The Complete Plays

INTRODUCTION

Anton Chekhov’s plays occupy a unique place in the history of drama. They derived from no obvious forerunners and produced no successful imitators. Despite his obvious influence on any number of important playwrights, there is no school of Chekhovian playwriting. Yet somehow, within the space of a few years, Chekhov managed to bring together elements that created, to paraphrase Maksim Gorky, a new kind of drama, which heightened reality to the point at which it turned into a profoundly inspired symbol.

Chekhov himself approached the theater and playwriting with a deep distrust, a fear that the demands of the stage would coarsen or distort his carefully wrought perceptions. As a boy in Taganrog, he delighted in the melodramas and operettas performed at the local playhouse, but as a young journalist in Moscow in the 1880s he poured vials of scorn on what he saw to be the ingrained mediocrity of professional theater practitioners. According to his friend Ivan Bunin, he regarded most actors as “vulgarians, thoroughly steeped in vanity.”¹ Still, his attraction to the theater persisted. The backstage world appeared in many of his stories, and, significantly, his first published collection was called Fairy Tales of Melpomene (1884), comic anecdotes dedicated to the Muse of Tragedy.

Chekhov’s early plays, written with an eye to stage production, clearly display his sense of the conflict between the pedestrian demands of the theater and the need to express his own concerns dramatically. His farces are extremely stageworthy, but differ from the run of most curtain-raisers only in their shrewd observation of human foibles. Chekhov’s discomfort with having to use traditional dramatic conventions is more apparent in the disjointed and contrived nature of Ivanov (1887; revised 1888) and The Wood Goblin (1889). They emerge from a period in his life when he was striving to perfect his skill as a short-story writer, to increase the subtlety of the techniques available to him, to depict states of unfulfilled desires, misconstrued ambitions, and futile endeavor. Transferring these concerns to writing for the stage, aware as he was of its fondness for platitudes and cheap effects, drove him to agonies of frustration.

Yet, when he gave advice to would-be playwrights, he limited himself to matters of technique. For instance, in 1889, he offered these adages to a young novice:

“If you have hung a pistol on the wall in the first act, then it has to be shot in the last act. Otherwise, don’t hang it up.”

“It is unconscionable of authors to bring on stage messengers, bystanders, policemen. Why force the poor actor to get into costume, make himself up, while away hours on end in a nasty draft backstage?”

“In drama you mustn’t be afraid of farce, but philosophizing in it is disgusting. Everything goes dead.”

“Nothing is more difficult than writing a good vaudeville. And how pleasant it is to write one.”²

Essentially, there were two prevalent traditions of nineteenth-century play-writing upon which Chekhov could draw. One was the mode of the “well-made play,” which dominated European and American stages. Based on strict rules of construction, the well-made play involved a central intrigue, intricate manipulation of the hero’s fortunes, contrived episodes of eavesdropping, revealing soliloquys, and misdelivered letters, and a denouement in which good would triumph and evil receive its just deserts. Its leading exponent, the French playwright Eugène Scribe, declared that the function of such a play was solely to entertain, not by mirroring real life, but by providing an improved surrogate for life. Many of the greatest “box-office hits” of all time have been enacted within the constraints of the well-made play.

Later on, the well-made play attempted to encompass social problems, setting forth in its neat five-act structure a “burning question of the day,” such as women’s rights, divorce, or unemployment, and just as neatly resolving it by the fall of the curtain. As the Russian critic Vasily Sleptsov pointed out, the social question and the mechanical plot seldom bore an organic relationship to one another. The question was usually embodied in the raisonneur, a character like a doctor or lawyer who, in Sleptsov’s image, is a bottle brought on, uncorked, its message poured out, and then packed away until needed again.

