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

the Artists' Theatre in Moscow. The theme is, as usual, the
greyness of provincial life, and the night is lit for his little
group of characters by a flash of passion so intense that the
darkness which succeeds it seems well-nigh intolerable.

"Uncle Vanya" followed "The Three Sisters," and the poignant
truth of the picture, together with the tender beauty of the last
scene, touched his audience profoundly, both on the stage and
when the play was afterward published.

"The Cherry Orchard" appeared in 1904 and was Tchekoff's last
play. At its production, just before his death, the author was
feted as one of Russia's greatest dramatists. Here it is not only
country life that Tchekoff shows us, but Russian life and
character in general, in which the old order is giving place to
the new, and we see the practical, modern spirit invading the
vague, aimless existence so dear to the owners of the cherry
orchard. A new epoch was beginning, and at its dawn the singer of
old, dim Russia was silenced.

In the year that saw the production of "The Cherry Orchard,"
Tchekoff, the favourite of the Russian people, whom Tolstoi
declared to be comparable as a writer of stories only to
Maupassant, died suddenly in a little village of the Black
Forest, whither he had gone a few weeks before in the hope of
recovering his lost health.

Tchekoff, with an art peculiar to himself, in scattered scenes,
in haphazard glimpses into the lives of his characters, in
seemingly trivial conversations, has succeeded in so
concentrating the atmosphere of the Russia of his day that we
feel it in every line we read, oppressive as the mists that hang
over a lake at dawn, and, like those mists, made visible to us by
the light of an approaching day.


CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL WORKS OF ANTON TCHEKOFF

PLAYS

"The Swan Song" 1889
"The Proposal" 1889
"Ivanoff " 1889
"The Boor" 1890
"The SeaGull" 1896
"The Tragedian in Spite of Himself" 1899
"The Three Sisters" 1901
"Uncle Vanya" 1902
"The Cherry Orchard" 1904