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RICHARD GILMAN. Chekhov's Plays: An Opening into Eternity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1995. Pp. 261. $30.
Richard Gilman's book on Chekhov's plays will delight those who wish to locate Chekhov's work beyond the critical cliches of bittersweet mood and atmosphere, inconclusiveness, and lack of traditional action or sensation, for Gilman offers new and different ways of understanding, performing, and directing these plays.
In 1974, in his book The Making of Modern Drama, Gilman eloquently sketched many of these ideas in his Chekhov chapter. Now, he painstakingly elaborates and develops. During the intervening years, Gilman switched translations from Ronald Hingley to Kristin Johnsen-Neshati for The Seagull and Paul Schmidt for Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Gilman still uses Magarshack's Platonov and Hingley's Ivanov and Wood Demon.
On The Seagull, Gilman writes that the play's chief subjects are art and love, yet "the reigning spirit of The Seagull is antiromanticism."...