PLAYS

ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1887 his first full-length play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, practising medicine and writing many of his best stories, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote his best-known plays in the last years of his life; in 1898 Stanislavsky produced The Seagull at his newly founded Moscow Art Theatre, and it was for him that Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya (1900), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903). In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, one of the Art Theatre’s leading actresses. He died of consumption in 1904.

PETER CARSON learned Russian during National Service in the Navy at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Crail and London, and at home – his mother’s family left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. His working life has been spent on the editorial side of London publishing.

RICHARD GILMAN is Professor Emeritus of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at Yale University’s School of Drama. He has been drama critic for Newsweek, Commonweal and the Nation and was a contributing editor of Partisan Review for many years. His latest book is Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity.

ANTON CHEKHOV

Plays

Ivanov
The Seagull
Uncle Vanya
Three Sisters
The Cherry Orchard

Translated with Notes by PETER CARSON
With an Introduction by RICHARD GILMAN

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First published 2002
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90627–0

INTRODUCTION

‘Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the fundamental qualities of every true talent.’
–CHEKHOV

In September of 1900 Anton Chekhov wrote from Yalta, a fading but still rather fashionable Black Sea health resort, to his sister Maria in Moscow that ‘I find it very difficult to write… Three Sisters, much more difficult than any other of my plays.’ A little later he wrote to his actress-wife Olga Knipper, for whom he had intended the important role of Masha, the middle sister, that ‘it looks at me gloomily… and I think about it gloomily’, and in another letter told her ‘there are a great many characters, it’s crowded, I’m afraid it will turn out obscure or pale.’ Even after he’d finished he continued to fret, telling a friend it was ‘dull, verbose and awkward’.

Three Sisters is none of those things; quite the contrary. One of the greatest dramas in any language since Shakespeare, the play is animated, often exhilarating, funny and deeply sad by turns, but never dull; far from being verbose and awkward, it’s a masterpiece of verbal economy and dramaturgical grace. (If you need any more testimony to Chekhov’s courage and mental strength remember that he wrote this play and another almost equally splendid work – The Cherry Orchard – while suffering through the last agonizing stages of the tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’, as it was called then) which would soon kill him; besides his lungs, the disease had attacked his spinal cord and intestines. A doctor himself, he strangely refused for years to acknowledge the severity, or even at first the existence, of his illness, at times using his literary gifts to disguise, or moderate, the truth; for example, he once described the sight of blood pouring from his mouth during a haemorrhage as resembling ‘the glow of a distant fire’.)

Olga Knipper, the daughter of a cultivated German-Russian family, had met Chekhov in 1899, when he was already a celebrated writer – of short fiction mostly; his first full-length plays were still making their way into public consciousness – and she was a promising young actress at the theatre with which he would soon become indelibly associated, the recently established Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). They fell in love and quietly married in 1901, but were mostly kept apart by Chekhov’s doctors’ insistence that, for his health, he must live in Yalta, which he bitterly called his ‘warm Siberia’. He wanted Olga to continue her career, though she was more than prepared to abandon it, to help nurse him or simply be with him. They built their relationship through occasional meetings, but even more, perhaps, through their many letters, filled with vivid expressions of love, longing, sorrow, frustration, a saving humour, and some equally saving, not wholly serious, quarrels.

Chekhov died in 1904 in a German spa where Olga had taken him, looking for a cure. He was forty-four. She, eight years younger, would outlive him by an astounding fifty-five years, her career launched and sustained by central roles in his plays, but not confined to them. She died in 1959, having never remarried. (It’s worth noting that Maria, Chekhov’s sister, who for years ran the Yalta house, first as their residence and then, after his death, as a Chekhov museum, also lived to a grand old age, dying at ninety-three in 1957.)

‘When someone spends the fewest number of motions on a given action, that is grace.’
–CHEKHOV

The difficulty Chekhov experienced with Three Sisters was unusual: although he had occasionally proclaimed his unfitness for playwriting, even vowing once or twice to abandon it, this doubtless came largely from anger at what he called the ‘conventions’ of the theatre, as well as from a modesty which Nathalie Sarraute, the brilliant Russian-French novelist, would later describe as ‘fierce’. He was ordinarily a sure-handed, confident dramatist; it was his fiction that sometimes bedevilled him, he once said.

Whatever the truth of this, nothing seems to have given him as much trouble as Three Sisters, for a good reason: it was inherently the most difficult artistic enterprise he had attempted, something whose full radical nature he would discover – to his surprise, I think – as the writing progressed.

