in the outside world — all my sins in red and white
nel mondo esterno: rosso su bianco tutti i miei peccati
*
at the nursing home — the old lady asleep with a packed suitcase
all’ospizio: la vecchia dorme con la valigia pronta
*
waiting for death the cat passes by to say hi
aspettando la morte il gatto passa per un salutino
*
Via Marsala — among the pigeons the bum talks to himself
Via Marsala: tra i piccioni il barbone parla da solo
*
the dog’s moaning is persistent — my fate
il lamento del cane è persistente: il mio destino
*
after sleeping on it I haven’t solved it yet — undertow of cars
dormendoci su non ho ancora risolto: risacca d’auto
*
in the face of my decline the bats laugh their jaws off
di fronte al mio declino i pipistrelli si sganasciano
*
end of April — a black trash bag dragged by the wind
fine d’aprile: la busta nera trascinata dal vento
Maurizio Brancaleoni is a poet and translator. He lives near Rome, Italy. His haiku have appeared in a wide variety of journals over the past few years. Maurizio manages “Leisure Spot”, a bilingual blog where he posts interviews, reviews and translations: https://leisurespotblog.blogspot.com/p/interviste-e-recensioni-interviews-and.html
The Problem of Emptiness and Loneliness of the Modern Individual in Chekhov’s Dramaturgy
Philology and History Faculty
Department of Native Language and Literature: Russian Language Specialization, Group 242
Annotation: this article analyzes the theme of existential emptiness and loneliness of the modern individual in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s dramaturgy. The author examines Chekhov’s plays such as “Uncle Vanya,” “Three Sisters,” “The Seagull,” and “The Cherry Orchard,” focusing on the characters’ inner emptiness, instability, and alienation from society. The paper draws parallels between literary characters and the philosophical-psychological views of J.-P. Sartre, E. Fromm, and V. Frankl. It demonstrates how Chekhov artistically portrays the loss of human vitality, inner suffering, communicative incapacity, and the search for meaning in modern life.
Аннотация: в данной статье анализируется тема экзистенциальной пустоты и одиночества современного человека в драматургии Антона Павловича Чехова. Автор рассматривает пьесы Чехова, такие как «Дядя Ваня», «Три сестры», «Чайка» и «Вишнёвый сад», сосредотачивая внимание на внутренней пустоте, нестабильности и отчуждённости персонажей от общества. В статье проводится параллель между литературными образами и философско-психологическими взглядами Ж.-П. Сартра, Э. Фромма и В. Франкла. Показано, как Чехов художественно отражает утрату жизненной энергии человека, его внутренние страдания, неспособность к коммуникации и поиск смысла жизни в условиях современной реальности.
Keywords: Chekhov’s dramaturgy, emptiness, loneliness, existentialism, modern individual, psychological crisis, communication, search for meaning.
Ключевые слова: драматургия Чехова, пустота, одиночество, экзистенциализм, современный человек, психологический кризис, коммуникация, поиск смысла.
The transformations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries left a profound imprint on human consciousness. Scientific progress, the crisis of spiritual values, and the contradiction between personal freedom and social restrictions raised new questions in the minds of individuals. It was precisely during this period that Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s dramaturgy offered a deep expression of the modern individual’s spiritual state, inner emptiness, and loneliness. Through the characters’ inner torments, unfulfilled dreams, instability, and difficulty in establishing human connection, Chekhov reveals the universal problems of his time [1]. In plays such as Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard, the absurdity of life, the lack of purpose, and the inevitability of loneliness become central themes. Chekhov’s characters seem to act, but they fail to achieve real change [2]. Their passivity, inner contradictions, and inaction align closely with modern existentialist philosophy [3].
In Chekhov’s work, the emptiness and loneliness of the modern individual are portrayed not only as personal but also as social problems, analyzed from psychological perspectives as well. Erich Fromm emphasized that loneliness and the lack of meaning in modern society are consequences that emerge alongside the acquisition of freedom [4]. Viktor Frankl showed that when a person loses meaning in life, emptiness and inner suffering arise [5]. Chekhov’s characters face precisely this kind of meaninglessness. This article examines how Chekhov’s dramaturgy portrays the emptiness and loneliness of the modern individual, analyzing the artistic representation and philosophical foundations of these states. Through the inner world of his characters, Chekhov addresses the most pressing issues of our time.
