>"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." >*— Chekhov, A.P., 1 November 1889, in a Letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A.S. Gruzinsky).* The "gun" refers here to a monologue that Chekhov deemed superfluous and unrelated to the rest of the play