His artistic task, as he saw it, or at least as we see it now, was to create drama and fiction out of seemingly unpromising materials. A generation or so later Samuel Beckett (with whose work Chekhov’s has many affinities) would confront much the same aesthetic task, and assert that he dealt with ‘a whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as unusable’, conditions like ‘ignorance and impotence’, to which it makes sense to add failure, weakness, apathy, and boredom, previously ‘unusable’ conditions which Chekhov put to remarkable dramatic use.

‘It’s only fools and charlatans who know everything and understand everything.’
–CHEKHOV

Almost certainly beyond his full, conscious awareness, Chekhov had for years been creating a new sort of drama. His way of working was painterly: make a starting stroke here, a counterstroke, a thematic strain, perhaps through a relationship between angles and curves, a countertheme, a little blurring, a revelation through juxtapositions, an enigma through loppings-off: the literary equivalents of visual puzzles, bits of emptiness, colours interrogating each other, shapes vying for room.

Chekhov’s most daring departure from the conventions of dramaturgical creation was to abandon, as much as possible, the usual linear movement of a play – from a starting-point to exposition and ‘development’ (which usually meant the ‘thickening’ of a plot) to a denouement (a climax, the resolution of the play’s struggle or dilemma); instead he worked toward the filling in of a dramatic field, an artistic space. This new dramaturgical construction, which began with Ivanov and culminated in Three Sisters, necessarily affected some of the most solidly rooted traditional elements and procedures of drama: all that had been accepted as its very constituents, and sanctified by centuries of theatrical pieties.

Chekhov as a subversive playwright? A revolutionary? Yes, we have to think of him in that way, in the face of popular and scholarly opinion having fixed him as the charming, conventionally realistic poet of the normal, the domestic and small; the dramatist of ‘real’, and unusually melancholy, life.

No contemporary play wright has been more widely misinterpreted; none has been more often wrongly directed and performed. The locus classicus of this was the MAT’s production of The Cherry Orchard, which Stanislavsky directed as a heavy, lugubrious near-tragedy, when Chekhov had taken pains to call it a ‘comedy’. Chekhov’s categorizing of his own plays is important to keep in mind as we read them. He called Ivanov and Three Sisters dramas, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard comedies, and Uncle Vanya, with extreme flatness, ‘Scenes from Country Life’. Obviously that last subtitle, together with the designations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as comedies – when we have been used to regarding them as basically sorrowful works – will engage our attention in the coming pages.

The intention with which Chekhov used subtitles went far beyond conventional practice. In calling The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard ‘comedies’ he intended something radically different from our usual meanings; the plays are comedies in the sense of Dante’s La Divina Commedia and Balzac’s ironic secular alternative, La Comédie humaine. Neither of these great works is ‘funny’, full of laughs; in their different ways they are deeply serious, providing us with comedy’s truest actions: to liberate, to relieve, to heal. Treplyov’s suicide in The Seagull, and the loss of the family estate in The Cherry Orchard, we might reflexively think, are endings which forbid the use of ‘comedy’ as ascriptions. But keep in mind that, as we’ll see, Chekhov counterbalances Treplyov’s death with Nina’s exemplary new understanding of the key to productive life. With this in mind we can grasp the play as a comedy in Dante’s sense: hope is kept alive, salvation is possible. In The Cherry Orchard something similar happens: Anya’s maturing wisdom leads the play to an unexpected, potentially ‘happy’ ending. We shall consider both plays at greater length later on.

Chekhov used his subtitles partly as warnings to readers or audiences or performers or directors not to be trapped by misleading labels, or accurate ones, for that matter. The point he made in Ivanov was that labels and tags could be instruments of tyranny; someone expecting a ‘serious’ drama, upon opening his or her playbill, or programme, for The Seagull, or the text itself, and seeing the subtitle ‘A Comedy’ would have to make some mental adjustments as the play went on to its surely unfunny climax. These adjustments were just what Chekhov wanted from his hypothetical reader or spectator: becoming open to new theatrical experiences, stepping past frozen categories, accepting newness.

‘Scenes from Country Life’ suggests a pastoral idyll; but of course Uncle Vanya is anything but. Why Chekhov decided on that subtitle has, I think, much to do with his sense of the play’s being so delicately poised between laughter and tears that the subtitle needed an especially exquisite neutrality to keep the work from toppling over for its audiences or readers into either of Chekhov’s main characterizations: drama or comedy. The term ‘tragicomic’ wasn’t in existence in Russia yet, nor would it have been entirely accurate.