Chekhov’s dramaturgy is distinguished by its psychological depth and subtle artistic expression of socio-philosophical issues. One of the central problems in his plays is the emptiness and loneliness of the modern human being. This theme acquires a unique aesthetic and philosophical layer in plays such as Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard.
The Psychological State of Chekhov’s Characters and the Sense of Emptiness
In Uncle Vanya, the protagonist comes to realize that his life has been wasted. Vanya experiences anger, despair, and deep inner torment upon realizing that he has spent his life serving others, only to be left with nothing. He declares, “I have squandered my life…” – thus transforming loneliness from a mere social condition into a deeply personal tragedy [6].
This state of inner emptiness resembles Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “freedom without ownership.” Sartre argues that although man is free, he is alone in the face of choices [7]. This very loneliness underlies the inaction and internal imbalance of Chekhov’s characters.
The Crisis of Communication and Futile Aspirations
In Three Sisters, the protagonists are dissatisfied with their current lives and dream of returning to Moscow. However, their longing never turns into real action. Their dialogues are filled with melancholy, loneliness, and emptiness. Often, their conversations fail to connect — a clear sign of the communication crisis [8].
Vladimir Kataev notes that behind their dreams, Chekhov presents the individual as a “mysterious being in the world.” According to him, for Chekhov’s characters, “a dream is not an action, but a desire for salvation” [9].
The Seagull and the Tragedy of Non-recognition
In The Seagull, Treplev’s artistic aspirations and attempts to assert himself end in rejection and failure. His life loses meaning, leading to one of Chekhov’s first clear depictions of suicide. Treplev finds no meaning in life and recognizes the absurdity of existence [10].Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, declares life absurd – meaningless but still to be continued. Treplev, however, rejects this struggle and puts an end to his life [11]. This deepens the psychological realism found in Chekhov’s plays.
The Cherry Orchard and Clinging to the Past
In The Cherry Orchard, the characters are unprepared for change. Ranevskaya and her family cannot accept the changing world. They are emotionally attached to the past and live in memories, refusing to confront real problems. This reflects the condition of a modern person detached from reality, searching for meaning but unable to find it [12].
Boris Tomashevsky described the characters of The Cherry Orchard as “a collection of individuals who failed to find their place in life.” According to him, Chekhov explores the problem of modernity not through action, but through inaction [13].
Psychological Foundations: From the Perspective of Fromm and Frankl
According to Erich Fromm, modern man’s loneliness stems from his alienation from society, abandonment of close relationships, and inability to understand himself. Chekhov’s characters experience precisely this: they speak, they dream, but they are unable to connect [14].Viktor Frankl argues that when a person cannot find meaning in life, inner emptiness and psychological stagnation follow. For Chekhov’s characters, this void leads to the loss of vitality — they live, but they do not feel alive [15].
Anton Chekhov’s dramaturgy reveals the inner world of the modern individual, especially their sense of emptiness and loneliness, through unique and unconventional artistic forms. Chekhov’s characters are those who do not act, who dream but do not strive for real change, who attempt to communicate but fail to establish connections. They are alienated from society, unable to find their place in life. These conditions align closely with modern psychological and philosophical perspectives: Sartre’s concept of loneliness within freedom, Fromm’s notion of alienation, and Frankl’s idea of lost meaning are vividly embodied in Chekhov’s literary figures.
In Uncle Vanya, suffering and inertia; in Three Sisters, passive dreams; in The Seagull, lack of recognition and lost meaning; and in The Cherry Orchard, the inability to let go of the past — all serve as artistic representations of spiritual crisis. Chekhov depicts psychological stagnation, hopelessness, and isolation against the backdrop of social upheaval. This makes his dramaturgy intimately connected to the existential concerns of the modern era.
