Anton Chekhov's Selected Plays (Norton Critical Edition Series) Book

Three Sisters - Chekhov 9/10

After reading some of Chekhov's short stories years ago I kept wanting to read his plays, but never got around to it. With Three Sisters starting at the theater near my house, I had an excuse to move them up my to read list. The story follows three sisters (and their brother) who live in rural Russia and are very well off and educated, pining to return to Moscow, where they grew up. The play occurs over several years covering a wide range of romances, aspirations, and struggles the family experiences with a kind of honest uncertainty that is rare to find. Chekhov has a talent for rendering the complexities of our hopes and doubts that does those questions justice with out succumbing to convenient cliches or sentiment for resolution. Instead we see life as a mystery that we pass through, like moving in the dark, echoed in the famous last lines "If only we knew... If only we knew." It is, frankly, a challenging play, dense with characters, ideas, and overlapping events. But Chekhov's uncompromising aesthetic offers a rich and unique kind of play.

The Cherry Orchard - Chekhov 8/10

The Cherry Orchard is the story of a Russian aristocratic Lyubov returning to her large countryside estate after a long spell abroad. The estate, known for its large cherry orchard, has fallen in to dire finances and is set to be auctioned. The estate represents a kind of microcosm of Russian society in a period of change. However, unlike most social commentary, there is little sloganeering or facile morals to be taken away. Instead, again, Chekhov dives deeply into the myriad of perspectives and their intertwined relationships. As the estate nears ruin, land owners and former serfs, the young and the elderly, intellectuals and laborers, all find themselves pulling in different directions. Chekhov offers no answers and we frequently don't know whether to laugh or cry. It is a strange kind of elixir he mixes, but one feels it somehow works.

Ivanov 5/10
Ivanov feels like the early Chekovian play that it is: it teems with the indefinable ennui of modernity and the complexities of social relations, but it does not quite come together. While his later plays certainly do not offer any kind of denouement or facile moral, they do have some trajectory they converge on where even with out resolution we feel some satisfaction of completion - that the story has done what it must. Further, the causes of Ivanov's troubles are never really understood. While not always essential to depict or explain every motivation, Ivanov's problems are such a driving point of the story that it is difficult have avoid. Nonetheless, the play has much of the beautiful writing and subtle, observant thoughts that make the later plays so wonderful it is still worth a read.

The Seagull 7/10
The Seagull is a strange play. Many of Chekhov's plays are strange in their mood, their balance of themes, but the Seagull is stranger in a more traditional sense. It contains with in it portions of a highly symbolic and abstract play that seems experimental and bleeds into the actual play in way that would not really arrive in theater for another half a century. I'm not sure about how I feel about the handling of the ending, but there is a modern realism and honesty about ugly truths about life to the play that is clearly on the precipice of his later plays. It is also a play that is strikingly visual, painting images in one's mind. A play about love and art, it is darker and more philosophically challenging than those themes often suggest.

Uncle Vanya 6/10
One should perhaps not be allowed to read Uncle Vanya after The Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters (which I did). On its own merits, I'm sure it holds up better than my current assessment, but it clearly belongs to his earlier plays. It is motivated by the ennui characteristic of all Chekhov's plays and his writing is as impressive as ever, but like The Seagull and Ivanov, he still doesn't seem to know what to do with it - or perhaps more accurately, feels obligated to do something with it at all. All of these plays feel like they end with some reaching out for a doctrine powerful enough or an event dramatic enough to resolve or overwhelm the uncertainty of the life. In contrast, in The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters Chekhov finally finds the courage to face the unknown unflinchingly and without recourse to artifice or platitudes. Here, instead, we find a play with Chekhov's markings, but not his best.