In the plays of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), tragedy and comedy are inextricably intertwined.

Although his major plays are suffused with an air of anxiety and pessimism akin to those
of Henrik Ibsen, he insisted on calling The Seagull(1895) and The Cherry Orchard (1903) comedies.
He gave Uncle Vanya (1896) the non-committal subtitle Scenes from Country Life, and
called Three Sisters (1900) a drama. Yet none of these plays is either conventionally comic or
tragic. In particular, the central aspect of Aristotelian tragedy, the climactic action entailing
reversal or recognition, seems absent from Chekhovs plays. In general, his Russian gentry are
in decline, but the decline is gradual and irreversible. They undergo various minor
illuminations in the course of the plays but never a blinding recognition that could lead to a
change of fortune.
Chekhov, a doctor and the grandson of a serf, became famous as a story-writer before his first
successes as a playwright. Doctors come and go in his plays, sometimes expressing wisdom and
more often resignation. Generally seen by his compatriots as a naturalist, he was later
interpreted by the Soviets as a chronicler of the rise of the bourgeoisie, the decline of the
aristocracy, and the imminence of revolution (he died in 1904, the year before the first Russian
Revolution). However, this interpretation depended on an avoidance of Chekhovs dramatic
innovations, which changed the nature of plot and its relationship to character. The plot of
Ibsen's first major play, The Seagull, is fairly conventional; Chekhovs symbolism and selfconscious reflection on the nature of drama are the main features that distinguish this work
from that of earlier realist and naturalist playwrights. In the last decade of his life, however,
Chekhov wrote three masterpieces that increasingly resembled the symbolist drama of his
fictional playwright Konstantin Treplev.
One of the characters in The Seagull complains about a play within the play that "nothing
happens a complaint that has been repeated by critics of Chekhovs later plays. In them, he
turns away from conventions like the love plot, the climactic final gunshot, even the main
character; instead Chekhov explores the drama of the undramatic.[1] Like life itself, Chekhovs
plots generally lack resolution. The loaded pistol of his famous aphorism provides an example.
In Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the pistols go off, and if the first one wounds Lovborg in an unexpected
way, the second provides a suitably dramatic climax. By contrast, in The Seagull, Konstantin
attempts suicide between the first and second acts, and then finally succeeds in killing himself
in the last scene. In Uncle Vanya, written a year later, Vanya wants to kill his brother-in-law
Professor Serebriakov, a charlatan who has consumed all the money the family estate can
produce. As Vanya complains, For twenty-five years hes been regurgitating other peoples
ideas about realism, naturalism, all that bullshit. At the end of the third act, Vanya, infuriated
with the Professor, shoots at him twice, but misses. The shots do not result in any climactic
action. Nothing changes. As Vanya observes in the fourth act, Funny, isnt it? I try to kill
someone, nobody calls the police, nobody arrests me. Which means you all think Im crazy.

Vanya thinks of killing himself with a vial of Dr. Astrovs morphine, but Sonya convinces him
to give the morphine back. The Professor and his second wife return to Moscow, and everything
on the estate returns to normal, except that the characters are more disillusioned than ever. In
his last work, The Cherry Orchard, a minor character boasts in the second act, I always carry a
loaded pistol. He brandishes the weapon too. Yet, as Chekhov announced proudly, Theres
not a single pistol-shot in the whole play.[2]
Chekhovs plays move away from the focus on a central heroic figure. Instead of heroes or
villains, the later plays tend to feature ensemble casts of characters who are neither particularly
good nor particularly bad. In Three Sisters, the sisters are indeed heroines, but their actions are
not typically heroic. Mainly, they endure. Throughout the play, the sisters dream of escaping
their country estate and going to Moscow. Irina begs to be allowed to go at the end of the
second and third acts. Gradually, however, their brother gambles away the family fortune, and
at the end of the play the oldest, Olga, realizes: of course, Ill never get to Moscow. As
Richard Gilman has observed, the sisters waiting to go to Moscow resembles the Vladimir and
Estragons waiting in Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot (1952), written half a century later.
Becketts novel, The Unnamable(1953), would end with the line you must go on, I cant go on,
Ill go on. Chekhov sounds the same theme of endurance. At the end of Uncle Vanya, Sonya
recognizes that nothing in her life or her uncles will change and says: You and I, Uncle Vanya,
we have to go on living. The days will be slow, and the nights will be long, but well take
whatever fate sends us. At the end of Three Sisters, Masha says we have to go on living.
Like the realists and naturalists (and unlike his character Konstantin), Chekhov claims to
represent the world as it is, without moral judgments. Most of the climactic action in his works
takes place offstage, often before the beginning of the play. What takes center stage is
conversation. Not exactly, as Irina puts it in The Seagull, one long speech, however; in
Chekhovs plays there are many short speeches and many long silences, only occasionally
punctuated by a longer monologue. Characters who do make lengthy speeches, about the
environment, or the problem of work, or the future of Russia, usually retract or ironize them.
Chekhovs characters often talk past each other, as if they are not hearing one another. Some,
like the old butler Firs, in The Cherry Orchard, are in fact deaf. Chekhov defended the dialogue in
his plays on realistic grounds: Things on stage should be as complicated and yet as simple as
in life. People dine, just dine, while their happiness is made and their lives are
smashed.[3] Here, Chekhov claimed to be exposing the drama of everyday life, and he does so,
but at the same time the effect of non-sequitur in his speeches prefigures the later absurdist
plays of Samuel Beckett or Eugne Ionesco.
Throughout Chekhovs plays, any sort of resolution, comic or tragic, is deferred; he often
presents courtships that go nowhere, instead of a conventional love plot. In The Cherry Orchard,

the characters expect the successful businessman Lopakhin, the son and grandson of serfs, to
propose to Varya, the adopted daughter of impoverished aristocrats. Yet, every time he is left
alone with her he seems uneasy. By the end of the play, the family estate is sold to Lopakhin,
and Chekhov seems to leave two possibilities open: a comic resolution in which Lopakhin
marries Varya and the estate stays in the family, or a tragic one, in which the estate is destroyed
for the sake of real estate development (a theme from Ibsens Master Builder). Yet, Chekhov
resists every opportunity to dramatize this ending. Lopakhin meets with Varya, but instead of
proposing he comments on the weather. Uncle Gayev plans to make a speech about the
significance of the occasion, but the others dissuade him from speaking. In the final scene, while
axes are heard chopping down the orchard offstage, the comic figure Firs reappears; elderly and
ill, he has been left behind by the family, who thought he had been taken to an old age home.
He has been locked in the house, which is soon to be demolished. So, he lies down on the stage
and waitsfor someone to come back, or simply for death to come get him. The scene can be
played tragically, but it works better as farce. This is one reason why Chekhov insisted on
calling the play a comedy. The Cherry Orchard does not resolve itself in marriage, like a
conventional comedy, but it deploys farce to come to terms with the modern failure of
resolution. For this reason, Chekhov complained about the lugubrious naturalistic staging of his
plays at Konstantin Stanislavskys Moscow Art Theater, even though these performances made
Chekhov famous. Although Chekhovs representation of passing time, boredom, and silence
can be justified in realist or naturalist terms, his plays continually gesture beyond the
naturalistic theater, portending the disruption of naturalism in the twentieth century