Three Sisters E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. This Drama Classics edition of Anton Chekhov's masterpiece of provincial claustrophobia is translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine.

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.