Anton Chekhov is the most frequently performed foreigner on the British stage, and, significantly, he is also the most often rewritten playwright in British drama. However, we still seem to be lacking a scholarly insight into this established phenomenon, dubbed in modern theatre history 'British Chekhov'. The remarkable quantity and quality of reincarnations of Chekhov in English are still interpreted by the academic community in terms of either sheer statistics or pure sentiment. Even more significantly, there appears to be no link between the ever revolutionary, and dispersed, developments in modern British drama with playwrights finding ever new modes of looking back in anger and the proliferation of British Chekhov, a body of a few repeatedly recycled plays, produced by the same playwrights, looking back in nostalgia. The present article offers a textually based and contextually informed analysis of Chekhov's metamorphoses in English. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which the transmigration of Chekhov's grammar, syntax and discourse structure from Russian to English brings out the essential nostalgic motif in his drama and elevates it to the level of universal human longing. The consideration of Anton Chekhov's fate in Britain, thus, transgresses the limits of a mere case study in the impossibility of translation, and opens up a discussion of the impossibility of representation itself as a common, and growing, concern of all twentieth century art.
