Natasha's Dance

8

Private theatrical undertakings were something of a Moscow fashion following the lifting of the state monopoly in 1882. The actress Maria Abramova, for example, set up her own theatre, with the help of merchant patrons, where Chekhov's Wood Demon (1889) had its premiere; and in the 1900s another well-known actress, Vera Komis-sarzhevskaya, owned a private theatre in St Petersburg. By far the most important of these private ventures was the Moscow Arts Theatre, founded by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky in 1898. Here Chekhov's last great plays were first performed. Stanislavsky was born in Moscow to a merchant family which 'had already crossed the threshold of culture', as he would later write. 'They made money in order to spend it on social and artistic institutions.' His maternal grandmother was the French actress Marie Varley, who had made herself a star in Petersburg. But while his parents were rich enough to put on lavish balls, they basically inhabited the old Moscow

mercantile world. Stanislavsky's father slept (with his grandfather) in the same bed.¹⁰⁶ As a student Stanislavsky took part in the Mamontov amateur productions. These convinced him that, while huge efforts had been put into the music, the costumes and the sets, very little had been done about the acting, which remained extremely amateurish, not just in the operas but in the theatre, too. He trained himself as an actor by standing for hours before a mirror every day and developing his gestures over several years to make them appear more natural. His famous 'method' (from which 'method acting' was to come) boiled down to a sort of naturalism. It was acting without 'acting' - which fitted in so well with the modern dialogue (where the pauses are as important as the words) and the everyday realities of Chekhov's plays.¹⁰⁷ Later his method was made more systematic through a series of techniques to help the actor convey the inner thoughts and emotions of a part. They were all about recalling moments of intense experience in the actor's own life, supposedly to help him produce the emotion on demand. Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote a blistering satire of the Moscow Arts in his farcical, unfinished Black Snow (1939- ), ridiculed these methods in a scene in which the director tries to get an actor to feel what passion is by riding round the stage on a bicycle.

Stanislavsky's vision of an independent theatre brought him together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Both men were committed to the idea that the theatre should reach out to the masses by producing plays about contemporary life. The Moscow Arts was originally called the Accessible Arts Theatre. Cheap seats for students and the poor were mixed in with the expensive ones at the front of the stalls. Even the building, the rundown hermitage in Karetny Row, had a democratic feel. It had previously been used for circuses, and when the actors first moved in there was an all-pervasive smell of beer.¹⁰⁸ After a quick coat of paint, they began in 1898 rehearsals for the opening performances of Alexei Tolstoy's Tsar Fedor (1868) and Chekhov's The Seagull (1896).

Nemirovich was a great admirer of Chekhov's play. In St Petersburg it had been a dreadful failure; the critics had panned it. But in the simple, lifelike style of the Moscow Arts' production it was a triumph. 'The public lost all sense of the theatre', wrote Nemirovich: 'the life they now beheld in these simple human contacts on the stage was

"real", not theatrical.' People felt 'almost embarrassed to be present', as if they were eavesdropping on a mundane domestic tragedy. There was 'nothing but shattered illusions, and tender feelings crushed by rude reality'.¹⁰⁹ The production relaunched Chekhov's career as a playwright - and he now came home to Moscow as its favourite literary son.

Born in Taganrog, in southern Russia, to a devout, old-style merchant, Anton Chekhov came to Moscow at the age of seventeen and two years later, in 1879, enrolled as a student of medicine at the university. He fell in love with the city from the start. 'I will be a Muscovite for ever', he wrote in a letter of 1881.¹¹⁰ As a hard-up student, and then as a doctor, Chekhov was acquainted with the city's slums, and he was a lifelong client of its brothels, too. His first literary efforts were as a journalist ('Antosha Chekhonte') for the humorous tabloids and weekly magazines aimed at Moscow's newly literate labourers and clerks. He wrote sketches of street life, vaudeville satires on love and marriage, and stories about doctors and magistrates, petty clerks and actors in Moscow's poor districts. There were many writers of this kind - the most successful being Vladimir Giliarovsky, author of the 1920s classic Moscow and the Muscovites (still widely read and loved in Russia today) and something of a mentor to the young Chekhov. But Chekhov was the first major Russian writer to emerge from the penny press (nineteenth-century writers such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had written for the serious or 'thick' periodicals that combined literature with criticism and political commentary). His concise written style, for which he is so famed, was fashioned by the need to write for commuters on the train.

