MODERN DRAMATISTS

TON CHEKHOV

MACMILLAJST MODERN DRAMATISTS

Macmillan Modern Dramatists

Series Editors: Bruce King and Adele King

Published titles

Reed Anderson, Federico Garcia Lorca

Eugene Benson,/. M. Synge

Renate Benson, German Expressionist Drama

Normand Berlin, Eugene O'Neill

Michael Billington, Alan Ayckbourn

John Bull, New British Political Dramatists

Denis Calandra, New German Dramatists

Neil Carson, Arthur Miller

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Ruby Cohn, New American Dramatists, 1960-1980

Bernard F. Dukore, American Dramatists, 1918-1945

Bernard F. Dukore, Harold Pinter

Arthur Ganz, George Bernard Shaw

Frances Gray, John Arden

Julian Hilton, George BiXchner

David Hirst, Edward Bond

Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre

Bettina L. Knapp, French Theatre 1918-1939

Charles Lyons, Samuel Beckett

Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Luigi Pirandello

Margery Morgan, August Strindberg

Leonard C. Pronko, Eugene Labiche and Georges Feydeau Jeanette L. Savona Jean Genet

Claude Schumacher, Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire

Laurence Senelick, Anton Chekhov

Theodore Shank, American Alternative Theatre

James Simmons, Sean O'Casey

David Thomas, Henrik Ibsen

Dennis Walder, Athol Fugard

Thomas Whitaker, Tom Stoppard

Nick Worrall, Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev

Katharine Worth, Oscar Wilde

Further titles are in preparation

MACMILLAN MODERN DRAMATISTS

ANTON CHEKHOV

Laurence Senelick

Professor of Drama, Tufts University

M

MACM1LLAN

� Laurence Senelick 1985

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmit�ted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1985

Published by

Higher and Further Education Division MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London

Companies and representatives throughout the world

Typeset by

Wessex Typesetters Ltd Frome, Somerset

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Senelick, Laurence

Anton Chekhov.�(Macmillan modern dramatists) 1. Chekhov, A.P.�Dramatic works I. Title

891.72'3 PG3458.Z9D7

ISBN 978-0-333-30882-0 ISBN 978-1-349-17981-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17981-7

To the memory of James Arnott

Contents

List of Plates viii

Editors' Preface x

A Life 1

At the Play 16

Journeyman Efforts 28

Without Patrimony 28

Ivanov 34

The Wood Demon 41

The One-Act Plays 50

On th e High way 5 3

On the Harmfulness of Tobacco 54

Swan Song 55

The Bear 56

The Proposal 58

Tatyana Repina 59

A Tragedian In Spite Of Himself 62

The Wedding 63

The Jubilee 65

The Night before the Trial 67The Seagull 70

Uncle Vanya 88

Three Sisters 102

The Cherry Orchard 117

The Theatrical Filter 135 References 151 Bibliography 158 Editions and Translations of Chekhov 163 Index 165

List of Plates

Georges Wilson as Borkin and Jean Vilar as Platonov in Ce Fou de Platonov at the Theatre National Populaire, Paris, 1956. (From The World. Photo: Agnes Varda)

Meyerhold's production of The Proposal in 33 Swoons, Moscow, 1935. Igor Ilyinsky as Lomov and Logina as Natasha.

Michael Chekhov, the dramatist's nephew, in A Tragedian in Spite of Himself, Majestic Theatre, New York, 1935.

Simov's setting for Acts One and Two of The Seagult at the Moscow Art Theatre, 1898.

The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre, 1898. End of Act Three: Stanislavsky as Trigorin (second from left), Olga Knipper as Arkadina (seated), Vishnevsky as Dorn (far right), Artyom as Shamrayev (kneeling).

Stephen Haggard as Treplyov and Peggy Ashcroft as Nina in Komisarjevsky's production of The Seagull, New Theatre, London, 1936.

Josef Svoboda's design for The Seagull, directed by Otomar Krejca at the Narodni Divadlo, Prague, 1960.

Retsuke Sugamote as Nina in the first act of The Seagull, directed by Andrei Serban for the Shiki Theatre Company, Tokyo, 1980.

The final curtain of Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre, 1900. Mariya Lilina as Sonya (left) and Vishnevsky as Vanya.

Sybil Thorndike as Marina and Laurence Olivier as Astrov in Uncle Vanya at the National Theatre, London, 1962. (Photo: Angus McBean. Courtesy: Harvard Theatre Collection)

Michel St-Denis' Three Sisters at the Queen's Theatre, London. From left to right: Frederick Lloyd (Chebutykin), Michael Redgrave (Tusenbach), Peggy Ashcroft (Irina), John Gielgud (Vershinin), Leon Quartermaine (Kulygin). (Photo: Houston Rogers)

Design for the Three Sisters at the Gorki Art Theatre, Moscow, 1940. (Photo: Motley Books Ltd.)

Ivan Moskvin as Yepikhodov in the original produc�tion of The Cherry Orchard Moscow Art Theatre, 1904.

Stanislavsky as Gayev and Lilina as Any a in The Cherry Orchard, Moscow Art Theatre, 1904.

A Note on Translations

All translations from Russian are my own, except where otherwise noted.

LS

Editors' Preface

The Macmillan Modern Dramatists is an international series of introductions to major and significant nineteenth and twentieth century dramatists, movements and new forms of drama in Europe, Great Britain, America and new nations such as Nigeria and Trinidad. Besides new studies of great and influential dramatists of the past, the series includes volumes on contemporary authors, recent trends in the theatre and on many dramatists, such as writers of farce, who have created theatre 'classics' while being neglected by literary criticism. The volumes in the series devoted to individual dramatists include a biography, a survey of the plays, and detailed analysis of the most significant plays, along with discussion, where relevant, of the political, social, historical and theatrical context. The authors of the volumes, who are involved with theatre as playwrights, directors, actors, teachers and critics, are concerned with the plays as theatre and discuss such matters as performance, character interpretation and staging, along with themes and contexts.

BRUCE KING

ADELE KING

1

A Life

Nature and life conform to the very same outdated stereotypes that even editors turn down. Chekhov to Suvorin (30 May 1888)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the town of Tagan�rog on the sea of Azov in southern Russia on 17 January I860¹, the third of six children, five boys and a girl. He might have been born a serf, as his father Pavel Yegorovich had, for the Emancipation came only in 1861; but his grandfather, a capable and energetic estate overseer named Yegor Chekh, had prospered so well that in 1841 he had purchased his freedom along with his family's. The boy's mother Yevgeniya was the orphaned daughter of a cloth merchant and a subservient spouse to her despotic husband. To their children, she imparted a sensibility he lacked: Chekhov would later say, somewhat unfairly, that they inherited their talent from their father and their soul from their mother.²

The talent was displayed in church. Beyond running a small grocery store where his sons served long hours, - 'In my childhood, there was no childhood,' Anton was to report³ - Pavel Chekhov had a taste for the outward trappings of religion. This was satisfied by unfailing obser�vance of the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church, daily family worship, and, especially, religious music. He enrol�led his sons in a choir which he founded and conducted; and aspired to be a pillar of the Taganrog community.

Taganrog, its once-prosperous port, now silted up and neglected, had a population that exceeded fifty thousand during Chekhov's boyhood. Its residents included wealthy Greek families and other Europeans, the ship-building interests. The town benefited from such public amenities of the Tsarist civic system as a pretentious-looking gym�nasium, which the Chekhov boys attended, for one of Pavel's aims was to procure his children the level of education needed for entry into the professions. The upward mobility in the Chekhov generations is reflected in the character of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, a self-made millionaire whose grandfather and father were serfs on the estate he manages to buy. Chekhov's father, born a serf, had risen from meshchanin or petty bourgeois⁴ to be a member of a merchant guild; and Chekhov himself, as a professional physician and writer, became influential on the national scene. He was a model of the raznochinets or person of no settled rank who had begun to dominate Russian society in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

To bar mass advancement, the tsarist curriculum laid great stress on Latin and Greek; one recalls the school�master Kulygin in Three Sisters chuckling over the fate of a friend who missed promotion because he could not master the ut consecutivum construction. Schoolmasters are usually portrayed by Chekhov as narrow, obsequious and deadly to the imagination, no doubt the result of his own experience as he studied the classics, German, Russian and, for a brief time, French. His best subject was Scripture. School days were lightened by the fairy tales of his nanny, the picaresque reminiscences of his mother, vacations spent on the estate his grandfather managed, fishing, swimming, and, later, visits to the theatre.

As a boy, Chekhov was stage-struck. Although it was against school regulations, he and his .classmates fre�quented the gallery, often in false whiskers and dark glasses. Besides attending the active and not inelegant Taganrog Playhouse, Chekhov was the star performer in domestic theatricals, playing comic roles like the Mayor in Gogol's Inspector General and the scribe Chuprun in the Ukrainian folk opera The Military Magician. While still at school, he wrote a drama, called Without Patrimony, and a vaudeville, The Hen Has Good Reason for Clucking. Later, while a medical student, he tried to revise them, even as he completed another farce, The Cleanshaven Secretary and the Pistol, which his younger brother Mikhail recalled as being very funny. It concerned the editing of a sleasy newspaper and featured a double-bed as the major set- piece. Never submitted to the censorship, it is now lost.

By 1876 Pavel Chekhov had so mismanaged his business that, fearing imprisonment for debt, he stole off to the next town, to take the train to Moscow. There his two elder sons were pursuing their studies. He had already stopped paying his dues to the merchant guild and had reverted to the status of meshchanin. Whether Anton suffered a psychic trauma at this loss of caste, as had the young Ibsen when/iw father went bankrupt, is matter for speculation; certainly the repercussions felt at the sale of the home left their trace on many of his plays. Dispossessed of house and furniture, his mother and the three youngest children also departed for Moscow, abandoning him in a home now owned by a friend of his father. He had to support himself by tutoring for the three years needed to complete his course. He did not rejoin his family until Easter 1877, his fare paid by his university student brother Aleksandr; and this first visit to Moscow and its theatres set standards by which he hence�forth judged the quality of life in the provinces. Suddenly, Taganrog began to look narrow and philistine.

Just before Anton Chekhov left Taganrog for good, a public library opened. This enabled him to read classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet, a work he was to cite indefatigably, and, like any Victorian schoolboy, Uncle Tom's Cabin and the adventure stories of Thomas Mayne Reid. Heavier reading included philosophic works that enjoyed a high reputation at the time, such as Buckle's positivist and sceptical survey of European culture, The History of Civilisation in England. Later in life, Chekhov took a wry view of this omnivorous autodidacticism, and had the clumsy bookkeeper Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard read Buckle for self-improvement.

It was at this time that Chekhov began writing, sending comic pieces to Aleksandr in Moscow in the hope they would be accepted by the numerous humour magazines that had sprung up in the capitals. He made friends with actors, hung around backstage, and learned how to make up. One of his school-fellows, Aleksandr Vishnevsky, did enter the profession, and eventually became a charter member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Nikolay Solovtsov, to whom Chekhov dedicated his farce The Bear and who created the title role, was another friend from these Taganrog days.

In 1879 Chekhov came to Moscow to study medicine at the University, aided by a scholarship from the Taganrog municipal authorities. He arrived to discover himself the head of the family, which was still in dire straits and living in a cramped basement flat in a disreputable slum. His father, now a humble clerk, boarded at his office; his elder brothers, Aleksandr, a writer, and Nikolay, a painter, led alcoholic bohemian lives; his three younger siblings, Ivan, Mariya, and Mikhail, had still to complete their educations. Lodging at home, Chekhov was compelled to launch a career as journalist, at the same time he carried out the rigorous five-year medical course.

At first, he wrote primarily for humour magazines, contributing anecdotes and extended jokes, sometimes as captions to Nikolay's drawings; these brought in ten to twelve kopeks a line. Gradually, he diversified into parodies, short stories and serials, including a murder mystery and a romance that proved so popular it was filmed four times in the early days of cinema. He was a reporter at a famous trial. He became close friends with Nikolay Leykin, editor of the periodical Splinters (Oskolki). He conducted a theatrical gossip column, which won him entry to all the greenrooms and side-scenes in Moscow. And he shared in his brothers' bohemianism; he wrote to an old schoolchum, in a letter the Soviets publish only in expur�gated form: 'I was on the trot all last night and, 'cept for a 5-ruble drunk didn't... or catch .... I'm just about to go on the trot again'.⁵ His writing at this time was published under a variety of pseudonyms, the best known Antosha Chekhonte, from a schoolboy nickname. He also found time to revise Without Patrimony which he seriously hoped would be staged; turned down by the leading actress to whom he submitted it, it was burnt by its author. But a copy survived, minus the title-page, and was first published in 1923; it has since become known as Platonov, after the central character.

1884 was a critical date in Chekhov's life. At the age of twenty-four, he set up as a general practitioner and, influ�enced by reading Herbert Spencer, began research on a history of medicine in Russia. Ironically, that December he had bouts of spitting blood, which his medical expertise might have diagnosed as symptoms of pulmonary tuber�culosis. No outside observer would have suspected that this active, well-built, handsome man was suffering from a mortal illness. Only in his last years did he become a semi-invalid and, until that time, he maintained the pre�tence that his symptoms were not fatal. This subterfuge was not carried on simply to allay his family's fears. He wilfully strove to ignore the forecast of his own mortality.

1884 also saw his first published collection of stories, pointedly entitled Fairy Tales of Melpomene: the muse of tragedy compressed into pithy anecdotes of the life of actors. Chekhov had found more prestigious and better- paying periodicals to take his stories and was now an expert on Muscovite life.

He had an opportunity to amplify his subject matter, when he and his family began to spend summers in the country, first with his brother Ivan, master of a village school; then in a cottage on the estate of the Kiselev family. It was during these summers that Chekhov gained first�hand knowledge of the manor-house setting he employed in so many of his plays, and made the acquaintance of officers of a battery, who turn up in Three Sisters. Chekhov's artistic horizons also expanded, for the Kiselevs, intimates of Tchaikovsky, were devoted to classi�cal music. Another summer visitor to become a lifelong friend was the painter Isaak Levitan, whose impressionistic landscapes are the painterly equivalent of Chekhov's prose techniques.

In 1885 Chekhov's literary career took a conscientious turn upwards. On a visit to St. Petersburg, he had been embarrassed by the acclaim that greeted him, because he recognised that he had been writing sloppily: 'If I had known that that was how they were reading me,' he told his brother Aleksandr (4 January 1886), 'I would not have written like a hack'. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from D. V. Grigorovich, doyen of Russian critics, singling him out as the most promising writer of his time and urging him to take his talent more seriously. Although Antosha Chekhonte continued to appear in print for a few more years, Anton Chekhov made his first bow in the prestigious Petersburg newspaper New Times (Novoe Vremya). Its editor Aleksey Suvorin had risen from peasant origins to become a tycoon and leading influence-monger in the conservative political c& he and Chekhov were to be closely allied, although their friendship would later founder when Suvorin promoted the anti-Semitic line during the Dreyfus affair.

During the years when he was winning recognition as a short-story writer, Chekov made two further attempts to write for the theatre. With the first, On the High Way (Na bolshoy doroge, 1885), he came up against the obstacle of the censorship, which banned it on the grounds that it was a 'gloomy, squalid play'. The other piece, the monologue On the Harmfulness of Tobacco (O brede tabake) was, like many of his early 'dramatic etudes', written with a specific actor in mind. It appeared in 1886 in a St. Petersburg newspaper, and Chekhov kept revising it, publishing the final version, almost a new work, in his collected writings of 1903. Two farces, Hamlet Prince of Denmark and The Power of Hypnotism (both 1887), never got beyond the planning stage.

Profiting from an advance from Suvorin, Chekhov returned to southern Russia in 1887, a refreshment of the memory that was productive of remarkable work. The stories that followed signalled his emergence as a leading writer of serious fiction. The publication of The Steppe {Step, 1888) took place in The Northern Herald (Severny vestnik), one of those so-called 'fat' journals that had housed the works of Turgenev and Tolstoy, and were instruments of public opinion. That same year, Chekhov was awarded the Pushkin Prize for Literature by the Imperial Academy of Science for his collection In the Gloaming (V sumerkakh). One of the most enthusiastic instigators of this honour had been the writer Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who would later play an impor�tant role in establishing Chekhov's reputation as a drama�tist.

