Anton Chekhov

Peter Carson

Richard Gilman

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Kansas

Ivanov; the Seagull; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; the CherryOrchard

Five masterful dramatic works from one of the world's best-loved playwrights, Anton Chekhov's Plays is translated with notes by Peter Carson, and an introduction by Richard Gilman in Penguin Classics.

At a time when the Russian theatre was dominated by formulaic melodramas and farces, Chekhov created a new sort of drama that laid bare the everyday lives, loves and yearnings of ordinary people. Ivanov depicts a man stifled by inactivity and lost idealism, and The Seagull contrasts a young man's selfish romanticism with the stoicism of a woman cruelly abandoned by her lover. With 'the scenes from country life' of Uncle Vanya, his first fully mature play, Chekhov developed his own unique dramatic world, neither tragedy nor comedy. In Three Sisters the Prozorov sisters endlessly dream of going to Moscow to escape the monotony of provincial life, while his comedy The Cherry Orchard portrays characters futilely clinging to the past as their land is sold from underneath them.

Peter Carson's moving translations convey Chekhov's subtle blend of comedy, tragedy and psychological insight. In his introduction, Richard Gilman examines how Chekhov broke with theatrical conventions and discusses each play in detail.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born in Taganrog, a port on the sea of Azov. In 1879 he travelled to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years, he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886, and a year later his second volume In the Twilight, for which he received the Pushkin Prize. Today his plays, including Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard are recognised as masterpieces the world over.

If you enjoyed Plays, you might like Chekhov's The Shooting Party, also available in Penguin Classics.

Plays

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Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Illinois

"Anton Chekhov's best stories display a detached sympathy for the Russian people and a controversial skill in portraying the decaying world of czarist Russia. Though not a political man, Chekhov could be cutting in his criticisms of upper-class society, and he turned a lens on its manners and shortsightedness. His finely observed and sharp-as-nails writing created unforgettable characters." "In these short novels, Chekhov was interested, above all, in human relationships, especially mutual unintelligibility and frustration between lovers and the evolution of affection over time. "The Duel," "My Life," and "Ward No. 6" are intimate portraits of individuals and their predicaments, while "A Woman's Kingdom," "Peasants," "Three Years," and "In the Ravine" depict the social milieu on a much larger scale than was possible in his shorter stories."--BOOK JACKET.

Seven Short Novels

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Tennessee

Roger Cockrell

Three Years

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Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsky

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

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Connecticut

Anton 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.

The Steppe--the most lyrical of the five--is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. The Duel sets two decadent figures--a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility--on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor.

The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.



The Complete Short Novels

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Rhode Island

2 pages have fallen out but are tucked into the book

New Jersey

Paul Schmidt

Maryland

These critically hailed translations of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and the other Chekhov plays are the only ones in English by a Russian-language scholar who is also a veteran Chekhovian actor. Without compromising the spirit of the text, Paul Schmidt accurately translates Chekhov's entire theatrical canon, rescuing the humor "lost" in most academic translations while respecting the historical context and original social climate. Schmidt's translations of Chekhov have been successfully staged all over the U.S. by such theatrical directors as Lee Strasberg, Elizabeth Swados, Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson. Critics have hailed these translations as making Chekhov fully accessible to American audiences. They are also accurate -- Schmidt has been described as "the gold standard in Russian-English translation" by Michael Holquist of the Russian department at Yale University.

The Plays of Anton Chekhov

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Laurence Senelick

New York

A  Norton Critical Edition

Anton Chekhov revolutionized Russian theater through his inimitable portrayals of characters faced with complex moral dilemmas.

Anton Chekhov's Selected Plays

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South Carolina

Marian Fell

Florida

Uncle Vanya

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New Hampshire

Includes a new forward by the screenwriter Mary Bing In Anton Chekhov's The Duel the escalating animosity between two men with opposed philosophies of life is played out against the backdrop of a seedy resort on the Black Sea coast. Laevsky is a dissipated romantic given to gambling and flirtation; he has run off with another man's wife, the beautiful but vapid Nadya, and now finds himself tiring of her. The scientist von Koren is contemptuous of Laevsky; as a fanatical devotee of Darwin, von Koren believes the other man to be unworthy of survival and is further enraged by his treatment of Nadya. As the confrontation between the two becomes increasingly heated, it leads to a duel that is as comically inadvertent as it is inevitable. Masterfully translated by the award-winnning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Duel is one of the most subtle examples of Chekhov's narrative art.

