More than one century after the death of Anton Chekhov (1860 1904), his plays are celebrated throughout the world as a major milestone in the history of theater and drama. Outside the Russian-speaking community, he is undoubtedly the most widely translated, studied, and performed of all Russian writers. His plays are characterized by their evasiveness: tragedy and comedy, realism and naturalism, symbolism and impressionism, as well as other labels of school and genre, all of which fail to account for the uniqueness of his artistic system and worldview. "A New Poetics of Chekhov's Plays:...