Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2011
Critics have long pointed out that in Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya," the dramatic tensions that build up over the course of the play remain unresolved at the end, that the characters learn nothing from their experience, and that the audience is left with a sour note of pessimism as the curtain falls. While this lack of a satisfactory ending has been seen by some as the play's greatest weakness, this paper argues that it is precisely the play's greatest strength. All the major characters in the play without exception choose to escape in some manner or other from the realizations that come to them during the course of the play. The paper argues that Chekhov deliberately chose to end the play the way he did in order to make the point that where there is escape there is no personal growth: only stasis—stultifying, stifling, crushing, defeating stasis.
Despite rapid growth of adaptation theory in the last two decades, there is a gap in the field. Books like Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Julie Sanders’ Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) approach adaptations from an audience’s perspective, describing the effects of the adaptation process and providing a robust taxonomy, identifying all of different forms that adaptation might take. They do not, however, describe the details of the process of adaptation itself, even though they often refer to the need for a process-oriented account of adaptation. Existing adaptation manuals focus on screen-writing, leaving someone with an interest in the specifics of adapting a play nowhere to turn. This paper begins to address this gap in the available knowledge by documenting the adaptation process involved in the creation of four new adaptations of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, targeted at a New Zealand audience. The experiments presented here confirm what is suggested by a survey of the reception of English-language adaptations of Chekhov: there is no single correct method for adapting a play. An adapter's greatest challenge can be identifying which strategy is appropriate for the conditions they face. This project experiments with different adaptive methods and strategies, developed by looking at other English-language Chekhov adaptations, including techniques of approximating the setting, language and themes to a target audience. I attempt to identify which methodologies will achieve the desired results, revealing a variety of different challenges, advantages and weaknesses inherent to each approach. Moreover, both the research and the experiments suggest how the success or failure of an adaptation depends on a variety of contextual factors, including the target audience's relationship with the adapted work, the dramaturgical characteristics of that work, and the abilities of the adapter.
2000 •
The results of experimental research to study factors that influence reception of a translated work, which, for its recipients in a target culture (TC), is, essentially, a fragment of a different culture, give strong evidence that readers in TC interpret translated texts in accordance with codes of TC. The experiment was based on Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya. The data of the questionnaire and interviews show very consistently that though the themes of the play seem to be of universal nature educated Americans who are not particularly familiar with Russian culture, on the one hand, and educated Russian readers of today, on the other hand, interpret the meaning of the play, make judgments about situations and the characters in the play in a very different way. This different reading of Uncle Vanya is largely determined by values and attitudes of American society, certain cultural stereotypes, cultural codes and readers’ expectations as to the plot, contents, and characters of a work of fiction. Our experimental data on the interpretation and evaluation of Uncle Vanya by American and Russian readers indicate that the way the original text and its translation function in two different cultures suggests fundamental differences between the two texts. The reading of the play and its evaluation in the two cultures is so different that the original and its translation could be seen functionally as two different texts (which, in fact, materially they are). This effect is particularly striking since in the case of Uncle Vanya the text of the original does not contain any specific cultural terms that would prevent a reader of a different culture from understanding it or might force translators to resort to compensations or changes in the text; so we undoubtedly have a quality ‘translation proper’ and not an adaptation: all the propositional structures of the original text are present in the text of the translation, semantic correspondences are sufficiently accurate, and, functionally, both texts do belong to the same kind of discourse. The experiment demonstrates that when translated a text is transferred into the context of intertextual relations of the TC, losing connection with the codes and texts of the culture where it was originally produced. This allows the phenomenon of translation to be seen as appropriation by the receiving culture. Readers’ cultural context, underlying cultural models of the TC determine to a large extent what meaning the readers construe when they read a work in translation (no doubt, this depends on the type of a translated text and its role in both cultures). Cultural factors are crucial to an adequate understanding of the nature of translation and it is these cultural factors that account for the ‘translation paradox’: a translated text in the receiving culture bears the name of the original author and is taken to be an equivalent of the original though functionally it is, in fact, a different text
Knowledge and Pain, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2012
The Code of Pain in ChekhovAbstract Chekhov’s works exhibit a distinctive pattern of references to human suffering that corresponds to his reserve in matters concerning his personal life. Signals of the pain and suffering of his characters represent an understated but identifiable code that allows the audience to interpret the meaning of the characters’ muted emotions. Chekhov was especially sensitive to inconspicuous human pain, hushed despair and humiliation of those who were unable to express their grief due to a lack of confidence and of a sense of their own worth. The code emerges as a strand of literary devices, often perceived as incongruities, which signal that we are confronted with the unutterable. This article offers an inventory of discursive elements that occur in disturbing situations and convey unease without naming its reasons.
An essay discussing the work of Howard Barker and The Wrestling School in what is the best volume of essays so far published on Britain's greatest living dramatist.
The Pushkin Review
Anticipating Chekhov: Tragicomic Elements in Griboedov's "Woe from Wit" - The Pushkin Review2012 •
In its nearly 200-year history, scholarship on Griboedov’s play Woe From Wit has been dominated by ideological readings. In the first few years of the play’s circulation, it sparked debate between conservative critics and Decembrist-Romantic writers about its depiction of Moscow society. The progressive critics of the mid-to-late 19th century, such as Belinskii and Dobroliubov, praised the work as one of the first sobering depictions of Russian reality, a tradition that, according to them, was continued by Pushkin and Gogol’. Soviet critics would later canonize this reading of Woe from Wit in the 20th century. Many have viewed the work as a Decembrist manifesto and its hero Chatskii as the most articulate spokesman of that movement. Some literary scholars, such as the Formalist Iurii Tynianov, have focused on the historical prototypes for the play’s characters. Modern western scholarship is relatively limited, but has included some re-evaluation of the play’s characters and analysis of its meter and language. However, the main feature of the play – its mixed genre of tragicomedy – has to my knowledge received little attention. It is the aim of this paper to provide a reading of Woe from Wit as a tragicomedy and, in doing so, to show how it anticipated many of Chekhov’s dramatic techniques: an undermined raisonneur and concomitant authorial distancing, a domino effect of unrequited love, constant miscommunication and disconnect between all characters and the incorporation of elements of commedia dell’arte. This reading opposes the view of Chekhov’s dramaturgy as anomalous and unprecedented in Russian letters, and instead suggests a clear evolution of the tragicomic genre, which began with Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor, was developed further in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit and Gogol’s The Government Inspector and culminated in Chekhov’s plays.
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 45.1 (2015): 46-78.
The Twilight of Realism: Russian Writers and the Fin-de-siècle
"The Burden of Superfluity: Reconsidering Female Heroism in Anton Chekhov's 'The Seagull'"2015 •
Published in 'The Twilight of Realism: Russian Writers and the Fin-de-siècle,' ed. Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Toronto Slavic Quarterly
Paradise Lost: Biblical Parallels and Autobiographical Allusions in Chekhov’s Story "The Black Monk"2013 •
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Literature and Medicine
Listening to Chekhov: Narrative Approaches to Depression2006 •
Russian Review
Imaginations of Destruction: The "Forest Question" in Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture2003 •