Chekhov, Anton

Chekhov, Anton (1860–1904),
Russian playwright and short-story writer. Chekhov repeatedly draws on the play and character of Hamlet: for the hero of Ivanov (1887); for the failed intellectual of ‘In Moscow’ (1891) declaring ‘I am a Moscow Hamlet’; and for The Seagull (1895), with its crucial relationships between a powerful mother, her lover, a sensitive, artistic son, and a victimized heroine—explicitly using Hamlet as a form of reference.

Tom Matheson