The Northern Herald was liberal in its politics, its editor Aleksey Pleshcheyev having been a prisoner in Siberia with Dostoevsky. Typically, Chekhov was able to be friends with Pleshcheyev and Suvorin simultaneously, and he con�tinued to write for New Times. But this reluctance to identify himself with a party exposed him to much acrimonious criticism from members of both camps, and especially from the progressive left. Katherine Mansfield has pointed out that the 'problem' in literature is an invention of the nineteenth century; one of the legacies of Russian 'civic criticism' of the 1840s was the notion that a writer had both an obligation to depict social problems and to pose a solution, making his works an uplifting tool of enlightenment. This usually meant espousing a doctrinaire political platform. Chekhov, perhaps fortified by his medi�cal training, treasured his objectivity and steadfastly refrained from taking sides, even when his sympathies were easy to ascertain. 'God keep us from generalisations,' he wrote. 'There are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of them are professed by people who have never had any problems'.

Between 1886 and 1890, his letters chew the cud over objectivity and his 'monthly change' of opinions, which readers preferred to see as the views of his leading characters. To his brother Aleksandr (10 May 1886), he insisted that no undue emphasis be placed on political, social or economic questions in writing. The author must be an observer, posing questions, but not supplying the answers, he insisted to Suvorin (27 October 1888); it is the reader who brings subjectivity to bear. Not that an author should be cold, but his own involvement in a problem should be unglimpsed by the reader.

You reproach me for my objectivity, [he wrote to Suvorin, 1 April 1890] calling it indifference to good and evil, absence of ideals and ideas, etc. You want me to say, when I depict horsethieves: horse-stealing is a bad thing. But that's been known for a long time, without my help, hasn't it? Let juries pass verdicts on horse-thieves; as for me, my work is only to show them as they are.

The year before77ze Steppe appeared, Chekhov had at last had a play produced; the impresario Fyodor Korsh had commissioned Ivanov and staged it at his Moscow theatre on 19 November 1887. It was an outstanding if controver�sial success. 'Theatre-buffs say they've never seen so much ferment, so much unanimous applause-cwra-hissing, and never ever heard so many arguments as they saw and heard at my play' (To Aleksandr, 20 November 1887). It was taken up by the Alexandra Theatre, the Imperial playhouse in St. Petersburg, and produced there on 31 January 1889, after much hectic rewriting in an attempt to make the playwright's intentions clearer and to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of the new cast.

Secure in his reputation and income at the age of thirty, Chekhov made the surprising move of travelling ten thousand miles to Sakhalin, the Russian Devil's Island, in 1890; the journey alone was arduous, for the Trans- Siberian Railway had not yet been built. The enterprise may have been inspired by a Tolstoy-influenced desire to practice a new-found altruism. In any case, the ensuing documentary study of the penal colony was a model of impartial field research and may have led to prison reforms. On a more personal level, it intensified a new strain of pessimism in Chekhov's work, for, despite his disclaimers, he began to be bothered by his lack of outlook or mission. The death of his brother Nikolay and his own failing health led him to question the dearth of ideals or motives in his writing. ,4 Boring Story (Skuchnaya istoriya, 1889) initiated this phase, with its first-person narrative of frustrated ideals and isolation.

The steady flow of royalties enabled Chekhov in 1891 to buy a farmstead at Melikhovo, some fifty miles south of Moscow, where he settled his parents and siblings. There he set about 'to squeeze the last drop of slave out of his system' (to Suvorin, 7 January 1899); 'a modern Cincin- natus,' he planted a cherry orchard and became a lavish host. This rustication had a beneficial effect on both his literary work and his humanitarianism. He threw himself into schemes for road-building, ameliorating peasant life, establishing schools and other improvements; during the cholera epidemic of 1892-93, he acted as an overworked member of the sanitary commission and head of the famine relief board. These experiences found their way into the character of Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya.

During this period, Chekhov composed masterful novel�las that explored the dead ends of life: The Duel {Duel), Ward No. 6 (Palata No. 6), The Black Monk (<Chyorny monakh), The Teacher of Literature (Uchitel slovesnosti), The House with the Maisonette (Dom s mezaninom), My Life (Moya zhizn) and Peasants (Muzhiki), carefully wrought prose pieces of great psychological subtlety. They recurrently dwell on the illusions indispensable to making life bearable, the often frustrated attempts at contact with one's fellow-man, the inexorable pull of inertia preventing humans from realising their potential for honesty and happiness. Chekhov's attitude is clinically critical, but always with a keen eye for the sympathetic detail that leads the reader to deeper awareness.

The success of Ivanov and the curtain-raisers, The Bear (Medved) and The Proposal (Predlozhenie) (1888-89), had put Chekhov at a premium as a dramatist. Urged on by Korsh and others, and frustrated by abortive projects for a novel, Chekhov plugged away at the comedy The Wood Demon (Leshy). It was promptly turned down by the state-subsidised theatres of Petersburg and Moscow which regarded it as more a dramatised story than a genuine play; they recommended that Chekhov give up writing for the theatre. A production at Abramova's Theatre in Moscow was received with apathy bordering on contempt, and may have confirmed Chekhov's decision to go to Sakhalin. For some years he did abandon the theatre, except for a one-act farce The Jubilee (Yubiley, 1891) and an unfinished comedy, The Night Before the Trial (Noch pered suda).

Not until January 1894 did he announce that he had again begun a play, only to renounce it a year later: 'I am not writing a play and I don't feel like writing one. I've grown old and I've lost my spark. I'd rather like to write a novel a hundred miles long' (to V. V. Bilibin, 18 January 1895). A year and a half later he was to break the news, \ . . can you imagine, I'm writing a play. . . it gives me a certain pleasure, although I rebel dreadfully against the conventions of the stage. It's a comedy, three female roles, six male roles, a landscape (view of a lake); lots of talk about literature, little action, a ton of love' (to Suvorin, 21 October 1895).

This comedy was The Seagull (Chayka), which had a rocky opening night at the Alexandra Theatre in 1896: the actors misunderstood it, the audience misapprehended it. Despite protestations of unconcern - 'I dosed myself with castor oil, took a cold bath - and now I wouldn't even mind writing another play' (to Suvorin, 22 October 1896) - Chekhov fled to Moscow, where he cultivated a distaste for writing for the stage. Although The Seagull grew in public favour in subsequent performances, Chekhov disliked submitting his work to the judgment of literary cliques and claques. Yet barely one year after this event, a new drama appeared in the 1897 collection of his plays: Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya), a reworking of The Wood Demon; and he began to draft the play that became Three Sisters (Tri sestry).

Chekhov's illness was definitively diagnosed as tuber�culosis in 1897, and he was compelled to leave Melikhovo for a milder climate. For the rest of his life, he shuttled between Yalta on the Black Sea and various French and German spas. To pay these new expenses, Chekhov sold all he had written before 1899, excepting the plays, to the publisher Marks for 75,000 rubles, along with the reprint rights to any future stories. It was an improvident move, since Marks had had no idea of the number of Chekhov's works. This error in calculation may have induced Chekhov to concentrate on playwriting which would prove to be more profitable.

The remainder of his dramatic career was bound up with the fortunes of the Moscow Art Theatre, founded in 1897 by his friend Nemirovich-Danchenko and the wealthy dilettante K. S. Alekseyev who acted under the name Stanislavsky. Chekhov was one of the original shareholders in the enterprise, for he admired their announced pro�gramme of ensemble playing, a serious attitude to art, and plays of high literary quality; at the opening production, Aleksey Tolstoy's blank-verse historical drama Tsar Fyodor loannovich, his eye was caught by Olga Knipper, the young actress who played the Tsarina. With only slight misgiving Chekhov allowed the Art Theatre to revive The Seagull at the close of its first season; Stanislavsky, the co-director, had greater misgivings, for he did not under�stand the play. But a strong cast and a heavily atmospheric production won over the audience, and the play had a resounding success. The Moscow Art Theatre adopted an art-nouveau seagull as its insignia and henceforth regarded itself as the House of Chekhov. When the Maly Theatre insisted on revisions to Uncle Vanya Chekhov withdrew the play and allowed the Art Theatre to stage its premiere, along with a revival of Ivanov. Three Sisters (1901) was written with Moscow Art actors in mind.

Chekhov's chronic reaction to the production of his plays was revulsion, and so two months after the opening of Three Sisters, he was writing 'I myself am quite discarding the theatre, I'll never write another thing for it. One can write for the theatre in Germany, Sweden, even Spain, but not in Russia, where dramatic authors aren't respected, are kicked with hooves and never forgiven success or failure' (to Olga Knipper, 1 March 1901). Nevertheless, he soon was deep into The Cherry Orchard (Vyshnyovy sad, 1904), tailoring the roles to specific Moscow Art players. Each of these productions won Chekhov greater fame as a play�wright, even when he himself disagreed with the chosen interpretation of the Moscow Art Theatre. Not long before his death, he was contemplating yet another play, this one even more untraditional, in which an Arctic explorer would be visited by the ghost of his beloved, and a ship would be seen crushed by ice.

At the age of forty, Chekhov married Olga Knipper. His liaisons with women had been numerous but low-keyed. He exercised an involuntary fascination over a certain type of ambitious bluestocking, who saw him as her mentor and herself as his Egeria. But whenever the affair became too demanding or the woman too clinging, Chekhov would use irony and playful humour to disengage himself. In his writings, marriage is usually portrayed as a snare and a delusion that mires his characters in spirit-sapping vul�garity. His relationship with Olga Knipper was both high- spirited - she was his 'kitten,' his 'puppy,' his iambkin,' his 'darling crocodile' - and conveniently aloof, for she had to spend much of her time in Moscow, while he convalesced at his villa in Yalta. On these terms, the marriage was a success.

The home in Yalta (today a Soviet museum) became a Mecca for young writers, importunate fans, touring acting companies, and plain free-loaders. Such pilgrimages, though well meant, did not conduce to Chekhov's peace of mind or body, and his health continued to deteriorate. In December 1903, he came to Moscow to attend rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard; the opening night, 17 January 1904, coincided with his nameday and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the commencement of his literary activity. Emaciated, hunched over, gravely ill, he did not show up until the second act and was made to stay through Act Three when the ceremony to honour him took place, greatly to his surprise.

Despite his rapid decline in health and the disappoint�ment of Olga's miscarriage in 1902, a deeply lyrical tone enters his last writings. His final stories, Lady with Lapdog (Dama s sobachkoy ), The Archbishop (Arkhierey ), and The Darling (Dushenka) present a more accepting view of the cyclical nature of life. They also reveal an almost musical attention to the structure and sounds of words, to be remarked as well in that last 'comedy' The Cherry Orchard.

In June 1904 his doctors ordered Chekhov to Baden- weiler, a small health resort in the Black Forest. There the forty-four-year old writer died on July 2. Shortly before his death, the doctor recommended putting an ice pack on his heart. 'You don't put ice on an empty heart,' Chekhov protested. When they insisted that he drink champagne, his last words came, 'It's been a long time sinced I've drunk champagne'. He was unconsciously echoing the line of the old nurse Marina in Uncle Vanya, 'It's a long time since I've tasted noodles'. Chekhov's obsequies were a comedy of errors he might have appreciated: the railway carriage that bore his body to St Petersburg was stencilled with the label 'Fresh Oysters,' and at the Moscow cemetery, the bystand�ers spent more time ogling Maksim Gorky and the basso Chaliapin than in mourning.⁶ Inadvertently, the procession became entangled with that of General Keller, a military hero who had been shipped home from the Far East, and Chekhov's friends were startled to hear an army band accompanying the remains of a man who had always been chary of grand gestures.

2

At the Play

'It is easy to convince the sentimental and credulous populace that the theatre, such as it is, is a school. But anyone who knows what a school is will not fall for this bait. I don't know what will happen fifty or a hundred years from now, but in its present state the theatre can only serve as an amusement.' The first-person narrator of A Boring Story, 1889

After his family moved to Moscow, Chekhov the schoolboy became an inveterate spectator at the Taganrog Civic Theatre, in company with his enthusiastic uncle Mitrofan. At this very time, the Taganrog management had com�pletely refurbished the repertory to suit a new building constructed in 1865. Formerly, the local company had played an outworn stock of Kotzebue and Pixerecourt, Lensky's vaudevilles and the grandiloquent patriotic dramas of Polevoy. The new management endeavoured to introduce the Taganrog public to more ambitious fare, enabling them to see Italian opera, along with Gogol's Inspector General and Getting Married, and the 'new drama' of Ostrovsky, Potekhin, Dyachenko, and Shpazhinsky. The newness now seems tenuous as Dyachenko's society dramas are one step away from Lady Audley's Secret, but as an impressionable adolescent, Chekhov observed what was taken to be the latest thing - problem plays, peasant dramas, and comedies of byt or everyday life, full of brutish merchants, virtuous muzhiks and improvident nobles. He also cherished a fondness for the older varieties of romantic melodrama, such as Dumas' Kean, and The Mail Robbery (the Russian Lyons Mail), which turns up in The Seagull as a memory of Shamraev the anecdotal overseer.

In 1873, when Chekhov was thirteen, the Taganrog management featured comic operas by Lecocq and Offen�bach: the latter's La Belle Helene, the first play Chekhov ever saw, was probably the most popular stage work in Tsarist Russia, and crops up repeatedly in Chekhov's writing. If we examine the repertory lists for 1876-79, when we know that Chekhov resorted regularly to the theatre to solace his loneliness, we find that he could have seen, among other presentations, four plays of Ostrovsky, a play apiece by Sardou and Dennery, one by Dyachenko, Offenbach's Perichole and Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka, a reference to which also surfaces in The Seagull .¹ The actors who played in these pieces belonged to a generation of flamboyant personalities who held an audience rapt by the virtuosity of their playing, little subordinated to the script.

For all its deficiencies, Chekhov could comprehend the appeal of the 'new drama', though he never put much stock in its attempts at social relevance and verisimilitude. At the same time, he mocked the conservatives who decried stage realism and hearkened back to the romantic past. In On Drama (1884), he showed a callous provincial magistrate pontificating on art:

Present-day dramatists and actors strive, uh, how can I put this more clearly . . . they strive to be life-like, realistic . . . On stage you see what you see in life . . . But is that what we need? We need expression, impact! [. . .] An actor used to talk with an unnatural gruff voice, beat his breast with his fists, howl, drop to the ground, and yet how expressive he was! And he was expressive in his speeches too! He would talk about duty, humanity, freedom. . .²

The impresario in the story The Jubilee (1886) declares that art is dead, because Today it's the thing to say the stage needs truth to life! . . . You can see that anywhere: at the inn, at home, in the market, but at the theatre give me expressiveness!'³ In fact, the new problem plays did retain enough of the romantic melodrama's emotionalism and rant to satisfy ordinary audiences.

Chekhov's years as a medical student in Moscow coin�cided with a period of transition in the drama. Increasing pressure from Ostrovsky and amateur groups for 'people's' theatres had led to the cancellation in 1882 of the monopoly held by the Imperial theatres. Many private theatricals went professional, appealing to new audiences and creating showcases for new playwrights, homegrown and imported. The young theatres Chekhov regularly attended were those of the 'Muscovite wizards and war�locks', Mikhail Lentovsky and Fyodor Korsh, who, in their separate ways, promulgated 'new forms'.

Chekhov's brother Nikolay worked for Lentovsky as a scene-painter, so they had free entry to the Hermitage Pleasure Garden, which he managed, and its 'Fantasy Theatre', a derelict mansion overgrown with weeds, but rendered romantic by moonbeams and electric fairy lights, chimes, a hidden orchestra, and a small stage where

Lentovsky could present the latest music hall attractions from Paris and Vienna. In 1886, with money from the merchant class that supported him, Lentovsky founded the Skomorokh or Mountebank Theatre, hoping to present a prestigious repertory. He even negotiated with Tolstoy, a supporter of 'people's' theatre, to mount The Power of Darkness, but the censor forbade it. Plays of Gogol and Ostrovsky and even Hamlet could be found there, but gradually the bulk of the repertory was translated farces, melodramas and feeries, including the Offenbach-Verne Trip to the Moon with illuminated panoramas. Lentovsky's productions abounded in pyrotechnical displays, explo�sions, fires, collapsing bridges, and the whole impedimenta of sensationalism. Of The Forest Tramp (1883), Chekhov wrote, 'Thanks to this new, bitter-sweet, German Lieber- gottic rubbish all Moscow smells of gunpowder'.⁴

Although his personal relations with Lentovsky, whom he credited with some sense and ingenuity, were good, Chekhov filled his newspaper columns with hilarious sallies at the mixtures of fustian and flash powder the director served up. He composed two absurd skits, Unclean Trage�dians and Leprous Playwrights and A Mess in Rome (both 1884), which riotously flayed the entrepreneur's choice of material, stagecraft and actors. Basically Chekhov's com�plaint was that Lentovsky's extravaganzas compromised heightened realism with flashy trickery; they were junk- food rather than true nourishment for the imagination. When Lentovskyan fireworks explode in a play of Chekhov's like Planonov, they are there to contrast with the damp squibs of the characters' unachieved yearnings.