‘Drama should present not new stories, but new relationships.’
–FRIEDRICH HEBBEL

The European theatre and the Russian stage in particular were at low ebbs in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Chekhov began writing plays. The stock fare in almost every cultural centre (including Moscow in the 1880s when Chekhov was studying and then practising medicine) were bedroom farces; formulaic, often violent melodramas; light romantic comedies (the whole repertoire mostly translations from the French or based on French models); vaudevilles; and, very occasionally, productions of classics – the Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Racine and Corneille. Here and there in Europe new genius (or at least major talent) had shown itself: Ibsen and Strindberg in Scandinavia, both of whom Chekhov read in translation and admired; Hauptmann in Germany; Zola – primarily a novelist, however – in France; Wilde and Shaw in Britain; Maurice Maeterlinck (with whose aesthetic ideas Chekhov largely agreed) in Belgium; but none gave rise to any movements of consequence or any significant successors. Acting was everywhere florid, declamatory; directing as an art was in its crude infancy; ensemble playing was barely known; costume and stage design were at worst flamboyant, at best uninspired.

‘We must get the theatre out of the hands of the grocers and into literary hands…’
–CHEKHOV

With its roots in religious and folk ritual the theatre in Russia had developed much later than in Western Europe. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anything appear that could be called a truly Russian theatre, with native actors, directors, designers and dramatists, instead of French, Italian or German practitioners, as in earlier days. Even so, of the two truly gifted Russian dramatists before Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, the former wrote only one full-length play – Boris Godunov – and was far more influential as a poet and patriot who incarnated the ‘national spirit’, while Gogol, who also wrote only one full-length play, The Government Inspector, was probably most influential as a satiric fantasist in fiction. Moreover, from its beginnings the Russian theatre was closely associated with the state and thus the court, one consequence being a heavy-handed censorship, something Chekhov continually railed against.

Gogol exerted a strong influence on him, perhaps by his ideas and judgements as much as his formal dramas. Chekhov surely must have read Gogol’s famous 1836 denunciation of theatre in Russia during the early nineteenth century and beyond. After deploring the stage’s corruption by ‘the monster… melodrama’, Gogol went on to ask ‘where is our life, ourselves with our own idiosyncrasies and traits?’ (These are almost the same words with which Shaw would praise Ibsen a half century later: ‘He gave us ourselves in our own situations.’) ‘The melodrama is lying most impudently,’ Gogol went on. ‘Only a great, rare, deep genius can catch what surrounds us daily, what always accompanies us, what is ordinary – while mediocrity grabs with both hands all that is out of rule, what happens only seldom and catches the eye by its ugliness and disharmony… The strange has become the subject-matter of our drama. The whole point is to tell a new, strange, unheard-of incident: murder, fire, wild passions… poisons. Effects, eternal effects!’

Chekhov would prove to be Gogol’s rare, deep genius, although it took a while.

In the summer of 1923 the manuscript of an untitled, previously unknown Chekhov play was found in an old desk in Moscow. It was soon published as A Play Without a Title in Four Acts, but wasn’t produced until 1954, when a truncated version in Swedish appeared in Stockholm under the title Poor Don Juan. Chekhov probably wrote it in 1881 or 1882, which would make it his first full-length play (although rumours persist of earlier high-school epics). Chekhov had shown the manuscript to the prestigious Maly Theatre, which rightly rejected it, for it was an amateurish, if ambitious, piece of work, which was so long that, as far as I know, no complete production has ever been done. Badly or incompletely rendered into English in a number of versions, the play did receive one full workmanlike translation by David Magarshack, who called it Platonov, after its central character, a good-looking, womanizing, self-important, quarrelsome yet charming former landowner. Still, nobody has rushed to stage this prehistoric monster.

‘A writer must be humane to his fingertips.’
–CHEKHOV

Chekhov left behind him many stories, most of them extremely short; a dozen or so one-act plays, or vaudevilles; one non-fiction book – an account of his 1890 journey to the half-Russian, half-Japanese island of Sakhalin off Siberia; the Russian sector was mostly a penal colony, and Chekhov’s account of his visit helped bring about some reforms of the atrocious conditions. He also left behind seven full-length plays, five of which, in new translations by Peter Carson, make up the present volume.

Chekhov had begun to write sketches while still a student in Taganrog, a Black Sea port, where his father ran a small grocery store; when his hard-pressed large family – Anton had three brothers and a sister – moved to Moscow in 1876 he stayed behind to go through high school, then joined them after his graduation in 1879. At sixteen he quickly became the chief – sometimes only – economic support of his beloved but improvident family (whose numbers were regularly swelled by relatives paying ‘visits’ that could last for months) by contributing sketches or stories to the popular journals of the day. At the same time he was earning a medical degree at Moscow University.

The little house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street in which he first practised medicine is now a museum where among other affecting objects one can see copies of some of the Punch-like magazines he first wrote for, often under a pseudonym – Antosha Chekhonte, for instance – his long, narrow bed with its plump comforters, a cane, a pair of pince-nez, and some early medical paraphernalia, including his worn black leather doctor’s bag. By all accounts he was a most generous physician, available at all hours to those in need, sometimes treating poor patients without charge and never dunning those who were late in paying him, throwing himself tirelessly, too, into the cause of public health and hygiene.

