The Complete Plays

THE EVILS OF TOBACCO, FINAL VERSION

Six distinct variants exist of this monologue, the more serious changes concomitant with the greater depth of psychology of Chekhov’s works throughout the 1890s. Over the course of the recension, Chekhov heightened the emotional tone of the monologue, refined the comedy, and increased the pathos. The speaker’s pseudo-scientific jargon became more attenuated, with a concurrent introduction of clichés.

The impetus for further revision may have come when, in 1898, Ya. Mer-pert, a Russian man of letters living in Paris, asked Chekhov for a one-act to be performed at an amateur recital. Although Chekhov asked his friends to send their plays instead, at the same time he made more revisions to Tobacco and presented it to his brother Ivan. In this version, a number of the grotesque details in the earlier variants are deleted. Nyukhin casts more aspersions on his unseen wife and reveals more pain at his enforced nullity. What Chekhov had earlier left the audience to deduce was now spelled out in tones of complaint. It was first performed by the writer A. I. Kuprin at a private club in Moscow in September 1901.

Chekhov did not intend to include the piece in his Collected Works but returned to it while working on The Cherry Orchard in 1902. To his publisher, Marks, he described it as “a new play” and insisted that it was intended exclusively for the stage, not for the reader. When Stanislavsky solicited Olga Knipper to ask Chekhov’s permission to put it on, Chekhov replied to his wife, “Are you crazy!!! Give a vaudeville to the Art Theatre! A vaudeville with a single character who only talks, and does absolutely nothing!!” (October 8, 1902).

The final revision draws a more hateful portrait of Nyukhin’s wife and consequently renders him more terrorized and pathetic. Chekhov turned the ridicule he had previously showered on his hero into pity, and suggested the spiritual vacuity of such a philistine existence. Nyukhin became the latest in the Russian tradition of the put-upon “little man.”

THE EVILS OF TOBACCO

O ‚pe‰e тa·aкa

A Stage Monologue in One Act

FINAL VERSION

CAST

IVAN IVANOVICH NYUKHIN,¹ the husband of his wife who runs a music school and a girls’ boarding school.

The stage represents the speaker’s platform of a provincial club.

