofus stuff off the top of my head as I go along. First off, and probably it’s because my reading effort wasn’t especially stellar, I wasn’t so deeply moved by the play, and wasn’t very responsive to its obvious poignancy. I wasn’t as detached (and confused) as I was reading Three Sisters, but it didn’t generate the same level of feeling, of revelation and emotional intensity, of “the soul gaining an astonishing sense of freedom,” (Woolf) as I did in reading Vanya or when I read and saw The Seagull in 2007. But that’s probably just me. CRC (Chekhov Reading Club) charter member Older Igor had a different experience, and I’ll always take every opportunity to mention that he’s playing at a much higher level, as he’s breezing through the plays and stories in his native Russian. His response was classic, sent under the heading “Model Homes are now open!”: Cherry Orchard Estates. Distinctive river-front summer retreats.

I want to sob, but then I realize that I live in a subdivision myself. As for my own gateway to this play, the easiest way in is to remember that this is a blog about nothing, and it’s always simplest to keep track of “nothing” as it appears and functions in any text at hand. TCO is full of nothings, it’s about nothing, nothing happens, and it’s about both stasis and change and the refined and attenuated practice of the Core Philosophy (“Do Nothing”) by the 19th century gentry. After reading Gooseberries and remembering The Seagull, it’s interesting to note Chekhov’s use of the objective correlative here, which is more significant than bitter berries or a dead bird. The cherry orchard itself, objective correlative par excellence, is notably artificial, gnerated and husbanded by a refined clss of men (although this is never firmly established, but is there any chance that it’s a natural, wild cherry orchard? I don’t think so.) It is unspeakably beautiful, shimmering and ethereal in the imagination, the perfect marriage of man and nature in its beauty.

And so too, Chekhov seems to say, is the class and its manners that created and nurtured it. But with the end of the century and new social movements very much in progress, its time is up. I’ll mention here that the objective correlative started making sense to me because Richard Yates was obsessed with it, and I’m still not sure that I’ve got it quite right. Whatever the emotional connection between objects/symbols and the story and characters might best be called, Chekhov seems to use it repeatedly with his flawless touch, and I’d like to pin it down a bit better. But I digress. I’m always on the lookout for “nothings,” which are inevitably pregnant and meaningful, and there are plenty of them here. When you have a cast of characters who have done nothing for their entire lives, it tends to come up, and the way that Chekhov walks the line between bourgeois stasis and paralysis and his “just do it,” “stay busy and fight off the despair” mode is amazing stuff. The issue goes to the heart of my interests and concerns, and the riches are definitely here to be found in this play, all sorts of wonderful nuggets strewn about with the master’s great artistry.

Another thing I look for (try it some time!) is direct statements about self-deception, which I think I wrote about most clearly in a follow-up post on Silas Lapham. That provides a nice segue, but first I’ll mention that there was at least one crystal clear mention of self-deception here that I have to dig out. So, segue: WD Howells, the author of Silas Lapham, led the way in introducing the Russian novelists and writers to American readers, as Turgenev’s move to Paris and publication in the west started things off. After reading Uncle Vanya I turned for some reason to Virginia Woolf, who was writing at the height of a Russian craze that was in part generated by the 16 volume translation of Chekhov by Constance Garnett, and the whole world of the transmission and reception of these texts to the English Language audience is the type of thing that interests me. Introducing her essay on Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Woolf starts off by talking about the ascendence, necessity, and omnipresence of the Russian novelists.

But 50 years earlier Howells, in his role of novelist-critic and realist, first wrote about Turgenev and was a pioneer, with the novels of what Chekhov called “the holy sixties” appearing on his watch. So I am extremely curious to delve into the basics of this transmission–and I think I know where to start looking–, but my question at the moment is just how aware of Howells himself was Chekhov? What I guess I’m looking for are the antecedents of Lopakhin, the successful businessman who is the son of a serf, who buys the cherry orchard at auction, fails to step up and marry Varya, and who gives the order to cut down the orchard at the conclusion. Lopakhin is a rather straightforward man of business, and I’m sure there are all sorts of models for him, but as the story was taking shape he did remind me vaguely of Silas Lapahm, although only in a vague way.