Chekhov knew these trains. In 1892 he purchased Melikhovo, a delightful small estate a short journey to the south of Moscow. Moscow often featured as a backdrop to his stories from this period - for example in 'Three Years' (1895) and 'Lady with the Dog' (1899). But the city was now felt by its absence, too. In all his greatest plays Moscow is perceived as a distant ideal realm, a paradise beyond the provinces, where his characters are trapped in a stagnant way of life. Chekhov understood their claustrophobia - he too yearned for city life. 'I miss Moscow', he wrote to Sobolevsky in 1899. 'It's boring without Muscovites, and without Moscow newspapers, and without

the Moscow church bells which I love so much.' And to Olga Knipper in 1903: 'There's no news. I'm not writing anything. I'm just waiting for you to give me the signal to pack and come to Moscow. "Moscow! Moscow!" These are not the refrain of Three Sisters: they are now the words of One Husband.'¹¹¹ In Three Sisters (1901) Moscow becomes a symbol for the happiness so lacking in the sisters' lives. They long to go to Moscow, where they lived as children and were happy when their father was alive. But they remain stuck in a provincial town, unable to escape, as youthful hopes give way to the bitter disappointments of middle age. There is no clear explanation for their inertia - a fact which has led critics to lose patience with the play. 'Give the sisters a railway ticket to Moscow at the end of Act One and the play will be over', Mandelstam once wrote.¹¹² But that is to miss the whole point of the play. The three sisters are suffering from a spiritual malaise, not a geographical displacement. Stifled by the petty routines of their daily life, they strive for a higher form of existence, which they imagine there to be in Moscow, yet in their hearts they know does not exist. The sisters' 'Moscow', then, is not so much a place (they never go there) as a legendary realm - a city of dreams which gives hope and the illusion of meaning to their lives. The real tragedy of the three sisters is voiced by Irena when she comes to realize that this paradise is a fantasy:

I've been waiting all this time, imagining that we'd be moving to Moscow, and I'd meet the man I'm meant for there. I've dreamt about him and I've loved him in my dreams… But it's all turned out to be nonsense… nonsense.¹¹³

Chekhov's Moscow, then, is a symbol of the happiness and better life to come. From Chekhov's point of view, as a Russian and a liberal, its promise was in progress and modernity - a far cry from the image of inertia which Musorgsky saw just thirty years before. Chekhov put his faith in science and technology. He was a doctor by training, and by temperament a man who looked to practical solutions rather than to religion or ideologies. In a veiled attack on Tolstoy in 1894, Chekhov wrote that 'there is more love of humanity in electricity and steam than in vegetarianism'.¹¹⁴ Progress is a constant theme in Chekhov's plays. Noblemen like Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1896) or Vershinin in

Three Sisters are constantly speculating about the future of Russia. They hope that one day life will become better and they talk about the need to work towards that end. Chekhov shared these dreamers' hopes, although he was scathing on the subject of intellectuals who did no more than speak about the need to work. Trofimov, the eternal student in The Cherry Orchard, is always saying 'we must work', yet he himself has never done a thing. Chekhov thought that well-intentioned chatter was Russia's greatest curse. He worked like one possessed throughout his life. He believed in work as the purpose of existence and as a form of redemption: it was at the heart of his own religious faith. 'If you work for the present moment', he wrote in his notebook, 'your work will be worthless. One must work bearing only the future in one's mind.'¹¹⁵ Perhaps his credo was best expressed by Sonya in the final moving moments of Uncle Vanya. There is, she says, no rest from work or suffering, and only in the ideal world is there a better life.

Well, what can we do? We must go on living! We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through a long, long succession of days and tedious evenings. We shall patiently suffer the trials which Fate imposes on us; we shall work for others, now and in our old age, and we shall have no rest. When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, in the other world, we shall say that we have suffered, that we've wept, that we've had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us. And then, Uncle dear, we shall both begin to know a life that is bright and beautiful, and lovely. We shall rejoice and look back at all our troubles with tender feelings, with a smile - and we shall have rest. I believe it, Uncle, I believe it fervently, passionately… We shall have rest!¹¹⁶

