The Complete Plays

60 “Masha’s confession in Act Three is not exactly a confession, but only a frank statement. Behave nervously but not despondently, no shouting, even smiling now and then and for the most part behave so that one can feel the weariness of the night. And so that one can feel that you are more intelligent than your sisters, you think yourself more intelligent, at least. As to ‘trom-tom-tom,’ do it your way” (Chekhov to Olga Knipper, January 21 [February 3], 1901).

61 Poprishchin, hero of Gogol’s story Diary of a Madman (1835), is a victim of unrequited love. He continually repeats the phrase “Never mind, never mind . . . be still.”

62 Polish: beloved, dearest.

63 A British music-hall song, accompanied by a high-kicking dance, which had a certain vogue on the Continent. In the Russian translation, it goes, “Tarara boom de-ay / I’m sitting on a curbstone / And weeping bitterly / Because I know so little.” The second verse is slightly racy. Compare Chekhov’s story “Volodya the Great and Volodya the Little” (1893).

64 Latin: a means of living, a temporary compromise.

65 The Russian joke is that chepukha (“nonsense,” “rot”) written out in Cyrillic script looks like a nonexistent but ostensible Latin word renixa.

66 A speaking name, since kozyr means “ace.”

67 The rule in Latin grammar that demands the use of the subjunctive mood in subordinate clauses beginning with the conjunction ut (that, so that). Chekhov had trouble with it as a schoolboy.

68 One of the decorations bestowed in pre-Revolutionary Russia on civil servants and military men. The least important, the Stanislas second class, was bestowed on Chekhov in 1899 for his work in educating the peasants.

69 Sentimental piano piece by the Polish composer T. Badarzewska-Baranovskaia (1838–1862), “La prière d’une vierge.” Anyone who could read a note could play it. In Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929), after it is played by a whore in a brothel, a customer sighs deeply and says, “Ah! that is eternal art.”

70 Familiar quotation from the poem “The Sail” (“Parus,” 1832), by Mikhail Lermontov. Chekhov quotes it also in The Wedding.

71 “[Chekhov] demanded that in the last monologue Andrey be very excited. ‘He should almost threaten the audience with his fists!’ ” (V. V. Luzhsky, Solntse Rossii 228/25 [1914]).

72 Bad French for “Don’t make any noise. Sophie is already asleep. You are a bear!”

73 The images are from the opening lines of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. See note 11. Masha changes the rhyme words “green oak” (dub zelyony) and “learned cat” (kot uchyony) to “green cat” (kot zelyony).

74 “Irina does not know that Tusenbach is off to fight a duel; but she surmises that something untoward happened the day before, which might have serious and therefore evil consequences. And whenever a woman surmises, she says ‘I knew it, I knew it’” (Chekhov to I. A. Tikhomirov, January 14 [27], 1901).

1 “Of course you’re a thousand times right, Tusenbach’s body should certainly not be shown; I felt that myself when I wrote and told you about it, if you recall” (Chekhov to Stanislavsky, January 15 [28], 1901).