from Leadership Medica n. 3/2000

Fragments of daily life turn in eternal metaphors, disclose secrets, human weaknesses, the pain of life, sunk in the dream maybe vain to succeed in changing one's own life. Anton Cechov (in picture) succeed fully in the attempt to construct dramaturgies structures centred over atmospheres, worries, generational clashes, feelings social claiming.

He, born in Ukraine in 1860, once graduated in medicine devoted himself fully to literature, becoming in a very few time rather famous as novelist and writer of tales.

Nevertheless, it was for him irresistible the recall of the activity as theatrical author: after three youth works, Cechov put on stage in 1887 Ivanov that, after undergoing a revision, will become the extremely well known Uncle Vanja (1897, represented in 1899) one of his four master works along with the The seagull (1895), The three sisters (1901) e The cherries garden (1904).

Cechov, already affected by tuberculosis, married Olga Knipper in 1902, an actress of the Art Theatre of Moscow, and two years later, in 1904, he died in the Black Forest, where he went to cure himself.

Cechov's home in Ukraine

Apparently linear, Checov's texts are the most complex of the modern repertoire; each detail has been considered and chosen carefully.  In the recesses of the dialogues you sense the determining emotions and the instinctive pulsion that form the scene action.

The seagull, in 4 acts, had a first unlucky representation. Cechov had, than, from the troupe of the Art Theatre of Moscow, directed by Stanislavskij and Dancenko, that something in addition leading it to success in 1898.
The seagull tells about Kostantin Treplev, a young novice dramatist, about his mother the actress Irina Arkadina and Nina, the girl he felt in love with, also wanting to be an actress.
They are in the country estate of the mother, when just Irina Arkadina arrives with her lover Trigorin, a well-known writer.
The young intends to organize a theatrical representation, but meanwhile Trigorin succeeds to fascinate and seduce Nina and leaves with her towards Moscow.Two years later Nina e Kostantin meet again; she, abandoned by Trigorin, and notwithstanding she is shattered, is reacting and she works as an actress in province, while the young, due to several failures in feelings and in the art, is full discouraged: at the end he decides to commit suicide.

Uncle Vanja, even it represented by the Art Theatre of Moscow, is a 4 acts drama. Since years Vanja manages scrupulously along with his niece Sonja a country real estate. The young is a Vanja's sister daughter, already dead, and of the well-known professor Serebrjakov, deemed by everybody a celebrity. Uncle Vanja, succeeding practicing economy on everything, sends always money to his brother in law, but, when the professor and the young wife Elena get to the estate, equilibriums break. The mean shabbiness and the egoism of the professor become so evident that uncle Vanja has a brusque reaction: he shoots him but he does not succeed in hitting him.

The three sister, staged in a Russian province little town, tells about the pining away by degrees of Olga, Mascia and Irina, three sisters orphans of a general, that live together with their brother Andrej and the sister in law Natalja.
All three of them nurse the dream to go to Moscow. Olga, the eldest, in the school career becomes a school director, but she is lonely and desperate.
Mascia, unhappily married, falls in love with Versinin, colonel, but it would be a brief passion because the garrison and the beloved must leave.
The youngest, Irina, gets a job she does not like, while his betrothed dies in duel.
In the last act the three sister part leaving the house in the hands of the arrogant and unscrupulous Natalja and of the unhappy brother Andrej.

The last work of Cechov, The cherries garden, represents a world in decay, dying out: on a side the indolent landowners, economically in ruin, replaced by common people exponents, as the ex servant Lopachin.
The landowner Ljubov'Ravenskaja, oppressed by debts, and his idle brother Gaev watch impotent at the destruction of the garden. Lopachin, the purchaser of the estate throws out the ancient owners from the house and makes all the cherries chop.
Only Anja, daughter of Ljubov'Ravenskaja, seems to be enthusiastic to live and for the love for Trofimov, everlasting student.
In these scenes Cechov analyses almost at the microscope the provincial, petit bourgeois, bureaucratic Russia, fossilized and immovable waiting for a real change.

Franco Manzoni