Platonov is Anton Chekhov’s first play and, in ways that recall Georg Büchner’s unfinished work Woycek, has a rather curious history. It was written in the 1880s when Chekhov was 20, living with his parents on the edge of the Black Sea in the village of Taganrog. He abandoned it when it was rejected by the Maly Theatre in Moscow and the play was forgotten until someone discovered the manuscript in a bank vault in 1923, 19 years after Chekhov’s death. It was first published in 1933, under the title Fatherlessness, but it didn’t premiere in Russia until 1957.
By all accounts, the original is a sprawling mess that runs for more than five hours. As the Russian critic Mikhail Gromov put it: "The play was put together with a profligacy that was inexcusable, and conceivable only in the writer's youth. At one and the same time it is a drama, a comedy and a vaudeville; or more accurately, it is not any one of these three. But that said, it is chaotic in a way that bore a remarkable resemblance to the reality of Russian life."
For a play generally regarded as juvenilia, Platonov is produced more often than you might expect. A full-length version was a hit at the 2002 Avignon Festival, and (perhaps ironically, given its rejection a century ago) the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg toured its celebrated production, now a decade old, to London last year. It inspired a celebrated film, An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, made by Nikita Mikhalkov in 1976, which in turn inspired Trevor Griffiths’ 1990 play, Piano. Michael Frayn adapted it in 1984, and David Hare in 2001. Which isn’t doing too badly.
Like Woycek, which was found in Büchner’s papers after his early death and has been the subject of endless dramaturgical speculation, it might be Platonov’s very disorder, this unfinished quality, which has ensured its continuing life more than a century later. Or perhaps the age has caught up with Chekhov’s instinctive dramaturgy: it could be that the play’s mimetic sense, the chaos that Gromov remarked as so realistic, appeals to contemporary sensibilities.
Certainly a sense of contemporary realism illuminates the Hayloft Theatre Project’s extraordinarily beautiful production, its first at its newly opened warehouse theatre in Seddon. As with this company’s impressive debut, a passionate production of Franz Wedekind’s Spring Awakening - itself opening at Belvoir St later this year - Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov is elegantly poised between fidelity to the 19th century origin of the work and a very 21st century aesthetic.
Simon Stone’s adaptation cuts the play to a swift two and a half hours, with eight speaking parts instead of 20. I haven't read the original text, so I can’t comment on the details of the adaptation (in passing, it was brilliant to experience a Chekhov play with no idea of what was going to happen). But even so, Stone demonstrates – as he did with Spring Awakening – a sure instinct for filleting out essential action; and he certainly hasn’t messed with the original four act structure.
Platonov (Simon Stone) is the first of Chekhov’s disillusioned provincial intellectuals. He is the local school teacher, an idealist in his (very recent) youth, but already, in his late 20s, soured and bored by the comfortable meaninglessness of his life. He is fascinating because he is a totally passive protagonist: he permits events to happen, always taking the most yielding option, permitting the desires of others to dictate his flaccid will. For all his appearance of profundity, he is a man who takes on the colours of those around him. He most startling lack is an interior life: he is all surface, all reflection. And his inner emptiness has disastrous results for everyone around him.
None of the men in the play is immune to his charisma - even those he cuckolds still love him. And as he is desired by every woman in the play - even the chemistry student Maria, whom he treats with sadistic contempt - his love life is complicated. In a curious reversal of gender roles, he is the blank screen on which these women project their frustrated desires. He is a different lover to each of them – to Sascha, his wife, he is a faithful husband and father; to the general’s widow Anna (Meredith Penman) - an amazing character for the time, being both intellectually and sexually forceful - he is the image of a grand passion; to his former lover Sofia (Jessamy Dyer) he represents freedom from a stiflingly respectable marriage.
The play's melodramatic elements reflect the theatre of its time, but in this adaptation they are at once absurd and realistic, winding out of the tragic aimlessness of the characters' situations. Platonov demonstrates that Chekhov's gently merciless insights into human behaviour were there from the beginning: more than anything, it reminds you that in its less pleasant moments, life tends more to melodrama than to the grave horror of the tragic. Chekhov's enduring attraction lies in how he traces the absurd sorrow of modernity; he understood, with Oscar Wilde, that “the dreadful thing about modernity is that it puts tragedy into the raiment of comedy”.