The Duel (Movie Tie-In Edition)

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Robert Brustein

Rosamund Bartlett

Anton Chekhov The Major Plays Ivanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya * The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard “Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life,” Chekhov once declared. “For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.” So it is that his plays express life through subtle construction, everyday dialogue, and an electrically charged atmosphere in which even the most casual words and actions assume great importance in his characters’ lives. This principle sets his plays apart from the rest, steering them clear of melodrama, and draws the audience into the lives of Chekhov’s colorful characters. Because of his adherence to realism, the playwright has been called an “incomparable artist of life.”* “What makes his work great is that it can be felt and understood not only by any Russian but by anybody in the world.”—*Leo Tolstoy With a Foreword by Robert Brustein and an Afterword by Rosamund Bartlett

The Major Plays

West Virginia

Anton Chekhov remarked toward the close of his life that people would stop reading him a year after his death. But his literary stature and popularity have grown steadily with the years, and he is accounted the single most important influence on the development of the modern short story.
 
Edited and with an introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov presents twenty-eight of Chekhov's best stories, chosen as particularly representative of his many-sided portrayal of the human comedy--including "The Kiss," "The Darling," and "In the Ravine"--as well as two complete plays; The Boor, an example of Chekhov's earlier dramatic work, and The Cherry Orchard, his last and finest play. In addition, this volume includes a selection of letters, candidly revealing of Chekhov's impassioned convictions on life and art, his high aspirations, his marriage, and his omnipresent compassion.

The Portable Chekhov

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Ronald Hingley

Taken from The Oxford Chekhov, the stories in this collection include "The Butterfly," "Ariadne," "A Dreary Story," "Neighbours," "An Anonymous Story," and "Doctor Startsev," as well as the title story.

Ward Number Six and Other Stories

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Ivanov, the Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and the Cherry Orchard

Chekhov's worldwide reputation as a dramatist rests on five great plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. All are presented in this collection, taken from the authoritative Oxford Chekhov, in Ronald Hingley's acclaimed translation. Hingley has also
written an introduction specifically for this volume in which he provides a detailed history of Chekhov's involvement in the theater and an assessment of his accomplishment as a dramatist.

Five Plays

David Mamet

Washington

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet's Uncle Vanya is a sparkling restoration of a masterpiece of the modern stage, marked by Mamet's finely tuned ear for dialogue and memorable poetic imagery.

In "Uncle Vanya," a retired professor and his beautiful young wife return to the country estate left by his deceased first wife to find themselves overwhelmed by the stagnant inevitability of the rituals of their life and class, and mercilessly taxed by the encroachment of age at the expense of youth. All of the play's characters are plunged into that precarious state where, in Beckett's words, "the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being."

Working from a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik, Mamet, who has also adapted Chekhov's Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, opens the way for a contemporary audience to establish immediate contact with a classic, infusing the power of Chekhov's play with the potent precision of his own modern voice.

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A powerful novella about redemption and the nuances of human relationships that helped cement Chekhov's reputation as a major figure in Russian literature. On a visit to a provincial town to see his sister Nina who is suffering from cancer, Alexei Laptev, who works for his father's Moscow haberdashery business, falls in love with Yulia, the daughter of her doctor, and proposes to her. Although she does not reciprocate his feelings, she agrees to marry him and live with him in the capital, where the couple's relationship is marred by tensions: Yulia is filled with regrets about her choice and boredom with her new existence, while Alexei is nagged by the suspicion that she married him for his money alone. However, as time passes and misfortune strikes, they both learn to reassess all of their assumptions. Chekhov's second-longest prose work after The Steppe, Three Years is, in the author's own words, “a novel of Moscow life” and an examination of its merchant classes. A powerful story of redemption and the nuances of human relationships, the novella helped cement Chekhov's reputation as a major figure in Russian literature.

Three Years: New Translation

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Anton Chekhov; Peter Carson; Richard Gilman

Plays

Anton Chekhov

Seven Short Novels

Anton Chekhov; Peter Carson; Richard Gilman

Plays

Anton Chekhov

Three Years

Anton Chekhov; Richard Pevear; Larissa Volokhonsky

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov; Richard Pevear; Larissa Volokhonsky

The Complete Short Novels

Anton Chekhov; Richard Pevear; Larissa Volokhonsky

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov; Peter Carson; Richard Gilman

Plays

Anton Chekhov; Paul Schmidt

The Plays of Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov; Laurence Senelick

Anton Chekhov's Selected Plays

Anton Chekhov; Paul Schmidt

The Plays of Anton Chekhov

Marian Fell; Anton Chekhov

Uncle Vanya

Anton Chekhov; Richard Pevear; Larissa Volokhonsky

The Duel (Movie Tie-In Edition)

Anton Chekhov; Robert Brustein; Rosamund Bartlett

The Major Plays

Anton Chekhov

The Portable Chekhov

Anton Chekhov; Ronald Hingley

Ward Number Six and Other Stories

Anton Chekhov; Ronald Hingley

Five Plays

Anton Chekhov; David Mamet

Uncle Vanya

Anton Chekhov; Roger Cockrell

Three Years: New Translation

Anton Chekhov; Paul Schmidt

The Plays of Anton Chekhov