Staging Existence

Chekhov's Tetralogy

Svetlana Evdokimova

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780299344801
• eBook ISBN:
  9780299344832
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama

Anton Chekhov is justly famous as an author and a playwright, with his work continuing to appear on stages around the world more than a century after his death. However, he is rarely studied for his intellectual and philosophical theories. His disinterest in developing a "unified idea"—in vogue for Russian intellectuals of his time—and his aversion to the maximalism characteristic of contemporary Russian culture and society set him apart from his fellow writers. As a result, Chekhov's contribution to intellectual and philosophical discourse was obscured both by his contemporaries and by subsequent scholars. 

Svetlana Evdokimova tackles this gap in Chekhov scholarship, examining the profound connections between his unstated philosophy and his artistic production. Arguing that Chekhov's four major plays (The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, The Seagull, and Uncle Vanya) constitute a kind of cycle, Staging Existence offers a major reappraisal of this critical playwright in Russian intellectual history. Evdokimova's deep, careful research into Chekhov's engagement with contemporary philosophy provides insight into both Chekhov's oeuvre and the writer himself.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction
• 1. Chekhov’s (Anti-)Philosophy
• 2. Life without a Plot: The Drama of Being
• 3. A Seagull Is a Seagull Is a Seagull: Chekhov’s What Is Art?
• 4. Dostoevsky’s Graft: “Ward Six,” The Wedding, The Three Sisters, and Uncle Vania
• 5. Homo Laborans: The Ontology of Work in Uncle Vania and The Three Sisters
• 6. The Three Sisters: Being as Event
• 7. The Temptations of the Nursery
• 8. Back to the Cherry Orchard Itself: “Let Us Cultivate Our Garden”
• Conclusion: Chekhov’s Ironic Truth and the Sense of Non-ending
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index