As good a man as we know him to have been, Chekhov wasn’t a saint, the way some of his contemporaries regarded him. After his death a well-meaning friend described him as having looked ‘Christ-like’, an epithet Chekhov could well have done without. But the chief figure in his near-canonization was most likely Maxim Gorky, who in his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev wrote this encomium: ‘I think that in Anton Chekhov’s presence everyone involuntarily felt in himself or herself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one’s self.’

Gorky, a notorious flatterer (of Josef Stalin among others), compounded the myth-making by extending his sycophancy to Chekhov’s writing (some of which he didn’t quite get), thereby establishing a view of the stories and plays that has been extremely influential – and almost wholly wrong. Treating Chekhov’s work as though it were chiefly a sociological critique, Gorky wrote: ‘in front of that dreary grey crowd of helpless people there passed a great, wise and observant man; he looked at all those dreary inhabitants of his country and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them: “You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.”’ This burst of sombre invention is surely one of the origins of the widely held idea that Chekhov combined the roles of priest and judge, and that his main characters, especially in his great last plays, are, in his eyes and so necessarily in ours, weak, ineffectual, defeated and culpable.

The relation between the main activities of Chekhov’s life, doctoring and writing, was sometimes stressful, but he mostly handled it with characteristic humour: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife,’ he once wrote, ‘and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I go to the other.’ A variant of this concerning his writing is rather more effervescent: ‘narrative [fiction] is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impudent, exhausting mistress.’

Yet in a letter of that period he spoke of the theatre in far less lively terms. ‘The atmosphere of the theatre in Russia,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he himself began to help resuscitate it, ‘is leaden and oppressive. It is covered inches thick in dust and enveloped in fog and tedium.’

No better source exists for an understanding of Chekhov’s thought and character than his large correspondence. Two letters written within a three-month period in the autumn of 1888 and winter of’89, a time when his renown was growing, call particular attention to themselves. The first, to the poet-critic Aleksey Pleshcheyev, is so revelatory of Chekhov’s governing values and attitudes that it deserves extensive quotation: ‘The people I fear,’ Chekhov wrote, ‘are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines [alongside widespread admiration and esteem, throughout his career Chekhov underwent savage attacks on the political and ideological ‘neutrality’ of his writing, especially his plays, and on their artistic ‘inconclusiveness’] and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk… I would like to be a free artist and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all their forms. Pharisaism, dull-wittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations… [but] in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no predilection for policemen… scientists, writers, or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom from violence and lies.’

The second letter was to Aleksey Suvorin, his publisher and friend. After writing about the newly finished Ivanov Chekhov told Suvorin that he had recently gained ‘a sense of personal freedom’; then, out of nowhere, came a tiny, scarcely disguised autobiography. ‘Write a story…,’ he told Suvorin, ‘about a young man, the son of a serf, a former grocery clerk, a choirsinger, a high school pupil and university student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss the hands of priests, to truckle to the ideas of others – a young man who expressed thanks for every piece of bread, who was whipped many times, who went without galoshes to do his tutoring, who used his fists, tortured animals [probably the one untrue statement of the lot], was fond of dining with rich relatives [Anton had one wealthy, generous relative, his father’s brother Mitrofan], was a hypocrite in his dealings with God and men, needlessly, solely out of a realization of his own insignificance – write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how, on awaking one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a slave, but that of a real human being.’ (Chekhov was actually the grandson of a slave, or serf, his paternal grandfather having bought the family’s freedom in 1840, a generation before the serfs’ formal emancipation.)

‘The plot is unprecedented,’ Chekhov wrote to his brother Aleksandr in October 1887, soon after finishing an early draft of Ivanov. The assertion was doubly uncharacteristic of Chekhov: first, it was contrary to his innate modesty; and second, it went against his lifelong aversion to aesthetic discussions. The letter went on again in an uncharacteristic way.

‘I wanted to be original,’ he told his brother. ‘I did not portray a single villain or a single angel… did not blame nor exculpate anyone.’ The subversive effects of this remark would continue to our own day.

Ordinarily Chekhov considered the quest for originality foolish and fruitless; originality was there or it wasn’t, but you couldn’t pursue it. Yet in Ivanov’s case he felt on sure ground. The ‘plot’ was indeed original. As he’d told Aleksandr, the play had no villains or angels and this marked a drastic break with almost the entire history of drama, and fiction too, for that matter.

