Customer Reviews

The Major Plays (Signet classics)

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This is a wonderful translation and it happens to be the translation reccomended to me by Miss Joan Potter. (Voted one of the five utmost speakers on Chekov) She has traveled all over and has all the translations ever. It's an easy read compared to most translations and very actable.

The five masterpieces in this collection deal with the dizzying pace of an industrializing world. Although the plays were written a hundred years ago, they are still very relevant to our modern existence. Chekov's questions about the place of class in a world in which class boundaries rapidly shift, the value of money in a world in which life has no meaning, and the meaning of existence in which experience is absurd still open our eyes to the many layers of existence which we uncover (or choose not to) every day.

In today's world, which, like Chekov's, is changing every day, it would behoove all of us to sit down for a while every day and ponder the infinite wisdom of "The Cherry Orchard" (which is in this collection) and try to understand ourselves.

Before this collection of plays was reissued, it was originally presented to the reader by a translator named Ann Dunnigan. That text was released some 20 years ago. These days you are likely to find a copy of her work in a used bookstore. To that I say: Good; go and find it there.

Her translation of this literature is more than adequate. Why the publisher felt the need to drag up a man who cannot even speak or read Russian and have him 'translate' it from other texts is beyond me. As a person who reads a lot of translations from various languages, I cannot imagine the arrogance it must take to think that you can 'translate' something and 'get a feel for an author' by not even being able to read the authors work. THAT edition is not worth your time.

However, if you are lucky enough to get your hands on an original Ann Dunnigan translation, you are in for a real treat- five of Chekhovs most important works, presented in a highly readable text. The translations are crisp, though she does tend to use ellipses quite frequently. She also tends to forgo annotations which might help a western reader to understand some of what is going on in the text. A quick review of Russian history towards the end of the 19th century can really help in that area.

The plays themselves are fairly dense material, though they are indeed readable. Chekhov portrays Russian life as an endless questioning of existence- Who am I? Where am I going? and tedium- at least once in every play someone begins to complain about how bored they are.

The plays are also depressing in nature. There are only two in this collection in which someone does not die at the end and in one of those two someone ATTEMPTS to kill another. The remaining one is indeed the most touching of them all (The Cherry Orchard), though even this one presents the moral and financial death of several of its characters (who would take delight in buying a treasure from underneath anothers nose, then celebrate it to their face?). In all, the plays are good, the characters are memorable, though some of the situations feel repetitive (Ivanov and The Sea Gull seem to have the same pattern to them).

Should these facts (dense and depressing) prevent you from reading these plays? Never. If depressing material were taboo then Shakespeare would be out of the question too; who would want to read Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet? The same holds true here- you can learn a lot by reading Chekhov, by observing how masterfully he crafts situations out of day-to-day conversations between his characters. It is this fine-tuned approach which can often make Chekhov difficult for a western reader to understand; the plays are told with a bare-boned plot and revolve instead around the characters themselves and their expressions, finding meaning in the most modest of actions. For an audience that is unused to having to dig to find their truths, this can often be disconcerting.

Bottom Line: Forget the new guy and seek out the old text (it has the woodcut cover).

-NL

Anton Chekhov had a strange idea of comedy.

His famous play "The Sea Gull" begins with a character dressed in black who declares: "I am in mourning for my life" and ends with a suicide. His other self-proclaimed "comedy" in this collection, "The Cherry Orchard", presents characters in such miserable condition that the director of its first production staged it as a drama, which annoyed Chekhov.

It's hard to tell a drama from a comedy when everyone is so miserable. That included me, the reader, as I sloughed my way through this collection of Chekhov's best-known plays. There actually is one funny line, not from either "comedy" but rather his earliest effort in this collection, the drama "Ivanov": "Doctors are exactly like lawyers, with this difference: lawyers merely strip you, while doctors strip you and kill you." But "Ivanov" serves as a better introduction to elements the other plays do to death: self-lacerating monologues, sudden melodrama, and people sitting around not doing much of anything for a very long time.

Chekhov is very popular with a certain type of person, and it's not hard guessing why: If a less-educated individual wandered into a Shakespeare production, or tuned into one on television, there's a chance he or she might actually like what was on display enough to develop an interest. Everyone knows something about MacBeth or Romeo; but there's no chance of that happening with a Chekhov play. They are so bleak and formless as to serve as a perfect secret handshake or hidden treehouse for self-regarding elites. Let others talk about "Grey's Anatomy" while we discuss Uncle Vanya's existential misery or the hidden meaning of dead seagulls. That'll show `em.

Like Matthew Krichman here, I was impressed somewhat only with "The Three Sisters", which as he notes creates a character we can dislike to make up for the fact Chekhov was unable to develop the other kind. It's also an interesting contrast piece, as the three sisters of the title represent three different ways of looking at the world, one resigned, one at peace, and one miserable. Chekhov manages to make each one sympathetic and their romantic foibles diverting, however predictably doomed. With Chekhov, everything is doomed.

If these are his major plays, one shudders to think how a "minor" Chekhov play might read. To be fair, plays are always better seen on stage than read, but Chekhov's nattering parade of patronymics talking over each other from seemingly different worlds really tests one's ability to keep the speakers straight.

"How drab your lives are, how full of futile talk!" cries one character in "The Cherry Orchard." Speak for yourself, Anton Pavlovich.