Ckekhov and Turgenev
Sir: Kenneth Hurren is that rare thing in our present era, a dramatic critic who IS not a figure of fun; which is no mean achievement and one for which there is no denying of gratitude. Nonetheless he cannot be allowed to get away with the Ratent paradox to the effect that Turgenev's exquisite and penetrating A Month in The Country is an amateurish, tedious and casual compilation, even While he is praising the windy ditherings of the feckless, over-explicit egotistic puppets featured in Tchekovian pseudo-drama. It is ludicrous to deny that A Month in The Country possesses great artifice. I submit furthermore, and in all seriousness, that Tchekov's The Three Sisters contains but one moment of real dramatic impact, the moment when one of the sisters, unable any longer to stand the unique tedium of the environment Provided by Tchekov for his characters, rounds on the old female retainer and gives her for the first time a piece of her hitherto carefully concealed mind.
• G. Reichardt 12a Mount Pleasant Road, Poole, Dorset
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