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Five Plays: Ivanov / The Seagull / Uncle Vanya / The Three Sisters / The Cherry Orchard

Anton Chekhov

Paperback | Pages: 336 pages

Rating: 4.18 | 5741 Users | 159 Reviews

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Original Title:	Иванов / Чайка / Дядя Ваня / Три сестры / Вишнёвый сад
ISBN:	0192834126 (ISBN13: 9780192834126)
Edition Language:	English

Narrative As Books Five Plays: Ivanov / The Seagull / Uncle Vanya / The Three Sisters / The Cherry Orchard

I don't think that this translation is the one that I was familiar with and can't recommend any one translation in particular.

Chekhov has a had a strange fate in English in that his plays - judging by revivals of Ivanov - seem to be more valued than his short stories. It seems as though Chekhov's plays have tapped into a particular British nostalgia which doesn't help us to understand his plays in their own context. Chekhov wasn't a solidly middle-class Edwardian Englishman reflecting on a world that had vanished after WWI, he was the grandson of a serf who through the business acumen of his grandfather was able to study to become a Doctor in late Tsarist Russia, an era of abrupt and uneven violent economic and social change.

During his medical training Chekhov wrote some one act comedies but moved on to become a writer of short stories. Later in his career he began to write plays as a sideline and his relationship with the actress Olga Knipper was important here. Reading the plays in chronological order you can feel the slow development of his style and voice, Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard are competent pieces but don't in my opinion come close to being as powerful as his best short fiction. Then again perhaps I don't have much of a taste for the theatrical. Though I'm oddly haunted that at the centre of Three Sisters is the maligned sister-in-law!

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Title	:	Five Plays: Ivanov / The Seagull / Uncle Vanya / The Three Sisters / The Cherry Orchard
Author	:	Anton Chekhov
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 336 pages
Published	:	July 9th 1998 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published 1887)
Categories	:	Plays. Drama. Classics. Cultural. Russia. Fiction. Literature. Russian Literature. Theatre

Rating Based On Books Five Plays: Ivanov / The Seagull / Uncle Vanya / The Three Sisters / The Cherry Orchard

Ratings: 4.18 From 5741 Users | 159 Reviews

Article Based On Books Five Plays: Ivanov / The Seagull / Uncle Vanya / The Three Sisters / The Cherry Orchard

This collection of stellar plays was my first experience with Chekhov yet most certainly not my last. The fact that he was writing these over 100 years ago is totally unfathomable. His works have a certain freshness that transcends the period. Of course today, his old homage, that if a gun is present in the first act of a Chekhov play it will go off in the last, is quite cliched, it was relatively original in its own time. In fact, I thought the underlying philosophies of Chekhov's plays were a

I love reading Chekhov's short stories. I love reading plays. I should love reading Chekhov's plays, right? Apparently not. These completely failed to interest me. I actually fell asleep several times while trying to get through this book. I'll stick with the short stories.

I suspect this edition of Chekhov's major plays is basically an update of the tattered old paperback I just read with its superb introduction by Robert Brustein, who expertly anatomizes Chekhov's mastery of understated stagecraft and downplayed melodrama. But I don't reread Chekhov every once in a while for introductions, which I generally avoid, or afterwords, which I generally avoid, or blurbs on the dust jacket. Chekhov for me is the master of the day-to-day dullness and frustrations of life,

This book consists of five different plays. As I read each one, I just wrote down my thoughts:Ivanov: a disillusioned landowner is fed up with his life. Really, he just over-thinks everything and has given up on trying to be happy. There is a lot of fussing over Ivanov and his choices - ever since his marriage to a "Jewess" who gave up her family and religion to be with him, he's gone emotionally downhill. There is a lot of men crying in this play and if I had to give it a theme or a point, I

"Of most importance was that he was always sincere, which is a great thing for a writer; and thanks to his sincerity Chekhov created new, totally new forms of writing." - Leo Tolstoy "I THINK that in Anton Chekhov's presence every one involuntarily felt in himself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one's self; I often saw how people cast off the motley finery of bookish phrases, smart words, and all the other cheap tricks with which a Russian, wishing to figure as a European, adorns

I must confess that classical Russian authors scare me. I believe that is why my Dostoevsky collection and most of my Tolstoy have remained untouched for all these years. When I reached for Chekhov I didnt know what to expect. The only thing I was certain of was that I wanted to see The Sea Gull in London. The plan was to actually read just that one play and carry on with my life. However, after reading the foreword by Robert Brustein I just couldnt and I am glad I didnt."You're a clever man:

Well, of course everyone says that Chekhov's plays are fantastic. Everybody knows it. But actually reading them, I experienced something very powerful. It's the kind of thing where, on finishing a play, I say to myself, "Now that's literature!"You can probably guess the reasons why; the same things people always say. He is very gentle and compassionate (to his principal characters, anyway). He is incredibly subtle. He knows how to build a mood, and sometimes that mood takes on an indescribable