Three Sisters E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Chekhov's masterpiece of provincial claustrophobia, translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine. Living in a provincial army barrack town, Olga, Masha and Irina are finding life dull and long for the vitality of Moscow. Meanwhile their brother's wife begins to take over their house and their lives. Anton Chekhov's play Three Sisters was first performed in 1901 at the Moscow Art Theatre. This translation by Stephen Mulrine, published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, was first staged by Bristol Old Vic and Out of Joint on tour in 1995.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THREE SISTERS

by

Anton Chekhov

translated and introduced by

Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Chekhov: Key Dates

Dramatis Personae

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog in South Russia, in 1860, just before the Emancipation, although his family had been bought out of serfdom some years earlier, by his paternal grandfather. By his own account, Chekhov’s childhood was far from idyllic. His father Pavel was a domestic tyrant, fanatically religious, and Chekhov and his brothers were forced to rise before dawn to sing in the local church choir, then work long hours after school, minding the family grocery business.

Chekhov’s record at the Taganrog school, not surprisingly, was undistinguished, and at the age of sixteen he was left behind to complete his education, when the family fled to Moscow to escape the consequences of his father’s bankruptcy. In 1879, Chekhov entered Moscow University’s Faculty of Medicine, and soon became the family’s principal breadwinner, writing short comic pieces to supplement his student allowance.

By the time Chekhov qualified in 1884, his literary ambitions were already in conflict with what he regarded as his vocation, and indeed until his own health collapsed, he continued to practise medicine, mostly as an unpaid service. Chekhov was almost certainly infected with tuberculosis from childhood, and the disease was in its terminal stages before he would consent to a diagnosis. In addition to frequent haemorrhaging from the lungs, compelling him to spend the winters in the warm South, Chekhov suffered from a variety of other debilitating ailments, which make his work-rate little short of heroic. In 1899, when he sold the rights in his works to the publisher Marks, they already filled ten volumes, and the critical consensus is that his short stories represent an unparalleled achievement in the form, with the three great plays of his mature dramatic method scarcely less important.