Chekhov world-weariness

This is rather how I felt in some of the places I've lived:

ANDREY: Oh where is it now, where has my past gone, the time when I was young, merry, clever, when I had fine thoughts, fine dreams, when my present and my future were lit up by hope? Why is it that no sooner have we begun to live, we become boring, grey, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy . . . Our town has existed now for two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants - and not one of them who isn't exactly like the others, not one hero, not one scholar, not one artist, not one who stands out in the slightest bit, who might inspire envy or a passionate desire to emulate him. They just eat, drink, sleep, then they die . . . others are born and they too eat, drink, sleep, and in order not to be dulled by boredom, they diversify their life with vile gossip, vodka, cards, law suits, and the wives deceive their husbands and the husbands lie, pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and an irremediably coarse influence weighs down on the children, and the spark of God's spirit dies in them and they become the same kind of pitiful corpses, one like another, as their mothers and fathers . . .

Chekhov Three Sisters, Act 4

The feel of ordinary life

Philip Pullman said something good about about the Chekhov story he’d read (Guardian short stories podcasts, ‘The Beauties’), about the plot not being the point but rather the often inconsequential texture of ordinary life. It’s true of Chekhov’s plays, too -- that’s one way he was a Modernist innovator. The story, says Pullman, is like the man said about Waiting for Godot, ‘In this play nothing happens -- twice.’

I recalled this when looking at a kids’ comic strip by Jim Medway, in which nothing happens five times, on successive days.

Now I've hit on another good quote from much earlier, as it happens in the introduction to Chekhov’s plays that I'm reading as preparation for seeing The Three Sisters tomorrow (by the Russian company again, so we’ll see what they do with something good). The author writes:

Chekhov surely must have read Gogol's famous 1836 denunciation of theatre in Russia during the early nineteenth century and beyond. After deploring the stage's corruption by 'the monster . . . melodrama', Gogol went on to ask 'where is our life, ourselves with our own idiosyncrasies and traits?'…. 'The melodrama is lying most impudently,' Gogol went on. 'Only a great, rare, deep genius can catch what surrounds us daily, what always accompanies us, what is ordinary — while mediocrity grabs with both hands all that is out of rule, what happens only seldom and catches the eye by its ugliness and disharmony . . . The strange has become the subject-matter of our drama. The whole point is to tell a new, strange, unheard-of incident: murder, fire, wild passions . . . poisons. Effects, eternal effects!'