Intellectual's in chekov's work Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Intellectuals in chekovs work - Essay ExampleHe is modest and quiet, just like a girl... Hes entirely wonderful. The memoirs f Maxim Gorky give us a modest and gentle and saintly Chekhov, too exhaustively to be true. In fact, not altogether true, according to Donald Rayfields recent biography f Chekhov.Rayfield gives us the long-familiar facts--the boy who lived in poverty, whose father was tyrannical, who became the breadwinner f his extended family by working at two vocations (doctor and writer), who at the age f 24 began spitting blood, the first sign f the tuberculosis that would claim his biography 20 years later, the doctor who treated poor peasants without receiving pay, who visited penal colonies to heal or console offense victims, the famous writer f short stories and plays--but he also tells us f Chekhovs callousness when he tried to protect his privacy and f Chekhovs many sexual relationships with women (what for many was a surprising determination approximately the man who had, according to V.S. Pritchett, an unusually low sexual temperature). The Rayfield biography gives us a truer, much balanced portrait f a complex man but it doesnt make cool the heartily feelings we have toward the writer whose compassion informs his art and whose plays--complex, ambiguous, difficult--continue to be popular.What prods me to write about Chekhov is the American Repertory Theaters production, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, f Ivanov, which I saw in January, 2000. Ivanov (1887) is Chekhovs first full-length play--he had already written many aneact farces--written and produced sooner the four plays that give Chekhov his importance--The Sea Gull (1898), Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Four plays is a astonishingly modest number f plays on which to sustain so high a reputation obviously, its enough. Chekhov worked rattling hard at his play indite, which, unlike his writing f short stories, did not come naturally to him. His notebooks and earn are filled with remarks on his struggle. A playful but accurate indication f his positioning toward the two kinds f writing in his comment Narrative is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impudent, exhausting mistress. (This is a variation f his much-quoted statement, Medicine is my legal wife and literature is my mistress.) Chekhov said he didnt recall a single tale f his that took him more than a day to write he wrote short stories, he said, with haste and carelessness. His mistress, it seems, gave him more trouble and demanded more attention. My focus is Chekhovs mistress. Ivanov was the A.R.T. debut f one f Russias leading directors, Yuri Yeremin, who is Artistic Director f the Moscow Pushkin Theatre. Because Yeremin is a disciple f the Stanislavsky manner f rehearsal and acting, and because Stanislavskys Moscow Art Theatre was the company that gave life, and took life, from Chekhovs plays, my expectations were high. They were disappointed, al though I must admit I never saw a praiseworthy production f the play. Ivanov gave Chekhov much trouble in the writing he spent many years revising it. During the revising he made many comments about it to his friends, itself a painful experience for a modest man who rarely discussed his work. From these comments we learn that Chekhov wrote the play to laugh at a Russian type, whose existential sickness was a Russian disease. Its plot is conventional and melodramatic, what the Russian