SOURCE: "Chekhov," in The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984, pp. 50-76.

In the following essay, Kane investigates Chekhov's use of language and silence in his plays, arguing: "Aware that speech, like time, is an anthropocentric effort to limit, control, and elucidate the chaos of experience, Chekhov relies on the unspoken to expose and examine the elusive and the enigmatic both within and beyond man. "

Anton Chekhov, respected for the concision, objectivity, sensitivity, and humanity of his short stories, began writing for the theatre in the 1880s. He was, in the opinion of Robert Corrigan, "the first playwright who sought to create in his plays a situation which would reveal the private drama that each man has inside himself and which is enacted everyday in the random, apparently meaningless and undramatic events of our common routine."¹ The Sea...