The other dramatic tradition available to Chekhov was a purely Russian one. From Gogol onward, Russian playwrights had composed open-ended dramas, loose in structure and combining elements of comedy and pathos. The most prolific dramatist of Chekhov’s youth, Aleksandr Ostrovsky, used such plays to depict byt, the everyday life of merchants and civil servants, and to capture the rhythms and idioms of vernacular speech. Many of Ostrovsky’s types recur in a modified shape in Chekhov: the dispossessed and victimized young girl seeking to make a life for herself reappears as The Seagull’s Nina; the boorish peasant who buys the estate in The Forest is refined into The Cherry Orchard’s Lopakhin. However, Ostrovsky and his imitators took a definite moral stance. The apportionment of good and evil in their plays is as strict as in melodrama. Chekhov’s view of life was too complex to allow such a simplistic viewpoint and his sense of form too sophisticated for him to adopt Ostrovsky’s lax principles of construction.

In practice, Chekhov repudiates his predecessors in radical ways. Che-khovian drama has been defined as imitation of stasis, with action so gradual and non-progressive as sometimes to be imperceptible. Nevertheless, even though central actions, such as Treplyov’s attempted suicide or the sale of the cherry orchard, take place off stage, a sense of development is produced by the sequential placement of characters and their concerns. Chekhov creates an illusion of life in motion by juxtaposing apparently static elements, implying relationships in objects by aligning them in a kind of “montage.” The authorial point of view is not invested in any one character, but a spectrum of attitudes is provided, which reflect on each another and offer ironic counterpoint. The dialogue eludes the characters themselves to be transmitted along an underground railway of subtext and hidden motivation. Often, the conversation breaks off just when the characters are about to declare themselves. As Patrice Pavis puts it, the peculiar power of Chekhov’s text originates in a sort of teasing, never explaining, never providing the key to the quotations or to the characters.³

Given the uniqueness of Chekhov’s plays, the rise of his reputation is something of an anomaly. Shortly before his death in 1904, if you asked anyone who was the greatest living Russian writer, the answer would no doubt have been Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s imposing position as a moralist and reformer, his eminence at the panoramic novel, the genre most honored by the nineteenth century, which preferred monumentality, his political stance as the unassailable opponent of autocracy—these and other features made the sage of Yas-naya Polyana the voice of humanitarian culture to the world at large.

Chekhov, on the other hand, was regarded as a purely local phenomenon. Within the Russian Empire, his reputation was fragmented among various publics. The common reader remembered him chiefly as the author of a number of funny stories. The intelligentsia saw him as a chronicler of its own malaise, particularly in the plays staged by the Moscow Art Theatre. Political factions on the right and left dismissed him as a fence-sitter, too cowardly to take sides in ideological battles. The literary avant-garde deplored his lack of religious uplift and “sublimity.”

Outside Russia, Chekhov was viewed at best as an exotic petit maitre, trading in doom and gloom. The Poles patriotically neglected him, the Germans interpreted him as another exponent of the tragedy of fate, and the Georgians noted sarcastically that only ethnic Russians would fritter away their time as trivially as his characters do. In France, the standard works on Russian literature around 1900 shrugged off Chekhov: Kazimierz Waliszewski described his drama as “completely devoid of action and psychological differentiation of characters,” while the critic and novelist Melchior de Vogüé declared the full-length plays too pessimistic for the French, full of impotent heroes with “enigmatic Slavic souls.”⁴ In the first two English-language reference books to include Chekhov, both published the year before his death, those same dramatic characters were cited as “fit subjects for the psychiatrist” and “a strange assemblage of neurotics, lunatic and semi-lunatic,” obsessed with solving the riddle of life.⁵

In Russia, too, the respect and affection Chekhov’s memory had accrued began to evaporate. At the jubilee celebrations in 1910, some dissenting voices could be heard above the chorus of praise. At a meeting of the St. Petersburg Literary Society, the prominent feminist author Olga Shapir renewed the charge that he was a poet of gray, humdrum depressives, and added the complaint that his women especially lacked clear outlines or strong emotion, despite the fact that since the 1880s he had been in the vanguard of political reform movements.⁶ In a period of activism and engagement, Chekhov’s deliberately peripheral stance grew increasingly distateful. It would culminate in the Bolshevik rejection of Chekhov after the October Revolution.

