Plays
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
GLOSSARY
Ivanov - A Drama in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
The Seagull - A Comedy in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
Uncle Vanya - Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
Three Sisters - A Drama in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
The Cherry Orchard - A Comedy in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
NOTES
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CLASSICS
PLAYS
ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1887 his first full-length play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, practising medicine and writing many of his best stories, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote his best-known plays in the last years of his life; in 1898 Stanislavsky produced The Seagull at his newly founded Moscow Art Theatre, and it was for him that Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya (1900), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903). In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, one of the Art Theatre’s leading actresses. He died of consumption in 1904.
PETER CARSON learned Russian during National Service in the Navy at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Crail and London, and at home — his mother’s family left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. His working life has been spent on the editorial side of London publishing.
RICHARD GILMAN is Professor Emeritus of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at Yale University’s School of Drama. He has been drama critic for Newsweek, Commonweal and the Nation and was a contributing editor of Partisan Review for many years. His latest book is Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity.
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First published 2002
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INTRODUCTION
‘Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the fundamental qualities of every true talent.’
— CHEKHOV
In September of 1900 Anton Chekhov wrote from Yalta, a fading but still rather fashionable Black Sea health resort, to his sister Maria in Moscow that ‘I find it very difficult to write ... Three Sisters, much more difficult than any other of my plays.’ A little later he wrote to his actress-wife Olga Knipper, for whom he had intended the important role of Masha, the middle sister, that ‘it looks at me gloomily ... and I think about it gloomily’, and in another letter told her ‘there are a great many characters, it’s crowded, I’m afraid it will turn out obscure or pale.’ Even after he’d finished he continued to fret, telling a friend it was ‘dull, verbose and awkward’.
Three Sisters is none of those things; quite the contrary. One of the greatest dramas in any language since Shakespeare, the play is animated, often exhilarating, funny and deeply sad by turns, but never dull; far from being verbose and awkward, it’s a masterpiece of verbal economy and dramaturgical grace. (If you need any more testimony to Chekhov’s courage and mental strength remember that he wrote this play and another almost equally splendid work — The Cherry Orchard - while suffering through the last agonizing stages of the tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’, as it was called then) which would soon kill him; besides his lungs, the disease had attacked his spinal cord and intestines. A doctor himself, he strangely refused for years to acknowledge the severity, or even at first the existence, of his illness, at times using his literary gifts to disguise, or moderate, the truth; for example, he once described the sight of blood pouring from his mouth during a haemorrhage as resembling ‘the glow of a distant fire’.)
Olga Knipper, the daughter of a cultivated German-Russian family, had met Chekhov in 1899, when he was already a celebrated writer — of short fiction mostly; his first full-length plays were still making their way into public consciousness — and she was a promising young actress at the theatre with which he would soon become indelibly associated, the recently established Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). They fell in love and quietly married in 1901, but were mostly kept apart by Chekhov’s doctors’ insistence that, for his health, he must live in Yalta, which he bitterly called his ‘warm Siberia’. He wanted Olga to continue her career, though she was more than prepared to abandon it, to help nurse him or simply be with him. They built their relationship through occasional meetings, but even more, perhaps, through their many letters, filled with vivid expressions of love, longing, sorrow, frustration, a saving humour, and some equally saving, not wholly serious, quarrels.
Chekhov died in 1904in a German spa where Olga had taken him, looking for a cure. He was forty-four. She, eight years younger, would outlive him by an astounding fifty-five years, her career launched and sustained by central roles in his plays, but not confined to them. She died in 1959, having never remarried. (It’s worth noting that Maria, Chekhov’s sister, who for years ran the Yalta house, first as their residence and then, after his death, as a Chekhov museum, also lived to a grand old age, dying at ninety-three in 1957.)
‘When someone spends the fewest number of motions on a given action, that is grace.’
— CHEKHOV
The difficulty Chekhov experienced with Three Sisters was unusual: although he had occasionally proclaimed his unfitness for playwriting, even vowing once or twice to abandon it, this doubtless came largely from anger at what he called the ‘conventions’ of t
he theatre, as well as from a modesty which Nathalie Sarraute, the brilliant Russian-French novelist, would later describe as ‘fierce’. He was ordinarily a sure-handed, confident dramatist; it was his fiction that sometimes bedevilled him, he once said.
