Word: chekhovisms
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...17th, 1896, when the first production of The Seagull opened in the State Theater of St. Petersburg, it was a resounding disaster. The play was poorly understood by its actors and poorly acted. Hissed down by the audience, it was dismissed by critics as inept and absurd Playwright Anton Chekhov, confounded by the disaster, left the theater after the second act, vowing never to write a play again...
Luckily, one member of the audience saw potential in the play, and mounted a second production. Critic-playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was at that time organizing the Moscow Art Theater with a partner and talked Chekhov into giving The Seagull a second chance. Their 1898 production of the play proved an enormous critical and commercial success, and led to the collaboration that established the Art Theater as one of the most prestigious in the world. It also inspired Chekhov to write his three greatest dramatic masterpieces. Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard...
...fate of The Seagull suggests, the very nature of Chekhov's art has often made his plays difficult to produce. Critic Keith Neilson has noted that Chekhov saw reality not as a series of dramatic climaxes, but as a mundane process of day-to-day living in which the crucial events happen unobtrusively in the background. Thus, though The Seagull includes a failed and successful suicide, a seduction, an abandonment, and the death of an infant, all of these melodramas occur offstage--mostly between the third and fourth acts. What we are shown instead is the residue of these events...
...another level, Moscow Circles is a literary odyssey. Erofeev and his fellow-passengers engage in some hilarious literary polemics tracing alcoholism in German and Russian authors (Chekhov's last words: "Let's have some champagne!"), even as his own journey takes on a mythico-literary cast. Erofeev is Sheherezade, avoiding one thousand and one train fares by telling obscene stories to chief Ticket Inspector Semyonych. He is Oedipus, parrying the ribald riddles of a drunken Sphinx. He is Dante descending through the Moscow circles of Hell, his Virgil a bottle of Stolychnaya. And in the tragic denouement, Erofeev becomes Christ...
...characterizations are swift and telling. In Bardon Bus, for example, a young woman falls in love often and, like the heroine of Chekhov's The Darling, identifies herself completely with each successive man in her life. "She takes up a man and his story wholeheartedly. . . Next time you see her she'll be in deep, going to fortunetellers, slipping his name into every other sentence; with this mention of the name there will be a mushy sound to her voice. . . Then comes the onset of gloom, the doubts . . . She will get drunk, and sign up for rolfing, swim...