The Complete Plays

UNCLEAN TRAGEDIANS AND LEPROUS PLAYWRIGHTS¹

Heчиcтыe трa„иkи и прokaжeнньie ‰рaмaтyр„и

A Horribly-Dreadfully-Excitingly-Desperate Trrragedy

by My Brother’s Brother

Lots of acts, even more scenes

CHARACTERS

MIKH. VAL. LENTOVSKY,² man and impresario

TARNOVSKY, a harrowing man; on a first-name basis with devils, whales, and crocodiles; pulse 225, temperature 109.4°

THE AUDIENCE, a lady amiable in every respect; eats whatever is put in front of her

CHARLES XII, King of Sweden;³ the manners of a fireman

THE BARONESS, a brunette with a modicum of talent; does not turn down insignificant roles

GENERAL EHRENSWERD, a frightfully big man with the voice of a mastodon

DELAGARDI, an ordinary man; plays the role with the free-and-easy manner of. . . a prompter

STELLA, the impresario’s sister⁴

BURL, a man brought in on Svobodin’s⁵ shoulders.

HANSEN⁶

OTHERS

EPILOGUE.*

The crater of a volcano. At a desk, covered in blood, sits TARNOVSKY; instead of a head, a skull sits on his shoulders; sulphur blazes in his mouth; out of his nostrils leap sneering green imps. He dips his pen not in an inkwell but in the lava that witches are stirring. It’s horrifying. Flying through the air are the shudders that run up and down your spine. Far upstage shivery shakes are hanging on red-hot hooks. Thunder and lightning. The calendar of Aleksey Suvorin⁷ (the county secretary) is lying right there as stoic as a process-server, as it predicts the collision of the earth with the sun, the destruction of the universe, and the price rise in pharmaceutical drugs. Chaos, horror, terror . . . The reader’s fancy can provide the rest.

TARNOVSKY (gnawing his pen). How am I to write this sort of thing, currrse it! I can’t come up with anything! There’s already been a Trip to the Moon . . . there’s been a Vagabond, too⁸. . . (Drinks boiling oil.) Have to come up with something else . . . something that’ll make the merchant’s wives across the river dream of devils three days running . . . (Rubs his cranium.) Hm . . . Bestir yourselves, great brains! (He thinks: thunder and lightning; the volley of a thousand cannons is heard, performed according to a design by Mr. Shekhtel;⁹ out of the cracks crawl a dragon, vampires, and serpents; into the crater falls a great steamer trunk, out of which pops Lentovsky, clad in a big poster.)

LENTOVSKY. Greetings, Tarnovsky!

TARNOVSKY

(

together

). All hail, my liege!

WITCHES

OTHERS

LENTOVSKY. Well then? Is the play ready, currrse it! (Waves a cudgel.)

TARNOVSKY. No, no way, Mikhail Valentinovich. I think, y’see, I sit and I come up with nothing. You have tasked me with too hard a task! You want my play to freeze the audience’s blood, an earthquake to take place in the hearts of the merchant’s wives from across the river, my monologues to make the lamps go out . . . But don’t you agree that such a thing is beyond the powers of even so great a dramatist as Tarnovsky! (He is embarrassed at having praised himself.)

LENTOVSKY. Rrrubbish, currrse it! More gunpowder, Bengal lights, highfa-lutin monologues—and it’s done! For the sake of the costumes, cursssse it, set it in the highest society . . . Betrayal . . . Prison . . . The prisoner’s beloved is forcibly married to the villain . . . In the villain’s role we’ll cast Pisaryov¹⁰ . . . Next, an escape from prison . . . gunshots . . . I won’t spare the gunpowder . . . Next, a baby, whose noble origins will be disclosed only in the sequel . . . And at the very end more gunshots, another fire, and the triumph of virtue . . . In short, concoct something hackneyed, the way the Rocamboles and Counts of Monte-Cristo¹¹ concoct things . . . (Thunder, lightning, hoarfrost, dew. The volcano erupts. LENTOVSKY is expelled.)

ACT ONE

The AUDIENCE, USHERS, HANSEN, and others.

USHERS (helping the audience members off with their fur coats). A tip, an’t please your worship! (Not getting a tip, they grab the audience members by the tails of their coats.) O, black ingratitude!!! (Are ashamed for humanity.)

ONE OF THE AUDIENCE. What, is Lentovsky recovered?

USHER. Started fighting again, which means he’s recovered!¹²

HANSEN (dressing in his dressing room). I’ll amaze them! I’ll show them! All the papers will start talking!

(The action continues, but the reader is impatient; he is thirsting for Act Two, and therefore — curtain!)

ACT TWO

The court of Charles XII. Behind his back, VALTS¹³ is swallowing swords and red-hot coals. Thunder and lightning.

CHARLES XII and his courtiers.

CHARLES (strides across the stage and rolls his eyes). Delagardi! You have betrayed the fatherland! Hand over your sword to the captain and be so good as to march into prison!

DELAGARDI (utters a few heartfelt words and exits).

CHARLES. Tarnovsky! In your heart-rending play you have made me live through an extra ten years! Be so good as to head for prison! (To the Baroness.) You love Delagardi and have a baby by him. In the interests of the plot I’m not supposed to know about that incident and am supposed to marry you off to a man you don’t love. Marry General Ehrenswerd.