Thus, through Chekhov’s works, we gain a profound understanding of one of the most crucial inner problems of the modern individual — the feeling of emptiness and loneliness. He is not merely a writer of his time, but a modern thinker who compels even 21st-century readers to reflect deeply. Chekhov’s characters suffer not from life itself, but from themselves — from their inaction and alienated emotions. This makes him an eternally relevant author.
References
1.Rayfield, D. (1997). Anton Chekhov: A Life. London: HarperCollins, p. 302.
2.Magarshack, D. (1960). Chekhov the Dramatist. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 110–115.
3.Etkind, A. (1985). Chekhov’s World: A Study of His Drama. Cambridge University Press, p. 87.
4.Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, p. 36.
5.Frankl, V. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 106.
Eastern Oregon is defined as east of the Cascade Mountains. The east/west divide is political and topographical. The fauna and flora and climate differ as well.
Many years ago, it could have been 2010, I went with a group of nature guides from the Portland Oregon area to an interesting historical site close to the Northeastern Oregon city Baker. The main attraction in nearby Sumpter was the remains of an odd gold mining operation that operated from 1934-1954. A dry land dredge created its own stream while running rock through the dredge. Workers picked gold from the rock that passed through.
As interesting as that was, what caught my attention was a scene at the yard of a Sumpter resident. A dog on a leash was barking at a deer peacefully munching on edibles in the yard. The drama looked like it could be a nightly show. After he had enough of the relentless barking the resident of the house came out to shoo the deer away. The dog relaxed.
That wasn’t the only example of games animals play. When we visited the Malheur National Game refuge in Southeastern Oregon we witnessed a coyote stalking a pheasant. When the coyote got close the pheasant would fly twenty feet way. We watched the slow motion unsuccessful pursuit for a few minutes, but it looked like the show could go on all day so we moved on to other wonders of nature. Imagine a slow motion version of Wiley Coyote and the Road Runner. Beep Beep.
On another occasion we found what appeared to be a flattened road runner. A coyote didn’t get it, but it may have failed to Dodge a Maverick, Cougar, Impala, or other animal-named automobile.
Going through South Central Oregon just north of Nevada, we have seen herds of antelope (more accurately pronghorns). They are the fastest land animal in the USA. They evolved when dire wolves were around so they needed to be a little faster, and the excess speed has survived the demise of dire wolves.
The bittern is a bird that stays safe by standing head tilted up in reeds and is hard to discern from its surroundings. It is good at hiding but we saw one.
The landscape east of the Cascades is much different. The trees are different and smaller. The juniper, sage brush, and horned toads (actually a lizard made famous by Yosemite Sam – I’ve run across a few) won’t be found in Western Oregon.
The differences between East and West are partly from climate differences and extent and timing of volcanic activity. Western Oregon has a moderate climate with a lot of rain. Eastern Oregon is arid and much more extreme. Volcanoes made both Crater Lake National Park and Newberry Crater National Monument, home to East and Paulina Lakes, a frequent summer vacation for my family in the 1950s. On a much smaller scale, there are the lava tubes and ice caves which were formed by lava vents. Lava River Cave is over a mile long and open to visitors. The various ice caves can keep ice for much of the year when the outside temperature can reach 90F. In earlier times they provided Bend Oregon with ice in the summer.
Alfonso Reyes and Poetic Consciousness: Dreams as Revelation
Cesare Pavese stated, “We don’t remember days, we remember moments,” and Heidegger reminds us that “man acts as if he were the shaper and master of language, while language remains man’s master.” These two ideas can illuminate the work of Alfonso Reyes, a writer whose poetic exploration is not only an exercise in memory and conscience, but also a testament to the relationship between language, dreams, and revelation.
For Reyes, the habit of poetic consciousness is the meeting point between word and idea, between thought and feeling, between life and reason. His fascination with Greek tradition led him to understand poetry as the origin of human existence. In his view, reason and hope were not opposites, but complementary, as evidenced in Platonic philosophy. Reyes, in agreement with María Zambrano, seemed to understand that in classical Greece there was no sharp separation between thought and feeling, between poetry and reason, but rather both elements coexisted in vital harmony.