That rejection was due in part to Chekhov’s inextricable association with the Moscow Art Theatre, a symbiosis rich in ironies. It was ironical that Chekhov, who deeply admired skilled acting technique, should have been imposed on the cultural consciousness of his times by a troupe of amateurs and semi-professionals. It was ironical that Stanislavsky, who had cut his teeth as an actor and director on Shakespeare, Schiller, and operetta, and whose dearest ambition was to stage historically accurate productions of the classics, should find his most important challenge and success in re-creating the dreary world of his contemporaries and, along the way, inevitably ennoble Chekhov’s characters. It was ironical that a theater whose founders intended it to be a school for a mass public should find itself explicating the intelligentsia to the intelligentsia. It is perhaps the irony of ironies that the Art Theatre, having discovered its most successful modus operandi in its staging of Chekhov, tried to apply this technique to all sorts of unlikely authors with the to-be-expected failure; while Chekhov himself chafed at what he felt were wilful departures from his meaning and intention.

He complained that, “at the Art Theatre, all those prop-room details distract the spectator, keep him from listening. [. . .] Let’s take Cherry Orchard . . . Is this really my Cherry Orchard? Are these really my types? . . . With the exception of a couple of performers, none of it’s mine. . . . I write life. . . . This gray, everyday life. . . . But that does not mean annoying moaning and groaning. . . . They make me lachrymose, a really boring writer. [. . .] It’s starting to get on my nerves. . . .”⁷

Whatever the discrepancy between Chekhov’s vision and that of the Art Theatre, what struck the spectators of the original productions most forcefully was that company and author seemed to be totally and intimately amalgamated; the plays seemed to be written and staged by the same person. When the actors at provincial theaters simple-mindedly played Chekhov in a dismal monotone, the result was boredom; whereas the Art Theatre revealed the covert, repressed feelings underlying the bad jokes and banal conversation. What distinguished Chekhov’s drama from all other plays at the time was what Stanislavsky called the “submarine” course of the through action, which renders the dialogue nearly allegorical. Every individual scenic moment was carefully worked out in terms of the integrity of the entire production, to create an effect of seamlessness. Everyday or material reality went beyond mere naturalism to achieve the famous nastroenie (mood). Stanislavsky’s layering of “mood” or “atmosphere” is essentially a symbolist technique. Just as the words “Balzac was married in Berdichev” overlay another, more profound emotion significance, so the tableaux of ordinary life, abetted by sound and lighting effects, opened into a “beyond” of more intense reality.

Those who saw Chekhov as a realist were deceived by Stanislavsky’s atmospheric and detail-crammed productions and the seeming looseness of the plays’s dialogue and structure. Like all great artists, however, Chekhov was highly selective in what he chose to take from reality. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold recalled an occasion in 1898 when The Seagull was in rehearsal at the Moscow Art Theatre, and an actor boasted to Chekhov of how backstage “frogs were to croak, dragon-flies were to buzz, dogs to bark.”

“What for?” Anton Pavlovich asks in a surly voice.

“Realism,” replies the actor.

“Realism,” repeats A. P., with a grin, and, after a brief pause, says: “The stage is art. There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy, with the faces magnificently painted. What if the nose were to be cut out of one of the faces and a real one stuck in? The nose is ‘realistic,’ but the painting is spoiled.”

One of the actors tells him proudly that at the end of the third act of Seagull, the director wants to bring on stage the whole domestic staff, some woman with a crying child.

Anton Pavlovich says:

“It isn’t necessary. It’s the same as if you’re playing a piano pianissimo, and meanwhile the lid of the piano collapses.”

“In life it often happens that a forte breaks into a pianissimo quite unexpectedly,” one of the acting company tries to object.

