Essays on Chekov

There is an old saying in china says: When a man is near death he speaks from the heart. It means when you really face the death, your words became soft and kind-hearted. It is the kind of phenomenon that people regret after they lose something wonderful. The selfish person donates all their belongings to the charity. The mean person treats others well and show them kindness. The mad man becomes gentler. In Chekhov’s” Rothschild’s Fiddle”, he illustrates a selfish and greedy man becomes soft-hearted and regrets his choices when he faces the death directly. Yakov, the ...

The distrust between East and West may be as old as the confluence of the two parts of the world themselves. After all, it was during his attempt to conquer India that Alexander the Great fell ill with the fever that was the only thing that kept him from world conquest (Biography.com Editors). The ongoing war between the feverishly fervent establishment of Islam and the coolly complacent secular-Christian West is only becoming more and more entrenched by the news cycle, as the West seems to have forgotten that it’s only been a few centuries since its leaders were ...

Anton Chekov’s seminal play The Cherry Orchard, among its many other themes, explores the theme of time passing. Lopakhin the businessman, for instance, remarks that “Time does go,” a simple statement that is nonetheless indicative of a larger sense of the significance of time in the lives of the characters (1). The play as viewed through the time-sensitive character Lopakhin operates on a ticking clock, as he is perpetually anxious about saving the titular cherry orchard in time, and gives the audience the impression of Lopakhin as a hurried, efficient character, representative of a more modern desire to ...

1- Publication sites

"Chekov and Zulu" was published in the New Yorker and then as part of a collection titled East-West.  It has also, obviously, been published in school anthologies.  How could these different publication venues shape or affect readings of the story?     One of the major contributions that the post-structuralist thinker Roland Barthes made to the field of literary criticism was the idea that there were no more authors and readers in literature, or in any other kind of writing. Instead, there were only “scriptors,” and both the people who wrote the words and the people who read them could fill ...