Chekhov

Chapter Eighteen

As we have seen, Chekhov draws on his short stories for the important characters and themes of his plays. In the stories his people live under the directing authority of his prose and are not at the mercy of producer or actors—a matter which plagued him; he had his own strict interpretation of the difference between the tragic and the dramatic. He was always angered when he was defined as a master of “twilight moods.”

If we turn to Donald Rayfield’s excellent work Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, we find he says something decisive on Chekhov’s last plays and especially on The Three Sisters, the longest and greatest of them. Rayfield notes that the total effect is symphonic; the play moves as a symphony does from movement to movement as it gathers power. The theme of changing time is set at once by the striking of a clock that interrupts the chatter of the three sisters on a happy May morning. Olga, the eldest, who is twenty-eight, remembers:

It is exactly a year ago today since Father died—on the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina. It was very cold then and snowing … but now a year has gone by and we don’t mind talking about it. You are wearing your white dress again and you look radiant…. The clock struck twelve then too. I remember the band playing when they took Father to the cemetery and they fired a salute. He was a general and commanded a Brigade. All the same, not many people came.

That last flat sentence tells us something of importance about the isolation of the family. The girls are trapped in a dull provincial town, alien to their cultivated upbringing. They long to get back to the wonderful earlier life they had in Moscow. Their longing is revived by the arrival of a new artillery brigade in the town. Two or three of the officers have known the girls and their family in Moscow when the girls were young; the soldiers seem to be messengers of release.

Chekhov had turned to an early story, The Kiss, written when he was at Babkino and studied an artillery brigade stationed there, a story that has something of Tolstoy’s understanding of the ethos of military life. Chekhov understood that a regiment is a disciplined and migrant culture passing through a stationary society. He also understood that since the officers were under orders, they became uprooted and solitary daydreamers on their monotonous journeys, and that this gave them a bond with the daydreaming sisters. In their isolation the simple officers become amateur philosophers. They brood on large insoluble questions, their private longings and sentimentalities. Disciplined, they see undisciplined Russia: they speculate about the “good life.” Vershinin, the decent middle-aged commanding officer, has his private miseries: he is the victim of an unlucky marriage to a wife who is a suicidal neurotic, and who joins him at his postings. Messages come that his wife has once more taken poison and he has to drop everything to go and protect his children. (He could very well have been the young officer in The Kiss who was stamped for life by his failure to trace the girl who kissed him in the dark, and who became obsessed by his failure.) Tuzenbakh is a stolid baron who believes, in his simplicity, that manual labor is the solution to Russian evils! He dreams of leaving the army and establishing brickfields—a life that will appeal to the idealism of the youngest sister, Irina. His enemy is a pestering Captain Solyony, a querulous and jealous adolescent who has failed to grow up and has dreams of becoming a romantic Byronic figure like the duelist in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. He is looking for someone to fight. There is the old idle army doctor Chebutykin, a cynic who likes to fancy he had been the lover of the sisters’ mother in Moscow. Life is meaningless, he believes; he drinks too much, reads out stupid items from the papers and occasionally sings out lines from a silly song—“Tararaboomdeay.” There are parties, dances, flirtations; love affairs begin. Even Masha, who reads Pushkin aloud and who is married to a boring foolish schoolmaster from the town, will have a secret love affair with the worried Vershinin before the play is done.

The sisters do not realize that the wrecker of their future is their brother, Andrey. He has easily given up the ambitions of his Moscow days—he had intended to be a professor—and has sunk to a minor job on the town council and to gambling at cards in this provincial backwater. He has fallen in love with Natasha, a shrewd local girl, one of Chekhov’s predatory women, and has married her. She becomes, by this marriage, the ruler of the house, and her provincial manners are mocked by the sisters. She is an ambitious secretive schemer. She has become the mistress of the powerful chairman of the town council, who does not appear in the play. Her only weakness is her ridiculous, if cunning, fuss about her baby. We soon hear whispers that the brother has gambled away his sisters’ inheritance.

It was Chekhov’s rule that a play must come to a decisive head in the third act. There is a sudden fire in the town—two streets of wooden houses are burned to the ground—and the soldiers help to fight it. We know of the fire by the sound of the galloping horses of the fire brigade, also by the reflected red glow on the walls of the room in which the sisters, overwrought by taking in refugees, are exchanging confidences. They are interrupted in their confessions and are scared by the sight of Natasha, asserting her power by crossing the room where they are huddled, carrying a lighted candle and ignoring them. It is the most arresting moment in the play. She is Lady Macbeth reborn. Masha says: “She goes about looking as if she started the fire.” Yes, Natasha is the spirit of destruction. We have already seen her cruelty when she sacks the eighty-year-old servant who has worked for the family all her life. Andrey, too, has seen his wife’s imperious “walk.” Confused by his guilt about what he has done to his sisters, he protests that he loves his wife and that they are wrong to hate her. She is splendid, he says, and they must stop hating her. Suddenly he shouts: “Don’t believe a word of what I’ve said.” He confesses he has mortgaged the property to pay his debts.

