The Bear

1 "The Bear" ("Медведь"), subtitled "A Joke in One Act," is a one-act farce Chekhov wrote in early 1888 and dedicated to the actor Nikolai Solovtsov, who created the role of Smirnov. It premiered in Moscow that October and was published the same year. The play became, in Chekhov’s own lifetime, by far his most frequently performed and most commercially successful piece for the stage – a fact he regarded with some rueful amusement, since he considered it a trifle dashed off for money next to the more serious fiction and drama he was writing at the same time. Its durability has only grown since: it remains one of the most widely produced Chekhov one-acts in the world, a staple of acting schools and repertory companies for its tight comic engine and its two gift roles.

2 The plot is a compressed farce built for speed: Elena Popova, a young widow who has sworn to entomb herself in permanent mourning for a faithless late husband, is invaded by Grigory Smirnov, a blustering landowner demanding immediate payment of a debt. Their standoff escalates from financial dispute to a shouting match over the constancy of men versus women, then to a proposed duel with pistols – and pivots, in the space of a few lines, into Smirnov falling helplessly in love with the "little widow" mid-quarrel. The comedy runs on Chekhov’s control of tempo and reversal: nearly every declaration is undercut or inverted within a page, and both leads are given extended, self-mocking tirades (Smirnov’s catalogue of women’s failings, Popova’s counter-case for her dead husband’s virtues) that the plot then cheerfully demolishes. The servant Luka supplies a low, frightened comic counterpoint to the principals’ operatic escalation. Structurally the piece is prized for demonstrating, in miniature, the mechanics Chekhov would later deploy at greater length: a plot that turns entirely on the gap between what characters say they feel and what they do next.