I could have been Schopenhauer: Anton Chekhov’s plays
SPbU Representative Office in Spain invites you to an online lecture "I could have been Schopenhauer: Anton Chekhov’s plays". The lecture will be given by Nina Scherbak, candidate of philology.
What would have been the fate of Russian and world theatre if Anton Pavlovich Chekhov had not started writing plays in the 1870s?
In 1889, Chekhov published his first play, «Ivanov», in the magazine «Severny Vestnik», in which the main character was not a hero but an ordinary man, breaking the rules of dramaturgy at that time.
"The Seagull, one of Chekhov’s most famous works, written between 1895 and 1896, was not well received by critics after its premiere at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1896. It was not until 1898, after a production by Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky and Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art and Public Theatre (Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre), that the play became a major success".
Chekhov completed the play "Uncle Vanya" in 1896. The play does not follow the rules of dramatic action as such, with its exposition, climax and resolution, but is imbued with a certain subtext that defines its artistic significance.
In the 20th century, Chekhov wrote his famous plays "Three Sisters" (1900) and "The Cherry Orchard" (1903), which only confirm the writer as a master of psychoanalysis with elegant language, able to walk a fine line between comedy and tragedy.
The originality of Chekhov’s plays was noted by his contemporaries already during the first productions. At first, it was perceived as Chekhov’s inability to create a consistent dramatic movement. Reviewers spoke of a lack of defined scenes, the play felt drawn out, passive, the dialogue muddled, the composition scattered and the plot — weak.
Increasingly, theatre critics accused Chekhov of introducing unnecessary mundane details into his plays, thus violating all the laws of stage action. For the author himself, this was the point: "On stage, the hero and heroine are supposed to be spectacular. But in real life we hardly shoot each other, hang ourselves or declare our love every minute. And we don’t have clever things to say every minute. Things on stage should be as complicated and yet as simple as in life".
Lecturer
Nina Shcherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU — Russia’s first university.