![]() If Ibsen liberated drama’s subject matter and restored the play as a serious criticism of life, Chekhov supplied the theater with a radically new method and dramatic form that altered all of the available conventions of dramatic production. ![]() Modern drama has two indisputable founding fathers: Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. In short, if it is permissible to use such vague language, I do not know how better to describe the sensation at the end of The Cherry Orchard, than by saying that it sends one into the street feeling like a piano-played upon at last, not in the middle only but all over the keyboard and with the lid left open so that the sound goes on. Long before the play was over, we seemed to have sunk below the surface of things and to be feeling our way among submerged but recognizable emotions. But let the word atmosphere be taken literally to mean that Chekhov has contrived to shed over us a luminous vapor in which life appears as it is, without veils, transparent and visible to the depths. And, given time, something might be said in greater detail of the causes which produced this atmosphere-the strange dislocated sentences, each so erratic and yet cutting out the shape so firmly, of the realism, of the humor, of the artistic unity. ![]() It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself or to trouble himself, that he refers to atmosphere. Analysis of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard ![]()
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