At his theatre, which opened in 1882 with The Inspector General, the former lawyer and ticket broker Korsh maintained a stable of hacks to produce translations of European bedroom farce and well-carpentered dramas of adultery; by so doing, he greatly increased his audiences and reached ranks of society new to the theatre. Moreover, to his credit, he instituted a policy of matinees at reduced prices every Friday, when he would present classics and controversial new plays. A Korsh premiere normally drew the entire literary and artistic world of Moscow, as well as an enthusiastic younger generation. Stanislavsky attributed to him the creation, over a decade, of a theatrically sophisticated public that was ready to accept the reforms of the Moscow Art Theatre.

Important works such as The Power of Darkness, Ibsen's A Dolls House and An Enemy of the People, and plays by Becque, Rostand and Sudermann had their first Moscow productions at Korsh matinees, in elaborate stage settings renowned for their realism. It was Korsh who nagged at Chekhov to write a comedy in the spirit of his funny stories, and who produced Chekhov's first staged play, Ivanov, with great success. Korsh's theatre, with its dedicated if uneven acting company, naturalistic scenery and lip service to the higher ideals of drama may be the generic target of Treplyov's disgust in The Seagull at the 'cliche-ridden, pedestrian' modern theatre.

When the curtain goes up to reveal an artificially-lighted room with three walls, these great talents, high priests of sacred art, demonstrate how people eat, drink, love, walk, wear their jackets; when out of cheap, vulgar tableaux and cheap, vulgar speeches they try to extract a moral - a tiny little moral, easy to understand, useful around the house; when in a thousand different ways they serve up the same old thing over and over again - then I run and keep on running . . . (Act 1)

During the period when Korsh and Lentovsky domi�nated the Moscow scene, Chekhov's journalism entailed much theatre attendance, and he became acquainted with actors and managers. Familiarity bred contempt in him but could not efface his perennial fascination with the stage. Many of his early works teem with vignettes of backstage life, usually presented as caricatures or sardonic social commentary. There is nothing idealised about Chekhov's gallery of thespians, who are depicted as vain, ignorant, petty but somehow more sympathetic than the solid citizenry. In the late 1880s, when Chekhov's friendship with professional playwrights such as Shcheglov (Leon- tyev) and Prince Sumbatov (Yuzhin) deepened, and when he saw his own plays produced, his commentary grew more embittered, more caustic and more exasperated.⁴ Actors are capricious and conceited,' he wrote to Leykin (4 December 1887), 'half-educated and presumptuous,' and, to Suvorin, 'actresses are cows who fancy themselves goddesses' (17 December 1889).

Actors never observe ordinary people. They do not know landowners or merchants or village priests or bureaucrats. On the other hand they can give dis�tinguished impersonations of billiard markers, kept women, distressed cardsharps, in short all those indi�viduals whom they observe as they ramble through pothouses and bachelor parties. Horrible ignorance (to Suvorin, 25 November 1889).

When Suvorin proposed to buy a theatre in St. Peters�burg, Chekhov tried vainly to dissuade him. But once Suvorin's Theatre was a fait accompli, Chekhov showered his friend with advice, recommendations, and suggestions for casting. In particular, he boosted Lidiya Yavorskaya, a popular star who excelled in plays such as La Dame aux camellias and Madame Sans-Gene. Chekhov's brother Mikhail later wrote, 'I was never a fan of her talent and especially disliked her voice, screechy and cracked as if she had a chronic sore throat. But she was an intelligent woman, progressive, and for her benefits would stage plays that seemed at the time "racy".'⁵ Chekhov was well aware of her defects as an actress, but they had a very brief fling, and he later used some of her traits in sketching Arkadina in The Seagull.

As his intimacy with professionals grew, Chekhov com�mented even more impatiently about the theatre's short�comings. 'I implore you,' he wrote to Shcheglov, 'please fall out of love with the stage'.

True, there is a lot of good in it. The good is overstated to the skies, and the vileness is masked . . . The modern theatre is a rash, an urban disease. The disease must be swept away, and loving it is unhealthy. You start arguing with me, repeating the old phrase, the theatre is a school, it educates and so on . . . But I am telling you what I see: the modern theatre is not superior to the crowd; on the contrary, the life of the crowd is more elevated and intelligent than the theatre ... (25 November 1888, 20 December 1888)

A typical example of what Chekhov abhorred in the theatre of his time was The Fumes of Life, Boleslav Markevich's dramatisation of his fashionable novel The Abyss (1883). It became such a bete noir that he returned to attack it again and again, excoriating it as a 'long, fat boring ink-blot' 'as pleasant as yesterday's porridge';⁶ he wrote a parody of The Fumes of Life, but had it destroyed in proof. His review of Lentovsky's production was unacharacteristi- cally abusive and personal, and ended, 'On the whole, the play is written with a lavatory brush and smells foul'.

The play that provoked such an intense reaction is a tear-jerker in the style of Dumas fils. It features an adventuress, who, over the course of five acts, betrays her adoring husband with his best friend, is protected and then repudiated by a noble old Count, becomes a pariah in Petersburg society, weds a scoundrel who robs and aban�dons her, and at last dies in an odour of sanctity, repentant and contrite, declaring that her life has been nothing but delusive 'fumes'. A role that involves five costume changes, the opportunity to run the gamut from passion to piety, and an almost constant presence on stage would have immedi�ate appeal to the Yavorskayas. In The Seagull, Chekhov has Arkadina tour this play in the provinces well into the mid-nineties, thus making a sarcastic reflection on her taste and vanity.

Partly it is a question of technique: twenty years later Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard is as 'depraved' as the heroine of The Fumes of Life, with her callous lover and her chequered past. But Chekhov keeps the sensational events offstage, while he shows us other, more everyday facets of her character. The most popular dramatist of Chekhov's day was the prolific hack Viktor Krylov, notorious for crass sentimentality. When Chekhov'sIvanov was in rehearsal in 1887, Krylov offered to doctor the play to meet acceptable stage standards, in return for a fifty per cent cut of the profits. Chekhov politely refused, not least because the entire goal of his dramatic activity was to deny the validity of those standards.⁷

Recoiling from the banality of the contemporary stage and its over-indulgence in cheap morality and flashy effects, Chekhov was among the first Russian writers to be attracted to symbolist drama. In the early 1890s, Dmitry

Merezhkovsky called for a return to liturgy in the drama, to produce a quasi-religious elation in the spectator; symbols rather than images were to be the effective artistic tool. Vladimir Solovyov's popular doctrine of a 'world soul' was translated into theatrical terms as a communion of audi�ence with player; the playwright's creative will was to lift the spectator beyond the material world into a transcen�dental realm. For models, the symbolists turned to Henrik Ibsen, whose characters they interpreted as abstractions conducive to radiant visions, and to Maurice Maeterlinck, who insisted that a play's action be internalised and submerged. In this aesthetic, individual character became less important than the struggle with a higher destiny. 'The essence of drama,' Merezhkovsky proclaimed in 1894, 'is the battle of a conscious will with obstacles'. The earliest Russian symbolist drama is Nikolay Minsky's mystery play, Cold Words (1896), which is in modern dress but otherwise every bit as recondite and 'undramatic' as Treplyov's play in The Seagull, written the same year.

Chekhov disparaged the symbolists' metaphysical pre�tensions, and they later returned the favour by reviling his plays for their depressing 'cold wind from the abyss.'⁹ But Chekhov was not disdainful of their literary experimenta�tion. Although, as both Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper attest, he regarded Ibsen as neither lifelike nor stage worthy, 'complicated, involved and cerebral,'¹⁰ Chekhov was attracted to Maeterlinck's 'odd wonderful plays [which] make an enormous impression'. What impressed him seems to have been their theatrical flair; mystical doctrines mat�tered less than that a play should work on stage. A week before he completed The Seagull, he had suggested that Suvorin stage Maeterlinck at his Petersburg theatre. 'If I were your producer, in two years I would turn it into a decadent playhouse or try my hand at doing so. The theatre might perhaps look strange, but still it would have a personality' (2 November 1895). (But he was not doc�trinaire; in the same letter, he also recommended Zola's Therese Raquin.) What he especially liked in Les Aveugles was 'a splendid set with the sea and a lighthouse in the distance' (to Suvorin, 12 July 1897). Maeterlinck appealed to Chekhov not for his other worldly creed, but for his stagecraft, his 'new forms'.

In letters to would-be dramatists, Chekhov continually came back to the need to see and understand how plays worked in the theatre. He was reluctantly compelled to reject Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson's spiritual drama Beyond Human Power, which he found moving and intelligent, because 'it won't do for the stage, because it can't be played, there's no action, no living characters, no dramatic interest' (To Suvorin, 20 June 1896). (Incidentally, this is the same argument Nina advances against Treplyov's play in The Seagull.) However, no cohesive theory of drama is to be cobbled together from Chekhov's voluminous corre�spondence. When scrutinised closely, his criticism turns out to be hints on craft: 'avoid cliches,' 'be compact,' 'use realistic dialogue,' 'vary the characters,' 'put your climax in the third act but be sure the fourth is not anticlimactic.. .'. His eminently practical comments on Gorky's plays, for example, have to do with their effects on an audience and how 'points are to be made. Even his references to his own plays are meant to clarify particulars for the performers or react to specific performances. His legendary statement that 'on stage people dine, simply dine, and meanwhile their happiness is taking shape or their lives are breaking up'¹¹ is indeed a telegraphic synopsis of an aesthetic, but it is a symbolist aesthetic: beyond the commonplace surface of existing lurks the real life of the characters.

When Chekhov himself set about to write plays, he was torn between creating works that would be successful because of their conformity to accepted norms, and works that avoided the cliches and conventions of the popular stage. He also had to confront the fact that audiences expected the dramatic equivalents of his prose writings, either hilarious anecdotes or refined treatments of modern life. When The Seagull failed in St. Petersburg in 1896, one spectator observed that the reasons for its failure were manifold.¹² It exasperated the older generation of literary men by its novelty. It exasperated the younger writers by what seemed to them Chekhov's failure to write a purely symbolic drama. It annoyed the journalists who associated Chekhov with Suvorin and New Times and would attack any members of that faction.

The development of Chekhov's drama then progresses from a gradual liberation from the theatre's traditional demands to the expression of an idiosyncratic and original vision. Chekhov had to find a way to convey the subtlety and multi-layered nature of his compressed fiction into drama, which has no narrative. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that Chekhov's earlier efforts, those most wedded to the conventions of the problem play and current stage practice, were composed while he was deeply immersed in the literary life of the Russian capitals. As early as 1887, Chekhov was insisting that the author must control his play, select the cast and issue instructions for its production (to N. A. Leykin, 15 November 1887).

The first consistent example of his new art, Uncle Vanya, was the deliberate revision of a failed experiment; his first perfectly-orchestrated achievement, Three Sisters, was written for the Moscow Art Theatre, a company made up of educated individuals, devoted to ensemble playing and the evocation of 'mood'. The Cherry Orchard, a work whose shape breaks with both realistic social drama and the Art

Theatre's soulful atmospherics, would be written in Yalta far distant from the day-to-day activities of a theatre and the call of literary fashion.

3

Journeyman Efforts

I don't believe in our intelligentsia ... I believe in individual people, I see salvation in individual personalities . . . Chekhov, to Ivan Orlov (22 February 1889)

The hammy hand of the contemporary Russian stage lay most heavily on Chekhov's earliest dramatic endeavours. The three full-length plays that preceded The Seagull reveal how Chekhov gradually mastered the dramatic form and how he sought to remodel it according to his own needs.

'Without Patrimony' ('Platonov')

While still in high school, Chekhov wrote a four-act play so full of incident, 'with horse-stealing a gunshot, a woman who throws herself under a train',¹ that a family friend described it as a 'drrama', the two 'r's' bespeaking its sensationalism. The critical consensus today regards it as the first draft of the work now known as Platonov.

Hopefully, the neophyte author sent the play, entitled Without Patrimony, to his literary brother Aleksandr in Moscow, and got back this critique (14 October 1878):

In without patrimony two scenes are worked out ingeni�ously, if you like, but on the whole it is an inexcusable, albeit innocent lie. Innocent because it derives from the virginal depths of your inner view of the world. You must feel yourself, though faintly and involuntarily, that your drama is a lie . . . The handling and the dramatic talent are worthy (on your own part) of greater activity and a wider frame.²

Chekhov must have taken this to heart, for he continued to work on the play; toning down the dialogue, dropping two characters (Shcherbuk's ugly daughters), and omitting a lurid scene in which Voynitsev pulled a dagger on Platonov, who disarmed him with the shout 'Stand back!' and a torrent of rhetoric. Even with cuts, it was twice the length of the average play of the period. But Chekhov took it to Mariya Yermolova, one of the stars of the Moscow Maly Theatre, as a possible offering for an upcoming benefit performance. The addressee was ill-considered: the only part suitable for Yermolova's status would have been that of Anna Petrovna, the frivolous widow, besieged on all sides by admirers. Yermolova was noted for her heroic impersonations of Joan of Arc and Lady Macbeth; her roles seldom admitted sexual laxity. In any case, she returned the play, and the chagrined young playwright tore up the manuscript.

But his brother Mikhail had copied out two scripts for submission to the censorship; and one of these survived to be published in 1923. Since then, actors and producers have tried to reconstitute it for the stage as a 'newly discovered play by Chekhov'. Cut to the bone, it has, since the 1930s, appeared as/l Country Scandal, A Provincial Don Juan, and, most frequently, as Platonov. Probably the most distinguished attempts were those of Jean Vilar in 1956, under the title CeFou Platonov, and Michael Frayn's wholly rewritten 1984 version Wild Honey. None of these versions has managed to secure a place for the protracted piece of juvenilia in the repertory. Its interest resides primarily in its being a dramatic storehouse for Chekhov's later themes and characters. Most intricately re-worked of all, the threat that the estate is to be auctioned in Platonov was to become the connecting thread and constitutive symbol of The Cherry Orchard.

A sign of Chekhov's youth at the time of writing is the obsession with parental relations, emblazoned in the original title Without Patrimony (Bezottsovshchina). Speci�fically, it refers to the economic dispossession of the main characters: Platonov, a member of the gentry, is forced by circumstances to descend in caste by becoming a village schoolmaster; Voynitsev loses the family estate through his stepmother's extravagance. But a bleak picture is drawn of fathers and children on a moral level as well. Platonov's recollections of his late father are contemptuous and angry. Glagolyev Junior heartlessly tricks his father and provokes him to a stroke; both Glagolyevs woo the same woman unsuccessfully and drown their defeat in mutual debauchery in Paris. The Triletskys are ashamed of their old father, the General, whom they treat as a kind of wayward child. Shcherbuk hates his two daughters. Platonov's infant son is a source of ill-concealed annoyance. Only the Vengerovichs father and son seem to preserve a mutually respectful alliance, and they are Jews, outsiders in this society.

Chekhov was unable to pursue all the hares he started in this play, or to find the proper angle of vision by which to regard his protagonist. Awkwardly, he puts his own opinion in the mouth of Glagolyev Senior shortly before Platonov makes his first entrance.

Platonov, to my mind, is the best representative of modern uncertainty . . . He is the hero of the best, still, regrettably, unwritten modern novel . . . (Laughs.) By uncertainty I mean the current state of our society: the Russian man of letters can sense this uncertainty. He's come to an impasse, he's gone astray, he doesn't know what to focus on, doesn't understand . . . It's hard to understand these gentlemen, indeed it is!

The uncertainty is Chekhov's as well.

The rural Don Juan irresistible to women is also a cracker-barrel Schopenhauer whose alleged idealism and scepticism appeal to the men. Shallow and wishy-washy, he has a silver tongue, not unlike Turgenev's Rudin, the classic example of the lishny chelovek or superfluous man in Russian literature. He bears all the earmarks of the type: alienated, hypersensitive and mired in inertia, in direct succession to Lermontov's Pechorin, the Byronic 'hero of our times', and Griboyedov's drawing-room misanthrope Chatsky, who were characterized at least by a definite moral stance towards their imperfect society.