From the beginnings of literature, through classic drama, epic poetry, romance and, later, the novel, the literary imagination had been largely propelled by the pitting of good against evil, darkness against light, a Manichaean division from which rose our categories of heroes and villains; both pulp fiction and its various derivatives, and popular plays, which we might call pulp drama (successful lowbrow melodramas), as well as nearly all recent mainstream movies and TV dramas, are built around this tension and struggle between ‘good guys’ (or gals) and bad, between the forces of light and darkness. Today when a work of drama or fiction or film tries to evade this cops-and-robbers structure it has usually, at best, been damned with the faint praise of ‘offbeat’.

The Moscow première of Ivanov, badly acted and under-rehearsed, was greeted largely with bafflement, rage, or scorn, with a smattering of praise for the play itself by a few astute critics and a handful of discerning audience members. The loudest complaints, ironically, were precisely that the ostensible hero and villain weren’t drawn sharply or accurately enough. How could one find heroic stature in a neurotic, weak figure like Ivanov? And Lvov? Why hadn’t Chekhov portrayed him more sympathetically? Even Chekhov’s brother Mikhail asked him to rewrite the two characters to bring them closer to the conventions of drama.

Chekhov naturally refused, as he did Suvorin’s plea to depict the character he rightly saw as the implicit villain of the piece, Lvov, even more broadly than Chekhov had drawn him. The public and the literati simply couldn’t cope with the absence of the poles of good and evil through which they had always manoeuvred their frail understanding.

Besides its moral-thematic originality, Ivanov presented some technical innovations, a few of which had tentatively shown themselves in Platonov: dialogue that sometimes wasn’t logical or consecutive, characters at times leaving speeches addressed to them unanswered or making irrelevant responses (German has a word for such dialogue, Aneinandervorbeisprechen, which can best be translated as ‘talking past one another’ and which seems to have first appeared on the stage in the 1830s with Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Woyzeck); actions that seemed to come from nowhere, and lead nowhere, such as two unnamed characters at the Lebedevs’ party crossing the stage in search of refreshments and another character, named Kosykh, mumbling to the empty air about a whist game. There was also some use of pauses, a Chekhov trademark that was really a kind of ‘silent speech’, a stretch of time during which any number of different mental actions could take place: the preceding speech or action might be tacitly refuted or the coming one undermined; or the characters and audience might simply be given time for reflection, intellectual organization of what has been said and done up to now and what might come. The famous pauses in Beckett or Harold Pinter owe much to Chekhov’s example.

Ivanov frustrated its first audiences by its lack of familiar moral structure and resolution. What were they supposed to make of Nikolay’s suicide? What, for that matter, were they supposed to think of Nikolay himself, that unprecedented protagonist? And Lvov? Didn’t he incarnate goodness, set against Nikolay’s evil? Then why do Shabelsky and Anna mock him?

For Chekhov, Ivanov seems to have begun as something of a polemic against several contemporary stereotypes, the so-called superfluous man, usually well-educated and well-intentioned, who, suffering from what we might now call an existential crisis, orburn-out, felt left out of society; and the Hamlet figure, a person marked by indecision and mysterious inner struggles. At century’s end Russian literature and table-talk were filled with superfluous men and Hamlet types, the two sometimes being combined as they are in Nikolay. They were joined in Ivano by another stereotype, a narodnik, a kind of self-righteous, soi-disant saint devoted to abstract words and causes, like the ‘people’, ‘progress’ and ‘the peasantry’. Lvov is roughly such a figure, as Ivanov is a representative ‘superfluous man’.

The first step in grasping Nikolay is to accept that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him; he simply doesn’t know. The abominable way he treats his wife, for example, is as mysterious to him as it is to everyone else. For before the onset of his malady, he was, and at bottom remains, a good, if bewildered man, as the following desperate, loving speech by Anna attests. In the evenings Nikolay wants to go to the Lebedevs’ for amusement and distraction, and Anna heartbreakingly pleads with him: ‘Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did… You stay in, we’ll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we’ll drive away your depression in a flash. I’ll sing if you like. Or else let’s go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you’ll tell me about your depression… You have such suffering eyes. I’ll look into them and cry, and we’ll both feel better… [Laughs and cries.] How does it go, Kolya? The flowers come up again every spring, but joy there is none. Is that it? So go off, go…’

For Lvov, the narodnik, everything is simple: Nikolay pins him down in his self-righteous cocksureness in an important late scene that widens the play’s scope from its local settings and parochial typologies towards more universal ones. Nikolay tells Lvov: ‘You think I’m the easiest thing in the world to understand. Right?… Man is such a simple and uncomplicated machine,’ and goes on: ‘we all have too many wheels, screws and valves for us to be able to judge each other…’ Ivanov can now be seen as a play about our destructive need for tags and labels: Mrs Lebedev and Borkin see Nikolay with their mercenary gazes, Sasha with her romantic one; Lvov with his pious superiority. If it is intelligently performed, Ivanov isn’t a narrow study of neurosis or perversity but much more a dramatic picture of the harm people do with their types and stereotypes.