But then a most curious thing occurs at the midpoint of the final act, something of an odd afterthought or coda, a final glimmer of Chekhov’s comic intentions before the final focus on loss and the end of a world. Pischik runs in and describes “a most extraordinary incident”: Some Englishmen arrived at my place and found some kind of white clay in the ground… (He gives away money and chatters on a bit.) I leased them the land with the clay in it for twenty-four years… and now, please excuse me, I’ve no more time… And so TCO ends, rather oddly and ironically, with one of its lesser characters receiving a temporary stay in the financial endgame that serves as the crux of the play.

And my immediate question was whether this bit about the clay and the Englishmen (“What sort of Englishmen?” someone asks) isn’t a nod at Howells and Silas Lapham, where the whole story is started, and Lapham makes his way as a man of business and forerunner of Lopakhin, because he lives on land in Vermont that has clay that’s useful for creating “mineral paint.” Just a minor question, and I suppose my larger note is that Howells makes a nice companion to Chekhov in a midlife reading project. They aren’t really “first impression” items, but I want to mention that I spent some time quickly going through Patrick Miller’s Chekhov in the Hesperus Brief Lives series, a relatively recent little volume that is concise and quite good, and it’s a bit clearer as a reference tool than Janet Malcolm’s book, which seems rather impressionistic now as I go back to it–but it was critical to getting started, and there’s still a lot of good stuff there. Reading the major plays has been an odd and unexpected turn, all started by our friend going to see Uncle Vanya in NYC.

What it does now, on a practical level, is that it throws the door on criticism and commentary wide open, as a whole lot of the action is focused on the “major plays” and a few of the most well-known stories. As I was going through Miller’s small volume it seemed as if there were more texts, stories and plays, that I knew rather than those I didn’t know, even if that’s not actually true–there’s still a long way to go, but we might be past the first full stage of Chekhov exposure and reference at this point. And you know, obviously, that it doesn’t take much to get me reading biography and criticism. I’ve been haphazardly glancing around as I’ve been going along, but getting through TCO now, I feel like it’s possible to dig in a bit further. So I want to note that this week, after finishing the play last weekend (but before finishing writing this up), I read what thus far has been the clearest and most luminous piece of criticism of Chekhov that I’ve encountered thus far, “Chekhov at Large,” by Boris Eichenbaum.

This relatively brief essay, written in 1944 at the 40th anniversary of Chekhov’s death, does a fantastic job of making clear the sources and progress of Chekhov’s antecedents, realism and technique, placing it in his medical training and scientific bent and showing how it was gradually enlarged to contain a broader world view. I’ll mention it again and quote from it as I jot down some thoughts on doctors and literature, which seems to be a pervasive issue in the reading I’ve been doing for awhile now, as I’ll try to follow that thread in my next post. Share this: Anton Chekhov: a celebration - Telegraph Culture Anton Chekhov: a celebration Charles Spencer applauds the fast and funny plays of Anton Chekhov, on the 150th anniversary of his birth By Charles Spencer 4:34PM GMT 14 Jan 2010 January 29 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov and the big guns are being wheeled out to celebrate.

Hampstead Theatre is organising a week-long jubilee for Chekhov with a series of shows and discussions about the great writer with Eileen Atkins, Simon Russell Beale, Richard Eyre, Michael Frayn, David Hare and Penelope Wilton among those taking part. Meanwhile the BBC is going to town, at least in its radio output, with a range of programmes on Radios 3, 4, and 7, including documentaries, essays, dramatisations of his short stories and productions of his greatest plays. Ben Whishaw, Michael Pennington – who is also co-hosting the Hampstead season – Daniela Nardini, Jasper Britton, Sarah Miles and Anne-Marie Duff are among those involved. If Chekhov is looking down on all this from somewhere above, he will be surprised. Shortly before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44, he predicted that he would be remembered for perhaps seven and a half years. One of the first things that strikes you about Chekhov is just how much he achieved in a short life dogged by illness.