NYUKHIN (with long side-whiskers, no moustache, in an old threadbare tailcoat, enters pompously, bows, and adjusts his waistcoat). Kind ladies and, in a manner of speaking, gentlemen. (Fluffs out his side-whiskers.) Someone suggested to my wife that on behalf of charity I should give a lecture on a popular topic. Why not? You want a lecture, you’ll get a lecture — I couldn’t care less. Of course, I’m no professor and a stranger to academic degrees, but, nevertheless, all the same, for thirty years now, unceasingly, one might even say, at the cost of my own health and so on, I have been working on questions of a strictly scientific bent, I think deep thoughts and sometimes I even write, if you can picture such a thing, scholarly articles, I mean not exactly scholarly, but sort of, pardon the expression, along the scholarly line. Among others, a few days ago, I wrote a huge article entitled: “The Evils of Certain Insects.” My daughters liked it a lot, especially the part about bedbugs, but I reread it and tore it up. After all, whatever you may write, you still can’t do without insect powder. We’ve even got bugs in the grand piano . . . As the subject for today’s lecture I chose, so to speak, the evils visited on humanity by the use of tobacco. I smoke myself, but my wife insisted that I lecture today about the evils of tobacco, and, so there’s no point in arguing. If you want tobacco, you’ll get tobacco—I really couldn’t care less, but I suggest that you, kind ladies and gentlemen, attend to to my current lecture with due seriousness, otherwise who knows what will happen. Anyone who quails at the thought of a scientific lecture, doesn’t care for it, doesn’t have to listen and can leave. (Adjusts his waistcoat.) I especially solicit the attention of the medical professionals assembled here, who can glean a good deal of useful information from my lecture, because tobacco, besides its deleterious effects, can be also used as medicine. So, for instance, if you put a fly in a snuff box, it will drop dead, probably, from a nervous breakdown. Tobacco is, by and large, a plant . . . When I give a lecture, my right eye usually twitches, but pay it no mind: it’s just from excitement. I’m a very nervous man, generally speaking, and my eye started to twitch on September 13th, 1889, the same day my wife gave birth, in a manner of speaking, to my fourth daughter, Varvara. All my daughters were born on the 13th. However (after a glance at his watch), considering the shortness of time, we will not digress from the subject of the lecture. I must remark that my wife runs a music school and a private boarding school, I mean not exactly a boarding school, but something along those lines. Just between ourselves, my wife loves to complain there’s never enough of anything, but she’s got a tidy sum tucked away, a good forty or fifty thousand, while I haven’t got a kopek to my name, not a penny—well, what’s the point of bringing that up? In the boarding school I’m in charge of the housekeeping department. I buy the provisions, supervise the servants, keep the accounts, stitch the composition books, exterminate the bedbugs, walk my wife’s lapdog, catch the mice . . . Last night it fell to my duties to dole out flour and butter to the cook, because pancakes were on the menu. Well, sir, to make a long story short, today when the pancakes were already out of the pan, my wife came into the kitchen to say that three of the students won’t eat pancakes, because they’ve got swollen glands. Therefore it would appear that we had fried a certain number of extra pancakes. What are we supposed to do with them? My wife at first ordered them put in the pantry, but then she thought about it and thought about it and says: “Eat those pancakes yourself, you dummy.” When she’s in a bad mood, that’s the sort of thing she calls me: dummy, or viper, or Satan. And what kind of Satan am I? She’s always in a bad mood. And I didn’t so much eat them as gulp them down without chewing, because I’m always hungry. Yesterday, for instance, she didn’t give me dinner. “Dummy,” she says, “there’s no point in feeding you . . .” But, however (looks at his watch), we have been wandering and digressed a bit from the subject. Let us proceed. Although, of course, you would much rather be listening to a ballad right now, or some symphony, or an aria . . . (Starts to sing.) “In the heat of battle we shall not blink an eye . . .” I don’t know where that’s from . . . Among other things, I forgot to tell you that in my wife’s music school, besides doing the housekeeping, I’m also charged with teaching mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography, history, vocal exercises, literature, and so on. For dancing, singing, and drawing my wife charges special fees, although I’m also the one who teaches dancing and singing. Our musical academy is located at No. 13 Five Dog Lane. That’s the reason, I suppose, that my life is such a failure, because I live at No. 13. And my daughters were born on the 13th, and our house has 13 window-panes . . . Well, what’s the point of talking about it! To discuss terms my wife can be at home at any time, and the school’s curriculum, if you like, can be purchased from the doorman for thirty kopeks a copy. (Pulls a few brochures out of his pocket.) And, if you like, I can let you have these. Thirty kopeks a piece! Anyone want one? (Pause.) Nobody wants one? Well, twenty kopeks! (Pause.) Annoying. Yes, No. 13! Nothing works out for me, I’ve got old, I’ve got stupid . . . Here I am giving a lecture, outwardly I’m cheerful, but in fact I’d like to scream my lungs out or fly somewhere to the ends of the earth. And there’s no one to complain to, you just want to break down and cry . . . You’ll say: your daughters . . . What about my daughters? I talk to them, but they only laugh . . . My wife has seven daughters . . . No, sorry, I think it’s six . . . (Briskly.) Seven! The oldest of them, Anna, is twenty-seven, the youngest seventeen. Kind ladies and gentlemen! (Glances around.) I’m unhappy, I’ve turned into an idiot, a nonentity, but basically you see before you the happiest of fathers. Basically, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and I don’t dare say anything else. If only you knew! I’ve lived with my wife for thirty-three years, and, I may say, they were the best years of my life, well, not exactly the best, but by and large. They have flown by, in short, like one happy moment, personally speaking, damn them to hell. (Glances around.) However, she hasn’t come yet, I don’t think she’s here, so I can say whatever I please . . . I am awfully scared . . . scared whenever she looks my way. Yes, here’s what I have to say: my daughters have taken so long to get married probably because they’re shy, and because no men ever get to see them. My wife doesn’t want to throw parties, she never invites anyone to dinner, she’s a very stingy, ill-tempered, bitchy lady, and therefore nobody calls on us, but . . . I can confide to you a secret . . . (Comes down to the footlights.) My wife’s daughters can be seen on holidays at their auntie’s, Natalya Semyonovna, the one who suffers from rheumatism and wears that yellow dress with the black polka-dots, as though she were sprinkled with spiders. They serve refreshments there. And when my wife isn’t around, you might get a little . . . (Flicks his throat to indicate drinking.) I have to mention that I get drunk on a single shot, and it starts to put me in a good mood and at the same time makes me so depressed that I run out of words; for some reason I recall the days of my youth, and for some reason I want to run away, ah, if you only knew how much I want to run away! (Passionately.) Run away, cast off all of this and run away without a backward glance . . . where to? It doesn’t matter where . . . just to run away from this shabby, vulgar, despicable life, which has turned me into an old, pathetic idiot, an old, pathetic imbecile, to run away from that stupid, shallow, penny-pinching bitch, bitch, bitch, my wife, who has made my life a living hell for thirty-three years, to run away from the music, the kitchen, my wife’s money, from all that inanity and banality . . . and come to a halt somewhere far, far away in a meadow and stand like a tree, a pillar, a scarecrow in a cornfield, under the broad sky, and spend all night watching the quiet, bright moon hanging overhead, and forget, forget . . . Oh, how I’d like to forget it all! . . . How I’d like to tear off this vile old rag of a tailcoat I wore when I walked up the aisle thirty years ago . . . (Tears off his tailcoat.) which I wear whenever I give a lecture on behalf of charity . . . Take that! (Tramples on the tailcoat.) Take that! I’m old, poor, pathetic, like this waistcoat with its threadbare, shabby backing . . . (Displays the back of it.) I don’t need anything! I am higher and purer than this, I was once young, intelligent, I studied at the university, I dreamed, I considered myself a human being . . . Now I don’t need anything! Nothing except peace and quiet . . . peace and quiet! (After a sidelong glance, quickly puts on his tailcoat.) However, my wife is standing in the wings . . . She’s arrived and is waiting there for me . . . (Looks at his watch.) Our time is up . . . If she asks, please, I beg you, tell her that the lecture was . . . that the dummy, I mean me, behaved with dignity. (Looks to the side, coughs.) She’s looking this way . . . (Raising his voice.) Proceeding from the proposition that tobacco does contain a lethal poison, which I have already discussed, smoking is wrong whatever the circumstances, and I allow myself, in a manner of speaking, to hope that this lecture of mine “on the evils of tobacco” will be of some benefit. I have had my say. Dixi et animam levavi!²

He bows and pompously exits.

NOTES

1 Although the joke surname, from nyukhat, to take snuff, to sniffle, is retained, the absurd Christian name Markel is now changed to the common Ivan.

2 Latin: I have spoken and my soul is the easier for it!