ANTON TCHEKOV
Anton Tchekov, considered the foremost of contemporary Russian dramatists, was born in 1860 at Taganrog, Russia. In 1880 he was graduated from the Medical School of the University of Moscow. Ill health soon compelled him to abandon his practice of medicine, and in 1887 he sought the south. In 1904, the year of the successful appearance of his Cherry Orchard, he died in a village of the Black Forest in Germany.
As a dramatist, Tchekov has with deliberate intent cast off much of the conventionalities of dramatic technic. In his longer plays especially, like The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, and Cherry Orchard, he somewhat avoids obvious struggles, time-worn commonplaces, well-prepared climaxes, and seeks rather to spread out a panoramic canvas for our contemplation. His chief aim is to show us humanity as he sees it. It is his interest in humanity that gives him so high rank as a dramatist.
His one-act plays, a form of drama unusually apt for certain intimate aspects of Russian peasant life, are more regular in their technic than his longer plays. Among the five or six shorter plays that Tchekov wrote, The Boor and A Marriage Proposal are his best. In these plays he shows the lighter side of Russian country life, infusing some of the spirit of the great Gogol into his broad and somewhat farcical character portrayals. With rare good grace, in these plays he appears to be asking us to throw aside our restraint and laugh with him at the stupidity and naïveté, as well as good-heartedness, of the Russian people he knew so well.
The Boor is a remarkably well-constructed one-act play, and is probably the finest one-act play of the Russian school of drama.
PERSONS IN THE PLAY
Helena Ivanovna Popov; a young widow, mistress of a country estate
Grigori Stepanovitch Smirnov; proprietor of a country estate
Luka, servant of Mrs. Popov
A gardener. A coachman. Several workmen.