The squalour of his provincial community is hardly enough to justify Platonov's sense of superiority; he appears to have no ideals outside his own creature com�forts. Did Chekhov intend a send-up of the superfluous man? Characteristically, he would make his initial forays into a new genre by parodying it. His first experiments with a iong short story' were The Futile Victory (1882), a spoof of the popular Hungarian romancer Mor Jokai, and A

Hunting Drama (1884), a detective story in the style of Gaboriau. If Platonov is meant as parody, that would save it from being a failed attempt at a society melodrama in the style of Shpazhinsky or Dyachenko. Then again, it may not be a case of either/or: the immature dramatist was unsure of the direction to take. He may have seriously intended to explore certain social issues, but was ineluctably drawn to the comic side of things. He himself was aware of the ambivalence: 'However much I try to be serious, I don't succeed, in me the serious is constantly mixed up with the vulgar. I suppose it's my fatality' (to Yakov Polonsky, 22 February 1888).

Even if Platonov were a serious try at a 'superfluous man,' the type could not hold up when juxtaposed with closely-observed real life. Irony swamps Platonov's claims to heroic stature; under the microscope, he looks shoddy and despicable. Platonov himself is prone to making high-flown comparisons, fancying himself Hamlet, 'a sec�ond Byron' and 'a prospective Cabinet minister and a Christopher Columbus'; but he is somewhat shamefaced to reveal his paunchy schoolmaster presence to a former girlfriend who had put him on a pedesal. He has not even graduated from the university, although this does not prevent him from lecturing others on their spiritual and moral failings. Since most of the men in the community are grotesque buffoons or flaccid weaklings, he seems in contrast a paragon, and hence a lodestone to women.

Four of themille e tre this village Don Giovanni numbers in his catalogue of conquests are drawn in detail. His wife Sasha is a long-suffering homebody, whom he forces to read Sacher-Masoch's Ideals of Our Times.³ Sasha waits long hours for Platonov to return from parties, and when her nose is rubbed in his unfaithfulness, she twice attempts suicide. Chekhov is unable to withhold a smile from repeated suicide attempts, so that Sasha's laying herself on the railway tracks and then drinking an infusion of sulphur matches are more farcical than pathetic. Twenty-year-old Mariya Grekova is first offended by Platonov's brutal behaviour, then secretly smitten; and when he writes her an irresistibly abject letter of apology, she melts at once and abandons her lawsuit against him. The sophisticated widow Anna Petrovna openly puts herself on offer, and when she finds that he has made her daughter-in-law Sofiya his mistress, deals with the facts coolly, refusing to break off their liaison. Sofiya, the most deeply committed, having jeopardized her marriage and compelled Platonov to elope with her, finally, in a fit of jealousy on seeing him and Mariya together, takes up a handy pistol and shoots the philanderer. If Mariya is the Donna Elvira, then Sofiya is the Donna Anna of this prose opera.

Osip the horse-thief does not play Leporello to Platonov's Giovanni; rather, he is a kind of double on the plebeian plane. Chekhov is not very indulgent to the lower classes in this play; Anna's servants are lazy and insolent, preliminary sketches for Yasha in The Cherry Orchard. Marko the messenger from the district court is dense, if honest. But Osip, like Platonov, tries to set himself above his fellows, keenly appreciative of his own intelligence. 'Let's say ever'body knows, let's say, that I'm a thief and a robber too,' Osip laughs, 'but not ever'body can prove it . . . Hm . . . These plain folks don't dare nowadays, they're fools, no brains I mean . . . Scared of ever'thing . . 'A nasty underhanded, puny bunch . . . Ignoramuses . . . Don't feel sorry if folks like that git hurt.' Osip prides himself, as does Platonov, on being superior to his fellows, but his superiority is expressed in a sub-Nietzschean amorality. He hires himself out as an assassin and sets on nocturnal pedestrians, the criminal equivalent of

Platonov's egoistic manipulation of others' feelings. At the end, both are destroyed by the people they contemned: Osip is lynched by the peasants, and Platonov is shot by a cast-off mistress. The similarities are so great that when Platonov and Osip grapple in the schoolroom, it is like a man fighting his shadow or mystic double. Perhaps Osip reneges on the murder contract because he recognizes their symbiosis.

For all its overstatement, what makes Platonov a real portent of Chekhov's mature work is the unsteady listing from the comic side to the serious. It bespeaks a view of the cohesiveness of life, in which important issues and mean�ingless trivia co-exist. Chekhov's career as a professional humourist made him alert to the grotesque detail, the absurd facet of any situation; but more important is his ingrained awareness that the current of life, awash with the banal flotsam of everyday, sweeps away heroic poses and epic aspirations. A comic effect is natural when grandiose philosophical questions and emotional crises have to share space with the inexorable demands of the humdrum.

'Ivanov'

Ivanov, Chekhov's first work to be staged, was written at the prompting of Korsh and in the wake of the creative gust that had produced the important transitional story 'The Steppe'. Chekhov dashed off the play in a couple of weeks in October 1887, pleased with its 'unhackneyed subject' and its lack of longueurs. He defined his own originality this way: 'Modern dramatists start their plays exclusively with angels, cads and buffoons - try and find those elements anywhere in Russia! Sure, you'll find them, but not in such extreme guises as dramatists need. I wanted to do some�thing original; I didn't hatch out a single villain, a single angel (although I couldn't refrain from buffoons), I didn't accuse anyone, I didn't acquit anyone' (to Aleksandr, 24 October 1887). He intended to 'sum up everything that's been written so far about whining and languishing people, and in my Ivanov to put an end to this writing' (to Suvorin, 7 January 1889). This determination shows Ivanov to be not a reconstruction of Without Patrimony, but a counter�blast to it and its ilk.

Ivanov was first played at Korsh's Theatre in Moscow on 19 November 1887, for the benefit of Nikolay Svetlov who created Borkin; it enjoyed a great success. The actors' praise and the audiences' plaudits made Chekhov euphoric, and he wrote to Aleksandr, 'You can't imagine what's happened! From that insignificant turd that is my playlet. . . the devil knows what has occurred ... in his 32 years in the theatre the prompter had never seen anything like it'. He triumphantly signed himself, 'Schiller Shakes- pearovich Goethe' (to Aleksandr, 24 November 1887). But his younger brother Mikhail recalled the event dif�ferently. 'The success of the performance was spotty: some hissed, others, the majority, noisily applauded and called for the author, but in general Ivanov was not understood, and for a long time afterwards the newspapers were explicating the personality and character of its main hero.' The impressionable playwright gradually came to the conclusion that the audience had welcomed Ivanov himself as a distillation of the Zeitgeist. His mooning and moaning, his fits of self-castigation summed up for the generation of the 1880s its own pusillanimous torpor during the 'darkling decade,' a period of political repression and social inaction. His death provided a kind of vicarious expiation.

That was not what Chekhov had in mind. Superficially, Ivanov, his name the Russian equivalent of 'Jones', seemed another common- or garden-variety 'superfluous man,': 'a university graduate, in no way remarkable; a somewhat excitable, ardent nature, strongly inclined to honourable and straightforward enthusiasm, like most educated gen�try,' was how Chekhov described him. Like Platonov, his past is nobler than his present; his projects for serving the people, rational farming, higher education have evapo�rated. But Chekhov wanted to get away from the apotheosis of this disillusionment, by then a stale treat�ment, to an examination by the character himself of the reasons for his empty life and contemptible behaviour. Ivanov was to suffer through his own awareness of wasted potential and vestigial honour. A basic dramatic problem was to keep the audience from idealising Ivanov's pessi�mism and, at the same time, to keep Ivanov from looking like the immoralist that Doctor Lvov makes him out to be.

The stage portrayal of this complex inner turmoil was tricky for an inexperienced playwright, trying to employ age-old strategies of dramatic carpentry to contain a richly psychological subject. Basically, the 'plot' might have come from a society melodrama by Dyachenko. A scoundrel abandons his exploited wife in hopes of repairing his fortunes by wedding a young heiress: this sensational story-line is how Ivanov's actions look to outsiders such as Lvov. Ibsen had already managed to sublimate such a triangle into the internalised conflicts of Rosmersholm, with the bedevilled intellectual Rosmer torn between coequal calls to duty. Chekhov, however, was constrained to write long expository speeches, endless explanations, confessions, acts of contrition, to counter his audience's preconceptions of heroism and villainy.

The earliest revision was for the Alexandra Theatre in St. Petersburg. Chekhov wrote, 'Now my Mr. Ivanov will be much better understood. The finale doesn't satisfy me exactly (except for the shooting, everything is weak) but I am comforted that its form is still not finished' (19 December 1888). Originally, Ivanov had died on stage of a heart attack and Chekhov realized that this posed a problem for an actor while it undermined the real causes of Ivanov's destruction.

The play's life-blood is gossip. In the first act, we hear of slanderous rumours about Ivanov, but no one takes them too seriously. In the second act, the school for scandal is in session at Lebedev's home, but the gossipmongers are so caricatured that again .their power to harm is discounted. Ivanov is now associated with Borkin's shady machina�tions, however. In Act Three, Lebedev still refuses to believe the tattle, but warns Ivanov, 'There're so many rumours about you running through the county, watch out, our friend the District Attorney may turn up . . . You're a murderer, and a vampire, and a grave-robber . . .'Aided by Lvov, the rumours reach Anna's ears, provoking her confrontation with Ivanov and her collapse. In the play's first version, this theme continued into Act Four, with even Lebedev succumbing to doubts about Anna's death. Ivanov, definitively charged with villainy by the Doctor, dies of a heart attack 'because,' said Chekhov, 'he can't endure the outrageous insult' (letter to Aleksandr, 20 November 1887).

This was to turn the play into a tract about provincial narrowmindedness, and, indeed, many of the critics described Ivanov as the honourable but vacillating victim of scandalmongers. So Chekhov added Sasha to the attackers in Act Four, and had Ivanov taking active measures in his own defence. He gave him a long mono�logue about dreams of becoming the young Ivanov once more. 'If Ivanov turns out looking like a cad or a superfluous man, and the doctor a great man . . . then, obviously, my play won't come off, and there can be no talk of a production' (to Suvorin, 30 December 1888).

Doctor Lvov therefore needed touching up. In tradi�tional drama, doctors were raisonneurs, whose sagacious moralizing clued the audience into the way to think about the characters. But Lvov does not heal breaches: he creates them through his purblind and self-righteous assumptions. In this respect, he much resembles Gregers Werle in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, who, in his quixotic attempt to strip away illusions, destroys the lives of those around him. Chekhov's task was to make sure that Lvov did not seem either an objective spokesman or a fatuous prig. 'Such persons are necessary, and for the most part sympathetic. To draw them as caricatures, even in the interests of the stage is dishonorable and serves no purpose' (to Suvorin, 30 December 1888).

Rehearsals for the Petersburg production went badly, despite a strong cast, and Chekhov quarrelled with the comic actor Vladimir Davydov who played the lead in a monotonous style to indicate seriousness. The opening night was a huge success, but Chekhov sneaked away, regarding the ovations as intoxication that would later give him a severe hangover. He continued to revise Ivanov, dropping one comic character, Dudkin, and, in general, toning down the farce elements. A third version appeared in 1889, with more explanations added between Lvov and Anna, and the removal of the dream monologue of Ivanov in the last act. Even then, Chekhov was not content and kept touching it up until 1901.

Chekhov never managed to eliminate the mannerisms of boulevard drama that vitiated the subtlety of his concept. The Act Two curtain, with a consumptive wife intruding on her husband in the arms of another woman, is effective claptrap; at least we are spared the fainting which is described in the next act. Scenes of vituperation rise, in the best melodrama manner, to one consummate insult. 'Kike bitch,' Ivanov screams at Anna in his ugliest moment; 'Bastard!' (or 'Cad' 'Villain' - podlets is too dated to translate well) is the summation of Lvov's contempt for Ivanov. Chekhov was to handle the slanging-match be�tween Arkadina and Treplyov in The Seagull more saliently. Even the final suicide is, as the critic Kugel said, 'a sacrifice made by Chekhov's soul to the god of theatrical gimmickry,'⁴ literally ending the play with a bang. It may have been copied directly from Luka Antropov's popular comedy-melodrama Will-o'-the-Wisps (1873).

Even toned down, the comic characters are reduced to a series of tics and hardly seem to exist on the same plane as the primary characters. Kosykh is nothing more than his obsession with cards; Zinaida becomes the epitome of her stinginess, 'Madame Gooseberry-Jam'. Gradually, Chekhov learned how to make farcical elements more revelatory of his plays' inner meanings. On the other hand, Shabelsky's off-again-on-again courtship of the widow sardonically comments on Ivanov's own conscience- stricken interest in Sasha. Here the comedy has the Shakespearean function of a reflective subplot, with the result that 'two weddings are spoilt'.

Within the conventional framework, however, a Chekhovian sense of atmospherics is beginning to emerge. He knew well the resonance that derived from a properly-chosen setting, and structured the play to alter�nate private and public life. We first see Ivanov solus, seated in a natural surrounding against the background of his house; he is outside it, because it represents to him a suffocating prison to be escaped. But the primal image of isolated Ivanov is shattered by Borkin with his gun.

As if to exacerbate the incursions into his privacy, Ivanov flees to a more peopled spot, the party at the Lebedevs. But there the guests are already yawning at the very boredom he hoped to avoid. Act Two begins in a crowd of persons, some so anonymous as to be designated only as First Guest, Second Guest, etc.; this chorus makes common knowledge deeds performed in private. Even before Ivanov and Shabelsky appear, their lives are trotted forth as gossip and conjecture; Ivanov's innermost motives are distorted, and his most intimate action here, the embrace of Sasha, is intruded upon by the worst possible witness, his wife.

Act Three returns to Ivanov's study, which ought to be his sanctum, but is, as the stage direction makes clear, a jumble, a visual metaphor for the disorder of his existence. His papers, presumably the products of his brain, lie cheek by jowl with food and drink, brought in by others, who expatiate on gastronomy. Coming as it does after Anna's melodramatic discovery, this interlude strikes the note of triviality, and neutralises what might otherwise be overly theatrical. It is Chekhov's way of cooling overheated actions by pairing them with the banal. Ivanov himself seems aware of this, for he resents the impinging of his workaday fellows on his moping. Their commentary reduces his soul-searching to cheap and obvious motives.

'It's like living in Australia!' says Kosykh, unwittingly evoking this provincial barbarity where vast expanses stretch between estates, and yet privacy is impossible. The last act sanctions a medley of public and private worlds as the wedding party prepares for blessing before going to church. The event could not be more gregarious, despite the personal nature of the conjugal bond, and the charac�ters have difficulty finding a quiet corner in which to unburden their minds. Ivanov's entrance is regarded as tactless invasion, a bridegroom seeing the bride before the ceremony; and his self-destruction is enacted before a crowd of horrified onlookers.

Suicide as a public act chimes in with Ivanov's continual self-dramatisation. He and his uncle Shabelsky put a literary construction on life. The Count tends to compare persons to characters in Gogol, life to events in French plays and novels. Ivanov points the comparisons inward: 'I'm dying of shame that I'm a healthy, strong man, and not turning into Hamlet or Manfred or a superfluous man'. Dr Lvov labels Ivanov a Tartuffe, Moliere's classic hypocrite. Most frequent is the Lazarus image, the dead man who might yet be called from the tomb if Sasha acts the Saviour. During the wedding preparations, Ivanov is told not to be a Chatsky, Griboyedeov's comic hero who regarded his society with scorn and was taken by it to be a madman. Ivanov's problem often seems to be an embarrassment of role models, none of which adequately expresses his complexity. Despite the conspectus of opinion that runs from Sasha's hero-worship to the malign slanders of the party-guests, Ivanov's character does not get beyond his own verbose self-scrutiny. 'How can a man see into another man's soul?' he asks Lvov. Chekhov did his best to present the evidence fairly, but he had yet to achieve the proper form.

⁴The Wood Demon'

In 1888, even before he had finished work on Ivanov, Chekhov suggested to Suvorin that they collaborate on a comedy. They drew up a list of characters, episodes and a distribution of assignments. Suvorin soon dropped out, and Chekhov reworked the play into The Wood Demon in Spring 1889.

The play turned out boring, pieced together like a mosaic, . . . nowhere in the whole play is there a single lackey or peripheral comic character or little widow. There are eight characters in all and only three of them are episodic. As a rule I tried to avoid superfluity, and I think I have succeeded' (to Suvorin, 14 May 1888).

