Anton Chekhov: drama, time, and crisis

Author(s)

Rodrigo Alves do Nascimento

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2019-08-05

Examining board members

Bruno Barretto Gomide; Gilberto Figueiredo Martins; Samuel de Vasconcelos Titan Junior; Rodrigo Turin

• Advisor: Bruno Barretto Gomide

Abstract

This dissertation analyses how time is settled in Anton Chekhov\'s dramaturgy. In his major plays, his characters are set against a backdrop of deep historical, ideological, and family crisis that leads them to a constant reflection on the meaning of his temporal experience. They often discuss their meaninglessness present and compare it to memories of the past or expectations of the future. However, their speeches rarely tune in and each seems to inhabit a distinct temporality, so the final effect is that of a centrifugal and dispersive dramatic movement. Thus, by populating his plays with a multitude of temporal experiences linked to waiting, boredom, memory, melancholy, desires, refusal, dreams and utopias, the playwright breaks with the \"absolute present\" of traditional drama, which it was based on intersubjective dialogue and the decisive action of the characters in a stable present. Through the analysis of plays such as Platonov, Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, but mainly The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, we intend to demonstrate how destabilization of this absolute present and the settlement of this multiplicity of temporalities are articulated in several ways by a dramatic irony that prevents certain temporal experiences from overlapping each other. Such irony, made of dialogues and dramatic events of another kind, is connected to the introduction of pauses, silences and moments of stasis, which open the drama to the expression of temporal experiences then already in frank experimentation in modern poetry and novel. The whole of the work reveals the complexity of the Russian province\'s temporal experience in a period of crisis, while at the same time calls into question the temporal synchronization that, in bourgeois modernity, has homogenized very different temporal experiences. In so doing, the work does not accommodate itself to an end-of-century crisis temporality and opens up radically, transforming the temporal multiplicity settled in the form into a device for the accommodation of future temporalities - which contributes decisively to that. Chekhov becomes more \"updatable\" in different times and cultures. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/21718-0 - Chekhov and the time recaptured
• Grantee: Rodrigo Alves Do Nascimento
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate