Chekhov a visit to friends book6/24/2023 We shall see all earthly evils, all our sufferings, vanish in the flood of mercy which will fill the whole world, and our life will become peaceful, gentle, sweet as a caress. ‘We shall hear the angels, we shall see the heavens covered with stars like diamonds. That is why Sonya’s silly speech at the end of Uncle Vanya is so unself-conscious and so moving. They are a collective farewell, and that is what moves us.’ The implicit comparison with a Greek chorus – time-honoured emblem of dramatic unity – is extraordinarily revealing. It is a farce because the people are a disordered chorus, who have lost their gods and invent themselves. Of The Cherry Orchard Pritchett says: ‘The matching of time present and time past gives the play the density and intricacy of a novel the play is the most novelised of Chekhov’s plays because the people talk it into existence and because no one listens. The cast of Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard or Uncle Vanya communicate by talking to their own images, which somehow coalesce into dramatic movement. ![]() Communing with the feel of his places and people, Pritchett perceives that Chekhov’s utter lack of sentimentality, even of ‘sentiment’, comes from the way he lets people present their own version of themselves. Short as it is, it says everything, both about the man and his art, giving the taste of Chekhov more subtly and comprehensively than the longer and laborious books about him. This gives his book its originality as close criticism, which is never self-preoccupied or over-insistent. Himself one of the best of modern short-story writers, Pritchett not only understands from the inside the story’s own process, but how it can lead to a play. No more than his hero does Pritchett contrast or separate the two. Pritchett shows how simply and naturally Chekhov gravitated to the stage while remaining all the while a story-writer. In what is by far the best study yet of the ways his stories and plays work and got written, V.S. Shakespeare’s begin and in a sense end as stories Henry James could not write for the stage, but produced tales and novels which have taken to it in a way which would have startled and perhaps discomposed him, even though he claimed in his Notebooks, after his own theatrical debacle, that the disaster had at least helped him to find the key which would fit ‘both the narrative and the dramatic lock’. The provenance of Chekhov’s plays is not unique. She wrote to him asking what was the meaning of life, and he replied that life was like a carrot, which was a carrot, ‘and no more is known.’ Like all stage people, Olga showed off about life, and Chekhov loved her deeply but a little derisively. The play necessarily goes against every public production of it, as Chekhov must have known and it must have amused him, as he was amused by the natural theatricality of the half-German actress Olga Knipper, whom he eventually married. How Chekhov would have hated ‘audience participation’! His plays turn the theatre from a public into a private place, where the actors are alone as if each were playing his own story, and the audience as if they were reading it. Socrates in the Symposium says that comedy and tragedy are the same and tragic farce is a cliché today, sealed off by all the usual theatrical devices. ![]() Like the young lawyer of the story or Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, he didn’t want to get involved: he preferred to disappear into the woodwork of life, not stand out in the responsibility of limelight. ![]() What he meant was that he didn’t like the stage, though he was happy with the money and reputation it brought him. When Stanislavsky called The Cherry Orchard ‘a truly great tragedy’ Chekhov muttered that it was not even a drama – it was a farce. He hated the building itself and used to sit in gloomy silence at the back when the actors and director were discussing how to play a scene. Theatre is always itself, self-contained in the speeches of the actors and actresses, and Chekhov wanted his plays to run away into life like water through a sieve, rather than remain insulated on the stage with its careful climaxes and anti-climaxes. Feeling a bit ashamed of himself, but not much, the young man gets up and sneaks off into the night.Ĭhekhov’s plays emerge naturally from his stories, which is why he always disliked the attempts by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko to turn them into ‘theatre’. Naturally cynical and self-absorbed, the young man is nonetheless sentimentally attracted to the daughter. He will marry their daughter and somehow get them out of the mess. It is likely that The Cherry Orchard was suggested by Chekhov’s story ‘A Visit to Friends’, which he did not include in the collected edition, and which concerns a family in dire financial straits (Chekhov knew them) who pin their hopes on a shrewd and successful young lawyer friend.
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