ABSTRACT
With Anton Chekhov, with this generous, realistic man, everything changes. He is the only dramatist whose success or failure I take personally. If his plays are badly produced, I find that I actually take it personally, wishing to protect him as if he were one of the family. His great dramas, balanced precariously between melancholy and yearning, are easily misunderstood, easily wrecked. We want to shield this most humane of dramatists from a careless world.
