Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich

Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860–1904), Russian dramatist, the one best known outside Russia. He came of humble parentage, but graduated as a doctor from Moscow University in 1884, and always thought of himself as more of a doctor than a writer. Well known for his short stories even during his student days, he was early attracted by the theatre, and his first plays were one-act comedies—The Bear (1888), The Proposal (1889), The Wedding (1890)—for which he always retained an amused affection. His first full-length plays, Ivanov (1887) and The Wood-Demon (1889), were unsuccessful, as was The Seagull (1896) when performed at the old-fashioned Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg (now the Pushkin Theatre, Leningrad); it had nothing in common with the plays currently popular and was incomprehensible to actors trained in the old traditions. Chekhov might have given up the theatre entirely had not Nemirovich-Danchenko persuaded him to let the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre revive The Seagull. The production was a success, and was followed by Uncle Vanya (1899) (a revision of The Wood-Demon), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904), in all of which Chekhov's wife Olga Knipper played leading parts. Chekhov died shortly afterwards, at the height of his powers.

His plays portray the constant attrition of daily life and the waste, under the social conditions of Old Russia, of youthful energy and talent. Yet at the same time they contain a note of hope for the future. This hopefulness seems to accord with Chekhov's own view of his plays, but not with Stanislavsky's, who wrote that he wept when he first read The Cherry Orchard. However one interprets the plays, they demand a subtlety of ensemble playing which was not available in Russia until the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre. The forces at work in Chekhov's dramas are those which produced the Russian Revolution, and the great speech by the student Trofimov at the end of Act II of The Cherry Orchard—the celebrated ‘All Russia is our garden’—is not only a concise review of then recent Russian history, but an astonishingly accurate prediction of the Revolution itself.

As far as can be ascertained, the first of Chekhov's plays to be acted in English was The Seagull (Glasgow Repertory Theatre, 1909, and London Little Theatre, 1912). The Stage Society was persuaded by Shaw to produce The Cherry Orchard in 1911 and Uncle Vanya in 1914. These early productions failed, but helped to make Chekhov's work known to actors and critics. Three Sisters was produced in London in 1920, but the first production to be commercially successful was The Cherry Orchard, brought to London in 1925 by Fagan from the Oxford Playhouse. Even more successful was a series of productions by Komisarjevsky at the Barnes Theatre, which finally naturalized Chekhov in England. The early unfinished play Platonov, first produced in Russia in the 1920s, was seen in London in 1960, and as Wild Honey, in a translation by Michael Frayn, at the National Theatre in 1984 (NY, 1986). The Moscow Art Theatre played Chekhov in Russian on various visits to London, the first in 1928.

America's introduction to Chekhov was in Russian, Alla Nazimova appearing in The Seagull in 1905. In an English translation, this play was produced by the Washington Square Players in 1916, but American interest in Chekhov dates from the visits of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1923 and 1924, and subsequent American productions have been strongly influenced by Stanislavsky.

There have been a number of translations of Chekhov's plays into English. The standard acting versions for many years were those of Constance Garnett (1923), which have frequently been used as the basis of new adaptations. The Penguin Classics published versions of The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, and Ivanov by Elisaveta Fen. All Chekhov's plays are contained in the first three volumes of the Oxford Chekhov, in translations by Ronald Hingley based on the definitive Moscow edition of 1944–51.