In Chekhov’s dramaturgy, however, fragments of melodramatic procedure remained, the most blatant being Nikolay’s suicide (in an early version Chekhov had him drop dead of a heart attack after Lvov’s public tirade!). Almost as egregiously melodramatic is Anna’s discovery of Nikolay and Sasha in one another’s arms. But even with these disfigurements Ivanov still stands as Chekhov’s first full, convincing work of dramatic art.

He kept tinkering with it; performances, in St Petersburg now, improved; and, moved by an intelligent review or a discerning friend’s recommendation, audiences grew larger and friendlier, until Chekhov had something of a hit on his hands, though he continued to think the play was popular for the wrong reasons, audiences having seized on its melodramatic incidents rather than its intelligent vision; to an extent he was right.

Ivanov had set Chekhov on a course which he would stick to, after one setback, in the major plays that followed. This is a good place to mention Chekhov’s main subjects, and examine how he dramatized – which is to say, gave stage life to – these themes, or what I once called, in another context, ‘notional presences’, ideas adhering to bodies, spirit to corporeality.

Beyond question Chekhov’s central themes in these plays are love and work (Lieben und Arbeit – Freud’s terse reply when asked what was necessary for a complete life). Closely connected to them are time, with a special emphasis on the future, and art, more particularly what being an artist spiritually demands.

Many ways exist for getting Chekhov wrong, so herewith a short guide to avoiding them. Don’t look for ‘realism’ in these plays; don’t expect conventional endings, happy or otherwise; be aware of how Chekhov often has one character subvert another’s point of view, when it threatens to harden into ideology or melt into sentimentality; keep alert to the hints and nuances in speeches, along with the literal words; don’t look for answers, to your problems or life’s dilemmas; throw away any idea you might have that drama is always about ‘conflict’, or, rather, remember that in these plays conflict is more often internal – within characters – than between them; keep in mind that no single character in any play speaks wholly for Chekhov, the most unbiased and democratic of authors; don’t ever regard, admiringly or not, a Chekhov play as an exercise in ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ – they’re solid works of imagination, not emotional vapours. Here is Virginia Woolf writing in 1920: ‘It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself, or to trouble himself, that he speaks of atmosphere.’ Don’t forget that Chekhov is often very funny, so feel free to laugh, aloud if the impulse strikes you.

The artistic setback I spoke of before was an attempt to write a classical comedy, the kind that ends with lovers united, marriages restored, and a sense of satisfaction, celebration, reigning over everything. Long, complicated, and crowded with incident, The Wood Demon was close to being a disaster. Still, Chekhov saw enough in the piece to carry a great many things over – some characters, settings and scenes, even a few swatches of dialogue – to the making of Uncle Vanya a few years later, though he obstinately insisted that the two plays were wholly independent, which in spirit they certainly are.

LOVE

Chekhov’s notebook contains this rather enigmatic remark about love (as sexual desire or romantic attraction): ‘Either it is a remnant of something “degenerating”, something which was once immense, or it is a particle of what will in the future develop into something immense, but at present it is unsatisfying, it gives much less than one expects.’ In each play that followed Ivanov Chekhov made love and sex central concerns, important notional presences. Love – erotic or romantic or spiritual – carries a great weight of significance in The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, before tapering off in The Cherry Orchard.

The notebook entry, especially the part about love, or sex, being rather unsatisfying, has been exploited by those commentators who, for various reasons – ignorance, literary envy, feminist theory – want to find Chekhov himself deficient in erotic vigour or enthusiasm. Some argue, absurdly, that because so many of his stories and plays deal with unsuccessful love affairs or marriages, he personally thought dimly of such relationships, seeing them as inherently unsatisfying. One biographer asked the nonsensical rhetorical question: ‘What was a woman to him, no matter how desirable, when his life was all pen and paper?’ In all the commentary on Chekhov that sentence is, I think, surpassed in foolishness only by some remarks of a scholar who wrote, without any evidence, that Chekhov had a ‘gloomy view of heterosexual relationships’ and offered the following presumably helpful distinction: ‘A full appreciation of Chekhov’s work requires… a certain degree of involvement, a response intellectual, or, as in the case of his love-stories, emotional.’