BARONESS (marrying the General). Ah!

GENERAL EHRENSWERD. I’ll make it hot for ‘em! (Is appointed warden of the prison, where Delagardi and Tarnovsky are incarcerated.)

CHARLES. Well, now I’m free right up to the fifth act. I’ll go to my dressing room!

ACTS THREE AND FOUR

STELLA (plays all right, as usual). Count, I love you!

YOUNG COUNT. And I love you, Stella, but I implore you in the name of love, tell me, why the hell did Tarnovsky get me mixed up in this godawful mess? What does he want from me? What’s my relationship to this plot?

BURL. Why, it was all Sprut’s doing! Thanks to him I wound up in the army. He beat me, dogged me, bit me . . . and my name’s not Burl if he wasn’t the one who wrote this play! He’s capable of anything just to make things hot for me!

STELLA (having found out her parentage). I’m going to father to set him free! (On the way to the prison she meets Hansen. HANSEN performs an entrechat.)

BURL. Thanks to Sprut I wound up in the army and am taking part in this play. Probably, it’s Sprut, just to make it hot for me, who made this Hansen trip the light fantastic! Well, just you wait! (The boards collapse. The stage caves in. HANSEN performs a leap that causes all the old maids present to feel faint.)

ACTS FIVE AND SIX

STELLA (meets her dear papa in prison and with him comes up with a plan of escape). I’ll save you, father! But how can it done so that Tarnovsky won’t escape with us? If he escapes from prison, he’ll write a new melodrama!

GENERAL EHRENSWERD (tortures the Baroness and the incarcerated). Because I’m the villain, I’m not supposed to resemble a human being at all! (Eats raw meat.)

DELAGARDI and STELLA (escape from prison).

EVERYONE. Hold ‘em! Catch ‘em!

DELAGARDI. Be that as it may, we’ll escape all the same and stay in one piece! (Gunshot.) Spit on it! (Falls dead.) And spit on this too! The author kills, but also resurrects! (CHARLES comes out of the dressing room and orders the virtuous to triumph over vice. General rejoicing. The moon smiles, and so do the stars.)

AUDIENCE (pointing out TARNOVSKY to Burl). There he is, there’s Sprut! Catch him!

BURL (strangles Tarnovsky. TARNOVSKY falls dead, but immediately leaps up again. Thunder, lightning, hoarfrost, the murder of Coverley,¹⁴ a great migration of peoples, shipwreck and the tying up of all the loose ends.)

LENTOVSKY. And yet I am not satisfied! (Is swallowed up.)

*I wanted to put down “Prologue,” but the editor says that the more improbable the better. Whatever he wants! (Typesetter’s note.)

NOTES

1 A parody of K. Tarnovsky’s adaptation from a German melodrama, The Clean and the Leprous, which opened at Lentovsky’s New Dramatic Theatre in Moscow on January 15, 1884. First published in The Alarm-clock (Budilnik) 4 (1884), pp. 50–51.

2 Mikhail Valentinovich Lentovsky (1843–1906), actor and manager, important in promoting Russian music-hall and operetta. Chekhov liked him personally but regularly made fun of his crowd-pleasing productions.

3 The action takes place in Sweden; the role of the king was played by V. L. Forkatti.

4 Lentovsky’s sister, A. V. Lentovskaya-Ryuban, was an actress in his company.

5 Pavel Mikhailovich Svobodin (Koznenko, 1850–1892) was an actor in the company in the 1883– 1884 season and played the simpleton Burl. His performance as Count Shabelsky in Ivanov in 1889 so pleased Chekhov that they became good friends.

6 I. Hansen (b.1841), the theater’s balletmaster, played the mute role of Axel.

7 Aleksey Sergeevich Suvorin (1834–1912), journalist and publisher, had risen from peasant origins to become a millionaire and influence monger in the conservative camp; he and Chekhov were good friends until they took different sides in the Dreyfus Affair. His publishing house issued calendars and almanacs, among other things.

8 Lentovsky had presented successful productions of the Offenbach operetta (based on Jules Verne) A Trip to the Moon (1878), and a melodrama called The Forest Vagabond (based on the French melodrama Les Pirates de la Savane) in 1884.

9 Frants Osipovich Shekhtel (1859–1926), an architect, who later designed the Moscow Art Theatre building and the Chekhov library in Taganrog.

10 Modest Ivanovich Pisaryov (1844–1905), an excellent realistic actor, who later created the role of Dorn in The Seagull in 1896.

11 Rocambole is a romantic burglar in adventure novels by Ponson de Terrail; the Count of Monte Cristo is the protagonist of Dumas père’s novel of the same name. Chekhov later made an abridgment of it for Suvorin.

12 After recovering from an illness, Lentovsky had been hauled into court and sentenced to a month’s house arrest for disturbing the peace through his production of Frol Skobeev.

13 Konstantin Fyodorovich Valts (1846–1929), scene designer and chief stagehand of the Moscow Imperial Theatres, a specialist in spectacular stage effects. He was blamed by the newspapers for the collapse of the stage at the Bolshoy Theatre during a ballet in 1883.

14 The Murder of Coverley was a sensational melodrama in which a train runs across the stage; Lentovsky had produced it in 1883.