The Wood Demon was read by the committee that passed on plays for the Petersburg state theatres, whose members included Grigorovich, the critic who had per�suaded Chekhov to be a serious writer. Its devastating and unanimous decision was unanimously to reject The Wood Demon as 'a beautiful dramatised novella'.⁵ However, the play was solicited by Chekhov's boyhood friend Solovtsov, who had left Korsh's to start a new theatre in Moscow with Madam Abramova. So The Wood Demon, with a hastily rewritten fourth act, was first presented at Abramova's private theatre on 27 December 1889, in a very weak production. The role of Yelena was taken by the corpulent actress Mariya Glebova, and, as Mikhail Chekhov remem�bered, 'to see the jeune premier, the actor Roshchin- Insarov, making a declaration of love to her was positively incongruous; he called her beautiful, yet he could not get his arms round her to embrace her. Then the glow of the forest fire was such that it raised laughter'.⁶ Dissatisfied, Chekhov withdrew the play, which had been at best received with indifference.

But Chekhov's dissatisfactions related more directly to its internal imperfections than to its faulty staging. The problem with The Wood Demon is that it tries very hard to make a positive statement. It had been preceded by the novella A Boring Story, whose central characters, a played-out scientist and his ward, a despairing actress, have reached an impasse in life. No way out of the sterility that confronts them seems possible. Adverse critics had been dwelling on Chekhov's so-called pessimism, and it was beginning to get under his skin.

During work on The Wood Demon Chekhov enunciated his most eloquent statement of political non-alignment:

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I would like to be an independent artist, except that I'm sorry God hasn't given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all their guises . . . Phariseeism, obtuseness and despotism do not prevail only in merchants' households and lockups, I see them in science, literature, among the young . . . Trademarks and labels I consider to be prejudice. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most abso�lute freedom. This is the programme I would adhere to if I were a great artist (to A. N. Pleshcheyev, 4 October 1888).

Personal integrity was more important for Chekhov than political adherence; he was no joiner.

Yet he was drawn to the increasingly popular teachings of Tolstoy, even though he rejected such tenets as ascetism and passive resistance to evil. In The Wood Demon he subscribes to the Tolstoyan notion of universal love as a means of cutting through the Gordian knot of social problems. The cast of characters he had drawn up for Suvorin had included two Tolstoyan characters: Anuchin, an old man, who as the result of a public repentance became the happiest person in the district, and the pilgrim Fedossy, a plain-speaking and optimistic lay brother of the Mt. Athos monastery. All that survives of these characters in The Wood Demon is a last act speech of Orlovsky Senior who relates his mid-life crisis and regeneration. By shout�ing 'My friends, my good people, forgive me, for the love of Christ!', he has become a paragon of loving-kindness and contentment.

That was the mood Chekhov intended to pervade the play. 'I filled the comedy with good, healthy people, half sympathetic, and a happy ending. The general tone is entirely lyrical' (to Pleshcheyev, 30 September 1889). Like many of Strindberg's late dramas, it is a play of conversion, but without overt religious references or a confessional tone. For the development of Chekhov's playwriting skills, the most important new feature is the suppression of a prominent hero in favour of a closely interrelated group. On this provincial estate the ties that bind the characters are more intricate than those in Ivanov.

Attractive young Yelena is married to an old, ailing, famous professor, and feels frustrated. She is wooed by two men: Voynitsky, a sour malcontent who feels he has wasted his life in supporting the Professor, and Fyodor Orlovsky, a rich young wastrel, whose father dotes on him. The professor's daughter by an earlier marriage, Sofiya, is intelligent but drily rationalistic. She is loved by Doctor Khrushchyov, nicknamed the Wood Demon for his work in reforestation and conservation; she returns his affection but they mistrust one another's attitudes. Sofiya is hope�lessly courted as well by the young landowner Zheltukhin, whose sister Yuliya has long loved Fyodor Orlovsky from afar, but cannot get him to change his wild ways. This lack of reciprocity and sympathy is, for Chekhov, more than a means of complicating the plot; it sounds the thematic note for the unbearable life these people lead. As Yelena says to Voynitsky, 'Everyone's warring against everyone else. Ask yourself, what's the sense of this war, what's it for?' The situation worsens to the point that Voynitsky shoots himself and Yelena runs away, and it is the task of the fourth act to unravel these misunderstandings and pose a solution.

'The world will be destroyed not by robbers and thieves,' declares Yelena, 'but by covert hatred, the enmity between good people, all these nasty squabbles.' Therefore, these good people must set things right, by casting aside narrow-minded distrust. Krushchyov complains that his neighbours unthinkingly define him as 'a populist, a psychopath, a phrase-monger, - whatever you like, but not a human being!'; and when Sofiya labels him a 'democrat' and a 'Tolstoyan', he explodes, 'That's no way to live! - Whoever I am, look me straight in the eye, clearly, without ulterior motives, without programmes and try to find the human being in me first, or else there'll never be peace in your relations with people'.

Baldly put, this formulates the play's ideology, and the happy ending that Chekhov boasted of comes about as the characters discover this idea for themselves. The couples who had been divided by mutual distrust now link up, and stand on the brink of a new life full of truth.

In the first version of The Wood Demon, this was not entirely clear and Chekhov worked hard to remove similarities to Ivanov. He radically changed the character of Zheltukhin, whom he had portrayed as a typically liberal, slogan-spouting landowner, prone to quote the populist poet Nekrasov. In Chekhov this is always a sign of insincerity: he later links it with Arkadina in The Seagull and the mendicant tramp in The Cherry Orchard, and elements of Zheltukhin's phrase-making recur there in Gayev. Sofiya was made to complain that her neighbours were all museum-pieces: 'Populists in embroidered peasant-shirts, district doctors who resemble Bazarov [in Fathers and Sons]. . . Tolstoyans who when they pay a call insist on coming through the kitchen or the back way'. Chekhov struck all this out lest he be accused of the very labelling for which he rebukes his characters.

In the produced version, the characters are pretty obviously divided between the self-centred rationalists, (Voynitsky, his mother, Zheltukhin, the Professor and Sofiya before her reformation); and the pure-in-heart, who avoid self-analysis and are direct and open in their reac�tions (the Orlovskys, Yuliya, Waffles). Chekhov strove hard to change the play's ending in order to point up this schism. Originally, the Professor was to undergo a change of heart, see the error of his ways and forgive Yelena, whereas Fyodor who had carried her off would behave like a hotheaded duellist until he receives news of his father's death. Instead, the naive Waffles was made to abduct Yelena, and Orlovsky senior did not die of shock. In the final version, it is Fyodor who undergoes a rather sudden and unconvincing conversion to simplicity and sensitivity, while the Professor remains unyielding to the end.

Khrushchyov the Wood-demon⁷ lends his name to the play, not because he is the pivotal figure but because his epiphany in the last act is the summation of the play's meaning.

There's a wood-demon lurking in me, I'm petty, untalented, blind, but even you, professor, are no eagle! And at the same time the whole county, all the women see me as a hero, a progressive, and you are famous throughout Russia. Well, if people like me are seriously taken to be heroes and if people like you are seriously famous, that must mean there's a shortage of human beings and every Jack's a gentleman, there are no genuine heroes, no talents, no people who would lead us out of this darkling wood, who would put right what we ruin, no real eagles with a right to respect and fame . . .

In Chekhov's later plays, a speech like this would be alloyed by some ironic flaw in the character; here it is meant to be taken as read. The critic Chudakov noted that Khrushchyov is perhaps the first hero in Russian theatre 'whose purpose in life is the preservation of nature,'⁸ but unlike Astrov, his counterpart in Uncle Vanya, Khrush- chyov's concern with conservation is not, by itself, a redeeming trait. Merit is not achieved by saving forests or serving science or by any practical activity; pure morality in human relations is of higher value. The crucial turning- point for Khrushchyov is the finding of Voynitsky's diary, which shows him how wrong he was to slander Yelena. The device is clumsy, a relic of the well-made play, but Chekhov needs it to propel Khrushchyov's volte-face, his awakening, when he casts off his suspicions of others.

I didn't shoot myself and I didn't cast myself into the millrace . . . Maybe I'm not a hero, but I shall become one! I shall sprout eagle's wings, and won't be frightened by this blaze or the devil himself! Let the forest burn - I'll plant a new one! Let someone not love me - I'll fall in love with someone else!

By means of rhetoric Chekhov is endeavouring to surpass his earlier dramatic statements. Both Without Patrimony and Ivanov centred upon somewhat outstand�ing individuals corroded by their own cynicism, self-doubt and reflective propensities. In The Wood Demon, those qualities re-emerge in Voynitsky, who, riddled with irony, finds the less complicated natures of Fyodor and Khrushchyov appealing; himself incapable of change, he has to commit suicide, to leave the stage clear for the reversals of the last act.

Because message is so important in this play, medium is more ungainly than usual with Chekhov. His recourse to such tried-and-true gimmicks as the overheard and mis�understood conversation, the all-explaining document that turns up at the critical moment, the speedy peripeteias that arrive in time to aTrange a symmetrical tableau of lovers for the curtain-call made Chekhov himself wince. For at just this period he was hoping to forge a new dramaturgy, to create 'a play where people would arrive, depart, talk about the weather, dine, play cards, but not because that is what goes on in life . . . We don't need realism or naturalism, we don't need to adjust to any sort of frame. We need life to be what it is and people what they are, not on stilts'.⁹ He did manage to bring real life on stage in The Wood Demon: everyday talk, casually tossed-off phrases, pauses as signs of inner concentration provide the fundamental texture. Such a seemingly minor detail as Yelena's playing Lensky's pre-duel aria from Yevgeny Onegin as Act Three starts bears a close relation to what will occur in the act: an explosion of violence between two men, ending in the shooting death of one of them.

Except for that third act, each tableau is grouped around a food-laden table, where the characters' participation in or withdrawal from the communal act of eating has dramatic weight. Yuliya spends the first act of The Wood Demon pressing pie and vodka on her guests, Waffles dilates on the virtues of a ham, champagne is ordered. Khrushchyov's hearty appetite is meant to be more attractive than Fyodor's attention to drink. Act Two takes place in the dining-room, and the affinity between Khrushchyov and Sofiya is revealed by their communion in cheese and vodka after hours, as later, she and Yelena will pledge friendship in a glass of wine. The reconciliations and revelations of the last act are staged at a picnic prepared by Waffles. The spoiled Professor is told by no-nonsense Yuliya that she won't add sugar to his tea: 'have your tea with jam'. When Fyodor enters with a hangover, he takes his with 'lemon, as sour as you please'. Yuliya and Waffles insist that he stick to tea and rusks as an emblem of his promised reformation.

Still, the attention to real life could not conceal the play's contrived denouement, tendentiousness and manipulation of psychology. Chekhov refused, despite the pleas of enthusiasts to have it reprinted. 'I hate that play and am trying to forget it,' he wrote later (to A. I. Urusov, 16 April 1900). But the ideology, if too blatantly expressed, was to abide; Chekhov's later plays continued to attribute greater importance to honesty in human relations than to any doctrinaire or programmatic prescriptions for society.

4

The One-Act Plays

'The difference between a full-length play and a one-act is simply quantitative,' Chekhov once remarked (to Suvorin, 14 October 1888). The generic term he used was vaude�ville, 'a one-act drama or comedy', but his short plays are not technically vaudevilles, since they lack two standard features of that form: intrigue, in the French sense of an articulated plot whose donnees are established at the start, and songs, verses set to familiar tunes that express the characters' intimate feelings. Often Chekhov termed his short comic plays shutki, jokes not unlike the squibs he submitted to comic papers in his early days as a writer.

Tn one-act pieces, one has to write nonsense - therein lies their strength,' he declared. But at the same time, he refused to consider such an activity as frivolous.

Sergeyenko is writing a tragedy on the life of Socrates. These pigheaded boors always latch on to greatness, because they don't know how to create something small and they have disproportionately grandiose pretensions, in default of literary taste. It is easier to write about Socrates than to write about a young girl or a cook. (To Suvorin, 2 January 1894, shortly before starting on The Seagull, which has in it both a young girl and a cook.)

His basic formula for a successful farce was compounded of: (a) a complete mix-up; (b) everyone on stage a clear-cut character, speaking his own language; (c) no long drawn- out passages; and (d) uninterrupted action (to A. S. Lazarev, 15 November 1887). Even when Chekhov begins with a hackneyed ploy, he manages to instill fresh vigour into it through well-observed characters, and, perhaps less apparent in translation, juicy dialogue.

Conflicts arise from breakdowns in communication, the misuse of ordinary units of meaning. The device of a business-like conversation going off on a tangent and seldom coming home is a time-honoured one in Russian comic literature: it is practically the underlying principle of Gogol's narrative technique. A character in Gogol's first version of The Inspector General, the ancient military man Rastakovsky, rambles on interminably about past cam�paigns; Chekhov revives the device in the deaf naval officer of The Wedding. In Turgenev's hilarious farce, Luncheon with the Marshal of Nobility, the obtuse biddy Kaurova repeatedly disrupts a 'peaceable settlement' with her vagaries; Chekhov would make her the model for the harridan Merchutkina in The Jubilee.

Almost every one of Chekhov's vaudevilles begins with a hoary stage tradition, a major character explaining at length to the audience his present circumstances. This bald exposition sets the scene for the ensuing complications. Usually two characters of differing temperament work at cross-purposes, their actions accompanied by the commen�tary of a third, less involved character. The Bear and The

Proposal derive much of their fun from such an arrange�ment.

Even in those simple forms, Chekhov was relying on a context that he would exploit more authoritatively in The Wedding, The Jubilee, and Tatyana Repina: a familiar social ritual to set off the satirical point. A period of mourning, a marriage proposal, a wedding ceremony, a nuptial banquet, an anniversary presentation are all rela�tively formal occasions, whose basic outlines are familiar to every member of a society. Each person knows how he is expected to behave at such times. But in Chekhov's one-acts, under the duress of monomania and personal stress these rituals collapse, revealing the frailty of their shared assumptions. The putative relationships prove to be faulty, the bonds of affection or sympathy wanting. In these shorter works, Chekhov's vaunted objectivity resembles impassivity, and he seems almost cruel to his creatures.

The finales of the farces are, in the earliest works, conventional enough: a wedding in the offing or an invitation to a drink, the standard New Comedy termina�tion. Endings gave Chekhov a hard time:

I've got an interesting plot (syuzhet) for a comedy, but I haven't yet come up with an ending. Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. Trite endings don't work! The hero either gets married or shoots himself, there's no other way out. . . Each act I finish like a story: I carry on the whole act peacefully and quietly, and at the end give the spectator a sock in the jaw (to Suvorin, 4 June 1892).

The development to be traced in his dramatic finales, from the suicides in Ivanov and The Seagull, the engagements in The Wood Demon, to the open-ended continuum of his final masterpieces, is conspicuous in the one-acts as well. Life goes squalidly on in The Wedding, life is startled into a frozen tableau in The Jubilee. A neat disposition of the characters' fates is no longer possible.

⁴On The Highway'

Chekhov wrote this 'dramatic etude' - which he privately referred to as a 'little nonsense for the stage' in autumn 1884. The piece was based on a short story 'Autumn' that had appeared the previous year. Story and play share the same locale, Uncle Tikhon's pothouse, and the same basic premise: a nobleman on the skids gives the tavernkeeper a medallion with the portrait of his unfaithful but still loved wife, to pay for another tot of vodka. A peasant who used to be in his service recognizes the gentleman and relates his unhappy history.

Adapting this for the stage, Chekhov conscientiously enlarged his canvas. The anonymous 'company of cabmen and pilgrims' is differentiated into the pilgrims Nazarovna and Yefimovna, the religious itinerant Savva, and the factory worker Fedya. But the valuable new astringent in the dramatic blend is the tramp Yegor Merik, who had also suffered an unhappy love affair in the past. Unfortunately, Chekhov felt that his prose sketch was too static as it stood, and so he had recourse to a violent climax. The gentleman's wife, by the most unlikely of coincidences, takes shelter in the pothouse and is almost killed by the delirious Merik. The story had ended with the author's rhetorical question, 'Spring, where art thou?' The play concludes with Merik's overwrought exclamation, 'My anguish! My vicious anguish! Pity me, orthodox folk!'

The play was submitted to the censor, an unavoidable step if it was to be performed on a public stage. This particular censor, who bore the burlesque name of E. I. Kaiser-von-Nilckheim, indignantly underlined the word 'gentleman' (barin) every time it appeared in the manu�script, and in his unfavourable report, commented that 'among all the vagrants and transients come to the pot�house to get warm and spend the night, there appears a decayed aristocrat (dyoryanin) who prays the tapster to give him a drink on credit . . . This gloomy and squalid play, in my opinion, cannot be allowed for production.'¹ Kaiser- von-Nilckheim has thus the dubious distinction of being the first of a long string of critics to complain that Chekhov's plays are gloomy.

