The Boor, A Comedy in One Act

by Anton Chekhov

Overview

While Anton Chekhov is best known for his lengthier plays, he also wrote one-act comedies. The Boor is one of those. In The Boor, a crude and rude landowner, Smirnov, visits a grieving widow, Yelena, to collect on a debt her departed husband owed him. He needs the money today as he has to pay tomorrow. Her estate manager is not there and she cannot pay until the man comes back the day after tomorrow. The boor decides he will camp out in her salon till she forks over the money. The play develops to the point that the boor challenges the widow to a duel with totally unexpected consequences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781495446931
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	02/09/2014
Pages:	30
Sales rank:	1,119,661
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.06(d)

About the Author

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896; but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Uncle Vanya and premiered Chekhov's last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text." Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.