One of the most interesting aspects of Reyes’s poetry is his conception of dreams as a space of revelation. He understood them not as a simple escape or manifestation of the unconscious, but as a path to knowledge and poetic creation. Just as Heraclitus saw dreams as a place of absolute individuality, Reyes perceived them as a form of wakefulness, an intermediate state where language and image illuminate each other.
This vision is present in his poem “Pesadilla,” where dreams are not only a refuge, but a stage where fear and memory converse with history, with the dead, and with time. In these verses, Reyes shows us a world where spirits and memories blur, suggesting that dreams are also a form of truth, a way of reconstructing human experience through poetic imagery:
“Through those houses I visit in dreams,
confused galleries and halls,
staircases where fear wanders
and darkness rolls in tremors…”
The same experience can be had again and again in the dream of returning. Ideas follow one another over time in a vital and luminous way, making it almost impossible to reconstruct the remnants of thought without taking into account the energy to which it leads us, the desire to return to that dream, to those houses visited in dreams, since dreaming is not conceived in Reyes’s work as the simple wandering of the unconscious. This sensation, which causes the discourse of the encounter with existence in Reyes, is repeated until it provokes the desire for an eternal dream, which is both origin and consequence in a given moment.
His poetics is a constant journey toward the mystery of being, an attempt to reconcile vital cosmology with poetry. For him, writing is tracing a path that begins with intuition and emotion and leads to the light of understanding.
Awakening, dream, and vision are a provocation in the depths of time. Their timelessness is the original awakening and therefore the birth of Alfonso’s history, consciousness, and thought. In this angle of poetic vision, the antagonistic tendency established by the poetic image of the theorist, of the instant in subordination to the contextual world, and on the other hand, the influence of the same world, within the artistic system of Alfonso Reyes, who, beyond the mimetic relationship between reality and vision, dream and configuration, life and word, highlights the deference of real contexts as an incitement to creative activity.
This poetic awareness that Reyes develops between the extratextual and the textual, from external and internal perspectives, between the objective and the subjective in Rey’s literary invention, produces an artistic effect, which is developed throughout his own artistic feeling, in which the writer’s balance and personality play a relevant role, defining the objective and the impersonal from a new perspective that concerns his own expectations and from a particular point of view.
Reyes seeks to make his vital thought an astral, eternal, and uniform inclination. It is possible for him to transit in and through life, even in the manner of the stars, which is not proper to man. And Reyes certainly recognizes that this image has something of a frenzy, since it is an image of an empty time, without beginning or end, of an absolutized time; devoid of scope. Yet if space is described by creating it, then it is an effigy of life in its purest state, of life as an existence both chosen and free.
If Heidegger proclaimed that language is man’s teacher, in Reyes we find a concrete application of this idea. We can see in him that the poetic word not only names reality, but creates, expands, and transforms it. As in Plato, in Reyes, poetry is a way of knowing the world, a journey that seeks to wrest its hidden truth from existence.
His writing moves between intellectual rigor and imagination, between clarity and reverie. His verses and essays reflect a ceaseless search for meaning, a desire to transcend everyday experience to reach a broader dimension, where thought and poetry intertwine in an unquenchable radiance.
In Alfonso Reyes’s work, dreaming is not simply closing one’s eyes and escaping, but opening one’s mind and expanding one’s consciousness. It is searching in the depths of language for those sparks of truth that illuminate the world and restore our breath in the true dimension of what we have experienced.
Fadwa Attia from Egypt writes about play (Fares reveals the hidden) Mohamed Sobhi’s directorial vision, from the very first scene, is presented by Sobhi using the technique of merging the cinema screen with theatrical performance, using footage from the character of Faris Faris Balajwad in the series, which he played years ago, to confirm a specific identity at the beginning of the play.
