Editing Anton Chekhov (section)

==Legacy==
[[File:Anton Chekhov museum Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky file 3.jpg|thumb|Anton Chekhov museum in [[Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky (town)|Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky]], Russia. It is the house where he stayed in Sakhalin during 1890.]]

A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer [[Ivan Bunin]] that he thought people might go on reading his writings for seven years. "Why seven?", asked Bunin. "Well, seven and a half", Chekhov replied. "That's not bad. I've got six years to live."{{sfn|Payne|1991|p=XXXVI}}
Chekhov's posthumous reputation greatly exceeded his expectations. The ovations for the play ''[[The Cherry Orchard]]'' in the year of his death served to demonstrate the Russian public's acclaim for the writer, which placed him second in literary celebrity only to [[Leo Tolstoy|Tolstoy]], who outlived him by six years. Tolstoy was an early admirer of Chekhov's short stories and had a series that he deemed "first quality" and "second quality" bound into a book. In the first category were: ''Children'', ''The Chorus Girl'', ''A Play'', ''Home'', ''Misery'', ''The Runaway'', ''In Court'', ''Vanka'', ''Ladies'', ''A Malefactor'', ''The Boys'', ''Darkness'', ''Sleepy'', ''The Helpmate'', and ''[[The Darling (Chekhov)|The Darling]]''; in the second: ''A Transgression'', ''Sorrow'', ''The Witch'', ''Verochka'', ''In a Strange Land'', ''The Cook's Wedding'', ''A Tedious Business'', ''An Upheaval'', ''Oh! The Public!'', ''The Mask'', ''A Woman's Luck'', ''Nerves'', ''The Wedding'', ''A Defenceless Creature'', and ''Peasant Wives.''{{sfn|Simmons|1970|p=595}}

Chekhov's work also found praise from several of Russia's most influential radical political thinkers. If anyone doubted the gloom and miserable poverty of Russia in the 1880s, the anarchist theorist [[Peter Kropotkin]] responded, "read only Chekhov's novels!"<ref>{{cite web
 | title=The Constitutional Movement in Russia
 | url=http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=142
 | author=Peter Kropotkin
 | publisher=The Nineteenth Century
 | website=revoltlib.com
 | date=1 January 1905
| access-date=5 November 2019
| archive-date=3 November 2019
| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191103020419/http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=142
 | url-status=dead
 }}</ref> [[Raymond Tallis]] further recounts that [[Vladimir Lenin]] believed his reading of the short story [[Ward No. 6]] "made him a revolutionary".<ref>{{cite book
 | title= In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections
 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aFhsBAAAQBAJ&q=Karl+Marx+ward+no+six&pg=PT154 
 | author=Raymond Tallis
 | publisher=Routledge
 | date=3 September 2014
|isbn = 9781317547402}}</ref> Upon finishing the story, Lenin is said to have remarked: "I absolutely had the feeling that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!"<ref>{{cite web 
 | title=To The Finland Station
 | author=Edmund Wilson
 | url=https://archive.org/details/WilsonToTheFinlandStation/page/n369/mode/2up?q=Ward+6+myself
 | publisher=Doubleday
 | website=archive.org
 | date=1940
 | quote=When Vladimir finished reading this story, he was seized with such a horror that he could not bear to stay in his room. He went out to find someone to talk to, but it was late: they had all gone to bed. 'I absolutely had the feeling,' he told his sister next day,'that I was shut up in Ward 6 myself!'
}}</ref>

In Chekhov's lifetime, British and Irish critics generally did not find his work pleasing; [[E. J. Dillon]] thought "the effect on the reader of Chekhov's tales was repulsion at the gallery of human waste represented by his fickle, spineless, drifting people" and [[R. E. C. Long]] said "Chekhov's characters were repugnant, and that Chekhov revelled in stripping the last rags of dignity from the human soul".<ref>{{cite journal|last=Meister|first=Charles W.|year=1953|title=Chekhov's Reception in England and America|journal=American Slavic and East European Review|volume=12|issue=1|pages=109–121|jstor=3004259|doi=10.2307/3004259}}</ref> After his death, Chekhov was reappraised. [[Constance Garnett]]'s translations won him an English-language readership and the admiration of writers such as [[James Joyce]], [[Virginia Woolf]], and [[Katherine Mansfield]], whose story "The Child Who Was Tired" is similar to Chekhov's "Sleepy".<ref>{{cite book|author=William H. New|title=Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Reform|publisher=McGill-Queen's Press|year=1999|isbn= 978-0-7735-1791-2|pages=15–17}}</ref> The Russian critic [[D. S. Mirsky]], who lived in England, explained Chekhov's popularity in that country by his "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values".{{sfn|Wood|2000|p=77}} In Russia itself, Chekhov's drama fell out of fashion after the [[Russian Revolution of 1917|revolution]], but it was later incorporated into the Soviet canon. The character of Lopakhin, for example, was reinvented as a hero of the new order, rising from a modest background so as eventually to possess the gentry's estates.{{sfn |Allen |2002 |p=[https://archive.org/details/performingchekho0000alle/page/88/mode/2up 88]}}<ref name = "Danchenko">"They won't allow a play which is seen to lament the lost estates of the gentry." Letter of [[Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko]], quoted by Anatoly Smeliansky in "Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre", from ''The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov'', 31–32.</ref>