The play is written with a youthful passion that makes it a peculiarly apt choice for this young company. Stone has collected a very fine cast, and elicits performances that impress on all levels - technical accomplishment, emotional accuracy, courage and nuance, the last being perhaps the most important element in acting Chekhov. They're so good that they rather show up Stone himself in the central role: although he is effective as Platonov, the original hollow man, he only just gets away with it, and certainly doesn't reach the lustre of his colleagues. The one problem with this production is that it's difficult to understand why Platonov is so irresistible: of course, it's understood that in a more exciting context he might not be desirable at all, that these destructive desires are frothed out of ennui; but as a man of surfaces he might glitter more fascinatingly. Stone might have to settle for merely being a brilliant adaptor and director.
Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay the actors is that they aren’t overwhelmed by the set. Evan Granger’s design, sensuously lit with an air of fin de siecle decadence by Danny Pettingill, is spectacular. The huge stage is defined by the ruinous walls of an elegant house, and filled with about a foot of water, in which are placed the tables, chaise lounges and standard lamps of a 19th century bourgeois home. The immediate effect is jaw-droppingly beautiful, but the set is much more than a gorgeous background: the water becomes an expressive part of the emotional action in ways that recall (forgive me, but it’s true) how water is used in Tarkovsky's films. As the actors wade across the stage, the ripples create a constant susurrus, and the splashing underlines the violence or gentleness of bodily gestures, just as the water's reflections suggest the deceptive, shifting surfaces of Chekhov’s characters.
It's an exquisite production and, as everyone is telling everyone else, you'd be mad to miss it. On a purely personal note, I'm delighted that it's happening on my side of town, and I'm hoping that all exciting theatre will now move westwards. The one disadvantage of the Hayloft space is the band that plays next door, mostly destroying Jared Lewis's delicate sound design all through the first half. Again, it's a tribute to the performers that they were both audible and unfazed, even weaving the ambient noise into the dialogue, and the band wasn't nearly as intrusive as it might have been.
I'm told that the space will be soundproofed soon: in the meantime, don't let a little unprogrammed music put you off. With Platonov, The Hayloft Project proves that it's the real thing, and that it's here to stay. This is a show that people will be talking about years from now.
bron
Posts tonen met het label platonov. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label platonov. Alle posts tonen
vrijdag 28 maart 2014
maandag 24 maart 2014
platonov and anton chekhov's proto-grunge philosophy - holly l. derr
Platonov and Anton Chekhov's Proto-Grunge Philosophy Holly L. Derr
December 5, 2013
Before he shot himself in the head, Kurt Cobain wrote a suicide note in which he said, "I still can't get over the frustration, the guilt and empathy I have for everyone. There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad."
Before they do their own fair share of shooting, the characters in Anton Chekhov's unfinished play Platonov (1878), an early dramatic work written while he was a schoolboy, say much the same thing—at least they do in Jay Scheib's adaptation titled Platonov, or The Disinherited, which recently ran at the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival. Chekhov never saw a production of the play, but it has had several high-profile adaptations and productions in the last few decades and is occasionally even staged in its full four-hour glory. The author used elements from this early piece—a drunk doctor, the decline of an aristocratic estate, extramarital affairs, and revenge by gunfire—freely in his later works, lending any performance a sense of déjà vu: If you've seen any Chekhov, you've seen parts of Platonov.
Platonov begins with the dinner party of a young widow named Anna (Judy Bauerlein). Her stepson Sergey (Jon Morris); his wife Sonya (Natalie Thomas); Platonov, a country school teacher (Mikéah Ernest Jennings); his wife Sasha (Ayesha Jordan); her sister Nicole, a doctor (Virginia Newcomb); and wealthy investor Porfiry Glagoyev (Todd Blakesley), are her guests. Porfiry wants to sleep with Anna, Anna wants to sleep with Platonov, Platonov wants to sleep with Sonya, and Nicole just wants to get drunk. Anna’s servant Jacob (Laine Rettmer) spends most of the play attempting to manage the chaos that ensues, and when Porfiry fails to save Anna’s estate, Jacob manages to convert her sobriety into success by buying it herself.
Scheib's adaptation of the play, which freely alludes to its author's dramatic oeuvre, is post-modern because of the connections it makes to the world of rock and roll and specifically, grunge. Thankfully, these connections are not aesthetic but rather philosophical: Drugs, sex, alcohol, and even the sound of a guitar (played live) serve to amplify a Chekhovian worldview, but there is no plaid and all of the actors appear to have washed their hair.