The play was not published until 1914, ten years after Chekhov's death, when a production was mounted at the Malakhov Theatre in Moscow. Reviewers varied in their assessments from ecstatic - one of them saw Fedya as an archetype of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard - to, mostly, hostile. Used to the lyrical qualities of Chekhov's mature works, they were appalled by the raw melodrama of On the Highway.

'On The Harmfulness of Tobacco'

Originally, Chekhov intended this as a monologue for the talented though alcoholic comedian Gradov-Sokolov, and dashed it off in two and a half hours in February, 1886. He spent the rest of his career returning to it, revising and emending it, until it reached the shape in which it is ordinarily reprinted today. Six distinct variants exist, the more serious changes concomitant with the greater depth of psychology of Chekhov's works throughout the 1890s. Over the course of this recension, Chekhov heightened the emotional tone of the monologue, refined the comedy and increased the pathos. The speaker's pseudo-scientific jar�gon became more attenuated, with a concurrent introduc�tion of cliches.

Nyukhin (the name suggests sniffing snuff, the perfect comic tag for a lecturer on the evils of tobacco) has been forced by his wife to deliver a lecture. During this half-hearted address, he reveals his henpecked existence and his insignificance in the life of his family. As draft followed draft, Nyukhin began to cast more aspersions on his unseen wife and to reveal more hatred for his enforced nullity. What Chekhov had earlier left the audience to deduce was now spelled out in tones of complaint. The pure ridicule that had been showered on his hero was turned to pity, and Nyukhin became the latest in the Russian tradition of the put-upon 'little man'.

'Swan Song' (Calchas)

Chekhov based Calchas (late 1886 or early 1887) on a short story of the same name; like the previous play, it was meant as a 'dramatic etude' for a popular comic actor, Davydov. 'It should play 15 to 20 minutes,' Chekhov suggested. 'As a rule little things are much better to write than big ones: they're less pretentious, but still successful . . . what more does anyone need?' (to M. V. Kiseleva, 14 January 1887). Davydov performed it at Korsh's Theatre on 19 February 1888, but put in so many ad-libs about great actors of the past that Chekhov could barely recog�nize his script. Later he made some slight emendations which he submitted to the censorship in hopes of a performance in a State theatre, and changed the title to Swan Song. 'A long title, bitter-sweet, but I can't think up another, although I thought a long time' (to Lensky, 26 October 1888). (It's six syllables in Russian: Lebedinaya pesna.)

Svetlovidov - which means 'of bright aspect', probably a nom de theatre - has, like one of Tolstoy's heroes, begun life as an army officer but lost caste by going on the stage. Even there, his career has been one of decline, from tragedian to buffo. He has been playing Calchas, the wily old oracle- monger in Offenbach's comic opera La Belle Helene, a secondary part chosen for his benefit, no doubt because the popular operetta would fill the house. Its standard costume consisted of a short Attic tunic and tights on his 68-year old legs. So, throughout this play, Svetlovidov's declamation from King Lear, Othello and Hamlet is continually con�tradicted by his ludicrous appearance.

Although the play draws heavily on Dumas' Kean to allow a skilled character actor a field-day, it still encom�passes a serious Chekhovian theme - coming to terms with life. Svetlovidov, in the course of fifteen minutes, passes from self-aggrandisement as a ruined tragedian to self-contempt as a hammy clown to self-acceptance as an attendant lord, like T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, who can 'swell a progress, start a scene or two'. At the height of his delusion, he spouts Lear's storm speech; but by the end, he exits with a pettish repudiation of society from Griboyedov's classic comedy Woe From Wit. This diminuendo hints at a pocket en�lightenment, a compressed version of the awareness that tragic heroes take five acts to achieve.

'The Bear'

As usual, Chekhov's earliest reference to his work-in- progress was offhandedly negative: 'Having nothing to do, I wrote a vapid little Frenchy vaudevillette (vodevil chik) entitled The Bear' (to I. L. Leontiev-Shcheglov, 22 Febru�ary 1888). No sooner had it appeared in print, than Chekhov's friends insisted that he submit it to the censor and recommended the perfect actors to play it. The censor was not amused, disturbed by the 'more than strange plot,' 'the coarseness and indecency of the tone of the whole play,'² and forbade production. But he was overruled by a superior bureaucrat who, by suppressing a few lines, rendered it suitable for the public. It had its premiere at Korsh's on 28 October 1888, with the clever ingenue Nataliya Rybchinskaya as Popova and Chekhov's boyhood friend Nikolay Solovtsov as Smirnov. Solovtsov, a tall, ungainly fellow with a huge voice, had probably been in Chekhov's mind for the role of the bear as he wrote it.

The Bear was, from the start, a runaway success: the audience roared with laughter and interrupted the dialogue with applause, and the newspapers praised it to the skies. Theatres all over Russia added it to their repertoires and the best Russian actors clamoured to play in it. In Chekhov's lifetime it brought him in regular royalties and has held the stage throughout the Soviet era.

The Bear's comedy proceeds from the characters' lack of self-knowledge: the widow Popova fancies herself incon- solably bereaved, a fugitive from the world, while Smirnov takes himself to be a misogynist to the core. It updates Petronius' ancient tale of the Widow of Ephesus, which Christopher Fry later turned into ,4 Phoenix Too Frequent. That ribald fable tells of a widow whose grief for a dead husband melts under the ardour of the soldier guarding a crucified corpse; she eventually colludes with him to substitute her own deceased spouse for the body stolen during their love-making. Chekhov puts the pony Toby in place of the corpse, as a token of the transference of the widow's affection; he also doubles the comic reversal.

Both Popova and Smirnov are alazons in the classic sense: figures made comic by pretending to be more than they actually are. If the languishing Popova derives from the Petronian source, Smirnov is a descendant of Moliere's Alceste, professing a hatred of society's hypocrisy but succumbing to a woman who exemplifies that society. The two poseurs come in conflict, and the roles reverse: the grieving relict snatches up a pistol and, like any case- hardened bully, insists on a duel while the gruff woman- hater finds himself incapable of facing down his female opponent. (It was the improbable duel that most outraged the critics.) It is in the cards that the frail widow and the brute in muddy boots will fall into one another's arms by the final curtain.

'The Proposal'

'A vulgarish and boringish vaudevillette, but suitable for the provinces' was how Chekhov disparaged The Proposal, even while he asked friends to intercede with the censors on its behalf. Inspired by the success of The Bear, he was anxious to get his next farce on the boards. It had its first production at the Krasnoe Selo Theatre on 9 August 1889, with a cast of Pavel Svobodin (who had created Shabelsky) as Lomov, Mariya Ilinskaya as Nataliya and the great comic actor Varlamov as Chubukov. It was greeted with unbroken laughter, not least from the Tsar who congratu�lated the actors. The Proposal shared The Bear's fate as a favourite curtain-raiser and benefit play in the provinces for years.

Botched proposals are a Chekhov specialty. The cross- purposes of the 'imaginary invalid' Lomov, incongruously decked out in tails and gloves, and Nataliya in her apron, mount to a boisterous, breathless pitch here. Chekhov understood how to accelerate the basic misapprehensions into a barrage of insults, and how, after building to a climax, to reinvigorate the action by introducing a fresh con�tretemps (which he may have learned from Turgenev's Luncheon with the Marshal). Later, the final interview of Tusenbach and Irina in Three Sisters, and Lopakhin's failure to propose to Varya in The Cherry Orchard will show Chekhov modulating the tone to one of shattered hopes and mutually conflicting illusions.

'Tatyana Repina'

Tatyana Repina is an anomaly among Chekhov's one-acts: it can be understood only in relationship to another play by someone else. In 1889, Suvorin wrote a 'comedy' founded on an actual occurrence: the suicide eight years earlier of the young actress Yevlaliya Kadmina. Jilted by her lover, she poisoned herself and came on in the last act of Ostrovsky's Vasilisa Melentieva, whose heroine is also supposed to die of poison. Kadmina perished in gruesome torments before the eyes of a Kharkov audience, and thus won posthumous notoriety. Chekhov considered her an 'extraordinary celebrity' and even solicited her photo�graph.

Suvorin's Tatyana Repina follows the facts fairly closely. Tatyana Repina, a high-spirited and talented provincial actress, is thrown over by her lover who hopes to repair his ruined fortunes by marrying an heiress. Deeply hurt, publicly insulted by a gross Jewish financier, seeing nothing to live for, Tatyana takes poison before going on stage and dies during the last act of Ostrovsky's play as her friends look on, aghast. From a modern standpoint, Chekhov's enthusiasm for this sensationalist play is hard to com�prehend; yet he was lavish with his praise and offered copious advice in his letters. He predicted a success that came to pass in both capitals, and got embroiled in the Moscow rehearsals as an intercessor between actors and author, when Suvorin was busy staging Chekhov's Ivanov in Petersburg.

Chekhov's one-act is therefore a kind of private joke, the 'what happens after the curtain goes down,' that St. John Hankin perfected in his Dramatic Sequels. Chekhov pur�ports to be amused by the epidemic of suicides that followed in the wake of Tatyana Repina's success, and he depicts the marriage taking place between the dead actress's lover and his rich heiress. The hieratic formality of the Orthodox wedding ceremony reproduced with con�siderable authenticity, blended with the trivial remarks of the bystanders, provides the structure. The counterpoint between the sonorous Church Slavonic with its portentous vows and the mundane chitchat of the wedding party produces a sour and sardonic effect. Eventually, the church choir has to compete with a worldly chorus of 'Voices' who begin to spread the news of the suicide epidemic, passing along fragments of tattle. Neurotic females are condemned for this copy-cat felo de se at the same time the choir is intoning its 'Lord have mercys' and 'Amens'.

Gradually, the bridegroom's bad conscience overwhelms him and he begins to imagine that Tatyana is there beside him in the church, while her colleagues from the theatre pray for her soul's rest and make disdainful comments about her seducer. When the wedding party finally departs, the remaining clergymen are startled by a woman in black who staggers out from behind a column; she has poisoned herself a la Repina and incoherently wavers between fatalism and the desire to be saved.

lady in black: . . . Everybody ought to take poison . . . (Groans and rolls on the floor.) She's in her grave, while he ... he ... To offend a woman is to offend God ... A woman has perished . . .

father ivan: What blasphemy against religion! (Flinging

up his arms.) What blasphemy against life! lady in black (jtears at herself and screams): Save me! Save me! Save me! . . .

CURTAIN

and the rest I leave to A. S. Suvorin s imagination.

Suvorin's Tatyana Repina is interesting for foreshadow�ing The Seagull. Chekhov's favourite character in Suvorin's play was the journalist Adashev, who denigrates his profession as a man of letters in a manner which Chekhov replicated in the Trigorin-Nina interview in The Seagull. It is Adashev, a raisonneur, who tells Tatyana, after she has, unbeknownst to him, already taken poison, his opinion that suicide is cowardice.

Among us suicide has really become something epidemic. There's no shortage of gunpowder for good people. Children rush for the revolver when they get low grades, grown-ups on account of trifles . . . They fall out of love - a bullet through the brain. Their vanity's been bruised, they aren't appreciated - they shoot themselves. What's happened to strength of character?³

Chekhov picks up this notion and carries it to its logical conclusion; he also carries it into his later works. Treplyov's suicide at the end of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya's abstraction of morphine must be viewed in this light. After Ivanov, Chekhov treated suicide as an act of weakness, an unwillingness to cope with life's demands.

Nina in The Seagull is a development of the Tatyana Repina model. In Suvorin's play, the young actress, forlorn in a suburban pleasure garden, hears her ex-lover singing at his bachelor supper.

tatyana: He? Wait . . . Yes, yes, that's his voice . . . l'amour qui nous . . . It's he, he . . . {Listens intently. )⁴

This is Tatyana's lowest ebb, the decisive factor in her self-destruction. In the last act of The Seagull, Nina overhears the laughter of Trigorin in the dining-room, runs to the door and states, 'He's here too . . . Why, yes . . . Never mind . . . Yes'. But Nina's confrontation with this spectre of her past confirms her in her decision to jettison the persona of the seagull.

Chekhov's Tatyana Repina however, a pastiche not a parody, is most intriguing as an experiment in polyphonic structure; in miniature, it practices the intricate interweav�ing of melodramatic pathos and crass diurnalism that was to become the trademark of Chekhov's major plays. Not just the suicides, but the mismatched marriages, failed careers and dashed hopes that will, in the last plays, be jumbled amid meals, card-games and dirty galoshes are adumbrated here. Tatyana Repina is a quintessence of Chekhov's notion of stage naturalism: not a slice of life copied from reality, but a reconstitution of the casual interconnections that tangle lives together.

'A Tragedian In Spite Of Himself

Chekhov had promised Varlamov another acting vehicle and turned to his story One of Many (1887) about a paterfamilias who must spend his time shunting back and forth between the dacha where his nearest and dearest are summering and the town where he carries out their innumerable commissions. For the sake of the stage, Chekhov altered the list of errands, deleting among other items 'a child's coffin', and racy remarks that could pass in print but would never get past the dramatic censor.

Varlamov did not in fact appear in the play, so that the first actor to create the harried family man was M. I. Bibikov at an amateur performance at the Petersburg German Club on 1 October 1889. Basically, A Tragedian remains a comic monologue, with the officious friend acting as straight man.

The allusion to Moliere in the title alerts one to the extreme contradictions of the protagonist Tolkachov. Described as 'the father of a family' he begins the play by calling for a pistol to commit suicide and ends it by quoting Othello, demanding the blood of his interlocutor. Between these two poles, the banal situation he describes comes less from the world of tragedy than that of existential absurdity. His multifarious errands require him to live in a muddle of inanimate objects. 'For instance, how are you going to lump together a heavy copper mortar and pestle with a lamp-globe or carbolic acid with tea? How are you going to combine beer bottles and this velocipede?' This surrealistic melange, followed by a detailed comparison of married life with the Israelites' labour in the Egyptian brickyards and the Spanish Inquisition, creates a manic impression of an ordinary middle-class existence as Bosch's hell. Although firmly in the Gogol tradition, Chekhov here moves halfway to Jarry and Ionesco.

'The Wedding⁹

Chekhov characterised The Wedding as 'a scene in one act,' thus distinguishing it from his other short comedies; it differs too in being based on real experiences and indi�viduals in Chekhov's past. The Greek confectioner Dymba was modelled on a clerk in his father's grocery store in Taganrog; the flirtatious midwife he had met when acting as best man at a wedding in 1887. Between 1885 and 1886 he had lived in a Moscow flat beneath the quarters of a caterer who rented our rooms for weddings and balls. At times, he seemed obsessed with weddings, which are the subject of many of his stories written in the 1880s. The one-act was first played at the Art and Literary Society at the Moscow Hunt Club on 28 November 1900, as part of a Chekhov evening; Tolstoy, who was there, laughed till he cried.

The Wedding is a masterful exhibition of the dissolution of social convention. Every pretence kept up by one character is demolished by another; no one's secrets are safe. Over the course of the play, we discover that the groom has married the bride for the sake of a paltry dowry, which has yet to be paid; that the bride herself is totally insensitive to her situation; that her parents are the most narrow and parsimonious of philistines; and that the guests bear no particular good will to the happy pair. The play revolves around one principal deception: to dress out the banquet, a 'General,' that is, a high-ranking official, is required as guest of honour. The bride's mother has charged a friend with this task; he has pocketed the money and brought a deaf naval captain, who assumes that he has been invited. The mother discovers the swindle and turns the old man out without further ado. At that moment, the farcical tone of the play disappears. The old captain, disabused and stripped of any consideration, can only gasp in horror, 'What a shabby trick! What a shabby trick!' After the old man's exit, the guests and hosts revert to their squabbling. The moment of genuine feeling has made no dent in their thick hides.

Again, Chekhov employed the comic device of the gap between the characters' aspirations and reality. Hoping to sound refined, they mangle French and mispronounce polysyllabic words. Zmeyukina, a midwife whose profession is of the earthiest, constantly demands 'atmosphere' and delicate feeling; she quotes Lermontov in anticipation of Solyony in Three Sisters. The bride's father invariably dismisses anything unfamiliar with contempt, branding it 'monkey business.' The main oration of the evening is delivered by a Greek who cannot speak Russian:

dymba (rises, bashful). I talk sometings, is no? ... Is Russia. And is Greece. Now in Russia is such a peoples, and in Greece is such a peoples . . . And peoples on ocean is sailing sheeps, in Russian means boots, but on land runs all sorts wildroot drains. I understanding good, is no?

