Word: chekhovisms
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...CHEKHOV (669 pp.)-Ernest J. Simmons-Atlantic-Little, Brown...
...small and vulnerably human. In an era where others were con cerned with the conflict of good v. evil, Anton Chekhov saw mainly the conflict of simplicity v. pretension, and found the consequences depressing. In his writing, he refused to pass explicit judgment, and observing life, he found no meaning but only a mystery. In flamboyant 19th century Russia, choked with morality tales, nourished on progressive theories of history, lashed with messianic messages, Chekhov, who lived from 1860 to 1904, was ahead of his literary time, a lonely, gentle, restrained man who remains an ambiguous figure even in this exhaustive...
...practicing doctor. Chekhov had tuberculosis for 20 years and did nothing about it until it was too late. One of history's most prolific story writers, Chekhov spent months trying to write a novel, never got much past Chapter 3. A lively ladies' man ("I was so drunk I took bottles for girls, and girls for bottles"), he was skittish about marriage and invited his sister Masha on his honeymoon...
Damaged Soles. "In my childhood." Chekhov used to say. with typically accurate restraint, "there was no childhood." His grim father was the self-taught son of one of the rare serfs in Russia who had been able to buy his family's freedom. He kept an anemic grocery store on the Sea of Azov, enrolled his son in a tailoring school as an economic practicality, once shouted at him. "You can't run about so much because you'll wear out your shoes." When a rat drowned in a vat of mineral oil in his store, Father...
...Boor, a farce on love and money, was amusing--and not all the credit for this goes to Chekhov. In a play which portrays such comic explosiveness of temperament and such undercutting (and yet tolerance) of sentiment, it was an intellectual pleasure to see amateurs capture so many of the emotional innuendoes. The stylization of Joanne Koch Schmelzer, her movements, her voice, her expression, were something to behold. Harry Knopf, as Luca, an old man, weak and frail, was very fine (and was an example of Knopf's versatility for those of us who remember...