He wrote about 600 short stories, including several masterpieces of the genre, like the superb “Lady with Lapdog”; he produced one-act comic vaudevilles at astonishing speed – he claimed to have written one of them, Swan Song, about a drunken old actor, in just an hour and five minutes; and in his final years, he wrote the quartet of great plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, on which his reputation now largely rests. And he did all this while training and then practising as a doctor. He was a great man as well as a great writer. He survived an unhappy childhood with a bigoted and violent father, a grocer in the southern Russian port of Taganrog who went bankrupt. Family life was so full of beatings and fanatical religious observance that Chekhov later remarked that he had been so crippled by tyranny and lies that he really had no childhood at all. As a doctor he endured a terrible journey across Siberia to the convict colony on Sakhalin Island off Russia’s east coast and did interviews with each of its 10,000 inmates before writing a report.

He worked to relieve famine in Russia, cultivated the soil, treated peasants, did much to forestall a cholera epidemic, conducted a district census and opened three schools and a post office. One wonders how he found time to write. He was not an overnight success when it came to the theatre and it took him time to find his distinctive style. The early plays, Platonov and Ivanov, concentrate on one central character rather than creating the richly observed ensemble of his mature masterpieces. They also incline to the melodramatic. He frequently declared that he “was absolutely not a dramatist” and threatened to give up the theatre, not least after the premiere of the first of his mature masterpieces, The Seagull, in 1896. “I have been going to the theatre for more than 20 years,” wrote one critic, “and I have witnessed a great many flops… but I can remember nothing resembling this.” By the third act the hissing had become “general and deafening” and the show was called “a dizzying flop” and “a stunning fiasco”.

“If I live to another 700 years I shan’t have a single play put on,” Chekhov told a friend. “Enough is enough. In this area I am a failure.” Yet two years later, The Seagull was revived at the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre and became a huge hit. In The Seagull, as Michael Frayn, who is one of Chekhov’s finest translators, has so acutely observed, Chekhov had achieved something unprecedented in theatre. The play has two writers among its characters, the unhappy Konstantin, struggling with new forms of drama, and the successful but slick short-story writer Trigorin. “The extraordinary trick of the play is that all around the two writers we see the very life that they are failing to capture,” Frayn writes. “What Chekhov is doing in fact is something formally impossible – to look behind the simplification and formalisation by which the world is represented in art and to show the raw confused flux of the world itself where nothing has its moral value written upon it, or for that matter its cause and effect, or even its boundaries or identity.” This strikes me as Chekhov’s greatest achievement.

As an author he is invisible, never apparently shaping his art to express his views, or coming up with a little nugget of a theme. In the best productions of his work, we forget that we are looking at art and seem to be in the midst of the messy, funny, sad chaos of life as we, and his characters, experience it. There are a lot of misconceptions about Chekhov’s plays. The first is that they are slow and deeply depressing, showing gloomy, idle Russians caught up in despair and often shooting themselves. In fact Chekhov emphasised that his plays were meant to be fast and funny and another of his masterstrokes is that feelings of profound despair, ennui and dissatisfaction are intermingled with scenes that are comic. At his best, he is sad and funny at the same instant. When Uncle Vanya attempts to shoot the brother-in-law he has come to despise and misses, not once but twice, it is for him a moment that summons up his overwhelming sense of failure and fatuity. But we, the audience, will laugh uproariously, even as we sympathise with him. This is not to suggest that Chekhov is a heartless writer.

He refuses to sit in judgment on characters and there is a palpable empathy in his depiction of their flawed personalities. The emotion, and the human behaviour in his plays, is deep and complex. The stoicism of the three sisters at the bitter end of their play, Sonya’s unrequited love for Astrov in Uncle Vanya and her longing for rest, the great scene of leave-taking at the end of The Cherry Orchard, in which the loyal steward Firs is left behind to die, are among the most heart-catching scenes in literature. Yet laughter, absurdity and sheer high spirits are never far away. A lot of nonsense is also talked about the “subtext” in Chekhov. All this really amounts to is that characters may be thinking and feeling something different from what they actually say, using words to conceal rather than reveal. But don’t we all do this? It is just another example of how Chekhov shows how people really behave, rather than how they normally behave in plays. Chekhov also shows us that the real truth about character emerges in such humdrum activities as eating, drinking and passing the idle hour, rather than through sudden twists of plot and speeches.