Yet when a Russian does rise to speak, it is the Captain, whose naval lingo is every bit as incomprehensible; assum�ing that he is entertaining the company, the old salt bores the guests into stupor and then mutiny. Over the entire action hangs a sense of affectlessness, no character ever making true contact with any other. Relatively realistic as it is, The Wedding subjects the lower-middle-class to the merciless derision of a Daumier.

'The Jubilee'

Private commercial banks were a relatively new feature in Russian life; the State bank itself dated back only to the reforms of 1866. The financial institution in Chekhov's farce is about to celebrate its fifteenth birthday, on which occasion the bank manager Shipuchin will receive a gift from grateful shareholders. While he prepares a speech of thanks and his clerk Khirin is, with an ill will, drawing up statistics, their work is interrupted by Shipuchin's giddy and garrulous wife and old Mrs Merchutkina nagging on behalf of her civil servant husband. The more the women talk, the more the men are driven to distraction. The deputation arrives with its testimonial scroll and silver tankard to behold a vision of chaos: the manager's wife fainting on the sofa, the old lady collapsing in the arms of a babbling Shipuchin, and Khirin threatening the females with mur�der.

The peculiar position of The Jubilee lies halfway between the unsuccessful experiment of The Wood Demon and Chekhov's transitional play The Seagull. Once again founded on a published short story, A Defenceless Creature (1887), it was written in December 1891, but not per�formed until the Chekhov evening at the Moscow Hunt Club in 1900. By the time The Jubilee reached the stage, Chekhov was already known to the general public as the author of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters; many were upset by what seemed a throwback to comic anarchy. The Moscow News referred to it as 'a strange play' that ended with 'the bank manager making an insulting gesture at his bookkeeper, while the latter tears books and files to pieces, tossing the ravaged pages in the manager's face.'⁵ Chekhov was later to transform this finale to the Gogolian tableau that greets the astonished delegation of stockholders.

The first St. Petersburg production on the stage of the Alexandra in May 1903 was even more questionably received. Although the audience was dying with laughter at the antics of Varlamov as Khirin and the hilarious comedienne Levkeyeva as Merchutkina, certain critics won�dered at the crude vulgarity of it all, and speculated whether such a piece had a place in a national theatre. They could not reconcile its extravagant humour with the Checkhov they had grown to expect.

There is a savagery to The Jubilee that exceeds even the contumely of The Wedding. Each member of the comic quartet is despicable: both women are portrayed as idiotic chatterboxes, the clerk is a crabbed misogynist, and the bank manager Shipuchin an ineffectual ass. The setting enforces hypocrisy: as Shipuchin says, 'At home I can be a philistine and a parvenu and indulge my own little habits, but here everything has to be on a grand scale. This is a bank!' The impending ceremony creates a temporal pres�sure that propels the mounting hysteria. The result is Homeric laughter, not at all what the textbooks call 'Chekhovian.'

'The Night Before The Trial'

In 1886, Chekhov had published a story by that title, and he returned to it in the early 1890s to convert it into a play. In the process, he intensified the guilt of the main character Zaytsev, causing him to come to trial not simply for bigamy and a series of beatings, but for bigamy, forging his grandmother's will and attempted murder. The scene in which he plays mock doctor to 'examine' the woman in the room next door was considerably enlarged; so was his sleasy courtship of her, and her own character was dark�ened to make her seem an experienced coquette ready to cuckold her husband. But, because the play was left unfinished, Zaytsev's farewell the next morning and his payment for his 'honest labour' were never worked out, nor was the climax, the scene in court when Zaytsev is surprised to find that the Public Prosecutor is in fact the deceived husband.

Why Chekhov gave it up is a matter for speculation. Perhaps he realised that the seduction would be hard to get past the censorship or that the necessary division into two or three scenes would defeat the comedy's economy as a curtain-raiser. As it stands, Night Before the Trial is close to

French boulevard farce in its sexual emphasis. The tone is more insistently vulgar than in any of Chekhov's short plays other than The Wedding; bedbugs and fleas are omnipres�ent, a dramatic legacy from Gogol, no doubt, but empha�sised here ad nauseam. The mock doctor's examination could easily coarsen into an American burlesque sketch. The Aesopic names Gusev and Zaystev (Goose and Hare) suggest a clown show, and the 'gags' are part of a long popular tradition. Zaytsev (who may in fact be guilty of the crimes he is charged with) contemplates suicide if the verdict goes against him.

In case the jury finds against me, I'll turn to my old friend ... A loyal, trusty friend! (Tales a large pistol from his suitcase.) here he is! How's the boy? I traded Cheprakov a couple of dogs for him. What a beauty! Just shooting yourself with him would be a kind of satisfaction . . . (Tenderly.) You loaded, boy? (In a piping voice, as if answering for the pistol.) I'm loaded ... (In his own voice.) I'll bet you'll go off with a bang, right? A real rip-roaring ear-splitter? (Piping.) A real rip-roaring ear-splitter ... (In his own voice.) Oh, you silly little thing, gun o'my heart. . . All right, now lie down and go to sleep . . . (Kisses the pistol and places it in the suitcase.) As soon as I hear 'Guilty as charged,' then right away - bang to the brain and the sweet bye-and-bye . . .

This ventriloqual exchange as he croons endearments to his suicide weapon is a comic device that goes back at least as far as the commedia delVarte and the folk comedies of Ruzzante. Zaytsev turns into an updated Harlequin, amoral and appetitive, whose ruminations on self- destruction reflect satirically on the suicides in Chekhov's serious works.

Did Chekhov, as he refined his full-length plays and purged them of the grossness of contemporary melodrama and farce, relegate his more exuberant and ironical spirits to the one-act form? The increasing grotesquerie of the series that begins with Tatyana Repina certainly suggests it.

5

'The Seagull⁹

I asked what was most requisite to make a piece fit for the theatre.

'It must by symbolical,' replied Goethe; 'that is to say, that each incident must be significant by itself, and yet lead naturally to something more important.' Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (26 July 1826)

Baldly put, the plot of The Seagull has the makings of a conventional romance. Arkadina, a flashy and egocentric actress, carrying on a liaison with a famous writer, has a neglected son, who wants to make a name for himself in literature. In his first effort, a play of symbolist tendency, he has featured a naive and beautiful girl, who longs for fame. But the young man meets with failure in every direction: his play is scoffed at by his mother; the girl, whom he claims to love, becomes infatuated with the famous writer and runs off with him to Moscow; the youth is unable to leave his uncle's estate because his mother will not give him any money and he attempts to take his life, without success. Two years later, all the characters return to the same place: her affair with the writer long over, the girl, Nina, has become a provincial actress, reduced to playing one-night stands in backward county towns. The young man, Treplyov, is now a published writer, his work appearing in the same journal as that of his mother's lover, Trigorin. Masha, the daughter of the estate's overseer, still carries a torch for the young writer, but he ignores her. While the other characters are at supper offstage, Nina and Treplyov have a final interview. Despite his pleas, Nina leaves to pursue her career; frustrated and confused, Treplyov destroys his manuscripts and shoots himself, this time successfully. Any actor, confronted with this scenario, might be excused for falling into standard patterns of characterisation.

The first production of the The Seagull at the Alexandra Theatre in St. Petersburg on 17 October 1896 has come down in theatrical legend as a classic fiasco. But this is an exaggeration. The cast was strong, with Davydov (the original Ivanov) as the uncle Sorin, the popular comedian Varlamov (who had already played Lebedev in Ivanov and Chubukov in The Proposal) as the overseer Shamrayev, the handsome jeune premier Roman Apollonsky as Treplyov, and the brilliant young actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya as Nina. During the scant week of rehearsals, Chekhov was in attendance, prompting the actors and correcting the direc�tor. Like most sensitive playwrights, he was dismayed by wasted rehearsal time and the actors' predilection for superficial characterisations that stunted his brainchildren; but by the last rehearsals his expectations had risen.

These expectations were dashed on opening night, for the spectators had come with expectations of their own, hoping to see their favorite comedienne Levkeyeva, whose benefit it was. They laughed, booed and whistled at whatever struck them as funny, from Nina's soliloquy to

Treplyov's entrance with the dead gull to the actors' ad-libs when they went up in their lines. Chekhov fled the theatre, vowing never again to write for the stage. Nevertheless, the ensuing performances, with the actors more secure, played to respectful houses. Before The Seagull closed in early November, it had become a succes d'estime, with Kommis- sarzhevskaya proclaimed as luminous. It was successfully revived in Kiev, Taganrog and other provincial centres, providing Chekhov with handsome royalties.

Nemirovich-Danchenko, an admirer of the play, thought The Seagull just the thing to rescue the flagging fortunes of his newly founded Moscow Art Theatre, whose first season was in danger of bankruptcy. He pressed it upon his reluctant colleague Stanislavsky, who at first found the play incomprehensible and unsympathetic. He retired to his country estate to compose a directorial score which he sent piecemeal to Moscow where Nemirovich rehearsed the actors, including the future director Vsevolod Meyerhold as Treplyov, Olga Knipper, Chekhov's wife-to-be, as Arkadina, and Aleksandr Vishnevsky, the author's boy�hood friend, as Dorn. Stanislavsky assumed the role of Trigorin.

Stanislavsky's fundamental approach to staging The Seagull differed little from his direction of historical drama. He sought in contemporary Russian life the same pictures�que groupings, the same telling mannerisms, the same pregnant pauses that had enthralled audiences when he reconstructed seventeenth-century Muscovy or Renais�sance Venice. Rather than inquiring into Chekhov's mean�ing, Stanislavsky took the play as a romantic melodrama: Nina was an innocent ruined by that 'scoundrelly Lovelace'¹ Trigorin, and Treplyov was a misunderstood Byronic genius, the hero of the piece. Nor, at this stage of his development, did Stanislavsky try organically to elicit performances from the actors. Their every action, reaction and intonation were prescribed by his score and learned by rote.

The opening night, 17th December 1898, despite off�stage jitters was a palpable hit, insuring the theatre's success, and the seagull became the Moscow Art Theatre's trademark. Chekhov was less than ecstatic. He thought that Stanislavsky misinterpreted Trigorin by making him too elegant and formal; he detested Roksanova's Nina. What�ever his misgivings, the middle-class professional audiences took to it precisely because, for the first time, 'the way we live now' was subjected to the same careful counterfeit presentment that had hitherto been applied only to the picturesque past. The spectators beheld their own tics and heard their own speech patterns meticulously copied.

Taking advantage of the outdoor settings of the early acts and the dimly lit interior at the end, Stanislavsky laid on climatic and atmospheric effects to create an overpowering nastroenie or mood. The method, relying on sound efects, diffused lighting and a snail's pace, worked so well for The Seagull that it became standard operating procedure at the Moscow Art Theatre for Chekhov's later plays and, indeed, those of almost any author. But already astute observers were noting these as obtrusive mannerisms. Prince Urusov, a fan of the Moscow Art Theatre production, called the red lighting at the beginning of Acts One and Four 'completely phoney' and 'unnatural'; 'such lighting, dim and sinister, keeps one from seeing and hearing'. The clever directorial trick of arranging the characters in a row with their backs to the audience 'may be innovative and daring, but . . . the actors hunch together embarrassed, compelled to speak to one side, twisting themselves into profiles, - otherwise they can't be heard'.²

In the last analysis, it was the mood that permeated that made The Seagull a hit. Meyerhold, in later years, credited Stanislavsky with being the first to link the sound of rain on the window and morning light peeping through the shutters with the characters' behaviour. 'At the time this was a discovery.'³ The dramatist Leonid Andreyev was to call it 'panpsychology,'⁴ the animation of everything in a Chekhov play from distant music to the chirp of a cricket to munching an apple, each sharing an equivalent relation to the play's total effect.

Chekhov's objections to the Moscow interpretation did not, however, spring from its style, but from the imbalance in meaning that Stanislavsky had induced. Although it contains a 'ton of love', The Seagull is not a soap opera about a triangular relationship or a romantic dramatisation of Trigorin's 'subject for a short story'. It is perhaps Chekhov's most personal play in its treatment of the artist's metier. The theme of splendours and miseries of artists is plainly struck by Nina at the start, when she explains why her parents won't let her come to Sorin's estate: 'They say this place is Bohemia'. Years of theatre-going, reviewing, dealing with performers and managers were distilled by Chekhov to create a density of metaphor for the artistic experience, for the contrasts between commercialism and idealism, facility and aspiration, purposeless talent and diligent mediocrity. Of the central characters, one is an aspiring playwright, another a successful and performed writer; one is an acclaimed star of the footlights, another a would-be actress.

Stanislavsky's black-and-white vision of the play also ran counter to Chekhov's attempt to create multiple heroes and multiple conflicts. Treplyov seems the protagonist because the play begins with his artistic credo and his moment of revolt, and it ends with his self-destruction. But in terms of stage time, he shares the limelight with many

other claimants, whose ambitions cancel out one another.

Nor can Nina be singled out as the one survivor who preserves her ideals in spite of all. The type of the victimised young girl, abandoned by her love and coming to a bad end, frequently recurred in Russian literature from Karamzin's Poor Liza (1792) onward. Often she was depicted as the ward of an older woman who, in her cruelty or wilful egoism, promotes the girl's downfall: many plays of Ostrovsky and Potekhin feature such a pair, the relation�ship is subtly handled by Turgenev in A Month in the Country (1850). In The Seagull, the relationship is rarefied: it is Arkadina's example rather than her intention that sends Nina to Moscow, maternity and mumming.

The pure-souled, lone, provincial actress, a prey to the jealousy of colleagues, the importunities of admirers, and the scorn of society, was an early avatar of the Poor Liza type. In Pisemsky's One Thousand Souls (1858) Nastenka, a local girl betrayed, returns to her home town as a famous tragedienne to enjoy a bittersweet reunion with her former lover. This interview parallels the similar scene between Treplyov and Nina. When Nastenka relates her past sufferings and berates her love for not going on with his writing, he flies into a rage and looks to her to save him from himself, which she does. Significantly, Nina does not marry her former suitor out of a sense of duty and fond memories; she sees her duty is to her career, and her memories of 'a bright, warm, joyous, pure life . . . feelings like tender, fragile flowers' are inaccurate. At Nina's most intense moment of recollection, she runs away, leaving the failed writer to save himself, if he can.

Other literary prototypes for Nina include Anninka and Lyubinka in Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyov Family (1876), who flee the stifling family estate and after a brief stint in Moscow, descend to touring seedy provincial theatres in musical comedy: seduction, arrest, alcoholism and attempted suicide follow in quick succession. Negina, in Ostrovsky's comedy Talents and Admirers (1881), on the other hand, a gifted provincial leading lady, turns down the love of the idealistic student Melusov to go to Moscow with a wealthy landowner in order to further her career.

melusov: Oh, Sasha, how can you! Are talent and depravity inseparable?

negina: No, no! Not depravity! Ah, what a man you are . . . understand . . . I'm an actress! But according to you I ought to be some sort of heroine. Yet how can every woman be a heroine? I'm an actress . . . And if I were to marry you I'd soon throw you over and go back to the stage. Even for the smallest salary. Just to be there - on the stage. I can't live without the theatre.⁵

Nina's beginnings, her debut outside Moscow at a summer theatre, her subsequent touring, her dead baby and empty affair, recall the swift decline of Anninka and Lyubinka, as do her third-class railway trips to boom towns like Yelets where 'businessmen with a taste for the arts will pester me with their attentions. A sordid life'. But, like Negina, her faith in her vocation keeps her from succumbing to despair. We even hear Negina's assertion in Nina's 'I'm a gull . . . Not so, I'm an actress. Why, yes!'

Chekhov's early stories abound with actresses who lead erratic lives and endure slurs and contempt for it; but Nina continues to dismiss the shoddiness of the work she is given, determined to develop an inner strength, regardless of old forms or new. Should she be extolled as a shining talent to be contrasted with Arkadina's routinier activity? Nina's ideas on art and fame are jejune and couched in the bromides of cheap fiction; her inability to see anything in

Treplyov's play other than words and speeches, her offer to eat black bread and live in a garret for the reward of celebrity, are obtuse and juvenile. Hers are not dreams that deserve to be realised, and there is nothing tragic in her having to reconcile them with the ordinary demands of life.

Similarly, Chekhov does not mean us to accept at face value Treplyov's harsh verdicts on his mother and her lover. They may truckle to popular demand, but they are not crippled by self-doubt. Arkadina, barnstorming the countryside in the Russian equivalent of East Lynne, is convinced that she is performing a public service; her stage name ambivalently refers both to Arcadia and to a garish amusement park in St. Petersburg. Trigorin, well aware that he is falling short of his masters Tolstoy and Turgenev, still plugs away in the tradition of well-observed realism.