“Yes, but the stage,” says A. P., “demands a certain conventional quality. We have no fourth wall. Nevertheless, the stage is art, the stage reflects the quintessence of life, you don’t have to put anything extraneous on stage.”⁸

This succinctly expresses Chekhov’s belief in the selective detail and the need to edit reality to make an artistic point. Perhaps the symbolist writer Andrey Bely put it best when he described The Cherry Orchard as “loops from the lace of life,” realistic details scrutinized so closely that the dimension beyond them is revealed. He suggested that Chekhov became an unwitting Symbolist as his surface layer of reality turned transparent and disclosed the hidden profundities beneath. A similar analogy might be made with pointillist painting. Up close, the individual specks of color make no sense, create no discernible pattern; but at the proper distance, the shapes reveal themselves in new and often striking ways; their relationships fall into place. In this respect, Chekhov’s plays fit Goethe’s prescription for a stageworthy drama: “each incident must be significant by itself, and yet lead naturally to something more important.”⁹

This scenic extension of the Russian tradition of literary realism enabled the intelligentsia to behold its hopes and fears on stage in terms it readily adopted. As the poet Osip Mandelshtam wrote in 1923:

For the intelligentsia to go to the Moscow Art Theatre was almost equal to taking communion or going to church. . . .

Literature, not theater, characterized that entire generation. . . . They understood theater exclusively as an interpretation of literature . . . into another, more comprehensible and completely natural language.

. . . The emotional zeal of that generation and of the Moscow Art Theatre was the emotional zeal of Doubting Thomas. They had Chekhov, but Thomas the intellectual did not trust him. He wanted to touch Chekhov, to feel him, to be convinced of his reality.¹⁰

The illusion of life created by Stanislavsky, his emphasis on subtext and context, provided that reality, and gave Chekhov a novel-like amplitude that satisified the intelligentsia’s need for theme and tendentiousness.

The Bolsheviks had extra-literary uses for the theater. No less tendentious, they fomented performance that was stark, immediate, and viscerally compelling. The new demands made on art in the aftermath of the October Revolution had a Medusa-like effect on the Art Theatre: it froze in place. Locked into its aging repertory, it found itself and Chekhov both repudiated as irrelevant excrescences of an obsolete bourgeois culture. Sailors at special matinees for workers shouted, “You bore me, Uncle Vanya,” while ideologues and journalists called for Chekhov’s suppression in favor of a vital, swashbuckling, romantic drama. “Is it really necessary to stir up such feelings?” émigrés reported Lenin complaining about Uncle Vanya. “One needs to appeal to cheerfulness, work, and joy.”¹¹ Such vital creators of Bolshevik theater as Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Meyerhold turned to the one-act farces when they sought to stage Chekhov, and the only full-length play of his to be performed regularly in this period was The Cherry Orchard, treated as a satiric farce mocking the estate owners and their parasites.

While Chekhov languished at home, abroad he was promulgated by a diaspora. The 1920s and 1930s are the decades of the émigrés’ Chekhov; fugitives from the Revolution saw themselves as Ranevskayas and Gaevs, expelled from a tsarist Eden. Outside Russia, the tours of the Moscow Art Theatre and its offshoot, the self-exiled Prague Group, disseminated the style and look of the original, but aging, productions, while resident actors and directors who left the Soviet Union perpetuated a Stanislavskian approach in Europe and America. Even those refugees who had never practiced the Art Theatre approach, such as Theodore Komisarjevsky in England and George Pitoëff in France, carried on under its banner. Their Chekhov was lyrical, enigmatic, moonstruck, and, above all, steeped in romantic nostalgia. European and American audiences accepted this without demur. After all, if Chekhov was a particularly Russian author, then who better to interpret him than a Russian, any Russian? Chekhov, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, came to be seen as elegiac and wistful.

After the Second World War, in countries under Soviet hegemony, Chekhov and the Art Theatre interpretation, now heavily adulterated by Socialist Realism, were thrust down the throats of Czech, Polish, East German, and Hungarian audiences. Little wonder if, left to their own devices, directors and critics found him indigestible and sought to supplant the Stanislavsky legacy.

The rehabilitation of Chekhov’s drama in Europe after World War II is due to a Czech and an Italian — Otomar Krejca and Giorgio Strehler, both leftists, but of quite different stripes. At his theater near Prague, Krejca worked in collaboration with his actors to realize what Gorky had once called the cold, cruel Chekhov, an impassive creator who flung his characters into an absurd world. There, in his interpretation, they beat their wings futilely against the meaninglessness of existence. Without being either a programmatic existentialist or a doctrinaire absurdist, Krejca distilled his own experiences as a victim of postwar Soviet domination into an interpretation of Chekhov that administered the shock of recognition to audiences throughout Europe. They could identify with the blighted hopes of his characters.

