The Proposal Study Guide

Anton Chekhov was one of six children born to a struggling grocer and his wife. When he wasn’t helping in his father’s store, Chekhov spent as much time as he could reading in the town library and enjoying the Russian countryside with his siblings. After the family went bankrupt, Chekhov both supported them and financed his own education by writing for periodicals. Though he trained as a doctor, his primary occupation became short-story writing, for which he won the Pushkin Prize in 1887, while only in his 20s. He was quoted as saying, “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I tire of one, I go and sleep with the other.” Humor aside, Chekhov was a compassionate physician and often refused payment from his rural patients. He also conducted thousands of interviews of convicts and settlers on Sakhalin Island, in Russia’s Far East, in 1890. These were published as The Island of Sahkalin, a powerful work calling for more humane treatment of convicts (one the Russian government ultimately heeded). Most of Chekhov’s plays were written during the last 15 years of his life, although early productions were disastrous. By the late 1890s, however, his plays were being produced by the Moscow Arts Theatre and became both commercially and critically successful. By this time in his life, Chekhov was suffering greatly from tuberculosis and traveled in search of a healthier climate, building a villa in Yalta and ultimately dying in Badenweiler, Germany with his wife, Olga, at his side. He was 44 years old.

When Chekhov wrote The Proposal, there was a marked disparity between the lives of the Russian upper classes—the aristocracy and provincial nobility—and the peasant and servant classes. Although this disparity is only hinted at in such a short and dialogue-driven comedy, it comes through when landowner Chubukóv declares that he would rather give his land to the peasants than to fellow landowner Lómov, hinting at underlying societal unrest. While Chubukóv means that giving away his land to anyone is unlikely, there’s some insecurity at the back of his mind regarding the status of his land and, with it, his aristocratic status. The characters’ overall obsession with land passed down through families and with aristocratic pursuits like hunting in field trials alongside the nobility—seemingly the main subjects anyone can think of to talk about—underline this preoccupation with class and status.

Chekhov is considered to be one of the founders of Modernism in the theater, along with his 19th-century contemporaries, Norway’s Henrik Ibsen and Sweden’s August Strindberg. Though Ibsen’s plays, such as An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, and A Doll’s House are certainly not comedic like The Proposal, they stand out for a similar kind of psychological realism, with the latter two plays also sharing Chekhov’s interest in social class. Strindberg wrote Miss Julie in 1888, the same year Chekhov wrote The Proposal. While it is also much darker in tone, it, too, explores questions of class on the cusp of aristocratic decline, especially as they impacted women. Chekhov’s own plays The Three Sisters (1900) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) likewise focused on the decline of the Russian aristocracy, albeit from a rather more tragic perspective. Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” (1884) is another example of a Realist work that considers problems of class inequality and social striving near the close of the 19th century. The Proposal is a farce, a type of satiric comedy that uses exaggerated and unlikely situations and characters. Other examples of farce in theater include Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew from the late 1500s, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1771), and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1894), with the latter two especially satirizing class expectations and romance in their respective eras.