Word: chekhovian
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...describes him as a Chekhovian figure, but in truth he is a little vague to the reader, and perhaps to her. She doesn't even know whether he is Freudian, Jungian or Adlerian. He is the name of what she clings to. Sarah understands her problem with merciless clarity: she yearns. "Yearn," she writes. "That is a word of such strength it makes me afraid." The specialty of the mediocre neurotic writer is to frighten a reader with his act. Sarah Ferguson does something far more subtle, far more relentless. She makes a reader enter not so much into...
...lost in the film. Vanya's senile mother reads her pamphlets on the emancipation of women and smokes cigarettes (which seems to encompass her idea of emancipation). Astrov gives a stirring rendition of the weather report when Vanya interrupts his seduction of Irina--an example of the Chekhovian principle that the words we exchange in conversation don't mean a damn thing. And Vanya, the prototype useless intellectual, constantly brings a smile of recognition with his temper tantrums...
...BLIND PIG. A superb quartet of actors draws Chekhovian music out of the humor, passion and frustration of black life in Chicago in the early...
Taking Revenge? According to Prescott's foreword, the history is based on his personal knowledge as well as on information obtained from such " 'faceless' functionaries as interpreters, bodyguards, valets, cooks, waiters and chauffeurs." Even more bizarre, Morrison's introduction points out that Prescott, "a Chekhovian-looking character" with "a weary sense of defeat," fleshed out his historical material with imaginary dialogue and even occasional fictitious characters. Morrison obviously has some misgivings. "Often, I confess, I was unable to separate 'fact' from 'invention,' so deftly did Prescott weave them together to give...
...Southern novel, like the Chekhovian play, has become almost ritualistic. Through nobody's fault, the tradition now comprises a pattern of characters, symbols and plots so fixed and familiar that only a genius or a black militant novelist can escape literary predestination. Madison Jones is neither, though he is a very good writer with all sorts of credentials from the Southern establishment, including a Sewanee Review fellowship in fiction and the unreserved recommendations of James Dickey ("profound"), Allen Tate ("the Thomas Hardy of the South") and Andrew Lytle ("as spare as Aeschylus; as rich as Euripides...