As a stagestruck boy,Anton Chekhov defied school regulations to attend the local playhouse in Taganrog. (He and his friends disguised themselves with false beards and glasses to sit in the gallery.) Later, he came to see Russian theatre as “the venereal disease of the cities.” “I don’t like the theatre, and he wrote. “I quickly collect bored—but I effect like watching vaudevilles.” Over time,Chekhov invented his own form of drama, which blended gravity and hilarity, and complexity and mystery. His plays are magisterial constructions of tone and texture; his antiphonal dialogue is the bittersweet music of ambivalence. As a practicing physician,Chekhov viewed Homo sapiens with a clinical eye; as a playwright, he reported on the rueful symptoms of mankind’s malaise and offered neither diagnosis nor remedy. “My job . . . is to be able to distinguish important phenomena from unimportant, or to be able to clarify; to light up characters and speak with their tongues,” he wrote to a friend, insisting that his characters’ ideas must be “examined like objects.” Chekhov’s satiric detachment is often confounding, or both to the players and to the audience,who are moved to tears by his tragic situations and confused by his classification of these landscapes of loss and regret as “comedies.”
Source: newyorker.com