Turns out, it's not much of a leap. The central characters in this play are at a turning point in their lives. They can't figure out how they got where they are. They are obsessed with whether it is too late to change course, and convinced that their potential has gone to waste, are rededicating themselves to living fully and in excess. They will woo whom they want, screw whom they want, drink and do coke as much as they want, and not apologize for it. They are living the spirit of punk as defined by Cobain himself: "Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want."
Though some points of connection—Sonya's tuberculosis might remind hardcore Cobain fans of his chronic bronchitis and Chekhov fans of his death from the same disease—are too esoteric for the average audience member, they are not incidental, nor are they a "concept" in which the director simply lays one world down on top of another. The marriage of Chekhov's world with Cobain's works because at the center of both is an overwhelming sense of capital-A Alienation.
Platonov's Porfiry Glagoyev like Cobain, suffers from an "ability to feel [that] is too great to ever possibly endure." In fact it makes him "so fucking sad" that he has a heart attack. Porfiry, who is slightly older than the other characters, sees civilization's downfall in our ever-increasing demand, to paraphrase Smells Like Teen Spirit, that someone better entertain us because we are here now:
Today there’s there’s just this pathetic little desire to get what you want and be gratified somehow. But Nobody really sacrifices for real anything really. Nobody feels really within a frame of real feeling and so no one dares to really love and feel real even real fucking and that really feeling loved hard sideways feeling. You know?
The characters in Platonov are alienated from their jobs (the doctor drinks too much to preserve anyone's health) and economic situations (the widowed Anna does nothing to prevent her estate being sold out from under her). They are alienated both from their pasts (Platonov, now a mere schoolteacher, was once a promising intellectual and artist) and their futures (Sonya settled for safety in her marriage but now cannot bear the boredom she foresees). They are alienated from their own feelings and use alcohol to try to get in touch with them, the result being the kind of selfish indulgence seen only in addicts and rock stars.
In the site-specific production of the WOW Festival, Schieb made the theme of alienation literal by limiting the audience's view of the performance. Neither the stage nor the seating was raked, making it difficult to see the live action for everyone except those in the first row. Scheib himself stood on stage with a camera which projected footage live to a screen that everyone could see. For some scenes, the actors went inside a room with only a small window and the audience could see only that at which Scheib pointed the camera. The result was reminiscent of the voyeurism of reality TV, in which the audience watches something presumably private being made [selectively] public.
Platonov Jay Scheib Anton Chekhov adaptation HowlRoundAs with reality TV, the camera's control over the narrative complicates the question of authorship, a question that mirrors not just the seeming post-structuralism of the piece but also the existential debate at the heart of the drama. Just as the audience wonders whether these are Chekhov's characters or Scheib's and imagines what's happening that we can't see, the characters ponder whether following one's passions is even possible or whether the endings to their stories have already been written.
I wish the use of the camera and the obstructed views had evolved as the story unfolded—as it was, the frustration of not being able to see the live action eventually overshadowed my interest in the experience. However, though actual emotional connection to the characters was inhibited by the verfremdungseffekt, close-ups of people enduring both pain and ecstasy did ensure that the audience's experience was as visceral as it is upon hearing the music of Kurt Cobain, whose sound Rolling Stone described as "a grenade detonating in your car radio."
In this adaptation, the titular character of Platonov is one of the least interesting. Though most of the other characters are in love with him, I was never quite sure why. The most interesting character is Jacob: in Chekhov a male servant, in Scheib's version a lesbian who rose to fame as an opinion-maker but managed to drink away her fortune. Jacob shared Cobain's inability to manage success, but unlike Cobain, her suicide attempt failed and at the beginning of the play, she is sober and putting the pieces of her life back together, working whatever jobs she can to pay the bills. In true Chekhovian fashion, by the end of the play she is the owner of an estate that its aristocratic owners mismanaged into bankruptcy.
It's not the sort of ending that makes one feel that everything is going to be all right for everyone, but it's a better ending than Cobain saw. Scheib's Platonov, therefore, leaves open the possibility of recovery—of a life lived fully but without dependence on substances to feel and to really live. Cobain himself said, "Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self esteem,” but he never stopped struggling with addiction. Perhaps Jacob has more in common with Cobain's wife Courtney Love, who said of herself, "I'm a survivor. At least that's what everyone tells me.
- See more
December 5, 2013
Before he shot himself in the head, Kurt Cobain wrote a suicide note in which he said, "I still can't get over the frustration, the guilt and empathy I have for everyone. There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad."
