Word: chekhovs
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...giants in poetry. The novel reached lofty heights with Goncharov, Gogol, Turgenev, and others--and a level unsurpassed in any other country or time with Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Some of these wrote for the theatre too, but the chief dramatists were Griboyedov, Ostrovsky, Gorky, and -- above all -- Anton Chekhov...
...Although Chekhov is Russia's supreme playwright, he did not devote the bulk of his efforts to the theatre. He was a physician, but spent most of his time turning out a stream of short stories--a field that paid well and paid quickly, important factors for Chekhov, who had a large family to support. In a life restricted to forty four years by the ravages of tuberculosis, he penned short stories totalling, I believe, close to a thousand. At any rate, he is universally considered Russia's greatest short-story teller, and by many the foremost practitioner...
Compared with this, his theatrical output was rather small. His eminence and influence have come, really, from only four plays--the last four: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. It is not correct, as often claimed, that Chekhov became interested in the theatre only in his last years. In his youth, in fact, he enjoyed quite a reputation as an actor in both professional and non-professional undertakings, which gave him a good deal of practical knowledge of the stage...
Besides a batch of one-act plays, mostly light "vaudevilles," Chekhov wrote a total of nine full-evening, four act plays. Of the first two, penned when he was 18, we know only the titles: The Fatherless, and Laugh It Off If You Can. At 21, he wrote the sprawling but remarkable Platonov, which turned up only long after his death, in the Soviet period. In his late twenties, he turned out Ivanov, a flawed but great and vastly underrated work capable of packing a tremendous wallop in performance; and the tentative, transitional The Wood Demon, which later also provided...
This individuality, which was both Babel's genius and his death warrant, comes through best in his tales of old Odessa. In them, Chekhov's melancholy, Maupassant's detachment and Gogol's grotesque wit seem to fuse into the unmistakable Babel voice. It is a voice that can be heard most simply and clearly in You Must Know Everything, the title story of the collection. Considered to be his earliest known fiction, the story was discovered in manuscript and published in the Soviet Union...