Chekhov: Shorts (NHB Classic Plays) E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This collection features Chekhov's best-known short plays in brand new translations: three farces, two comic duologues and a monologue, all of them referred to by Chekhov as 'vaudevilles' and all written in the late 1880s before any of his great full-length plays. 'I don't much care for theatre,' he wrote at the time, 'but I do enjoy vaudevilles.' The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding are all farces on the preposterous busness of courtship and marriage. A Tragic Figure and Swansong are comic duologues: one about a civil servant sweltering in Moscow coping with the incessant demands of his family from their summer dacha, the other about a melancholy old actor perked up by memories of past glories. On the Evils of Tobacco is a bittersweet monologue in which a scientific lecture is hijacked by thoughts of domestic misery. These accurate and actable translations by Chekhov expert Stephen Mulrine reveal a dramatist revelling in the broad comedy of human behaviour, a comedy which was refined in his later masterpieces. Highly entertaining, these comic shorts offer a fascinating insight into Chekhov's development as a dramatist, and will provide actors at any level - student, amateur or professional - with an ideal showcase. This edition also includes an introduction, a chronology of key dates, and a pronunciation guide.

Leseprobe

CHEKHOV: SHORTS

THE BEAR

THE PROPOSAL

A TRAGIC FIGURE

THE WEDDING

SWANSONG

ON THE EVILS OF TOBACCO

translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

For Further Reading

Key Dates

Pronunciation Guide

The Bear

The Proposal

A Tragic Figure

The Wedding

Swansong

On the Evils of Tobacco

Translator Biography

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, a seaport in South Russia, in 1860. By his own account, his childhood was far from idyllic. His father Pavel was a domestic tyrant, fanatically religious, and Chekhov and his brothers were forced to rise before dawn to sing in the local church choir, then work long hours after school in the family grocer’s shop.

Taganrog was in decline, but its Greek shipping community was relatively wealthy, and Chekhov was first sent to a Greek-language school, which his father naively regarded as the highway to a lucrative career. After a wasted year, Chekhov was enrolled in the local high school, where he stayed, an unremarkable scholar, until 1879.

His last years at the Taganrog school were spent apart from his family, however, since his bankrupt father had fled to Moscow, where Chekhov’s elder brothers were already students. Chekhov completed his studies, entered Moscow University’s Faculty of Medicine and, at the age of nineteen, became the family’s principal breadwinner, writing short comic pieces to supplement his student allowance.

By the time he qualified in 1884, Chekhov’s literary ambitions were already in conflict with what he regarded as his true vocation. Indeed, throughout his life until his own health collapsed, he continued to practise medicine, mostly as an unpaid service to nearby rural communities. Chekhov was almost certainly infected with tuberculosis from childhood, and the disease was in its terminal stages before he would permit an independent diagnosis. In addition to frequent haemorrhaging from the lungs, which forced him to spend the winters in the warm south, Chekhov also suffered from a variety of other chronic ailments, yet his work rate was little short of heroic. In 1899, when he agreed to sell the rights in his works to the publisher Marks, they already filled ten volumes, and the critical consensus is that his short stories are an unparalleled achievement, with the four great plays of his mature dramatic method, , , and , no less important.