In short, he observes his beautifully drawn characters with the same dispassionate wisdom and insight that I suspect he also brought to his practice as a doctor. For my money he is second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of great dramatists. His output may be much smaller, his range far narrower, but there is a similarly profound understanding of what makes the human heart tick. The BBC’s Chekhov season runs from Jan 19 to 30 on Radios 3, 4 and 7. ‘A Jubilee for Anton Chekhov’, a series of readings and performances, runs at the Hampstead Theatre, London from Jan 18 to 23 Anton Chekhov - Modernism Lab Essays Anton Chekhov by Pericles Lewis In the plays of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), tragedy and comedy are inextricably intertwined. Although his major plays are suffused with an air of anxiety and pessimism akin to those of Henrik Ibsen , he insisted on calling The Seagull (1895) and The Cherry Orchard (1903) comedies.

He gave Uncle Vanya (1896) the non-committal subtitle “Scenes from Country Life,” and called Three Sisters (1900) a “drama.” Yet none of these plays is either conventionally comic or tragic. In particular, the central aspect of Aristotelian tragedy, the climactic action entailing reversal or recognition, seems absent from Chekhov’s plays. In general, his Russian gentry are in decline, but the decline is gradual and irreversible. They undergo various minor illuminations in the course of the plays but never a blinding recognition that could lead to a change of fortune. Chekhov, a doctor and the grandson of a serf, became famous as a story-writer before his first successes as a playwright. Doctors come and go in his plays, sometimes expressing wisdom and more often resignation. Generally seen by his compatriots as a naturalist, he was later interpreted by the Soviets as a chronicler of the rise of the bourgeoisie, the decline of the aristocracy, and the imminence of revolution (he died in 1904, the year before the first Russian Revolution).

However, this interpretation depended on an avoidance of Chekhov’s dramatic innovations, which changed the nature of plot and its relationship to character. The plot of Ibsen's first major play, The Seagull , is fairly conventional; Chekhov’s symbolism and self-conscious reflection on the nature of drama are the main features that distinguish this work from that of earlier realist and naturalist playwrights. In the last decade of his life, however, Chekhov wrote three masterpieces that increasingly resembled the symbolist drama of his fictional playwright Konstantin Treplev. One of the characters in The Seagull complains about a play within the play that "nothing happens”— a complaint that has been repeated by critics of Chekhov’s later plays. In them, he turns away from conventions like the love plot, the climactic final gunshot, even the main character; instead Chekhov explores “the drama of the undramatic.” [1] Like life itself, Chekhov’s plots generally lack resolution. The loaded pistol of his famous aphorism provides an example.

In Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the pistols go off, and if the first one wounds Lovborg in an unexpected way, the second provides a suitably dramatic climax. By contrast, in The Seagull, Konstantin attempts suicide between the first and second acts, and then finally succeeds in killing himself in the last scene. In Uncle Vanya, written a year later, Vanya wants to kill his brother-in-law Professor Serebriakov, a charlatan who has consumed all the money the family estate can produce. As Vanya complains, “For twenty-five years he’s been regurgitating other people’s ideas about realism, naturalism, all that bullshit.” At the end of the third act, Vanya, infuriated with the Professor, shoots at him twice, but misses. The shots do not result in any climactic action. Nothing changes. As Vanya observes in the fourth act, “Funny, isn’t it? I try to kill someone, nobody calls the police, nobody arrests me. Which means you all think I’m crazy.” Vanya thinks of killing himself with a vial of Dr. Astrov’s morphine, but Sonya convinces him to give the morphine back.

The Professor and his second wife return to Moscow, and everything on the estate returns to normal, except that the characters are more disillusioned than ever. In his last work, The Cherry Orchard, a minor character boasts in the second act, “I always carry a loaded pistol.” He brandishes the weapon too. Yet, as Chekhov announced proudly, “There’s not a single pistol-shot in the whole play.” [2] Chekhov’s plays move away from the focus on a central heroic figure. Instead of heroes or villains, the later plays tend to feature ensemble casts of characters who are neither particularly good nor particularly bad. In Three Sisters, the sisters are indeed heroines, but their actions are not typically heroic. Mainly, they endure. Throughout the play, the sisters dream of escaping their country estate and going to Moscow. Irina begs to be allowed to go at the end of the second and third acts.