In the last act the play is haunted not simply by the goodbyes of the soldiers and the girls as the army prepares to move off. The partings begin. We shall see Masha’s guilt as she says good-bye to Vershinin. Her decent ridiculous husband, the schoolmaster, puts on a false beard and mustache he has taken from a boy in his class and clowns to prevent Masha from confessing her guilt. The fool loves her and she is grateful. But laughter and tears are not enough. Theater requires horror. Everyone half knows that the baron and the jealous Solyony are absent for no good reason. There is the sound of a shout from across the fields. It is not a shout but a shot: Solyony has had his duel and killed the baron. Chebutykin, the believer in meaninglessness, reacts to this tragedy with a typical display of indifference. He takes a newspaper out of his pocket and sings his familiar silly song: “Tararaboomdeay.” The collector of faits divers from the newspapers is enjoying being adjacent to catastrophe. Why? No reason at all except that it supports his doctrine: “Nothing matters.” God has become the Absurd, or, rather, the Indifferent.

At the house Natasha, the vulgar interloper, says that she intends to have their lovely avenue of firs cut down “because it looks awful in the evenings.” She is going to have a proper little suburban avenue of garden flowers. She sees a maid has left a table fork on a chair and screams at the maid: “Don’t answer me back”—the voice of power and pettiness made absolute.

Farewells are over. We see the sisters listening to the distant, stirring, mocking sound of the army band as the soldiers march away. The symphony is over. Olga comforts Masha. As she weeps Irina cries, “Why do we have to suffer so much?” but clings to Chekhov’s remedy: we must work and work and think of nothing else. The most searing line comes from Olga: “In time we shall pass on for ever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices, and [most piercingly of all] no one will even know how many of us there were.”

What has moved us so much? As in real life the feeling lies not in the words that are said, but in what lies unspoken between the words. Even the abused things of this household play their part.

Before turning to his last play, Chekhov turned to what would be his last story. It exists in five versions and is The Bride. Many Russian and English critics have seen it as being “more affirmative” or “positive” than the rest of his later writing because the heroine, Nadya, breaks with her provincial family and leaves her home to go to Petersburg to be reeducated. She is stirred by the wild talk of Sasha, a young painter, who talks about “the glorious future.” He is obviously dying of consumption and she has been captivated by what she supposes is his genius. In fact he has failed as a painter and is no more than a lithographer in a modest printing works. His stirring speeches are those of a man recklessly deceiving himself but she has learned something from him: one must rebel. Sasha has at least made her break with the pompous conventional son of a priest to whom she was engaged. There is a remarkable scene in which her fiancé takes her to inspect the house and conventional pictures and furnishings which would be her future home. No elation there! What a prison! Her future husband’s only gift is the absurd squeaking and grunting preoccupation with playing the violin. There is a wonderful moment when Chekhov uses his old trick with sounds: one day a string snaps.

In a letter to Olga Chekhov said he was writing this story in the “style of the seventies,” which suggests his study of self-satisfied bourgeois life in Three Years. He said he was writing slowly, a spoonful at a time— “possibly because there are a lot of characters or because I’ve lost the knack.” Not quite, for in a few lines he establishes the dead town. One quiet evening Nadya stands listening to the distant croaking of the frogs, which makes the place seem “much larger than it really is.” Chekhov evokes the finicking house-proud mother and her pride in her jewelry. We hear Sasha’s denunciation of the beetle- and bug-infested kitchens where the servants sleep on the floor. Much of Sasha’s talk will recall Trofimov’s outburst in The Cherry Orchard. There is a savage moment when the prim garden of the house is slashed by the autumn winds. News comes that Sasha, who has been taking the koumiss cure, has died, and Nadya leaves home for good. The last words of this story are enigmatic:

In a lively, cheerful mood she left the town, forever, as she thought.

Her rebellion is positive. There are no tears. She will, as Sasha has urged her, “educate herself.” Many critics have thought that in the portrait of the dying Sasha Chekhov is in some degree mocking himself.

The importance of the story really lies in details that connect it with the writing of The Cherry Orchard.