Whatever the truth of this, nothing seems to have given him as much trouble as Three Sisters, for a good reason: it was inherently the most difficult artistic enterprise he had attempted, something whose full radical nature he would discover — to his surprise, I think — as the writing progressed.
His artistic task, as he saw it, or at least as we see it now, was to create drama and fiction out of seemingly unpromising materials. A generation or so later Samuel Beckett (with whose work Chekhov’s has many affinities) would confront much the same aesthetic task, and assert that he dealt with ‘a whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as unusable’, conditions like ‘ignorance and impotence’, to which it makes sense to add failure, weakness, apathy, and boredom, previously ‘unusable’ conditions which Chekhov put to remarkable dramatic use.
’It’s only fools and charlatans who know everything and understand everything.’
— CHEKHOV
Almost certainly beyond his full, conscious awareness, Chekhov had for years been creating a new sort of drama. His way of working was painterly: make a starting stroke here, a counterstroke, a thematic strain, perhaps through a relationship between angles and curves, a countertheme, a little blurring, a revelation through juxtapositions, an enigma through loppings-off: the literary equivalents of visual puzzles, bits of emptiness, colours interrogating each other, shapes vying for room.
Chekhov’s most daring departure from the conventions of dramaturgical creation was to abandon, as much as possible, the usual linear movement of a play — from a starting-point to exposition and ‘development’ (which usually meant the ’thickening’ of a plot) to a denouement (a climax, the resolution of the play’s struggle or dilemma); instead he worked toward the filling in of a dramatic field, an artistic space. This new dramaturgical construction, which began with Ivanov and culminated in Three Sisters, necessarily affected some of the most solidly rooted traditional elements and procedures of drama: all that had been accepted as its very constituents, and sanctified by centuries of theatrical pieties.
Chekhov as a subversive playwright? A revolutionary? Yes, we have to think of him in that way, in the face of popular and scholarly opinion having fixed him as the charming, conventionally realistic poet of the normal, the domestic and small; the dramatist of ‘real’, and unusually melancholy, life.
No contemporary playwright has been more widely misinterpreted; none has been more often wrongly directed and performed. The locus classicus of this was the MAT’s production of The Cherry Orchard, which Stanislavsky directed as a heavy, lugubrious near-tragedy, when Chekhov had taken pains to call it a ‘comedy’. Chekhov’s categorizing of his own plays is important to keep in mind as we read them. He called Ivanov and Three Sisters dramas, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard comedies, and Uncle Vanya, with extreme flatness, ‘Scenes from Country Life’. Obviously that last subtitle, together with the designations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as comedies — when we have been used to regarding them as basically sorrowful works — will engage our attention in the coming pages.
The intention with which Chekhov used subtitles went far beyond conventional practice. In calling The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard ‘comedies’ he intended something radically different from our usual meanings; the plays are comedies in the sense of Dante’s La Divina Commedia and Balzac’s ironic secular alternative, La Comédie humaine. Neither of these great works is ‘funny’, full of laughs; in their different ways they are deeply serious, providing us with comedy’s truest actions: to liberate, to relieve, to heal. Treplyov’s suicide in The Seagull, and the loss of the family estate in The Cherry Orchard, we might reflexively think, are endings which forbid the use of ‘comedy’ as ascriptions. But keep in mind that, as we’ll see, Chekhov counterbalances Treplyov’s death with Nina’s exemplary new understanding of the key to productive life. With this in mind we can grasp the play as a comedy in Dante’s sense: hope is kept alive, salvation is possible. In The Cherry Orchard something similar happens: Anya’s maturing wisdom leads the play to an unexpected, potentially ‘happy’ ending. We shall consider both plays at greater length later on.
Chekhov used his subtitles partly as warnings to readers or audiences or performers or directors not to be trapped by misleading labels, or accurate ones, for that matter. The point he made in Ivanov was that labels and tags could be instruments of tyranny; someone expecting a ‘serious’ drama, upon opening his or her playbill, or programme, for The Seagull, or the text itself, and seeing the subtitle ‘A Comedy’ would have to make some mental adjustments as the play went on to its surely unfunny climax. These adjustments were just what Chekhov wanted from his hypothetical reader or spectator: becoming open to new theatrical experiences, stepping past frozen categories, accepting newness.