Gradually, however, their brother gambles away the family fortune, and at the end of the play the oldest, Olga, realizes: “of course, I’ll never get to Moscow….” As Richard Gilman has observed, the sisters’ waiting to go to Moscow resembles the Vladimir and Estragon’s waiting in Samuel Beckett ’s Waiting for Godot (1952), written half a century later. Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable(1953), would end with the line “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Chekhov sounds the same theme of endurance. At the end of Uncle Vanya, Sonya recognizes that nothing in her life or her uncle’s will change and says: “You and I, Uncle Vanya, we have to go on living. The days will be slow, and the nights will be long, but we’ll take whatever fate sends us.” At the end of Three Sisters, Masha says “we have to go on living.” Like the realists and naturalists (and unlike his character Konstantin), Chekhov claims to represent the world as it is, without moral judgments.

Most of the climactic action in his works takes place offstage, often before the beginning of the play. What takes center stage is conversation. Not exactly, as Irina puts it in The Seagull, “one long speech,” however; in Chekhov’s plays there are many short speeches and many long silences, only occasionally punctuated by a longer monologue. Characters who do make lengthy speeches, about the environment, or the problem of work, or the future of Russia, usually retract or ironize them. Chekhov’s characters often talk past each other, as if they are not hearing one another. Some, like the old butler Firs, in The Cherry Orchard, are in fact deaf. Chekhov defended the dialogue in his plays on realistic grounds: “Things on stage should be as complicated and yet as simple as in life. People dine, just dine, while their happiness is made and their lives are smashed.” [3] Here, Chekhov claimed to be exposing the drama of everyday life, and he does so, but at the same time the effect of non-sequitur in his speeches prefigures the later absurdist plays of Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco.

Throughout Chekhov’s plays, any sort of resolution, comic or tragic, is deferred; he often presents courtships that go nowhere, instead of a conventional love plot. In The Cherry Orchard, the characters expect the successful businessman Lopakhin, the son and grandson of serfs, to propose to Varya, the adopted daughter of impoverished aristocrats. Yet, every time he is left alone with her he seems uneasy. By the end of the play, the family estate is sold to Lopakhin, and Chekhov seems to leave two possibilities open: a comic resolution in which Lopakhin marries Varya and the estate stays in the family, or a tragic one, in which the estate is destroyed for the sake of real estate development (a theme from Ibsen’s Master Builder). Yet, Chekhov resists every opportunity to dramatize this ending. Lopakhin meets with Varya, but instead of proposing he comments on the weather. Uncle Gayev plans to make a speech about the significance of the occasion, but the others dissuade him from speaking.

In the final scene, while axes are heard chopping down the orchard offstage, the comic figure Firs reappears; elderly and ill, he has been left behind by the family, who thought he had been taken to an old age home. He has been locked in the house, which is soon to be demolished. So, he lies down on the stage and waits—for someone to come back, or simply for death to come get him. The scene can be played tragically, but it works better as farce. This is one reason why Chekhov insisted on calling the play a comedy. The Cherry Orchard does not resolve itself in marriage, like a conventional comedy, but it deploys farce to come to terms with the modern failure of resolution. For this reason, Chekhov complained about the lugubrious naturalistic staging of his plays at Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, even though these performances made Chekhov famous. Although Chekhov’s representation of passing time, boredom, and silence can be justified in realist or naturalist terms, his plays continually gesture beyond the naturalistic theater, portending the disruption of naturalism in the twentieth century.

[4] ↑ Richard Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girous, 1974), p. 120. ↑ Quoted in James McFarlane, “Intimate Theatre: Maeterlinck to Strindberg,” Modernism 1890-1930, p. 519. ↑ Ilia Gurlyand, “Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov,” quoted in Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 203. ↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 184-187. The Three Sisters Essay - The Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov - eNotes.com The Three Sisters Essay - The Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov link Link The Three Sisters Anton Chekhov The following entry presents criticism on Chekhov's Tri sestry (1901; The Three Sisters).