[[File:Chekhov 1898 by Osip Braz.jpg|thumb|upright=.7|[[Osip Braz]], ''Anton Chekhov'', 1898, oil on canvas; [[Tretyakov Gallery]], [[Moscow]]]]

Despite Chekhov's reputation as a playwright, [[William Boyd (writer)|William Boyd]] asserts that his short stories represent the greater achievement.<ref name = "Boyd">"The plays lack the seamless authority of the fiction: there are great characters, wonderful scenes, tremendous passages, moments of acute melancholy and sagacity, but the parts appear greater than the whole." [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,1261403,00.html ''A Chekhov Lexicon,''] by [[William Boyd (writer)|William Boyd]], ''The Guardian'', 3 July 2004. Retrieved 16 February 2007.</ref> [[Raymond Carver]], who wrote the short story "Errand" about Chekhov's death, believed that Chekhov was the greatest of all short story writers:

{{blockquote|Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote—for few, if any, writers have ever done more—it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.<ref>Bartlett, [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,1261382,00.html "From Russia, with Love"], ''The Guardian'', 15 July 2004. Retrieved 17 February 2007.</ref>}}

According to literary critic [[Daniel S. Burt]], Chekhov was one of the greatest and most influential writers of all time.<ref name=":8">{{Cite book |last=Burt |first=Daniel S. |url=https://archive.org/details/literary100ranki0000burt_v6e1/mode/2up |title=The Literary 100, Revised Edition: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time |publisher=Facts On File |year=2009 |pages=137–139 |language=en |author-link=Daniel Burt (author)}}</ref>

===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>

===Influence on dramatic arts===

In the United States, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through the influence of [[Stanislavski's system]] of acting, with its notion of [[subtext]]: "Chekhov often expressed his thought not in speeches", wrote Stanislavski, "but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word&nbsp;... the characters often feel and think things not expressed in the lines they speak."<ref>Reynolds, Elizabeth (ed), ''Stanislavski's Legacy'', Theatre Arts Books, 1987, {{ISBN|978-0-87830-127-0}}, 81, 83.</ref><ref name = "Eßlin">"It was Chekhov who first deliberately wrote dialogue in which the mainstream of emotional action ran underneath the surface. It was he who articulated the notion that human beings hardly ever speak in explicit terms among each other about their deepest emotions, that the great, tragic, climactic moments are often happening beneath outwardly trivial conversation." [[Martin Esslin]], from ''Text and Subtext in Shavian Drama'', in ''1922: Shaw and the last Hundred Years'', ed. Bernard. F. Dukore, Penn State Press, 1994, {{ISBN|978-0-271-01324-4}}, 200.</ref> The [[Group Theatre (New York)|Group Theatre]], in particular, developed the subtextual approach to drama, influencing generations of [[Theater in the United States|American playwrights]], screenwriters, and actors, including [[Clifford Odets]], [[Elia Kazan]] and, in particular, [[Lee Strasberg]]. In turn, Strasberg's [[Actors Studio]] and the [[Method acting|"Method" acting]] approach influenced many actors, including [[Marlon Brando]] and [[Robert De Niro]], though by then the Chekhov tradition may have been distorted by a preoccupation with realism.<ref name="Tovstonogov 1968 pp. 146–155">{{cite journal |last=Tovstonogov |first=Georgii |title=Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Gorky Theatre |journal=The Drama Review |publisher=JSTOR |volume=13 |issue=2 |year=1968 |issn=0012-5962 |doi=10.2307/1144419 |jstor=1144419 |pages=146–155 |quote=Lee Strasberg became in my opinion a victim of the traditional idea of Chekhovian theatre&nbsp;... [he left] no room for Chekhov's imagery.}}</ref> In 1981, the playwright [[Tennessee Williams]] adapted ''The Seagull'' as ''[[The Notebook of Trigorin]]''. One of Anton's nephews, [[Michael Chekhov]], would also contribute heavily to modern theatre, particularly through his unique acting methods which developed Stanislavski's ideas further.