Before they do their own fair share of shooting, the characters in Anton Chekhov's unfinished play Platonov (1878), an early dramatic work written while he was a schoolboy, say much the same thing—at least they do in Jay Scheib's adaptation titled Platonov, or The Disinherited, which recently ran at the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival. Chekhov never saw a production of the play, but it has had several high-profile adaptations and productions in the last few decades and is occasionally even staged in its full four-hour glory. The author used elements from this early piece—a drunk doctor, the decline of an aristocratic estate, extramarital affairs, and revenge by gunfire—freely in his later works, lending any performance a sense of déjà vu: If you've seen any Chekhov, you've seen parts of Platonov.
Platonov begins with the dinner party of a young widow named Anna (Judy Bauerlein). Her stepson Sergey (Jon Morris); his wife Sonya (Natalie Thomas); Platonov, a country school teacher (Mikéah Ernest Jennings); his wife Sasha (Ayesha Jordan); her sister Nicole, a doctor (Virginia Newcomb); and wealthy investor Porfiry Glagoyev (Todd Blakesley), are her guests. Porfiry wants to sleep with Anna, Anna wants to sleep with Platonov, Platonov wants to sleep with Sonya, and Nicole just wants to get drunk. Anna’s servant Jacob (Laine Rettmer) spends most of the play attempting to manage the chaos that ensues, and when Porfiry fails to save Anna’s estate, Jacob manages to convert her sobriety into success by buying it herself.
Scheib's adaptation of the play, which freely alludes to its author's dramatic oeuvre, is post-modern because of the connections it makes to the world of rock and roll and specifically, grunge. Thankfully, these connections are not aesthetic but rather philosophical: Drugs, sex, alcohol, and even the sound of a guitar (played live) serve to amplify a Chekhovian worldview, but there is no plaid and all of the actors appear to have washed their hair.
Turns out, it's not much of a leap. The central characters in this play are at a turning point in their lives. They can't figure out how they got where they are. They are obsessed with whether it is too late to change course, and convinced that their potential has gone to waste, are rededicating themselves to living fully and in excess. They will woo whom they want, screw whom they want, drink and do coke as much as they want, and not apologize for it. They are living the spirit of punk as defined by Cobain himself: "Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want."
Though some points of connection—Sonya's tuberculosis might remind hardcore Cobain fans of his chronic bronchitis and Chekhov fans of his death from the same disease—are too esoteric for the average audience member, they are not incidental, nor are they a "concept" in which the director simply lays one world down on top of another. The marriage of Chekhov's world with Cobain's works because at the center of both is an overwhelming sense of capital-A Alienation.
Platonov's Porfiry Glagoyev like Cobain, suffers from an "ability to feel [that] is too great to ever possibly endure." In fact it makes him "so fucking sad" that he has a heart attack. Porfiry, who is slightly older than the other characters, sees civilization's downfall in our ever-increasing demand, to paraphrase Smells Like Teen Spirit, that someone better entertain us because we are here now:
Today there’s there’s just this pathetic little desire to get what you want and be gratified somehow. But Nobody really sacrifices for real anything really. Nobody feels really within a frame of real feeling and so no one dares to really love and feel real even real fucking and that really feeling loved hard sideways feeling. You know?
The characters in Platonov are alienated from their jobs (the doctor drinks too much to preserve anyone's health) and economic situations (the widowed Anna does nothing to prevent her estate being sold out from under her). They are alienated both from their pasts (Platonov, now a mere schoolteacher, was once a promising intellectual and artist) and their futures (Sonya settled for safety in her marriage but now cannot bear the boredom she foresees). They are alienated from their own feelings and use alcohol to try to get in touch with them, the result being the kind of selfish indulgence seen only in addicts and rock stars.
In the site-specific production of the WOW Festival, Schieb made the theme of alienation literal by limiting the audience's view of the performance. Neither the stage nor the seating was raked, making it difficult to see the live action for everyone except those in the first row. Scheib himself stood on stage with a camera which projected footage live to a screen that everyone could see. For some scenes, the actors went inside a room with only a small window and the audience could see only that at which Scheib pointed the camera. The result was reminiscent of the voyeurism of reality TV, in which the audience watches something presumably private being made [selectively] public.
