A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre by Christopher Innes (ed)

Author:Christopher Innes (ed) [Innes, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415152280
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Indeed, politics form only the most muted subtext in his plays, the most obvious example being the polemic speech of the student radical in Act II of The Cherry Orchard.

However, Chekhov was certainly aware of the ideological ferment that increasingly preoccupied the Russian intelligentsia from the mid-1880s, leading up to the 1905 revolution. He saw the political activist Vladimir Korolenko, whose writing was largely protest literature devoted to the liberation of the common people, as a close colleague. He corresponded with Maxim Gorki, and resigned from the Russian Academy together with Korolenko when Gorki’s election was cancelled in 1902. His rejection of overtly political commentary in art expresses a position familiar to more contemporary political writers:

I sometimes preach heresies, but I haven’t gone so far as to deny that problematic questions have a place in art … You are right to demand that an author takes conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

(Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 27 October 1888)

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