[[Alan Twigg]], the chief editor and publisher of the Canadian book review magazine ''[[B.C. BookWorld]]'' wrote:

{{blockquote|One can argue Anton Chekhov is the second-most popular writer on the planet. Only Shakespeare outranks Chekhov in terms of movie adaptations of their work, according to the movie database IMDb.&nbsp;... We generally know less about Chekhov than we know about mysterious Shakespeare.<ref>{{Cite book|title = Memories of Chekhov: Accounts of the Writer from His Family, Friends and Contemporaries. Foreword by Alan Twigg.|last = Sekirin|first = Peter|publisher = MacFarland Publishers|year = 2011|isbn = 978-0-7864-5871-4|location = Jefferson, NC|pages = 1}}</ref>}}

Chekhov has also influenced the work of Japanese playwrights including [[Shimizu Kunio]], [[Yōji Sakate]], and [[Ai Nagai]]. Critics have noted similarities in how Chekhov and Shimizu use a mixture of light humour as well as an intense depictions of longing.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Rimer|first1=J.|title=Japanese Theatre and the International Stage|publisher=Koninklijke Brill NV|location=Leiden, The Netherlands|isbn=978-90-04-12011-2|pages=299–311|year=2001}}</ref> Sakate adapted several of Chekhov's plays and transformed them in the general style of ''[[nō]]''.<ref name=Clayton>{{cite book|last1=Clayton|first1=J. Douglas|title=Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0-415-50969-5|pages=269–270|year=2013}}</ref> Nagai also adapted Chekhov's plays, including [[Three Sisters (play)|''Three Sisters'']], and transformed his dramatic style into Nagai's style of satirical realism while emphasising the social issues depicted in the play.<ref name=Clayton/>

Chekhov's works have been adapted for the screen, including [[Sidney Lumet]]'s ''[[The Sea Gull|Sea Gull]]'' and [[Louis Malle]]'s ''[[Vanya on 42nd Street]]''. [[Laurence Olivier]]'s final effort as a film director was a 1970 adaptation of ''[[Three Sisters (1970 film)|Three Sisters]]'' in which he also played a supporting role. His work has also served as inspiration or been referenced in numerous films. In [[Andrei Tarkovsky]]'s 1975 film [[The Mirror (1975 film)|''The Mirror'']], characters discuss his short story "[[Ward No. 6]]". Woody Allen has been influenced by Chekhov and references to his works are present in many of his films including ''[[Love and Death]]'' (1975), ''[[Interiors]]'' (1978) and ''[[Hannah and Her Sisters]]'' (1986). Plays by Chekhov are also referenced in [[François Truffaut]]'s 1980 drama film ''[[The Last Metro]]'', which is set in a theatre. ''[[The Cherry Orchard]]'' has a role in the comedy film ''[[Henry's Crime]]'' (2011). A portion of a stage production of ''[[Three Sisters (play)|Three Sisters]]'' appears in the 2014 drama film ''[[Still Alice]]''.  The 2022 Foreign Language Oscar winner, [[Drive My Car (film)|''Drive My Car'']], is centered on a production of ''Uncle Vanya''.
 
Several of Chekhov's short stories were adapted as episodes of the 1986 Indian anthology television series ''[[Katha Sagar]]''. Another Indian television series titled ''Chekhov Ki Duniya'' aired on [[DD National]] in the 1990s, adapting different works of Chekhov.<ref>{{cite web |title=Chekhov Ki Duniya |url=https://nettv4u.com/about/Hindi/tv-serials/chekhov-ki-duniya |website=nettv4u |language=en}}</ref>

[[Nuri Bilge Ceylan]]'s Palme d'Or winner [[Winter Sleep (film)|''Winter Sleep'']] was adapted from the short story "The Wife" by Anton Chekhov.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Diken |first=Bülent |date=1 September 2017 |title=Money, Religion, and Symbolic Exchange in Winter Sleep |url=https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/religion-and-society/8/1/arrs080106.xml |journal=Religion and Society |language=en-US |volume=8 |issue=1 |pages=94–108 |doi=10.3167/arrs.2017.080106 |issn=2150-9301}}</ref>