Word: chekhovisms
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...Three Sisters. If the Hemingway hero was the man to whom things happened, the Chekhov hero and heroine are people to whom nothing happens. His Sisters exist in a sad purgatory of might-have-beens and never-will-bes. Masha (Kim Stanley), married at 18 to a bureaucratic clod, alternately tongue-lashes him as a clownish bore and lapses broodily into tears. Irina (Shirley Knight) has made a hysterical religion of work. Olga (Geraldine Page) is a kind of involuntary nun of duty, serving joylessly as the local school headmistress. The cultured, well-educated sisters are too weak to demand...
...Chekhov's comic irony to show how sorry his characters feel for themselves. It is his genius for finding the human pulse to make playgoers feel sorry for them too. But if a masterpiece may have a flaw, it is perhaps that Chekhov tries to make pathos do the work of tragedy. If the sisters and the men around them draw their breath in pain, they rarely raise a finger against fate. They are small sinners and great talkers. Masha comes closest to making a breakthrough to life by falling in love with an unhappily married colonel (Kevin McCarthy...
From there he moves to analyses and reminescences of famous and less famous roles in his experience. His quick studies of Hamlet, Richard II, Cassius, Leontes,. The School for Scandal, and Chekhov are both practical and perceptive, helpful cribs for students as well as for actors. Particularly useful for this Loeb Shakespeare Festival is Gielgud's discussion of Lear, including in an appendix Granville-Barker's notes on the play, from the Old Vic production...
While in Shushenskoe, Lenin married a fellow exile, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a thin, hot-eyed girl with carroty hair and many of the strong-minded qualities of the young women in the pages of Chekhov and Turgenev. The honeymooners spent their time translating The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism, by the British Socialist sages Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Of necessity, every revolutionary needed a pen name, and Vladimir chose his: Lenin, presumably from the Lena River, the longest and one of the coldest in Siberia...
...this early play, written at the age of twenty-one, Chekhov was already a master of comic technique though he strongly foreshadows the sulking self-mockery in his later pieces. Resemblances to later plays in A Country Scandal may be partly due to the able work of Chekhov's translater Alex Szogyi. Szogyi judiciously pruned the manuscript down from six to two and a half hours of curt speeches in contemporay idiom, broken by endless exits and entrances. The "few liberties" which the translater took "for the sake of fashioning a coherent play" almost certainly improved on the original, bringing...