Modern English playwright Willie Russell called his play “Educating Rita” a comedy - as Chekhov once called his plays. It is clear that Chekhov put a very special, non-traditional, meaning into the word “comedy”, and, frankly speaking, there is not too much funny in his plays. Uncle Vanya’s words “life is lost” can become an epigraph to almost each of them. And it seems to me that these are the words that could be repeated after Chekhov’s hero by Frank from Russell’s play - an intellectual university teacher, who, however, has an indispensable bottle of whiskey hidden on his bookshelves behind the volumes of Eliot and Blake.