Against such an array of unseeing commentators I have space for only one rebuttal. In the best, most illuminating essay on Chekhov’s fiction, ‘Reality in Chekhov’s Stories’, Eudora Welty said, simply and sanely, that ‘Chekhov wrote of sex with honesty and lack of fuss as he wrote of all human experience… Much ahead of its time, and perhaps of ours, in “The Duel” he treated with candour and seriousness a young woman of compelling sexuality. “The Lady with the Little Dog” is a compassionate study of a cynical middle-aged man surprised when, almost against his will and against his belief, his sexual worldliness turns into the honesty and difficulty of belated love.’

In October 1895, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin that he was working on a new long play, his first for several years. Among other things, he continued, the play had the usual ‘four acts, a landscape… much conversation about literature, little action, and five tons of love.’ Chekhov actually wrote puds, a pud being a unit of about thirty-six pounds. At the end of Act One a major character will exclaim, ‘You’re all so highly strung… And such a lot of love…’

The Seagull does indeed contain two or three puds of love, if not five – how does one measure such things? – and much talk not only about literature but also about plays and playwrights, art and artists. Love and art, art and love – Chekhov weaves back and forth between these categories of experience and aspiration.

The most ardent lovers in this play of romantic cross-hatchings are the most infected by the practice, or dream, of art – the actresses Nina and Arkadina, the writers Trigorin and Treplyov – and the play they’re in is in a sense a drama of selves seeking, or failing, to reconcile the various modes of living.

Chekhov once wrote that ‘Nina’s part is everything in the play.’ The first of Chekhov’s heroes of what I call existential sobriety, a person who neither begs for the impossible nor abjectly surrenders to what seems inevitable, but courageously lives through whatever life demands of her, at the same time as it grants her – if she’ll seize them – the virtues she needs to survive, to go on: clear understanding, courage, humility, stamina. Sonya in Uncle Vanya, all three Prozorov sisters, and Anya, Varya and Mme Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard will follow in Nina’s footsteps.

Against her balanced and hard-earned self-knowledge, her integrity, Chekhov puts Treplyov’s immaturity, romanticism and moral weakness. The climactic scene, Nina’s unavailing visit to Treplyov, takes its place among the great moments of Chekhovian theatre, and is a workshop in his techniques. I have space for one central example: after Nina says, ‘You’re a writer, I’m an actress,’ she adds, ‘I loved you, I dreamed of being famous, but now?’ She breaks off and tells him some details of her physical life since she left him, which we know has been bitterly painful. Treplyov’s fateful response is to ignore her words and burst out with ‘life has been unbearable for me’ and ‘I call you, I kiss the ground on which you’ve walked…’ To this Nina (‘bewildered’) asks, ‘Why is he talking like this?’ and repeats the words, which, we quickly see by her use of the impersonal ‘he’, are not a question but a complex recognition: that Treplyov doesn’t so much love as desperately need her, that his emotional immaturity extends to his would-be artist’s self; his writing is lifeless because in some deep dimension he himself lacks animation, life. Before leaving, Nina tells Treplyov what she has learned about being an artist: ‘I know now, I understand…the most important thing isn’t fame or glory or anything I used to dream about – but the ability to endure. To know how to bear your cross and have faith…when I think about my vocation I’m not afraid of life.’

Treplyov, who lacks a true vocation, is afraid, and his shooting himself is an extreme demonstration of his inability to persevere. A measure of Chekhov’s artistic growth is the difference between the suicides with which both Ivanov and The Seagull end. Nikolay’s shooting himself is inorganic and arbitrary, issuing from the stock of melodramatic actions and situations with which Chekhov was familiar. Treplyov’s suicide comes from the heart of the play’s vision, which itself is seized from actuality in order to be dramatized.

Perhaps the shrewdest comment on the play and its ending was made by someone outside the theatre and academic life. After praising the work, the well-known jurist Anatoly Koni wrote to Chekhov: ‘How good the ending is. It is not she, the seagull [who] commits suicide (which a run-of-the-mill playwright, out for his audience’s tears, would be sure to have done) but the young man who lives in an abstract future and has no idea of…what goes on around him.’

In the ‘puds of love’ letter to Suvorin Chekhov wrote: ‘I can’t say I’m not enjoying writing [the play], though [it would have been more accurate if he’d said ‘because’] I’m flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage…’

In his important book Chekhov the Dramatist David Magarshack argues that the turning-point in Chekhov’s dramaturgy came with The Seagull, when he moved from writing plays of ‘direct’ action – one of the stage’s basic tenets – to ones of ‘indirect’. Magarshack’s theory is too complex and detailed to deal with thoroughly here, but his main point is central to our grasp of Chekhov. Action, especially physical action to the point of violence, had always been at the centre of dramatic practice; language, dialogue primarily, must defer to a play’s physical events, or what makes up most of what we call ‘plot’. Magarshack implied that plot, bound to or embedded in physical action, was a source of melodrama, which may be defined as drama without ‘consciousness’. In turn consciousness can be described as both the recording instrument of our sentient life and the substance of what has been recorded.

