"swnsg10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chekhov Anton)

enthusiastically feted, but the burden of his growing fame was
beginning to be very irksome to him, and he wrote wearily at this
time that he longed to be in the country, fishing in the lake, or
lying in the hay.

His next play to appear was a farce entitled "The Boor," which he
wrote in a single evening and which had a great success. This was
followed by "The Demon," a failure, rewritten ten years later as
"Uncle Vanya."

All Russia now combined in urging Tchekoff to write some
important work, and this, too, was the writer's dream; but his
only long story is "The Steppe," which is, after all, but a
series of sketches, exquisitely drawn, and strung together on the
slenderest connecting thread. Tchekoff's delicate and elusive
descriptive power did not lend itself to painting on a large
canvas, and his strange little tragicomedies of Russian life, his
"Tedious Tales," as he called them, were always to remain his
masterpieces.

In 1890 Tchekoff made a journey to the Island of Saghalien, after
which his health definitely failed, and the consumption, with
which he had long been threatened, finally declared itself. His
illness exiled him to the Crimea, and he spent his last ten years
there, making frequent trips to Moscow to superintend the
production of his four important plays, written during this
period of his life.

"The Sea-Gull" appeared in 1896, and, after a failure in St.
Petersburg, won instant success as soon as it was given on the
stage of the Artists' Theatre in Moscow. Of all Tchekoff's plays,
this one conforms most nearly to our Western conventions, and is
therefore most easily appreciated here. In Trigorin the author
gives us one of the rare glimpses of his own mind, for Tchekoff
seldom put his own personality into the pictures of the life in
which he took such immense interest.

In "The Sea-Gull" we see clearly the increase of Tchekoff's power
of analysis, which is remarkable in his next play, "The Three
Sisters," gloomiest of all his dramas.

"The Three Sisters," produced in 1901, depends, even more than
most of Tchekoff's plays, on its interpretation, and it is almost
essential to its appreciation that it should be seen rather than
read. The atmosphere of gloom with which it is pervaded is a
thousand times more intense when it comes to us across the
foot-lights. In it Tchekoff probes the depths of human life with
so sure a touch, and lights them with an insight so piercing,
that the play made a deep impression when it appeared. This was
also partly owing to the masterly way in which it was acted at