SOURCE: "Chekhov and the Bubble Reputation," in Chekhov Then and Now: The Reception of Chekhov in World Culture, edited by J. Douglas Clayton, Peter Lang, 1997, pp. 5-18.

The following is the text of an address Senelick delivered at a 1994 symposium on Chekhov's reception. Senelick traces shifts in the author's reputation over the years.

When Douglas Clayton asked me to deliver the keynote address to this illustrious assemblage, my first impulse was to entitle it "Confessions of an Inveterate Chekhovian." From my earliest memories, as the grandchild of Russian émigrés and in particular of an ochen ' kul'turnaia babushka, as a child playgoer and a child actor in a company based on the Method, I was surrounded by people who venerated Chekhov, and who thought nothing in the world more fulfilling than to be associated with a production of his plays. "Hallowed awe" is the term Ivan Voinitsky...