Treplyov and Trigorin cannot be set up as hostile antitheses, for, as the Soviet critic Chudakov has said, they 'themselves call their basic theses into question'.⁶ Trep�lyov's desire for new forms is a more vociferous and less knowing version of Trigorin's self-deprecation. The younger writer scorns the elder as a belletrist, but by the play's end, he is longing to find similar formulas by which to avoid journalese. Arkadina may not have read her son's work ('No time') and Trigorin may not have cut the pages on any story but his own; but Treplyov himself admits he has never read Trigorin's stuff, thus partaking of their casual egoism. A more productive antithesis than that of Treplyov-Trigorin, who both contain elements of Chekhov himself, might be a polarity of idealism and art, with Treplyov at one end, and the schoolmaster Medvedenko, all purblind financial worries, at the other. The two men are linked by Masha, who loves the young writer ('He has. . . the look of a poet') and is loved by the teacher. Each act opens with her statement of the hopelessness of her situation, moving from the affected pose of 'I am in mourning for my life' to the flat acceptance of 'unrequited love - that's only for novels'. She and Nina are to be contrasted in the uneasy terms with which they deal with their frustrated hopes.

The literary critic Prince Mirsky pointed out that bezdar- nost ('giftlessness' or 'lack of talent') was a 'characteristi�cally Chekhovian word'⁷; for it sums up an absence of positive qualities. Chekhov once defined talent as the ability 'to distinguish important evidence from unimpor�tant' (to Suvorin, 30 May 1888). In The Seagull, the word 'talent' is the touchstone by which the characters evaluate themselves and one another. Treplyov begins by feeling he is a nobody among the actors and writers that crowd his mother's salon: he claims to have 'no talent at all'. But he rebukes Nina for considering him 'a mediocrity, a nonen�tity' and points scornfully at Trigorin as a 'genuine talent'. In her anger, Arkadina lashes out at her son by referring to 'people with no talent and lots of pretensions', and when he retaliates 'I've got more talent than the lot of you put together,' she crushes him by uttering his own thought: 'You nobody'. In Act One, Arkadina encourages Nina to go on the stage by saying 'You must have talent'; in the last act, Treplyov grudgingly states 'she showed some talent at screaming or dying'. Trigorin complains that his public regards him as no more than 'charming and talented,' yet when Arkadina caresses him with 'You're so talented,' he succumbs to her blandishments.

The point is that 'talent' exists independently of human relations and can be consummated in isolation. To be talented is not necessarily to be a superior person. As usual, Dorn sees most acutely to the heart of the matter: 'you're a talented fellow,' he tells Treplyov, but 'without a well- defined goal. . . your talent will destroy you'. Tactlessly in

Arkadina's presence, he had declared 'there aren't many brilliant talents around these days . . . but the average actor has improved greatly'. Sharing Chekhov's distrust of the grand gesture, Dorn prefers the amelioration of the general lot to artistic supermen. Nina, who had idealised Arkadina and Trigorin as 'a celebrated actress' and 'a famous author' to whom commoners must defer, finally recognises that fame and glamour are less important than staying power.

Treplyov's one display of talent, his symbolist play located in a void where all things are extinct and the only conflicts are between the Universal Will and the Principle of Eternal Matter, may seem like parody. But Chekhov is careful to place the harsh criticism on the lips of Arkadina, whose taste and motives are suspect, and Nina, who complains that it is nothing but chitka, literally a 'reading,' a technical term she may have picked up from Arkadina. Chekhov is not ridiculing Treplyov for his espousal of new forms, something he himself had predicted might take a hundred years to evolve. Treplyov's shortcoming is his inability to preserve the purity of his ideal; his symbolist venture is actually a garble of popular stage techniques ill-connected to his poetic aspirations. The devil's red eyes are, as Arkadina observes, 'special effects'. His theatre, 'Curtain, first grooves, second grooves, and beyond that, empty space' is an amateur mock-up of Lentovsky's Fantasy Theatre in Moscow, relying on the gloom and the damp for atmosphere. He seems unable to find an original way of expressing his nebulous ideas; his play, like Bj0rnson's Beyond Human Power, 'has no significance because the idea isn't clear. It's impossible to make one's characters perform miracles, when you yourself have no sharply defined conviction as to miracles' (to Suvorin, 20 June 1896). In his notebooks, Chekhov stressed, 'Treplyov has no fixed goals and that's what destroyed him. Talent destroyed him'.

Chekhov, however, did manage in The Seagull to initiate his own new form, incomplete and transitional though it may be. For the first time, he did away with Trench scenes,' allowing each act to develop not through the artificial entrances and exits of characters, but by a concealed inner dynamic. The overall rhythm of the play is also carefully scored. 'I wrote it forte and ended it pianissimo, contrary to all the rules of dramatic art' (to Suvorin, 21 Nov. 1895). The forte passages occur in the first three acts, which are compressed to within a week's time; there is then the lapse of two years before the pianissimo of Act Four. The characters must fill in the gaps in their and our knowledge by the awkward device of asking one another what's been going on. But this apparently clumsy structure derives from Chekhov's anxiety to keep offstage what a traditional playwright would have saved for his obligatory scenes. The most intense and sensational actions - Nina's seduction and abandonment, the death of her child, Trigorin's return to Arkadina, - are, like Treplyov's two suicide attempts, left to our imagination. We are allowed to see the antecedents and consequences, as it were the foreplay and post-coital subsidence, but not the act itself.

The submergence of hyper-dramatic moments, the key to Chekhov's dramatic method, can be noticed halfway through Act One, after Treplyov has rung down the curtain on his play and stormed off. Eventually, Nina emerges from behind the stage, and Arkadina introduces her to Trigorin.

nina: Oh, I'm so pleased . . . (Embarrassed.) I read all your things.

arkadina (seating Nina beside her). Don't be bashful,

darling. He's a celebrity, but he doesn't put on airs. You see, he's bashful himself.

dorn: I presume we can raise the curtain now, it's spooky like this.

shamrayev (loudly). Yakov, haul up that curtain, boy!

(The curtain is raised.)

nina (to Trigorin). It's a strange play, isn't it?

trigorin: I didn't understand a word. Nevertheless, I did enjoy watching it. Your acting was so sincere. And the scenery was gorgeous. (Pause.) I suppose there are lots of fish in that lake.

nina: Yes.

trigorin: I love fishing. For me there's no greater pleasure than sitting on the bank at sunset and watching the cork bob up and down.

nina: But I should think that if someone had pleasure in creating a work of art, he couldn't take pleasure in anything else.

arkadina (laughing). Don't talk that way. Whenever anyone compliments him, he makes himself scarce.

At which point, Shamrayev launches into his anecdote about the basso Silva, a pause ensues, and Dorn makes his famous remark, 'A silent angel flew by'.

The apparently banal passage is in fact a turning-point for Nina and Trigorin. Their introduction reveals in a few deft strokes the incompatibility of their views of art: Trigorin can proffer only a few platitudes about the play, before turning to a more engaging subject, fishing. (These are, incidentally, two of his mere three speeches in this act, a sign of his displacement in the wild Treplyovian surround�ings.) Nina can only express her second-hand notions of artistic creativity. Arkadina plays stage manager, seating Nina, answering for Trigorin and patronizing them both.

But the brilliant coup de theatre is to have the stage curtain taken up during the social ceremony; what might have been merely a naturalistic byblow becomes a symbolic revelation that Treplyov's effort is indeed spent, and the drama of Nina and Trigorin is about to begin. The pause that follows Shamrayev's story marks a first intermission, during which the liaison between the two is tacitly forged.

The two-year hiatus between the third and fourth acts stresses the recurrent theme of memory. The past is always idyllic: Arkadina's retrospection of life along the lakeshore, Polina's evocation of her past fling with the Doctor, Shamrayev's anecdotes of antediluvian actors, Sorin's rosy picture of an urban existence are the older generation's forecast of the clashing recollections of Trep�lyov and Nina. With wry irony, Chekhov divulges each of his characters' insensitivity or obliviousness. 'It's too late,' insists Dr. Dorn when Polina tries to rekindle their earlier affair. 'I don't remember,' shrugs Arkadina when her son recalls her charitable behaviour to an injured laundress. 'I don't remember,' says Trigorin when he is shown the gull he ordered stuffed and mounted in memory of his interview with Nina.

In the last act, the two-year hiatus also sets the charac�ters' development in sharper highlight. Arkadina, Trigorin and the older generation have remained the same; Sorin's stasis has even been intensified by his illness. The only characters to have undergone change are the four young people. Nina and Masha have both compromised their fantasies, Masha by hanging about Treplyov even though she knows her love is hopeless, and Nina by persevering, though aware that stardom is out of her reach. Med- vedenko has become more subdued, less anxious to correct his wife; his insistent material worries have modulated into low-keyed domestic fretting. Treplyov has forgotten why he wants to write, although he persists at it. If Nina and Masha are about to turn into pallid versions of Arkadina and Polina, Medvedenko and Treplyov do not have the stamina to become even Shamrayev and Trigorin. The repetition of the monologue from Treplyov's play makes clear the distance travelled between Acts One and Four.

Another new form that Chekhov practised in The Seagull was an emblematic progression of locales. The first act is set in 'a portion of the park on Sorin's estate,' where the path to the lake is blocked off by Treplyov's platform stage. This particular region is remote from the main house, and Treplyov has chosen it as his private turf: the characters who come to make up his audience must enter his world of shadows and damp (Polina fears the Doctor will catch cold), and they spend only a brief time there, before returning to safe norms evoked by the strains of the piano drifting into the clearing. Treplyov wants his work of art to be seen as co-existent with nature, with the 'spellbinding lake,' as Dorn calls it; ironically, his man-made stage prevents people from walking to the lake which his mother identifies with 'laughter, noise, shooting, and one romance after another,' ordinary diversions Treplyov disdains. The most casual response to the lake comes from Trigorin who sees it simply as a place to fish.

Act Two moves to Arkadina's territory, a house with a large veranda. The lake can be seen now in the bright light of the sun, not the pallid rays of the moon; but the surrounding verdure is a 'croquet lawn'. Such lawns must be well-kempt, not unlike Arkadina herself, who 'keeps myself in trim, as the saying goes, and I'm always dressed and have my hair done in the latest style'. Notably, Treplyov is the only member of the family circle who does not go into the house during the act. It stands for

Arkadina's hold on life, and from its depths comes the call that keeps Trigorin on the estate.

The dining-room of Act Three brings us into the house; but it is a neutral space, used for solitary meals, changing the dressing on wounds, saying farewells. The act is organized as a series of tete-a-tetes which are all the more intense for taking place in a locale no one can call his own. The last act is a drawing-room which Treplyov has turned into a workroom; as the act opens, preparations are being made to convert it to a sickroom. The huddling together of the dying Sorin and the creatively moribund Treplyov implies that they are both Thomme qui a voulu' but who never got what he wanted: a wife and a literary career. Once again, Treplyov has tried to establish a space of his own, only to find it overrun by a bustling form of life that ejects him totally by the end. To have a moment alone with Nina, he must close the door to the dining-room and bar it with a chair; when he removes the impediment, the intruders establish a gameroom, and his private act of suicide must happen somewhere else, prefaced by the pathetic fear that 'Mama might be distressed'.

This final locale has a Maeterlinckian tinge, for there is a glass door, used only to admit Nina, who enters romanti�cally enswathed in a talma, an enveloping cloak, named after Napoleon's favourite actor. After days spent wander�ing around the lake, she employs an aperture no other character does, to come in from 'the garden' where 'it's dark . . . that stage . . . stands bare and unsightly, like a skeleton, and the scene curtain flaps in the wind'. Maeter�linck's dramas are full of mysterious windows and doors that act as entries into another world, beyond which invisible forces are to be intuited and uncanny figures glimpsed. Quoting Turgenev, Nina identifies herself as a homeless wanderer, seeking a haven.⁸ But what is 'warm

and cosy' to her is claustrophobic and stifling to Treplyov.

In fact, the whole estate acts as a cynosure for the characters' frustrations. Although it has been in Sorin's family for at least two generations - Arkadina recalls playing lotto there as a child, - it is no Turgenevian nest of gentry. None of the characters actually belongs there or feels at home: Arkadina would rather be in an hotel room learning lines; she loses her temper when her wish to go to town is thwarted. Sorin would like to be in an office, hearing street traffic and feels 'as stale as an old cigarette holder'; he sees his nephew going the same way and tries to pry loose some money for a trip abroad. Nina's are always flying visits, time snatched from her oppressed life else�where. Medvedenko is there on sufferance. Shamrayev the overseer is a retired military man with no skill as an agricultural manager. Only Trigorin is loath to depart, because, for him, the estate provides enforced idleness. The lake's enchantment can be felt as the spell of Sleeping Beauty's castle: everyone who sets foot there is suspended in time, frozen in place. Real life seems to go on somewhere else.

This symbolic use of environment is better integrated than the more obvious symbol of the seagull. In Ibsen's The Wild Duck, the title is of essential importance; all the leading characters are defined by their attitude to the bird, and it exists, unseen, only as they recreate it in their imaginations. The seagull, however, signifies only to three characters: Treplyov who defines it as a symbol, Trigorin who reshapes its symbolic meaning, and Nina who adopts and eventually rejects the symbolism. For Treplyov, it is a means of turning life into art: feeling despised and rejected he shoots the bird as a surrogate martyr, and when the surrogate is in turn rejected, tries to shoot himself. Nina, in Act One, had felt 'lured to the lake like a gull,' but repudiates Treplyov's use of bird imagery for his self- identification. However, when her idol Trigorin spins his yarn about a girl who lives beside a lake, happy and free as a gull, she avidly adopts the persona, even though his notion of her freedom is wholly inaccurate. The story turns out to be false, for the man who ruined the bird is not the one who ruins the girl. Nor is Nina ruined in any real sense. She starts to sign her letters to Treplyov 'The Seagull,' which he associates with the mad miller in Pushkin's dramatic poem, 'The Rusalka'. The miller's daughter had been 'ruined' by a prince and drowned herself, leaving her father to run mad and think himself a crow. Both Treplyov and Trigorin thus endeavour to recast Nina as a character in fiction. But when, in the last act, she rejects the sobriquet - 'I'm a seagull. No, not so,' - she is spurning both Treplyov's martyr-bird and Trigorin's novelettish heroine. She sur�vives, if only in an anti-romantic, workaday world.

The varying interpretations to which the seagull is subjected indicate the solipsism in which each character's dream clashes with the others'. A significant speech in the last act has been overlooked because, typically, it seems to be an irrelevance. Dr. Dorn is asked which city he most enjoyed in Europe and he replies 'Genoa,' on account of

The marvellous crowds in the street there. When even�ing comes and you leave your hotel, the whole street is teeming with people. Then you drift aimlessly into the crowd zigzagging this way and that, you live with its rhythm, you merge with it psychically and you begin to believe that in fact there may be a universal soul, much like the one that Nina Zarechnaya acted in your play once.

Dorn's description presages W. B. Yeats' 1932 poem

2. Meyerhold's production of The Proposal in 33 Swoons, Moscow, 1935. Igor llyinsky as Lomov and Logina as Natasha.

Michael Chekhov, the dramatist's nephew, in A Tragedian in Spite of Himself, Majestic Theatre, New York, 1935.

Simov's setting for acts One and Two of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre, 1898.

5. The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre, 1898. End of Act Three: Stanislavsky as Trigorin (second from left), Olga Knipper as Arkadina (seated), Vishnevsky as Dorn (far right), Artyom as Shamraev (kneeling).

6. Stephen Haggard as Treplyov and Peggy Ashcroft as Nina in Komisarjevsky's production of The Seagull, New Theatre, London, 1936.

Josef Svoboda's design for The Seagull, directed by Otomar Krejca at the Narodni Divadlo, Prague, 1960.

Retsuke Sugamote as Nina in the first act of The Seagull, directed by Andrei Serban for the Shiki Theatre Company, Tokyo, 1980.

9. The final curtain of Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre, 1900. Mariya Lilina as Sonya (left) and Vishnevsky as Vanya.

10. Sybil Thorndike as Marina and Laurence Olivier as Astrov in Uncle Vanya at the National Theatre, London, 1962.

11. Michel St-Denis' Three Sisters at the Queen's Theatre, London. From left to right: Frederick Lloyd (Chebutykin), Michael Redgrave (Tusenbach), Peggy Ashcroft (Irina), John Gielgud (Vershinin), Leon Quartermaine (Kulygin).

12. Design for the Three Sisters at the Gorki Art Theatre, Moscow, 1940.