Preserving the text of the play, the amazing dialogues, the brilliant characters, we have transposed the action into today’s Russian provinces and changed only one thing: the age of the heroes. In Anton Chekhov’s play the heroines are aged around 25; now they are 55. What does that do? The heroes’ retorts, stylistically inappropriate from today’s twenty-year-olds, are absolutely organic for the older generation, the ‘Soviet’ intelligentsia. The problems of Chekhov’s classical work concerning the search for a meaning in life, the loss of ideals, the fear before death without having achieved anything in the world, the desire to be useful to others – all these things are also a typical attribute of the Soviet intelligentsia.

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