Platonov Jay Scheib Anton Chekhov adaptation HowlRoundAs with reality TV, the camera's control over the narrative complicates the question of authorship, a question that mirrors not just the seeming post-structuralism of the piece but also the existential debate at the heart of the drama. Just as the audience wonders whether these are Chekhov's characters or Scheib's and imagines what's happening that we can't see, the characters ponder whether following one's passions is even possible or whether the endings to their stories have already been written.
I wish the use of the camera and the obstructed views had evolved as the story unfolded—as it was, the frustration of not being able to see the live action eventually overshadowed my interest in the experience. However, though actual emotional connection to the characters was inhibited by the verfremdungseffekt, close-ups of people enduring both pain and ecstasy did ensure that the audience's experience was as visceral as it is upon hearing the music of Kurt Cobain, whose sound Rolling Stone described as "a grenade detonating in your car radio."
In this adaptation, the titular character of Platonov is one of the least interesting. Though most of the other characters are in love with him, I was never quite sure why. The most interesting character is Jacob: in Chekhov a male servant, in Scheib's version a lesbian who rose to fame as an opinion-maker but managed to drink away her fortune. Jacob shared Cobain's inability to manage success, but unlike Cobain, her suicide attempt failed and at the beginning of the play, she is sober and putting the pieces of her life back together, working whatever jobs she can to pay the bills. In true Chekhovian fashion, by the end of the play she is the owner of an estate that its aristocratic owners mismanaged into bankruptcy.
It's not the sort of ending that makes one feel that everything is going to be all right for everyone, but it's a better ending than Cobain saw. Scheib's Platonov, therefore, leaves open the possibility of recovery—of a life lived fully but without dependence on substances to feel and to really live. Cobain himself said, "Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self esteem,” but he never stopped struggling with addiction. Perhaps Jacob has more in common with Cobain's wife Courtney Love, who said of herself, "I'm a survivor. At least that's what everyone tells me.
- See more
trailer platonov - tsjechov
Münchner Kammerspiele 2009
dinsdag 18 maart 2014
anton tsjechov - biografie
[Taganrog (R) 1860 - Badenweiler (D) 1904]
Anton Pavlovic Tsjechov werd geboren in het zuiden van Rusland als zoon van een kleinhandelaar , die hem streng en vroom grootbracht. Toen het winkeltje failliet ging, vluchtte de vader naar Moskou; Anton ging in Moskou geneeskunde studeren en moest zijn familie onderhouden. Dit deed hij door kleine stukjes te schrijven voor humoristische tijdschriften. Tsjechov wijdde zich meer aan de literatuur dan aan zijn dokterspraktijk, maar zijn beroep zal hem wel geholpen hebben bij het stellen van nuchtere diagnoses in zijn literaire werk. Kort vóór 1890 ontstonden Tsjechovs eerste grote verhalen, waarvan 'De steppe' het belangrijkste is.
In 1890 besluit Tsjechov het gevangeneneiland Sachalin te bezoeken; hier legde hij omvangrijk statistisch materiaal over dwangarbeiders en bannelingen aan (10.000 kaarten). Dit resulteerde in de documentaire studie Ostrov Sachalin (De reis naar Sachalin, 1895 in boekvorm), een objectief historisch document, dat de Russische samenleving verbijsterde en dat tot geringe hervormingen heeft geleid. Deze reis naar Ruslands gevangenishel wakkerde Tjechovs belangstelling voor sociale problemen aan. Na zijn reis koopt hij ten zuiden van Moskou een landhuis waar hij samen met zijn familie gedurende de jaren '90 heeft gewoond. Hier kan hij het leven op het platteland observeren en sociale activiteit aan de dag leggen (gratis medische behandeling van de boeren, strijd tegen cholera, bouw van dorpsscholen). Hier schrijft Tsjechov veel van zijn rijpste verhalen. Het boerenleven beeldt hij nuchter uit in Muziki (De boeren, 1897), Novaja daca (De nieuwe villa) en V ovrage (In het ravijn). Hier schrijft hij zijn eerste drama Cajka (De meeuw), dat in 1896 wordt opgevoerd in Sint-Petersburg en een flop wordt, maar succes kent in het Moskouse Kunsttheater. Dit leidde tot vruchtbare samenwerking met dit theater, ook voor de stukken Djadja Vanja (Oom Wanja, 1900), Tri sestry (Drie zusters, 1901) en Visnëvyj sad (De kersentuin, 1904). In 1901 trouwde Tsjechov met een van de vertolksters van zijn stukken Olga Knipper .