See also Anton Chekhov Short Story Criticism, Anton Chekhov Drama Criticism, Gooseberries Criticism, and The Seagull Criticism. Considered to be one of Chekhov's most moving and sensitive dramas, The Three Sisters reflects the pervasive pessimism of its era. The play tells the story of the three Prozorov sisters who despise their small-town life in Russia. Though the women pine for the glamour of Moscow where they previously lived, they refuse to do anything to change their unhappy lives. Chekhov used the Prozorov family as an analogy for the futility and despair experienced by Russians of that era. Since its initial production, The Three Sisters has been widely acclaimed for its subtle artistry and insight. Plot and Major Characters The Three Sisters examines the lives of the Prozorovs, a Russian family who live in a provincial garrison town far from Moscow. The three sisters, Masha, Olga, and Irina, all long to return to Moscow and spend their time bemoaning their humdrum lives. As the male head of the family after their father dies, their brother Andrey is thought to be their only hope for a secure future.

But he spoils both his future and his sisters' by marrying Natasha, a greedy and vulgar woman who eventually forces the sisters to leave their own home. Rather than studying, Andrey spends his time gambling, while Masha, Irina, and Olga fail at jobs, marriage, and romance. At the end, as dreams are uniformly shattered, each sister ponders why life has brought them so much pain. Major Themes The Three Sisters, like Chekhov's plays of his later period, intertwines the mundane and the tragic. Chekhov focuses on the women's inability to be happy and their brother's staunch rejection of any promise in his life. But Chekhov is not above the use of humor to poke fun at the stubborn backwardness of his characters. The Three Sisters uses a subtle form of indirect action that, for Chekhov, mirrored real life. If reality is paced in a certain fashion, Chekhov reasoned, his plays should reflect that reality. Critical Reception In 1901 the Moscow Art Theater presented The Three Sisters. Early critics, especially Russian commentators, interpreted the play as yet another chapter in the ongoing saga of Russian landowners' demise.

Other criticism focused on a perceived lack of storyline and dramatic conflict in the work. Scholars have consistently pointed to the careful construction of the play. While The Three Sisters may appear static in print, it is complicated to perform. Because The Three Sisters, like Chekhov's other dramas, called for a performance style that was less grandiose and more given to inflection and allusion, a flamboyant production could easily obscure the intention of Chekhov's work. Fortunately, the noted director Konstantin Stanislavski, who directed Three Sisters at the Moscow Art Theater, developed a psychological, introspective dramatic style appropriate to Chekhov's plays. In later years The Three Sister's depiction of futility has caused Chekhov to be considered a precursor to dramatists of the Theater of the Absurd.

More Content: The Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov (hide) Leshy [The Wood Demon] (drama) 1889 Chayka [The Seagull] (drama) 1896 *Dyadya Vanya [Uncle Vanya] (drama) 1899 Tri sestry [The Three Sisters] (drama) 1901 Vishnevy sad [The Cherry Orchard] (drama) 1904 **Pyesa bez nazvaniya [That Worthless Fellow Platonov] (drama) 1923 Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem A. P. Chekhova (dramas, short stories, notebooks, diaries, and letters) 1944-1951 The Oxford Chekhov. 9 vols. (dramas and short stories) 1964-1980 *This work is a revision of the earlier drama Leshy. **This work was written in 1881. link Link SOURCE: A review of The Three Sisters, in The New Statesman, Vol.

14, March 13, 1920, pp. 676-77. [MacCarthy compares the characters and plot of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House to The Three Sisters and reviews an early production of The Three Sisters.] “What does Bernard Shaw know about ‘heartbreak’—gay, courageous, resilient, handy, pugnacious, indispensable man that he is?” I reflected as I walked slowly away from the Court Theatre, where the Art Theatre Company had been acting Tchekhov's play The Three Sisters. For I had been sitting three hours (or was it months?) in real “Heartbreak House”; not in a “Heartbreak House,” of which the roof, as in the case of one London music-hall, was sometimes rolled back, releasing all the stuffy used-up air, leaving the antics of humanity bare to the speculation of the stars; not in a house of which at least half the inmates were crackling and sparking with vitality like the most electric of cats, but in one where they were more like dying flies in a glue-pot. It was a queer notion Mr.

