ABSTRACT
Chekhov I revere this side idolatry, but an irreverent thought occurred to me at the close of ‘The Three Sisters,’ when these ladies were grouped for their last and somewhat sing-song lamentation. They reminded me of those sororal duos and trios who croon their heart-break into microphones. Was not Chekhov, after all, a kind of sublime crooner, continually cultivating his Muscovite Blues? And may not that be the reason why, neglected in England for a quarter of a century, he recently became ‘box-office’? He spoke for the defeated, for the self-pitying, for the parlour philosophers whose babbling of -isms and -ologies is only a veil for inertia. The mood of our English nineteen-twenties was doleful enough. Rich girls had to be pitied for their poverty, and popular melody was all boo-hoo-hoos and blue-hue-hues. Self-pity was the note and sourness the flavour. The Edwardian intellectuals had rejected Chekhov because he told them nothing, and Mr. Shaw had convinced them that doctrine and debate were the true signs of an advanced dramatist. But the young people of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, tired of being told where to get off by Socialists who had got on, could be far more responsive to Chekhov's compassionate studies of defeatism; his samovar gave them just their cup of tea. . . .
