Word: chekhov
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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William Gerhardi, a polyglot Englishman who was born in Russia, has written novels, short stories, a play, a critical biography of Chekhov. He is perhaps most widely known for his novel The Polyglots. Last week he added to his list a long (484-page), glittering, malicious, at times staggeringly funny history of the Romanov dynasty. Subtitled Evocation of the Past as a Mirror for the Present, it is a profuse record of peculiarly dizzy people in a peculiarly dizzy part of the world...
...Possessed (chiefly based on Dostoevsky's novel, adapted by George Shdan-off; produced by Chekhov Theatre Productions, Inc.). Ever since Dostoevsky first published his great novels, playwrights have gone about dramatizing them. The lure of powerful scenes, extraordinary characters, exciting dialogue is understandable but dangerous...
Last week Director Michael Chekhov, nephew of famed Playwright Anton Chekhov, offered a dramatization of Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Probably the worst of all attempts to put Dostoevsky on the stage, it reduced the vast forest of his imagination to dead, sapless stumps. One grotesque, blighted scene followed another. The hero Stavrogin-one of the most astounding characters in fiction-became any confused young intellectual seeking an answer to life. The answer itself was pared down to a kind of Dos-toevsky-for-Tots...
...Webster slid into directing because the field was less crowded, but admits she prefers acting. Though she professionally directed a score of plays in England, it was in the U. S. three years ago, with Evans' Richard II, that she first directed Shakespeare. Directing plans for next year: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Some day: Shakespeare's Troilus and, Cressida, Macbeth...
...refused to explain. "How should I know?" he told actors who asked him what it meant: "I am only the author." But Shaw provided meaning enough when he asserted that Heartbreak House is "cultured, leisured Europe before the War," just as he evoked mood enough when he acknowledged that Chekhov had sounded the same music in his Cherry Orchard...