The Chekhov scholar Ronald Hingley once made a most astute observation about Chekhov’s fiction, which I think it permissible to apply to the plays too: ‘The more complex the plot of a Chekhov story, the less artistically successful it’s likely to be.’

Why this should be so is a complicated matter. Plot – the twists and turns of the drama’s tale, its suspensefulness and surprises, its outcome, its very body or physicality – tends to crowd out consciousness, leaving less room for awareness, insight, perception, contemplation – the basic instruments of our experience of art. Had Chekhov not moved offstage the key elements of Nina’s story – her disastrous affair with Trigorin, his abuse of her and desertion, the child she bears who dies young, and her life’s effect on her art – Chekhov’s play, bursting with intellectual vitality, full of fascinating moral and spiritual dilemmas, would almost certainly have turned into a cautionary tale (talented young girls oughtn’t to trust lecherous older writers), or else a spicy love story with twists, but in any case, a melodrama.

WORK

Many, if not most, of the major characters in Chekhov’s plays look for salvation, rescue, through love, and learn, to their sorrow, that love isn’t the answer; neither is work, to which they most often turn next. The supreme portrayer of what life is really like, the incorruptible artist of the way things are – Beckett’s non-contingent Comment c’est – Chekhov never allows wishfulness to block out actuality and cannot be tempted away (by audiences’ or readers’ or critics’ shallow or naive yearnings) from what he sees as a writer. Love, sex and marriage are most often grave, painful and difficult in life, and so, too, they are in his writings.

Chekhov, the realist, knows, too, that work is more often dull or painful than fulfilling; something to notice is that women work hardest in the plays (Sonya in Uncle Vanya, Olga in Three Sisters, Varya in The Cherry Orchard) and men talk about it most often, most abstractly and most romantically: Vershinin and Tuzenbakh, and belatedly Andrey Prozorov, in Three Sisters, and Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard.

‘White, wan, slender, and very beautiful in the moonlight, she was expecting tenderness; her constant dreams of happiness and love had exhausted her.’
–CHEKHOV, ‘A Visit’

Irina, the youngest Prozorov sister, is doubly afflicted: she dreams constantly of love, and of work too – until her romantic desire runs up against the hardness of fact, and, after having had at least two jobs, she bitterly deplores their lack of ‘poetry’. Meanwhile Olga works hard at her school, and is worn out by her diligence.

The cry ‘Work! for we must work!’ is heard throughout the last plays. In almost every case the character is speaking out of desperation, not conviction; to claim that the orchard is being lost because the family’s ancestors scorned work is both silly and false.

In a masterstroke of Chekhov’s artistry in Three Sisters, he has Irina accept Tuzenbakh, whom she doesn’t love but admires; she then suffers his loss when he is killed in a duel. Chekhov’s genius lies in his avoiding the temptations the situation throws out, and which a lesser playwright would have snatched. Such a dramatist would doubtless have portrayed Irina and Tuzenbakh as passionately in love, so that Irina’s loss would appear more wrenching. That Chekhov conceived Irina as having matured enough to accept a loveless marriage, after giving up her idle dreams of a lover-to-come in Moscow, the site of potential happiness for Olga and Masha, also makes Tuzenbakh’s death all the more poignant.

One of the most heartrending moments in drama is Tuzenbakh and Irina’s farewell. In less gifted hands it surely would have been sentimental, even maudlin; in Chekhov it’s stringent with the truest feeling. The baron is going off to the duel, which we and all the characters sense will be fatal. As he makes ready to go, they stand irresolute, struggling for words. Finally, he speaks lyrically about the vagaries of life, and notices a dead tree that still sways with the others. So, too, he would still be ‘taking part in life’, even after his death. She suddenly says, ‘I’ll come with you’, alarming Tuzenbakh into flight.

Then in one of the most piteous speeches in all drama, he turns round and says, ‘I didn’t have any coffee this morning. Will you ask them to make me some…’

The simplicity and matter-of-factness of this utterance, in the face of all the horror we know will come, is exactly what gives the words their extraordinary power to move us. Chekhov takes one more step to ensure that nothing banal or bathetic will occur: he moves the duel so far offstage that the fatal shot can barely be heard.

The play’s other affecting – and necessarily ill-fated – love story is Masha and Vershinin’s. Chekhov lets their romance develop slowly and rather quietly, with only a few amorous declarations on each side. Their leave-taking is even quieter, with Vershinin simply slipping away after Olga assures him she’ll look after Masha and, a lovely note, Vershinin’s family too.

Plays

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

LOVE

WORK