Strehler, for his part, employed elegance and metaphor in his 1956 Cherry Orchard, arguably the most influential Chekhov production of modern times. His white-on-white decor, with its overhead membrane of petals in a diaphanous veil, was copied from Bucharest to Indiana. Strehler sought to conflate all the levels of meaning in the play: the narrative, the socio-histori-cal, and the universally metaphoric. The toys in the nursery, for instance, went beyond realistic props to become emblems of the characters’ lost innocence and retarded emotions. Strehler universalized the nostalgia of Komisarjevsky and Pitoëff by enlarging it beyond the private sphere, while Krejca’s productions grew ever more schematic, insisting on the collective grotesque of the Chekhovian world.

In Soviet Russia during the 1960s, Chekhov was co-opted by a generation of idealists opposed to one of cynics. Ivanov became the play for the times, repeatedly revived. Antidomesticity was proclaimed by scenery that lacked walls and doors; manor houses were made to look like skeletal prisons and the branches of the cherry orchard became sterile and gnarled.

The English-speaking world has been the most resistant to extreme reforms in the performance of Chekhov. Psychological realism remains the preferred format, and the Chekhovian estate has become as familiar as the old homestead or the derelict country house. “Chekhov has been ennobled by age,” says Spencer Golub. “. . . He is as soothing and reassuring as the useless valerian drops dispensed by the doctors in all his plays . . . an article of faith, like all stereotypes . . . the Santa Claus of dramatic literature.”¹² This may account for the large number of plays about Chekhov’s life, in which he turns into Drs. Dorn, Astrov, or Chebutykin, depending on the playwright’s bent. It is also the case that the English-speaking theater has, until very recently, been dominated by playwrights rather than directors. A Chekhovian resonance can be found more in the plays of leading dramatists from Rodney Ackland to Tennessee Williams than in extraordinary stagings.

Anywhere else in the world, the reinterpretation of Chekhov, defying the conventional homilies and exploding the traditional conventions, was the work of directors. At least until the end of the nineteenth century, one could trace the stage history of Shakespeare or Molière through the actors and their treatment of individual roles. Chekhov’s career as a dramatist, however, coincides with the rise of the director as prime mover in the modern theater; and the nature of his last plays derives in part from his awareness—if not his full approval — of what a director’s theater was capable of. Following the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, it required the integration of every component: the actors had to become an ensemble led by a virtuoso conductor. We can compare the Hamlets of great actors to some advantage and insight; but to compare the Ranevskayas of individual actresses makes no sense outside the context of the directorial visions for the productions in which they appeared.

Writing in 1960, Harry Levin pointed out that the opening of a New York apartment building called The Picasso signaled the domestication, and hence the end, of modernism.¹³ When the enfant terrible becomes the elder statesman and new coinages turn into commonplaces, efforts have to be made to recapture the original effect. The acceptance of Chekhov as a readily recognizable cultural totem makes him available for all kinds of co-optation. In the 1970s, the process of dismantling the Soviet icon of Chekhov continued: Anatoly Éfros converted The Cherry Orchard to a graveyard and Yury Lyubimov flung open the wall of the Taganka Theatre during his Three Sisters to reveal the Moscow streets outside: “You yearn for Moscow?” he seemed to be saying, “Well, there it is, in all its noise, grubbiness, and squalor.” Fifty years of false aspiration were debunked in a moment.

