Anton Chekhov and Tennessee Williams: The Atmosphere of Middle-Class Emptiness and the End of an Era

Abstract

This article proposes a dialectical reading of Once in a Lifetime [1939], by Tennessee Williams, and The Cherry Orchard [1904], by Anton Chekhov, highlighting how both plays stage the collapse of declining social orders: the Russian aristocracy and the American middle class. Drawing on the theories of Peter Szondi and Theodor Adorno, the study argues that the dissolution of dramatic action, the repetition of gestures, and the depletion of language are expressions of a historical crisis embedded within the dramaturgical structure itself. Grounded also in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Gernot Böhme Michael Chekhov’s concept of Stimmung, the article examines how these plays construct atmospheres saturated with waiting and paralysis as aesthetic manifestations of the failure of bourgeois promises. Thus, dramaturgy becomes a sensitive space of ruin, where emptiness and suspension figure the impossibility of social transformation.