Editing Anton Chekhov (section)

===Style===

One of the first non-Russians to praise Chekhov's plays was [[George Bernard Shaw]], who subtitled his ''[[Heartbreak House]]'' "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes", and pointed out similarities between the predicament of the British landed class and that of their Russian counterparts as depicted by Chekhov: "the same nice people, the same utter futility".<ref>Anna Obraztsova in "Bernard Shaw's Dialogue with Chekhov", from Miles, 43–44.</ref>

[[Ernest Hemingway]], another writer influenced by Chekhov, was more grudging: "Chekhov wrote about six good stories. But he was an amateur writer."<ref>Letter from [[Ernest Hemingway]] to [[Archibald MacLeish]], 1925 (from ''Selected Letters'', p. 179), in ''Ernest Hemingway on Writing'', Ed Larry W. Phillips, Touchstone, (1984) 1999, {{ISBN|978-0-684-18119-6}}, 101.</ref> Comparing Chekhov to Tolstoy, [[Vladimir Nabokov]] wrote, "I do love Chekhov dearly. I fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with the flash of this or that unforgettable passage […], but when I imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is ''his'' works which I would take on a trip to another planet."<ref>[[q:Anton Chekhov#Quotes about Chekhov|Wikiquote quotes about Chekhov]]</ref> Nabokov called "[[The Lady with the Dog]]" "one of the greatest stories ever written" in its depiction of a problematic relationship, and described Chekhov as writing "the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice".<ref>From [[Vladimir Nabokov]]'s ''Lectures on Russian Literature'', quoted by [[Francine Prose]] in ''Learning from Chekhov'', 231.</ref>

For the writer [[William Boyd (writer)|William Boyd]], Chekhov's historical accomplishment was to abandon what [[William Gerhardie]] called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life".<ref>"For the first time in literature the fluidity and randomness of life was made the form of the fiction. Before Chekhov, the event-plot drove all fictions." [[William Boyd (writer)|William Boyd]], referring to the novelist [[William Gerhardie]]'s analysis in ''Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study'', 1923. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,1261403,00.html "A Chekhov Lexicon"] by William Boyd, ''The Guardian'', 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref>

Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in ''The Common Reader'' (1925):

{{blockquote|But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most [[Victorian literature|Victorian fiction]], we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.<ref>Woolf, Virginia, ''The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition'', Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, {{ISBN|0-15-602778-X}}, 172.</ref>}}

Michael Goldman has said of the elusive quality of Chekhov's comedies: "Having learned that Chekhov is comic&nbsp;... Chekhov is comic in a very special, paradoxical way. His plays depend, as comedy does, on the vitality of the actors to make pleasurable what would otherwise be painfully awkward—inappropriate speeches, missed connections, ''faux pas'', stumbles, childishness—but as part of a deeper pathos; the stumbles are not pratfalls but an energized, graceful dissolution of purpose."<ref>Michael Goldman, ''The Actor's Freedom: Towards a Theory of Drama'', p72.</ref>