Small Surroundings

I never really related to Anton Chekhov nor got to really understand his ”greatness.” The fact that I have never seen a Chekhov production on stage may have contributed to this lack of understanding or ignorance of mine. I think the first thing I read by Chekhov (rather tried to, but didn’t survive it) was a novel, translated in Persian. After that I gave it a couple of goes, but it didn’t go that well anyways. Recently, I guess ten years after the last attempt, I read Three Sisters-in English this time. I did not relate to it either. I could not discover the chain of action in the play.
However, I realized that Chekhov has a great skill in creating mood. One of the most interesting aspects of this mood-creating is the sense of displacement and hating ones surrounding, that is, one that occupies my mind most often. There is a passage where Andrey Serghyeevich Prozorov is complaining in despair:

• ANDREY: …Our town has been here for at least two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, and there is not one of them in all that number who is not like all the others, not a single saintly fanatic either in the past or in the present, not a single scholar, not a single artist, not even a remotely noteworthy man who might awaken some envy, or the desire to imitate him… All they do is eat, and drink, and sleep, and then die… others are then born and they also eat, and drink and sleep, and so as not to become completely numb from boredom, they embroider their lives with disgusting gossip, with vodka, with cards, and deceptions, and the wives deceive their husbands, while the husbands lie to themselves, they give the appearance that they see nothing and hear nothing, and the oppressing, inescapable and degenerate influence crushes their children, and the spark of divinity is extinguished in them, and they become just the same pitiful and mean corpses without life, all the same as one another, just as their parents were before them…
  Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, Act 4

Sounds just like Denmark; Yeah, but Chekhov was Russian. I think this has to do with all of us who hate their surroundings. I can see this feeling in Henrik Ibsen as well with his detestation for Norway. He wrote to Magdalene Thorsen:

• “I have got far enough from home to see the hollowness of all the lies that parade themselves in our so-called public life and the despicability of that canting spirit that is glibly eloquent in talk about “a great cause,” but has neither will nor ability nor feeling of duty when a great deed is called for. [3rd Dec. 1865] Life there [Norway], as it presents itself to me now, has something indescribably wearisome about it; it wearies the soul out of one, wearies the strength out of one’s will. That is the accursed thing about the small surroundings—they make the soul small. [15th Oct. 1867] It is often evident to me that there is nothing left in our country for any one gifted with mind and heart to do […] Try to get away! Go abroad! Do it whether it is possible or impossible. But nothing is impossible that one desires with an indomitable will. [31st Mar. 1868]
  Henrik Ibsen, Letters