By Anton Chekhov - Center Stage

Chekhov
1860–1904
By Gavin Witt, Production Dramaturg
When Anton Chekhov was born in the Black expanse of the steppes. The population surged to the cities
Sea backwater of Taganrog, anywhere from
20 to 40 million Russians lived in slavery as
serfs, the legal property of landowners, the
imperial family, or the Church. The czar freed the
serfs by proclamation in 1861, two years before four million
“You ask ‘What is life?’
That is the same as asking
‘What is a carrot?’
A carrot is a carrot and
we know nothing more.”
in search of work. There were conflicts of expansion with
Turkey, Japan, and China; and there continued a diplomatic
and military quadrille of shifting allegiances with the nations
of Europe. There were wild swings from political reform—or
the semblance of reform—to reactionary repression. While an
American slaves gained their freedom. Russia, mired in tradition,
harnessed to a rigidly stratified society, governed by an imperial
autocracy, and entrenched in a centuries-old agricultural
economy, embarked on an all-out effort to industrialize and
compete. Webs of railways were thrown across the infinite
elite of about 100,000 enjoyed a steadily rising standard of
living and all modern luxuries, many of Russia’s 120 million or so
citizens lived in nearly medieval conditions. As for the serfs, they
emerged from slavery into a poverty made even more abject by
the burden of debt. >>>
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