The Complete Plays

As a medical student in Moscow, Chekhov was drawn into the world of journalism through his brothers, Aleksandr, a writer, and Nikolay, an artist. Through their agency, he began to compose cartoon captions for the humor journal The Alarm Clock in 1879, and gradually started writing comic squibs that were not dependent on illustration. Between 1880 and 1887 he contributed jokes, monologues, dialogues, anecdotes, parodies, and short stories to magazines in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, using a host of pen names, among them Antosha Chekhonte, The Doctor Who’s Lost His Patients, The Man without a Spleen, The Spleen without a Man, and My Brother’s Brother.

These first steps in writing dialogue are heavily derivative of the Russian comic traditions. Significantly, his earliest playlet, The Fool, or The Retired Captain, resembles matchmaker scenes in Gogol and Ostrovsky, even though its conclusion is more scabrous than anything to be found in them. The two-part Honorable Townsfolk recalls Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satires of provincial life. Others are simply extended gags.

Chekhov’s journalism entailed much theater attendance, for in the early 1880s he wrote what amounted to a behind-the-scenes gossip column with occasional reviews. This activity led in turn to an acquaintance with actors and managers. Growing familiarity bred contempt but could not efface his fascination with the stage.

One of the prime butts of Chekhov’s ridicule was Mikhail Valentinovich Lentovsky, who enjoyed considerable success running the Hermitage Pleasure Garden and an operetta theater, the Bouffe, although his New Theatre, devoted to legitimate drama, foundered. After he was declared bankrupt, the merchant class, to whose taste he catered, enabled him to make a fresh start, and in 1886 he founded the Skomorokh (Minstrel) Theatre. Plays of Gogol and Ostrovsky and even Hamlet could be found there, but the bulk of the repertory was made up of farces, melodramas, and fairy extravaganzas. His productions abounded in pyrotechnical displays, explosions, fires, collapsing bridges, and all the impedimenta of sensationalism.

Nikolay Chekhov worked for Lentovsky as a scene painter, allowing the brothers entry to green rooms and dressing-rooms, and although Anton himself kept up good relations with the manager, he fired hilarious sallies at the mixtures of fustian and lycopodium powder that reigned at Lentovsky’s theater. Chekhov pooh-poohed the stage’s claim to be an educational force, a means of uplifting the people. For him, the chasm between the theater’s aspirations and the tawdriness of its personnel was too patent to assume society would be edified by playgoing. He was also bemused by the pretensions of dramatists. His “dramatic sketch” The Sudden Death of a Steed, which mocks playwriting dilettantes, offers such a rich piece of nonsense that it was later staged by Moscow’s rollicking cabaret The Bat (known in the West as the Chauve-Souris) before the First World War.