Chekhov's emphasis on the need to work was more than a Vol-tairean solution to the quest for meaning in one's life. It was a critique of the landed gentry, which had never really known the meaning of hard work and for this reason was destined for decline. This is the theme of Chekhov's final play, The Cherry Orchard, written for the Moscow Arts in 1904. It has often been perceived as a sentimental drama about the passing from an old and charming gentry world to a brash, modern, city-based economy. The plot is, indeed, quite remi-

niscent of the 'nest of gentry' melodramas that had been in fashion since Turgenev's time. The main characters, the Ranevskys, are forced by debt to sell their prized possession and inheritance (the orchard) to a merchant called Lopakhin, who plans to clear the land and build dachas on it for the new middle classes of Moscow. Stanislavsky, in the first production, played it as a sentimental tragedy: his actors cried when they first heard the script. No one was prepared to puncture the mystique of 'the good old days' on the estate - a mystique that had grown into a national myth. Journals such as Bygone Years (Starye gody) and Town and Country (Stolitsa i usad'ba) catered to this cult with their dreamy pictures and nostalgic memoirs about the old gentry way of life. The political agenda of these journals was the preservation of the landowners' estates, not just as a piece of property, an economic system or ancestral home, but as the last remaining outposts of a civilization that was threatened with extinction by the social revolution of the towns. 'Our country nests', Count Pavel Sheremetev told the Moscow zemstvo, 'are carrying the ancient torch of culture and enlightenment. God grant them success, if only they are spared the senseless movement to destroy them, supposedly in the interests of social justice.'¹¹⁷ Had Chekhov's play been written after 1905, when the first agrarian revolution swept through Russia and thousands of those country nests were set alight or ransacked by the peasants, it might have been conceived in this nostalgic way. But Chekhov was insistent that the play should be performed as a comedy, not a sentimental tragedy; and in this conception the play could not have been written later than it was, even if Chekhov had lived for another twenty years. After the 1905 Revolution the passing of the old world was no longer a subject of comedy.

Chekhov called his play a 'piece of vaudeville'.¹¹⁸ Throughout The Cherry Orchard he is subtly ironic and iconoclastic in his treatment of the gentry's 'cultivated ways'. He is sending up the mystique of the 'good old days' on the estate. We are meant to laugh at the cliched sentimental speeches of Madame Ranevskaya when she waxes lyrical on the former beauty of the old estate or her happy childhood there: a world she had abandoned long ago for France. Her overblown expressions of sadness and nostalgia are belied by the speed with which she recovers and then forgets her grief. This is not a tragedy: it is a

satire of the old-world gentry and the cult of rural Russia which grew up around it. What are we to think of Pishchik, for example, the landowner who sings the praises of the 'gentry on the land' and yet at the first opportunity sells his land to some English businessmen who want it for its special clay (no doubt to be used for the manufacturing of lavatories in Stoke-on-Trent)? What are we to make of the Ranev-skys who set such store by the old paternal ways? Their ancient butler Feers looks back nostalgically to the days of serfdom ('when the peasants belonged to the gentry and the gentry belonged to the peasants'). But he is left behind on the estate when its owners all pack up and go away. Chekhov himself felt nothing but contempt for such hypocrisy. He wrote The Cherry Orchard while staying on the estate of Maria Yakunchikova near Moscow. 'A more disgracefully idle, absurd and tasteless life would be hard to find', he wrote. 'These people live exclusively for pleasure.'¹¹⁹ The merchant Lopakhin, on the other hand, was intended by Chekhov as the hero of the play. He is portrayed as an honest businessman, industrious and modest, kind and generous, with a real nobility of spirit underneath his peasant-like exterior. Although he stands to gain from buying the estate (where his father was a serf), Lopakhin does everything he can to persuade the Ranevskys to develop it themselves, offering to lend them money to help them (and no doubt giving money to them all the time). Here was the first merchant hero to be represented on the Russian stage. From the start Chekhov had the part in mind for Stanislavsky himself, who was of course the son of a merchant family from peasant stock. But mindful of this parallel, Stanislavsky took the role of the feckless noble Gaev, leaving Lopakhin to be played by Leonidov as the usual merchant stereotype - fat and badly dressed (in checkered trousers), speaking boorishly in a loud voice and 'flailing with his arms'.¹²⁰ As Meyerhold concluded, the effect was to deprive Chekhov's play of its hero: 'when the curtain falls one senses no such presence and one retains only an impression of "types"'.¹²¹

The Moscow Arts' production of The Cherry Orchard, which became the standard view, has taken us away from the real conception of the play - and from the real Chekhov, too. For everything suggests that, by temperament and background, he identified himself with the outsider crashing through the barriers of society. Like Lopakhin,

Chekhov's father was a merchant who had risen from the enserfed peasantry. He taught himself to play the violin, sang in the church choir, and became the choir master in the Taganrog cathedral in 1864. Chekhov shared his father's industry. He understood that common people could be artists, too. Far from lamenting the old gentry world, his last play embraces the cultural forces that emerged in Moscow on the eve of the twentieth century.