Word: chekhovisms
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...trouble started, Kerr thinks, nearly 80 years ago, when Ibsen, later abetted by Shaw and Chekhov, renounced melodrama and fancy-dress intrigues and ushered in a drama of photographic realism and socially significant content directed at an audience of intellectuals. Like any fresh theatrical cycle, Critic Kerr feels, the one Ibsen introduced gave new vitality to the stage of its time, but unlike the Greek or Elizabethan cycles, it reached its height in its originators, and has long since outlived its original artistic impulse: "The best new brains are feeding on dead tissue...
...funnier was the off-Broadway Shoestring Revue; and there were such other achievements as Jean Anouilh's gay and witty Thieves' Carnival, a stylish revival of Congreve's Way of the World, a sensitive revival-in Stark Young's admirable new translation-of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Despite much that is amateurish or pretentious, off-Broadway increasingly ministers to sound minority tastes; these days, indeed, dramatic caviar is only to be had cafeteria-style...
Direct Foundation grants have enabled refugees from behind the Iron Curtain to establish the Free University of Berlin. The East European Fund helps ex-Soviet refugees toward a full participation in American life, and the Chekhov Publishing House, established in 1951, has reprinted 42 Russian titles suppressed inside the Soviet Union in order to preserve democratic contacts for the Russian people...
Tolstoy always roused warring feelings in Chekhov. He could wholeheartedly write, "I have never loved anyone as much as him," but the sage's moralizing struck him as twaddle. "Old men have always been prone to see the end of the world," he wrote. "The hell with the philosophy of the great of this world...
...Black Sea exile at Yalta (the doctors ordered him out of the Moscow climate), Chekhov yearned for Moscow as wistfully as any of the famed trio in The Three Sisters. At 41, he made his last pass at life by marrying the actress Olga Knipper. He called her his "kitten," "pup," "lamb," and "my little crocodile," but she was really something of a big-name hunter out to bag the half-dead lion of the Russian theater. They scarcely lived together, but she was with him on a trip through Germany in 1904 when the final TB attack came...