Shaw had of his own work when he thought he was writing in the spirit of Tchekhov; though we need not regret that he found as usual his inspiration in himself and created something individual and new. Indeed, that public criticism did not recognize a sharp discernment of actualities everywhere present in the fantastic implausibility of his characters shows, I fear, that public criticism is in an exceedingly feeble condition. What is Mr. Shaw's conception of “heart-break”?—a sudden disillusionment, cleansing and cutting as a flash of lightning. “Major Barbara,” the poet in Candida, the girl in Heartbreak House endure a sharp wretchedness, but not the misery that maims; presently they are not merely themselves again but twice as strong as before. Mr. Shaw's conception of such suffering is a price (sometimes it may be a high one) paid for freedom, but paid down at once on the nail and done with. “My heart is broken,” cries one character. “Then,” replies another, “You have lost happiness and found peace.” Moral pain is only life educating one, Man's will is his Kingdom of Heaven, are two root beliefs in Mr. Shaw.

He has a most penetrating eye for the odd substitutes for self-respect and happiness men and women will adopt; he rips them up—exposes them, laughing; but a victorious mockery produces a very different atmosphere from Tchekhov's. Nothing, indeed, can be further removed from it. Mr. Shaw's characters in Heartbreak House may be failures, but they carry off their failure, play their parts, with gusto; they remain amusing to themselves and others. They may, as a fact, be left high and dry with life rushing past them, but the spot where they stand is not sad, dim and slimy as the shores of Styx, where Tchekhov's characters, poor, inhibited, excitable creatures, their eyes fixed on a pearly streak of light on the horizon, wait and wait, wailing for waftage. Contrast the lines from Mr.

Shaw's play about heart-break quoted above with Masha's speech when her surreptitious affair with Colonel Vershinin comes to a huddled ending: “Grabbing at one's happiness and eating it in little bits and then having it suddenly taken away from one, makes one hard and vulgar.” We have had our English Tchekhov; his name was George Gissing. The Three Sisters reminded me of Odd Women; Gissing's long novels remind me of Tchekhov's short stories, spiritually and sociologically.

There is the same insistence on the deadly quarrel between sensitive refinement and poverty; both are impressed with the fact that often the best qualities in people make them helpless and unhappy; both have infinite pity for weak-winged aspiration; both believe that coarseness of fibre is the best outfit for life, refuse to be reconciled to that or to become cynical themselves, but lament it should be so; both seem to fix the blame in part on our civilisation, yet to both the trouble seems also to lie deeper than that, indeed in the texture of life itself; both always see peeping over the shoulder of the muse of tragedy the blank puffy face of the goddess, Anti-climax, with her idiotic, meaningless smile; to both the sweetest thing in life is that kindred spirits who feel and suffer from these things, should keep close to one another—yet chance is always tearing them apart; both understand the poignancy of the flatness of good-byes; in both hope is a torpid chrysalis, never quite dead—a touch and it stirs in its sluggish dream. … As I dived for my hat, when the curtain fell on The Three Sisters, an instantaneous memory-picture rose before me.

It was of a crowded upper room of a public-house. The air was hot and misty; shiny coppery faces like new pennies at the bottom of a basin of soapy water, loomed through the smoke of pipes and cheap cigars; a subscription “sing-song” was going on, interrupted from time to time by the crash of a glass or the squeal of a cuddled hoyden. By the side of the jingling, rowdy piano a young girl stood and sang. She had a sallow, swatty face, round shoulders, and gentle protruding eyes. She sang of a love which she would never know: two more years of work and a diet of sweets and pickles, and she would become a sour-smelling, toothless, anœmic draggletail. Why did this scene recur to me that moment so vividly? Thank you, my helpers and servers! Was it not in picture the story of the soul... (The entire section is 2245 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries.

Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers. On the Go Access link Link SOURCE: “To Moscow Again,” in The King of the Cats and Other Remarks on Writers and Writing, Second Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 84-90. [In the following essay, Dupee examines the stylistic and thematic limitations of Chekhov's work and the special demands that The Three Sisters places upon the performers.] “The profundity of Chekhov's works is inexhaustible to the actor,” Stanislavsky said. But under present theater conditions, Chekhov's profundity, like Shakespeare's, can involve liabilities, for audience and actors alike. Perhaps it was so even in the patriarchal days of the archetypal Moscow Art Theater, Chekhov's shrine. There... (The entire section is 1929 words.) Get Free Access link Link SOURCE: “Dreaming the Music,” in Fields of Play in Modern Drama, Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 79-101.

