Word: chekhovisms
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Though one was mainly a novelist and storyteller and the other a born play wright, Turgenev is sometimes regarded as a precursor of Chekhov. But even the similarities between the two great Russians are deceptive. Chekhov drew a bitingly comic profile of the follies that his provincial characters are prey to; yet he shared their pain. Turgenev fired off comic volleys that riddle his provincial characters' vanity and pretension; but when his people bleed, he casts a cold and worldly eye upon the scene. In Chekhov, longing is the arrow of love, usually un requited; in Turgenev, idle fantasy...
Even the lightest children's tales display Singer's sources: the Bible, mystic writings of Jewish cabala, Tolstoy and Chekhov. "I never forget," he maintains, "that I am only a storyteller." This insistence on the unities of plot and form has made Singer the greatest living 19th century writer and perhaps the only Nobel prizewinner with no pretensions whatever. The lively old figure, with eyes the color of the Israeli flag, dressed as for a formal walk on Warsaw's main street in 1928, has become a familiar one to shopkeepers of Manhattan's scruffy West...
Unfortunately the film's screenplay could have used a little Chekhov-or Gorki-as well. Too many lines are overly explicit ("We're like children forgotten in the nursery of a house on fire"); others recall the parody of Woody Allen's Love and Death ("You are choked by boredom"). Mikhalkov could also use some of Renoir's toughness of mind and poetic genius. The Rules of the Game dared to dissect contemporary France; A Slave of Love is essentially a safe nostalgia piece. Where Renoir merged theme, style and narrative into a seamless whole, Mikhalkov...
Three Plays for Bureaucrats--one-act jobs by Chekhov, Shaw and O'Casey at 3 Church St., Harvard Square, Friday and Saturday...
...never fear. Chekhov will always be in the best of hands: his own and those of audiences who can never resist his appeal for co-authorship or deny the stinging reproof of their own desolated lives...