Tsjechov deelde de illusies van de populisten niet, ook niet de visie van de liberalen op 'de kleine daden', en evenmin Tolstojs leer van de zelfvervolmaking. Hij koesterde sympathie voor de studentenbeweging, stond aan de zijde van Dreyfus en diens verdediger Zola, en sloot vriendschap met Gorkij en Lev Tolstoj; Tolstoj leerde hij kennen in de Krim, waar Tsjechov in verband met zijn slechte gezondheid (tbc) een landhuis (in Jalta) had gebouwd. In 1902 protesteerde Tsjechov samen met Korolenko tegen de uitsluiting van Gorkij uit de Academie.
De revolutie van 1905 heeft Tsjechov niet meer meegemaakt. Hij stierf in Badenweiler, een kuuroord in het Zwarte Woud, en hij werd begraven in Moskou.
Tsjechov schreef meer dan 400 korte verhalen, zo'n 70 grotere, een dozijn eenakters en drama's en een 8 delen tellende correspondentie.
Anton Pavlovic Tsjechov werd geboren in het zuiden van Rusland als zoon van een kleinhandelaar , die hem streng en vroom grootbracht. Toen het winkeltje failliet ging, vluchtte de vader naar Moskou; Anton ging in Moskou geneeskunde studeren en moest zijn familie onderhouden. Dit deed hij door kleine stukjes te schrijven voor humoristische tijdschriften. Tsjechov wijdde zich meer aan de literatuur dan aan zijn dokterspraktijk, maar zijn beroep zal hem wel geholpen hebben bij het stellen van nuchtere diagnoses in zijn literaire werk. Kort vóór 1890 ontstonden Tsjechovs eerste grote verhalen, waarvan 'De steppe' het belangrijkste is.
In 1890 besluit Tsjechov het gevangeneneiland Sachalin te bezoeken; hier legde hij omvangrijk statistisch materiaal over dwangarbeiders en bannelingen aan (10.000 kaarten). Dit resulteerde in de documentaire studie Ostrov Sachalin (De reis naar Sachalin, 1895 in boekvorm), een objectief historisch document, dat de Russische samenleving verbijsterde en dat tot geringe hervormingen heeft geleid. Deze reis naar Ruslands gevangenishel wakkerde Tjechovs belangstelling voor sociale problemen aan. Na zijn reis koopt hij ten zuiden van Moskou een landhuis waar hij samen met zijn familie gedurende de jaren '90 heeft gewoond. Hier kan hij het leven op het platteland observeren en sociale activiteit aan de dag leggen (gratis medische behandeling van de boeren, strijd tegen cholera, bouw van dorpsscholen). Hier schrijft Tsjechov veel van zijn rijpste verhalen. Het boerenleven beeldt hij nuchter uit in Muziki (De boeren, 1897), Novaja daca (De nieuwe villa) en V ovrage (In het ravijn). Hier schrijft hij zijn eerste drama Cajka (De meeuw), dat in 1896 wordt opgevoerd in Sint-Petersburg en een flop wordt, maar succes kent in het Moskouse Kunsttheater. Dit leidde tot vruchtbare samenwerking met dit theater, ook voor de stukken Djadja Vanja (Oom Wanja, 1900), Tri sestry (Drie zusters, 1901) en Visnëvyj sad (De kersentuin, 1904). In 1901 trouwde Tsjechov met een van de vertolksters van zijn stukken Olga Knipper .
Tsjechov deelde de illusies van de populisten niet, ook niet de visie van de liberalen op 'de kleine daden', en evenmin Tolstojs leer van de zelfvervolmaking. Hij koesterde sympathie voor de studentenbeweging, stond aan de zijde van Dreyfus en diens verdediger Zola, en sloot vriendschap met Gorkij en Lev Tolstoj; Tolstoj leerde hij kennen in de Krim, waar Tsjechov in verband met zijn slechte gezondheid (tbc) een landhuis (in Jalta) had gebouwd. In 1902 protesteerde Tsjechov samen met Korolenko tegen de uitsluiting van Gorkij uit de Academie.
De revolutie van 1905 heeft Tsjechov niet meer meegemaakt. Hij stierf in Badenweiler, een kuuroord in het Zwarte Woud, en hij werd begraven in Moskou.
Tsjechov schreef meer dan 400 korte verhalen, zo'n 70 grotere, een dozijn eenakters en drama's en een 8 delen tellende correspondentie.
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