SOURCE: "Chekhov's Dramatic Technique," in A Chekhov Companion, edited by Toby W. Clyman, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 107-22.

In the following essay, Styan looks at the characters, settings, plots, and moods of Chekhov's plays.

As the years pass and as Chekhov's plays are given different treatments and exposed to new and larger audiences, it grows increasingly clear that Chekhov was the complete playwright. In his awareness of the needs of the stage and its actors it might be said that he was also a complete man of the theatre. He held to a minimum of rules for writing a play, and he ruthlessly abandoned others that had been sanctified by centuries of tradition, but he could only do this because he enjoyed a full sense of the theatre. A sense of the theatre embraces not so much its mechanics of acting and staging, plotting, and character-drawing as the way...