Five Plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard

Translated and with an introduction by Ronald Hingley.

‘Where does one get to with your heroes? From the sofa to the privy and from the privy back to the sofa, was Tolstoy’s baffled – and inaccurate – comment on Russia’s greatest dramatist; and the five plays on which Chekhov’s worldwide reputation rests still defy attempts to determine what they are about. Some productions of Chekhov exude an atmosphere of unrelieved gloom; others turn into a boisterous romp round the samovar. Are they tragedies of loss and dispossession, or lighthearted send-ups of society’s misfits? Chekhov does not answer such questions: instead, he induces our involvement with the emotional experience of his characters as individually they seek for a pattern and meaning in their lives. The grand design eludes them, but what they have left, their everyday existence, their unspectacular victories and unheroic disappointments, can seem somehow, within the confines of the Chekhov play, to matter at least as much.

This collection of the five great plays (Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard) is taken from The Oxford Chekhov, Ronald Hingley’s scholarly edition, acclaimed for the accuracy and ‘speakability’ of his translations.