Chekhov, The Anxious Playwright : His Four Great Plays in Their Cultural Context

This book examines Chekhov's four major plays, analyzing how his non-aristocratic background influenced his literary style. It applies Bloom's anxiety of influence theory to his distinctive use of intertextuality, combining Russian and Western scholarship to offer new perspectives for theatre and Russian literature scholars.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of Anton Chekhov’s four great plays within their cultural context: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. The author explores how Chekhov’s historical situation as a non-aristocratic writer gave him an intense awareness of his relationship to the past. Chekhov had a very literary imagination and thus an essential feature of his work is the way he used intertextuality to incorporate and react to the work of his predecessors. Chekhov’s plays therefore lend themselves to analysis that uses Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence. Applying these principles make it possible to give coherence to Chekhov’s. The anxiety of influence was a pervasive factor in Chekhov’s evolution, and explains why Chekhov used intertextuality more frequently, and to greater effect, than any of his contemporaries. Close study of Chekhov’s four great plays shows that they have a hitherto unrecognized stylistic alternation. ‘Chekhov the Anxious Playwright’ makes extensive use of recent Russian scholarship (including dissertations) on Chekhov and synthesizes it with Western scholarship to produce a general understanding of his plays in their cultural context. It will be the first major book that brings together both a wide range of scholarship and as well as literary theory to analyze Chekhov’s plays. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre history and Russian literature.