Later, Yury Pogrebnichko re-created Three Sisters behind a velvet rope as a museum exhibit, cluttered with the detritus of the past, forcing the post-Soviet spectator to come to terms with a regime that left him washed up on the shoals of the present. Henrietta Yanovskaya put her Ivanov on roller-skates to show him attempting to evade the responsibilities of his sordid situation. In the United States, the experimental Wooster Group dismantled Three Sisters by means of video screens and improvisation to evoke the modern world of mass media and create a hybrid theatrical language. The seamless web of the Stanislavskian simulacrum is fragmented into jagged shreds of interrupted meaning and faulty recollection. Dramatists remote from Chekhov’s sensibility, language, and concerns, such as Pam Gems, Edward Bond, David Mamet, Trevor Griffiths, Lanford Wilson, David Hare, Brian Friel, and Richard Nelson, transmogrify him in new versions, refracting their own preoccupations. This need of the English-speaking playwright to wrestle Chekhov to the mat has become a rite of passage. There is something compulsively Oedipal in this recurrent grappling with the one universally admitted patriarch of the modern stage.

Chekhov as patriarch may be a jarring image. Let us return to Chekhov’s replacement of Tolstoy as the Russian man of letters par excellence. Even as late as the 1940s, the Communist critic György Lukács could point to Tolstoy as the paradigm of universal genius who transcended his otherwise crippling bourgeois milieu through the power of his demiurgic creativity. In our less heroic age, however, Tolstoy seems unsympathetic; like Blake’s old Nobo-daddy, he glowers at us dispprovingly from beneath his beetling brows. Tolstoy’s creative achievements and his moral demands on us seem the titanic labors of some mythic era, impossible to us puny mortals. They also exude a kind of confidence and self-righteousness that are luxuries too costly for the spiritually impecunious survivors of the twentieth century. Even his death was exemplary: Tolstoy’s solitary demise in the railway station at Astapovo is the stuff of tragedy, Lear succumbing on the heath, this time unreconciled with Cordelia.

Chekhov’s death, which has been so often retold and reworked as fiction, is, in contrast, a comedy of errors. It too is exemplary, but as farce, from his alleged last words, “It’s been a long time since I’ve drunk champagne” (which echoes Uncle Vanya’s nanny: “It’s a long time since I’ve had noodles” ) to the transport of his corpse in a freight car marked “Oysters,” to the military band straying from a general’s funeral to double in brass at his graveside. Chekhov is the more accessible and more familiar figure. His irony has greater appeal than does Tolstoy’s moral absolutism. His vaunted objectivity, not all that objective under scrutiny, is more welcome because less judgmental. His inability to write a novel and his preference for small forms, open endings, and ethical ambiguities appeal to our postmodern fondness for the marginal, our wary distrust of the grand gesture. Tolstoy the schoolmaster stands over his text, ferule in hand, to make sure we have learned the lesson; Chekhov endears himself by modestly bowing out, protesting that it’s all in the words.

Yet, for all this modesty, over the course of a mere century Chekhov has reached the rank of Shakespeare. They are bracketed together as the greatest playwrights of all time. The Polish director Andrzej Wajda has remarked, “Theatre in our European tradition derives from the word, from literature, the Greeks, Shakespeare, Chekhov.”¹⁴ Note the absence of Ibsen, who might deserve better, with his endeavors to raise everyday experience to an epic level. Ibsen’s grandiosity takes risks: when he succeeds, the effect is breathtaking; when he fails, it is involuntarily ludicrous. Chekhov regularly avoided the grandiose, the overtly poetic, the tragic pose; or else he undercut them when they arose inadvertantly.

Despite what Wajda says about the word, part of Chekhov’s special appeal comes from what he leaves out, another legacy from the Symbolists, the pregnant pause. Often what is left unsaid—the awkward gaps in conversation, the sentences that trail off in the air, the interstices of pauses—matters most in Chekhov’s plays. Of course, Stanislavsky, who distrusted understatement, amplified and multiplied the Chekhovian pause, turning it into a pretext for veristic stage effects. An actor who worked at the Art Theatre in 1908–1909 recalled that the pauses “were held precisely by the numbers and the actors were recommended to count the seconds mentally during the duration of the pauses.”¹⁵ This mechanical rendition loses touch with the essence of the Chekhovian pause, itself a precursor of what Beckett referred to as the transitional zone in which being makes itself heard.

