Abstract
Research has characterized Nadezhda Teffi as the female Chekhov. (See Stelleman 2019.) However, connections can also be found between her work and that of Ivan S. Turgenev. In particular the one-act plays Разговор на большой дороге (Conversation on a Highroad; 1851) and Женский вопрос (The Woman Question; 1907) are suitable for comparison. Not only does my comparison consider the gender conflict between man and woman, but also a dialectic method which Teffi may have discovered in Turgenev’s work and elaborated further. The dialectical considerations are connected with different comic approaches: the psychological comedy of the realist Turgenev in the middle of the 19th century and the mechanical comedy of the utopian Teffi at the start of the 20th century. Its mechanical comicality shows that Женский вопрос relates to an international debate, in which Paul Julius Möbius’ essay ‘Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes’ (‘On the Physiological Idiocy of the Female’; 1900) may well have played an unfavourable role.
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