[In the following essay, Whitaker compares the musical elements of The Three Sisters with George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House and Paul Claudel's Break of Noon. ] You seem wide awake tonight as you settle into your seats and begin to scan the program, but you must be dreaming—for what director in his right mind would dare to run these three talky plays together in repertory? Yet there they are, spelled out in black on green: Three Sisters, Heartbreak House, and Break of Noon. And your ticket-stubs—M 12 and 13, just... (The entire section is 8359 words.) SOURCE: A review of Three Sisters, in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXX, No. 4, Winter, 1977-78, pp. 525-43. [In the following essay, Moss examines the subtle elements of Chekhov's character and thematic development.] In Three Sisters, the inability to act becomes the action of the play. How to make stasis dramatic is its problem and Chekhov solves it by a gradual deepening of insight rather than by the play of event.

The grandeur of great gestures and magnificent speeches remains a Shakespearian possibility—a diminishing one. Most often, we get to know people through the accretion of small details—minute responses, tiny actions, little gauze screens being... (The entire section is 7980 words.) SOURCE: “Chekhov and the Contemporary Theatre,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, September, 1981, pp. 357-66. [In the following essay, Hubbs discusses the various dimensions of themes and characterization in The Three Sisters.] In recent years we have seen a new appreciation of Chekhov's plays on the part of general audiences as well as students of drama. Directors have emphasized Chekhov's contemporary quality, and critics have attempted to define elements in his dramatic techniques that link him with Beckett, Pinter, and other contemporary playwrights. In this updating of Chekhov, the nature of his dramatic realism has been a subject of increasingly enlightened...

(The entire section is 5032 words.) link Link SOURCE: “Three Sisters; Or, Taking a Chance on Love,” in Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jean-Pierre Barricelli, New York University Press, 1981, pp. 61-75. [In the following essay, Kramer examines the role of love in The Three Sisters and the characters' reactions to their romantic entanglements.] For all the talk about Three Sisters, it is still extraordinarily difficult to determine exactly what the play is about. One prominent school places the emphasis on the sisters as inevitably ruined creatures. Beverly Hahn, for instance, speaks of the “inbuilt momentum towards destruction” in the sisters' world.1... (The entire section is 6011 words.) link Link SOURCE: “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests, and Three Sisters,” in Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jean-Pierre Barricelli, New York University Press, 1981, pp. 144-60.

[In the following essay, Karlinsky discusses the images of hunting and the forest throughout Chekhov's work and points to its significance in The Three Sisters.] In describing the domestic arrangements of her parents at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's daughter Aleksandra emphasized the major role that dogs and horses played in their day-to-day existence.1 Few people who live in the twentieth century find themselves in such close proximity to such large numbers of these two... (The entire section is 6824 words.) SOURCE: “The Three Sisters,” in Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays, Yale University Press, 1983, pp. 75-116. [In the following essay, Peace discusses the creative genesis of The Three Sisters. ] Chekhov began work on The Three Sisters in August 1900. It was the first play he wrote specifically for the Moscow Arts Theatre after their earlier successes with The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. The play received its premiere on 27 January 1901, with Olga Knipper, soon to be Chekhov's wife, playing the role of Masha.

The Three Sisters is described as a ‘drama in four acts’. In Act I of Uncle Vanya Chekhov... (The entire section is 19588 words.) SOURCE: “Prisoners of Their Plots: Literary Allusion and the Satiric Drama of Self-Consciousness in Chekhov's Three Sisters,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, December, 1989, pp. 485-501. [In the following essay, Tufts praises the satirical elements of The Three Sisters.] Chekhov signals his audience from the very beginning. As the curtain rises on a set divided into a “drawing room with columns, behind which is seen a ballroom,”1 a set which is itself a stage within a stage, we see the Prozorov sisters, each dressed in a costume that is emblematic of her situation in life and her view of herself, and each fixed in the posture that... (The entire section is 8681 words.)

Question: Who wrote the plays "The Seagull", "The Cherry Orchard", "The Three Sisters" and "Uncle Vanya"?
Answer: Chekhov