‘Scenes from Country Life’ suggests a pastoral idyll; but of course Uncle Vanya is anything but. Why Chekhov decided on that subtitle has, I think, much to do with his sense of the play’s being so delicately poised between laughter and tears that the subtitle needed an especially exquisite neutrality to keep the work from toppling over for its audiences or readers into either of Chekhov’s main characterizations: drama or comedy. The term ‘tragicomic’ wasn’t in existence in Russia yet, nor would it have been entirely accurate.
‘Drama should present not new stories, but new relationships.’
— FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
The European theatre and the Russian stage in particular were at low ebbs in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Chekhov began writing plays. The stock fare in almost every cultural centre (including Moscow in the 1880s when Chekhov was studying and then practising medicine) were bedroom farces; formulaic, often violent melodramas; light romantic comedies (the whole repertoire mostly translations from the French or based on French models); vaudevilles; and, very occasionally, productions of classics — the Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Racine and Corneille. Here and there in Europe new genius (or at least major talent) had shown itself: Ibsen and Strindberg in Scandinavia, both of whom Chekhov read in translation and admired; Hauptmann in Germany; Zola — primarily a novelist, however — in France; Wilde and Shaw in Britain; Maurice Maeterlinck (with whose aesthetic ideas Chekhov largely agreed) in Belgium; but none gave rise to any movements of consequence or any significant successors. Acting was everywhere florid, declamatory; directing as an art was in its crude infancy; ensemble playing was barely known; costume and stage design were at worst flamboyant, at best uninspired.
‘We must get the theatre out of the hands of the grocers and into literary hands . . .’
— CHEKHOV
With its roots in religious and folk ritual the theatre in Russia had developed much later than in Western Europe. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anything appear that could be called a truly Russian theatre, with native actors, directors, designers and dramatists, instead of French, Italian or German practitioners, as in earlier days. Even so, of the two truly gifted Russian dramatists before Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, the former wrote only one full-length play — Boris Godunov — and was far more influential as a poet and patriot who incarnated the ‘national spirit’, while Gogol, who also wrote only one full-length play, The Government Inspector, was probably most influential as a satiric fantasist in fiction. Moreover, from its beginnings the Russian theatre was closely associated with the state and thus the court, one consequence being a heavy-handed censorship, something Chekhov continually railed against.
Gogol exerted a strong influence on him, perhaps by his ideas and judgements as much as his formal dramas. Chekhov surely must have read Gogol’s famous 1836 denunciation of theatre in Russia during the early nineteenth century and beyond. After deploring the stage’s corru
ption by ‘the monster ... melodrama’, Gogol went on to ask ‘where is our life, ourselves with our own idiosyncrasies and traits?’ (These are almost the same words with which Shaw would praise Ibsen a half century later: ‘He gave us ourselves in our own situations.’) ‘The melodrama is lying most impudently,’ Gogol went on. ‘Only a great, rare, deep genius can catch what surrounds us daily, what always accompanies us, what is ordinary — while mediocrity grabs with both hands all that is out of rule, what happens only seldom and catches the eye by its ugliness and disharmony ... The strange has become the subject-matter of our drama. The whole point is to tell a new, strange, unheard-of incident: murder, fire, wild passions ... poisons. Effects, eternal effects!’
Chekhov would prove to be Gogol’s rare, deep genius, although it took a while.
In the summer of 1923 the manuscript of an untitled, previously unknown Chekhov play was found in an old desk in Moscow. It was soon published as A Play Without a Title in Four Acts, but wasn’t produced until 1954, when a truncated version in Swedish appeared in Stockholm under the title Poor Don Juan. Chekhov probably wrote it in 1881 or 1882, which would make it his first full-length play (although rumours persist of earlier high-school epics). Chekhov had shown the manuscript to the prestigious Maly Theatre, which rightly rejected it, for it was an amateurish, if ambitious, piece of work, which was so long that, as far as I know, no complete production has ever been done. Badly or incompletely rendered into English in a number of versions, the play did receive one full workmanlike translation by David Magarshack, who called it Platonov, after its central character, a good-looking, womanizing, self-important, quarrelsome yet charming former landowner. Still, nobody has rushed to stage this prehistoric monster.