What then justifies this coupling of Shakespeare and Chekhov? I would suggest that John Keats, in a famous letter of 1818, put his finger on it. Reacting to a performance of Edmund Kean as Richard III, Keats mused on Shakespeare’s protean brilliance:

at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainities, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.¹⁶

Walter J. Bate paraphrases this: “in our life of uncertainties, where no one system or formula can explain everything . . . what is needed is an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness.”¹⁷ Shakespearean mastery requires a negation of the writer’s own ego, a sympathetic absorption into the essential significance of the writer’s object. Chekhov seems to have attained that state of authorial absence.

For Keats, as for the other English Romantics, Shakespeare’s brilliance at negative capability was shown in his extensive gallery of characters, all equally vivid, multi-faceted, and imbued with idiosyncratic opinions, idioms, behavior. Chekhov can hardly exhibit the Bard’s variety or plenitude in his plays; the narrow, seemingly repetitive nature of his dramatic world was a ready target for satire even in his lifetime. But another, earlier letter of Keats comes to our aid; in it he divided ethereal things into three categories: “Things real— things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare—Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist— and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit.”¹⁸

Chekhov admits the existence of real things in his writings and endows them with a significance beyond their material status; however, the existence of semireal things such as love remains problematic and nebulous for his characters. Yet, the confines of the Chekhovian world teem with Keats’s “Nothings” to be made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit. As Stanislavsky intuited, a samovar in Chekhov was not the same as a samovar in Ostrovsky; it, along with the pauses and sound effects and changeable weather, bespoke the overall tone, reflected the inner life of the characters. Leonid Andreev named this interrelationship of everything in Chekhov “panpsychism.” The same soul animates whatever appears on stage:

On the stage Chekhov must be performed not only by human beings, but by drinking glasses and chairs and crickets and military overcoats and engagement rings. . . . it all comes across not as items from reality or true-to-life sound and its utterances, but as the protagonists’ thoughts and sensations disseminated throughout space.¹⁹

This goes beyond the sympathetic fallacy; it creates a distinctive microcosm, instantly recognizable whatever the vagaries of directors. It is the unifying factor that ties together even the most seemingly non-communicative dialogue and solipsistic yearnings.

When Mariya Knebel, Stanislavsky’s last pupil, came to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1968 to direct The Cherry Orchard, the actors were surprised that she did not require a samovar on stage.²⁰ The samovar had always been the indispensable token of Chekhov’s foreignness. In the last decades, however, in production after production, the samovar has been supplanted as emblematic prop by an old Victrola with a morning-glory horn. Chekhov is still associated with the past, but not a specificially Russian or historic past. His “pastness,” like that of any great dramatist, is part of a continuum with the present. The suggestion is that somehow the screechy recorded voices played back on a turntable return the past to us in distorted, nostalgic form, which we interpret as our needs require.²¹

In his book The Theatrical Event, David Cole refers to illud tempus, an archetypal realm that the theater must depict, “not so much when it first occurred as where it is always happening.”²² Beyond the reality the estates and garrison towns of Chekhov’s plays held for their original audiences, they have now taken on a polysemic existence. They transcend a specific society to become archetypal realms. The spellbinding lake of The Seagull has more in common with the island of The Tempest than with a landscape in Turgenev. The rooms in the Prozorov home can expand to the dimensions of Agamemnon’s palace or dwindle to the claustrophobic cells of Beckett. The early critics of Chekhov could not have been more wrong when they condemned him as the poet of an obsolescent set, circumscribed by its own eccentricity. Just as the Shakespearean illud tempus shines through modern dress and radical transpositions, the Chekhovian illud tempus gains in eloquent meaning from its disguises, even when Thomas Kilroy transfers The Seagull to the Ireland of the Celtic Twilight or Tadashi Suzuki plungs the officers of Three Sisters into absurdist baskets or the Irondale Ensemble Project turns Uncle Vanya into a 1940s radio announcer in Charlevoix, Michigan. Without shedding its specificity, the world of the Chekhovian intellectual has become as remote as Camelot and as familiar as Grover’s Corners, as exotic as Shangri-La and as homely as Kasrilevka. It instantly conjures up a long-vanished way of life that nevertheless compels us to adduce current counterparts. The persistence of the identifiable and idiosyncratic world suggests that he never stopped being Chekhov our contemporary.