He takes us back to the very first scene of that, enthusiastically entering the scenes of that train—the train that expresses the history and identity of a nation, and the Al-Sadawi family, who came from different places for the inheritance and do not know each other—and a discussion about the treasure in the scene that follows, in an enjoyable transition between Cairo Station and the scene of the apartment in which they will live, which is the family home, conveying to us the concerns of the Egyptian household, from free education and its concerns to Afrocentricity, which is trying to steal the identity of the ancient Egyptians, to the conscientious censorship of our lives, to artificial crying, globalization, technology, and the mobile phone that has torn the Egyptian family apart.
All of this is done in successive scenes in the first act as they search for the treasure amidst a succession of slogans, songs, lighting, and sets, and an attempt to decipher the treasure between the two heroes of the play, Mohamed Sobhi and Wafaa Sadek. By inviting the 22 heirs of Hafez Naguib to search for the treasure of their great patriotic grandfather, the land usurped by Maysoun, Mudalla Ghazi. These heirs include traitors, agents, pessimists, frustrated opportunists, superficial and greedy individuals. They resorted to deception until they were burdened with debts in their quest to fulfill the terms of the requirements of the rulers of Zion to the letter, ending with their dispersal, despairing and hopeless, due to their lack of true awareness of what was being plotted against them.
A play by the Fares Studio troupe, Uncovering the Hidden. This is the Actor’s Studio band, founded by the star Mohamed Sobhi in the eighties. With the team spirit, expressing the dreams of young people today, raising the slogan of awareness of the Palestinian cause. These are the names of the actors and actresses.
This play revolves around the events of a knight’s play, which reveals the hidden, set against a melodramatic background. A true artistic, comedic, musical, and theatrical show, presented by the Actor’s Studio troupe, written and directed by Mohamed Sobhy, with Ayman Fatia participating in the book, decor by Mohamed El-Gharbawy, lyrics by Abdullah Hassan, music by Sherif Hamdan, and starring: Mohamed Sobhy (Fares), Wafa Sadek (Baheya), Kamal Attia (Dahab), Rehab Hussein (Maison), Angelica Ayman (Nidal), Laila Fawzy (Souad), Dalida (Shaimaa), Mustafa Youssef (Ghazy), Mohamed Shawky (Shawky), Lamia Orabi (Abla), Dalia Nabil (Malak), Michael William (Michael William, Daqdaq), Abou Heiba (Sand), Helmy Galal (Aref the lawyer), Mohamed Abdel Moaty (Mukhtar), Alaa Fouad (Kamal), Khaled Mohamed (the final man), Gamal Abdel Nasser(Sadon), Walid Hany, James: Mahmoud El-Sherif (Rahma), Remasib (Sara), Lamar Awad (Hanin), Bilal Mohamed (Seif).
The play consists of two acts, each with seven scenes, and achieves harmony in all elements between the various sets and theatrical scenery, from the station to the apartment to the palace to the grounds. The smooth and effortless performance, the spirit of a loving team, the various topics including the identity of the homeland, the Palestinian cause, the golden billion, education issues, and others, and the emphasis on “We are all one, Muslim and Christian, hand in hand.”
The music, theatrical lighting, and the integrated visual image with integrated scenography, in addition to the appropriate clothing for each actor and actress, the songs and performance in singing as well, with a new return to emphasize identity, homeland, and belonging, and a reminder of the integration of cinematic presentation with theater, by integrating the character of Fares, who appeared to us years ago in the series “Fares without a Horse,” so that the prologue at the beginning of the play became the first scene that attracted the audience. As for the children, he presented them in the impact of technology and artificial intelligence on their lives, bringing us to our lives and what is in them, so that we can stand with ourselves, fully aware of the external threats from Israel to the challenges within our daily lives.
Thus, “Fares Uncovers the Hidden” is a historical show that displays the past, present, and future in the best play presented at the level of public and private sector theater, to sit on the throne of the summit in terms of occupying first place compared to shows that did not achieve the same artistic and moral value, achieving the difficult equation in a complete artistic show. The play “Fares Uncovers the Hidden” occupied first.
Fadwa Attia is a writer, painter and photographer from Egypt.
