Word: chekhovisms
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...accessible to Westerners. Moreover, it requires at least a crude grasp of the technicalities of Go (for which a certain number of charts are provided). But in this book as in the Orient, a little discipline is the way to enlightenment. Any reader who can respond, for example, to Chekhov's plays will rise to the austere, autumnal nobility in Kawabata's tale...
AFTER SEEING a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, George Bernard Shaw said, "I feel as if I want to tear up all my plays and begin all over again." Soon afterwards he began writing Heartbreak House. Although he subtitled the remarkable work "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on an English Theme," the played turned out to be a quintessentially Shavian treatment of "cultured, leisured" British society before World...
...drawingroom setting borrowed from Chekhov, Shaw's delightful but useless creatures engage in some of the master's most lively and trenchant prose. Not hampered by the limited arena of action, they spend quite an action-packed three hours on the stage. Yet their witty opinions sometimes seem a substitute for more complete characterization, and the constant action sometimes seems effected by too improbably contrivances. Though the atmosphere is consistent, the politics of the play are occasionally confused. It is perhaps this mixture of virtue and vices that have caused critics to make diametrically different judgments upon Heartbreak House. While...
...THAT the movie is uniformly gray. Chekhov intended his plays to be comedy of a sort, and the comic moments are not lost in the film. Vanya's senile mother reads her pamphlets on the emancipation of women and smokes cigarettes (which seems to encompass her idea of emancipation). Astrov gives a stirring rendition of the weather report when Vanya interrupts his seduction of Irina--an example of the Chekhovian principle that the words we exchange in conversation don't mean a damn thing. And Vanya, the prototype useless intellectual, constantly brings a smile of recognition with his temper tantrums...
...highest praise goes to Irina Kupchenko's Sonya. I remember at my first viewing of the film feeling that this Sonya was too young and pretty to be Chekhov's Sonya: I envisioned a cowish sort of girl--hardworking, trusting, basically provincial and unstimulating. The Sonya in the film is so captivating that I couldn't imagine why Astrov did not immediately fall in love with...