Chekh It Out is your all-purpose interactive guide to Anton Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters.

The text of this play is loaded with links, polls, puns, translation and language notes, photos and videos, all designed to add context and value to your reading experience. We advise you to read through the play at least once before using the site, since discussion questions and intra-textual references may spoil the ending for you.

 

People Rachel Woods Samantha Parry Luke Schanz-Garbassi Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., CV Starr Professor of Russian & East European Studies

Related Links http://chekhitout.wordpress.com

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As arguably the most famous playwright that Russia has ever produced, Anton Chekhov has written works that have been read and performed on an international level since their first publication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His literary genius has helped to further the genre of realistic theatre with a tragicomedy of simultaneous humor and melancholy unique to his plays. In comparing three contemporary dramatic literature adaptations of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya to the original (Sam Holcroft’s Vanya, Howard Barker’s Uncle Vanya and David Mamet’s Uncle Vanya) I will prove that Chekhov’s particular use of tragicomedy creates a human universality that dramatists try to emulate to this day, while each individually adjusts the test to fit his own distinctive writing style and vision for the plotline. This comparison asserts that classic works of dramatic literature contain an isolated universal human element that compels playwrights to create modern adaptations.

People Cori Hundt Researcher John Bertolini Sponsor & Ellis Professor of English and Liberal Arts

Scene from Sam Holcroft’s Vanya performed as part of 10-Minute Plays during the 2011 Spring Student Symposium.

Related Links Full text of Uncle Vanya in English Full text of Uncle Vanya in Russian Watch Uncle Vanya directed by Stanley Spenger Sonya’s Story, an operatic adaptation of Uncle Vanya Undergraduate Research Office

Downloads Critical Essay Presented to the Department of English and American Literatures Images from the Performance