/View.info/ Dear to all of us today is Anton Pavlovich Chekhov/ 1860-1904/. More than a century has passed since his death, and his stories and plays never cease to excite us with their humanistic pathos, with their belief in the bright and beautiful in man. Wasn’t he the first to utter the catchphrase that: “everything in man must be beautiful”?
Forced to live and create in a complex, critical time, on the border between two centuries and epochs, Chekhov, like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, populated his works with an impressive gallery of representatives of the various strata in Russia. To this Russia, which after him tried to give birth to the “new, fairer world”, but failed…
Like any great and talented writer, Chekhov does not just describe life, but wants it to be more real, more human. But his method is too innovative, too unusual, designed for people with a more complex mentality. Perhaps that is why most of his contemporaries do not understand and accept him. Literary critics do not accept it either. Some of them have claimed that: «… this writer preaches nothing, calls no one, teaches no one, complains of nothing, desires nothing/?!/»…His short, extremely concentrated, bright and hot stories were, according to them, “an empty game of talent and mind, indifferent to the concerns of the people of Russia…” Indeed, an assessment worthy of amazement today, knowing that Chekhov was actually the most implacable, the most militant, despite his apparent restraint and the tight laconic style with which he had become proverbial…
The writer-doctor not only continues the great traditions of great Russian literature/ Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky/. He created a new tradition, a new school. As a true innovative artist, Chekhov discovered unsuspected paths before prose and drama. He did it with his short stories, novels and plays, being the first among the artists of his time to transfer the center of gravity from the external action to the mechanism of the hidden internal plot related to the peace of mind of the characters. This is actually the genius discovery of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov!
Chekhov’s lessons crossed the long-forever closed Russian borders. After him, it was simply not possible to write in the old way. His incredible short stories caused a real explosion in world literature and especially in fiction. His plays turned the theater upside down. The latter /together with Shakespeare’s/ have become a basic and integral part of the repertoire of theaters around the world. The innovative poetics of his dramaturgy synthesizes into a complex unity the condensed symbolism of the “undercurrent” of the plots in his plays/ which are usually plotless/, the tragic comedy, the musicality and the inner psychological volume, the multiplicity of conflict lines and the features of genre synthesis.
A brilliant reformer of the Russian and world theater from the end of the 19th century, Chekhov is also the progenitor of the modern drama of the 20th century. In Europe and America, he is revered as one of the gods in the theater, on a par with Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, and Ionesco.
He himself became a standard, a model and generates influences even today.
22 wise thoughts of Chekhov
1. The problem is not optimism or pessimism. The problem is that 99 percent of people have no brains.
2. If a person doesn’t drink or smoke, you automatically think – isn’t he a scoundrel after all?
3. There are people who always talk beautifully and smartly, but do you ever wonder if they are actually dumb?
4. If your wife is cheating on you, be glad that she is cheating on you and not on the Motherland.
5. The university develops all human faculties, including stupidity.
6. They say that the truth always prevails in the end, but that is not true at all.
7. Only old people are healthy and normal.
8. To feel constant happiness within you, even in moments of sorrow and sadness: a) know how to enjoy the present and b) rejoice in your mind that it could be worse.
9. When you get a fever in your thumb, be glad it didn’t get in your eye.
10. Today is a great day. Wondering whether to drink tea, hang yourself…
11. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.
12. He who is alien to life, who is incapable of living, has no choice but to become a clerk.
13. One pain always dulls another. Step on a cat’s tail when it has a toothache and it will go right away.
14. Hundreds of versts of desert and monotonous landscape cannot cause such boredom as a person who sits, chatters and does not know when he will leave.
15. If you want to have some time – just do nothing.
16. You have to drown the slave in yourself drop by drop.
17. No one wants to love the average person in us.
18. You should not get in the way of people who are not in the right mind.
19. “Cynic” is a Greek word and means: “A pig who wished the whole world to know that he was a pig”.
20. If people talk and suddenly become sincere, everything between them will go to hell.
21. A talented person in Russia cannot be a purist.
22. You can’t ask mud not to be mud.
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