The Swan Song
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who want to encounter Chekhov's drama in a short time yet still read complete works
- Theater enthusiasts and small-theater practitioners interested in one-act structure and comic rhythm
- Teachers and students who need short scripts for classroom reading, acting exercises, or book-club materials
- Advanced readers who have read Chekhov's full-length plays and want to fill in his experiments in small forms
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer long narratives and complex fates and find one-act plays too limited in scope
- Pure prose readers unwilling to engage with script format and stage directions at all
- Readers who expect a single complete long play and are uninterested in a collection of short plays
Reading tips
- Read through in table-of-contents order, then reread Swan Song and The Bear to compare their balance of sorrow and comedy.
- While reading each short play, note entrances, exits, and pauses; in short works these arrangements often carry key information.
- Listen to one or two excerpts from the audio performances and compare them with the rhythm of your own reading.
- After finishing, revisit Peng Tao's introduction and carry its way of observing in the one-act plays into reading the full-length ones.
About the publisher
Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.
Contents
- 版权信息
- 导读 不简单的“小形式”
- 《契诃夫独幕剧集》初版序
- 大路上
- 论烟草有害（一九〇二年版）
- 天鹅之歌
- 熊
- 求婚
- 塔杰雅娜癕雷宾娜
- 一位做不了主的悲剧人物
- 结婚
- 周年纪念
- 契诃夫自传
- ［附录］
- 论烟草有害（一八八六年版）
- 《论烟草有害》的两个版本
FAQ
I haven't read Chekhov's full-length plays. Can I start with this one-act collection?
Which one-act plays are included in this book?
Why is it said that the one-act plays are a key to reading the full-length plays?
What situations are the audio performances in the book suited to?
Comments
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About the author
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian writer and playwright. Born in Taganrog, he graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Moscow University and practiced medicine and traveled to Sakhalin. With a concise and restrained style, he wrote short stories such as "Chameleon," "The Man in the Case," and "Ward No. 6," as well as plays including "The Seagull," "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," and "The Cherry Orchard." He is a representative figure of late 19th-century Russian realist literature. His works often focus on the daily lives and spiritual predicaments of ordinary people, revealing irony and compassion through plain narration, and have had a profound influence on later short fiction and modern drama. In 1904 he died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany.
Li Jianwu (1906–1982) was a Chinese writer, literary critic, translator, and drama educator from Yuncheng, Shanxi, who often wrote under the pen name Liu Xiwu. He graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages at Tsinghua University and later studied Flaubert in France. His plays, including This Is Only Spring and Liang Yunda, focus on real life, while his essay collections, such as the Juhua Ji and Juhua Erji, are noted for their sensitive artistic appreciation. As a translator, he rendered Madame Bovary and Molière's comedies, and his multi-volume collected works have had a lasting influence on the introduction of foreign literature to Chinese readers. His catalog spans foreign literature, world classics, and drama, with twenty-nine titles held in the collection, including translations and guided editions of works by Flaubert and Chekhov.