NOTES

1 Ivan Bunin, O Chekhove [About Chekhov] (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1955). Translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

2 Ars. G., in Teatr i Iskusstvo [Theater and Art] 28 (1904). The author’s real name was Ilya Yakovle-vich Gurlyand (b. 1863?), a student at the time he met Chekhov in Yalta in 1889, later a journalist and professor.

3 Patrice Pavis, “Commentaires et notes” to Antoine Tchékhov, La Mouette. Traduction d’Antoine Vitez (Paris: Actes Sud, 1985), pp. 99–103.

4 K. Waliszewski, Littérature russe (Paris, 1900), p. 426; de Vogüé, quoted in Yu. Felichkin, “Rol teatra v vospriyati tvorchestva Chekhova vo Frantsii,” in Literaturny Muzey A. P. Chekhova: sbornik statey i materialov [The Chekhov Literary Museum: a collection of articles and documents], vyp. V (Rostov, 1969), p. 155.

5 Leo Wiener, Anthology of Russian Literature (New York, 1903), II; A. Bates, The Drama (London, 1903), p. 73.

6 “V Peterburge,” Chekhovsky yubileiny sbornik [Chekhov Jubilee Anthology] (Moscow, 1910), p. 530.

7 Yevtikhy Karpov, “Dve poslednie vstrechi s A. P. Chekhovym” [My last two encounters with Chekhov], Ezhegodnik imperatorskikh teatrov [Yearbook of the Imperial Theaters], vyp. V. (1909). It should be noted that Bunin considered Karpov’s reminiscences to be a tissue of lies.

8 V. E. Meyerhold, “Naturalistichesky teatr i teatr nastroenii” [“The Naturalistic Theater and the Theater of Mood”], in Teatr. Kniga o novom teatre: sbornik statey [Theater: A Book About the New Theater. A Collection of Articles] (St Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908): 136–150.

9 J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life, trans. S. M. Fuller (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1839), p. 168 (July 26, 1826).

10 Osip Mandelshtam, in Teatr i muzyka [Theater and Music] 36 (November 6, 1923).

11 Moskovsky Khudozhestvenny teatr v sovetskuyu épokhu. Materialy, dokumenty [The Moscow Art Theatre in the Soviet Era. Materials, Documents], 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1974), p. 124; V. A. Nelidov, Teatralnaya Moskva (sorok let moskovskikh teatrov) [Theatrical Moscow (Forty Years of Moscow Theaters)] (Berlin-Riga, 1931), p. 436.

12 In Newsnotes on Soviet and East European Drama and Theatre, III, 3 (November 1983): 2–3.

13 Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?” (1960), in Varieties of Literary Experience, ed. S. Burn-shaw (New York: New York University Press, 1962), p. 307.

14 Quoted in Maciej Karpinski, The Theatre of Andrej Wajda, trans. C. Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 124.

15 A. A. Mgebrov, Zhizn v teatre [A Life in the Theater], ed. E. Kuznetsov (Leningrad, 1920), I, pp. 224–225.

16 The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 184.

17 W. J. Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 249.

18 Letter to Benjamin Bailey (March 13, 1818).

19 Leonid Andreev, Pisma o teatre (1912), trans. as “Letters on Theatre,” in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, ed. and trans. L. Senelick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 240–241.

20 Mariya Knebel, “ ‘Vishnyovy sad’ v Irlandii,” Teatr 5 (1969): 158–166.

21 Even the first production of Three Sisters in 1901 gave the critic Innokenty Annensky the sense of a phonograph reproducing his own world: “the phonograph presents me with my voice, my words, which, however, I had been quick to forget, and as I listen, I naively ask: ‘who is that talking through his nose and lisping?’ ” I. F. Annensky, “Drama nastroeniya. Tri sestry,” in Knigi otrazhenii [A Book of Reflections] I (St. Petersburg: Trud, 1906), p. 147.

22 David Cole, The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective (Middletown, Conn., 1975), p. 8.