Added by: englishcology | Karma: 4552.52 | Fiction literature | 13 March 2012
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Aanton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Performing Chekhov is a unique and remarkably comprehensive guide to Chekhov's plays in performance. Drawing on extensive interviews with actors, directors and designers, it offers in-depth case studies of a number of significant and often controversial productions of Chekhov's plays. It focuses on the work of key directors in Russia, America and England and reflects a number of significant and on-going debates, not only about Chekhov's work, but about the very nture of acting and performance.
If any writer can be said to have invented the modern short story, it is Anton Chekhov. It is not just that Chekhov democratized this art form; more than that, he changed the thrust of short fiction from relating to revealing. And what marvelous and unbearable things are revealed in these Forty Stories.
All but one of these stories feature and are about children or animals. They don't have a "story" structure--they're more the sort of slice of life that came into style in the first third of the 20th century, many years after Chekhov put them together. They show Chekhov's immense sympathy for the downtrodden, the off-the-gird, the under-the-radar. His kids look at the world in innocent confusion; his animals think not like humans (or like animals) but like isolated points of wonder. Psychologically, the child tales would hardly pass, but as examinations of the underlife that exists everywhere, largely unacknowledged, they are superb snippets.
In The Party and Other Stories Chekhov shows his sympathy and understanding for human nature under strain and in great life- difficulty. The opening story " The Party" focuses on a character in late - states of pregnancy who observes by mistake her philandering husband's talk with a young attractive girl. The long story " My Life" has many elements of Chekhov's own youth in it, including the cruel beatings administered by the father. In "The Woman's Kingdom" a former worker and now factory owner thinks of escaping her isolation through marrying one of the workers, only to understand how socially this has become impossible.
