The Plays of Anton Chekhov Read online

  Against such an array of unseeing commentators I have space for only one rebuttal. In the best, most illuminating essay on Chekhov’s fiction, ‘Reality in Chekhov’s Stories’, Eudora Welty said, simply and sanely, that ‘Chekhov wrote of sex with honesty and lack of fuss as he wrote of all human experience ... Much ahead of its time, and perhaps of ours, in “The Duel” he treated with candour and seriousness a young woman of compelling sexuality. “The Lady with the Little Dog” is a compassionate study of a cynical middle-aged man surprised when, almost against his will and against his belief, his sexual worldliness turns into the honesty and difficulty of belated love.’

  In October 1895, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin that he was working on a new long play, his first for several years. Among other things, he continued, the play had the usual ‘four acts, a landscape ... much conversation about literature, little action, and five tons of love.’ Chekhov actually wrote puds, a pud being a unit of about thirty-six pounds. At the end of Act One a major character will exclaim, ‘You’re all so highly strung ... And such a lot of love ...’

  The Seagull does indeed contain two or three puds of love, if not five — how does one measure such things? — and much talk not only about literature but also about plays and playwrights, art and artists. Love and art, art and love — Chekhov weaves back and forth between these categories of experience and aspiration.

  The most ardent lovers in this play of romantic cross-hatchings are the most infected by the practice, or dream, of art — the actresses Nina and Arkadina, the writers Trigorin and Treplyov — and the play they’re in is in a sense a drama of selves seeking, or failing, to reconcile the various modes of living.

  Chekhov once wrote that ‘Nina’s part is everything in the play.’ The first of Chekhov’s heroes of what I call existential sobriety, a person who neither begs for the impossible nor abjectly surrenders to what seems inevitable, but courageously lives through whatever life demands of her, at the same time as it grants her — if she’ll seize them — the virtues she needs to survive, to go on: clear understanding, courage, humility, stamina. Sonya in Uncle Vanya, all three Prozorov sisters, and Anya, Varya and Mme Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard will follow in Nina’s footsteps.

  Against her balanced and hard-earned self-knowledge, her integrity, Chekhov puts Treplyov’s immaturity, romanticism and moral weakness. The climactic scene, Nina’s unavailing visit to Treplyov, takes its place among the great moments of Chekhovian theatre, and is a workshop in his techniques. I have space for one central example: after Nina says, ‘You’re a writer, I’m an actress,’ she adds, ‘I loved you, I dreamed of being famous, but now?’ She breaks off and tells him some details of her physical life since she left him, which we know has been bitterly painful. Treplyov’s fateful response is to ignore her words and burst out with ‘life has been unbearable for me’ and ‘I call you, I kiss the ground on which you’ve walked ...’ To this Nina (‘bewildered’) asks, ‘Why is he talking like this?’ and repeats the words, which, we quickly see by her use of the impersonal ‘he’, are not a question but a complex recognition: that Treplyov doesn’t so much love as desperately need her, that his emotional immaturity extends to his would-be artist’s self; his writing is lifeless because in some deep dimension he himself lacks animation, life. Before leaving, Nina tells Treplyov what she has learned about being an artist: ‘I know now, I understand ... the most important thing isn’t fame or glory or anything I used to dream about — but the ability to endure. To know how to bear your cross and have faith ... when I think about my vocation I’m not afraid of life.’

  Treplyov, who lacks a true vocation, is afraid, and his shooting himself is an extreme demonstration of his inability to persevere. A measure of Chekhov’s artistic growth is the difference between the suicides with which both Ivanov and The Seagull end. Nikolay’s shooting himself is inorganic and arbitrary, issuing from the stock of melodramatic actions and situations with which Chekhov was familiar. Treplyov’s suicide comes from the heart of the play’s vision, which itself is seized from actuality in order to be dramatized.

  Perhaps the shrewdest comment on the play and its ending was made by someone outside the theatre and academic life. After praising the work, the well-known jurist Anatoly Koni wrote to Chekhov:

  ‘How good the ending is. It is not she, the seagull [who] commits suicide (which a run-of-the-mill playwright, out for his audience’s tears, would be sure to have done) but the young man who lives in an abstract future and has no idea of ... what goes on around him.’

  In the ‘puds of love’ letter to Suvorin Chekhov wrote: ‘I can’t say I’m not enjoying writing [the play], though [it would have been more accurate if he’d said ‘because’] I’m flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage ...’

  In his important book Chekhov the Dramatist David Magarshack argues that the turning-point in Chekhov’s dramaturgy came with The Seagull, when he moved from writing plays of ‘direct’ action — one of the stage’s basic tenets — to ones of ‘indirect’. Magarshack’s theory is too complex and detailed to deal with thoroughly here, but his main point is central to our grasp of Chekhov. Action, especially physical action to the point of violence, had always been at the centre of dramatic practice; language, dialogue primarily, must defer to a play’s physical events, or what makes up most of what we call ‘plot’. Magarshack implied that plot, bound to or embedded in physical action, was a source of melodrama, which may be defined as drama without ‘consciousness’. In turn consciousness can be described as both the recording instrument of our sentient life and the substance of what has been recorded.

  The Chekhov scholar Ronald Hingley once made a most astute observation about Chekhov’s fiction, which I think it permissible to apply to the plays too: ‘The more complex the plot of a Chekhov story, the less artistically successful it’s likely to be.’

  Why this should be so is a complicated matter. Plot — the twists and turns of the drama’s tale, its suspensefulness and surprises, its outcome, its very body or physicality — tends to crowd out consciousness, leaving less room for awareness, insight, perception, contemplation — the basic instruments of our experience of art. Had Chekhov not moved offstage the key elements of Nina’s story — her disastrous affair with Trigorin, his abuse of her and desertion, the child she bears who dies young, and her life’s effect on her art — Chekhov’s play, bursting with intellectual vitality, full of fascinating moral and spiritual dilemmas, would almost certainly have turned into a cautionary tale (talented young girls oughtn’t to trust lecherous older writers), or else a spicy love story with twists, but in any case, a melodrama.

  WORK

  Many, if not most, of the major characters in Chekhov’s plays look for salvation, rescue, through love, and learn, to their sorrow, that love isn’t the answer; neither is work, to which they most often turn next. The supreme portrayer of what life is really like, the incorruptible artist of the way things are - Beckett’s non-contingent Comment c’est — Chekhov never allows wishfulness to block out actuality and cannot be tempted away (by audiences’ or readers’ or critics’ shallow or naive yearnings) from what he sees as a writer. Love, sex and marriage are most often grave, painful and difficult in life, and so, too, they are in his writings.

  Chekhov, the realist, knows, too, that work is more often dull or painful than fulfilling; something to notice is that women work hardest in the plays (Sonya in Uncle Vanya, Olga in Three Sisters, Varya in The Cherry Orchard) and men talk about it most often, most abstractly and most romantically: Vershinin and Tuzenbakh, and belatedly Andrey Prozorov, in Three Sisters, and Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard.

  ‘White, wan, slender, and very beautiful in the moonlight, she was expecting tenderness; her constant dreams of happiness and love had exhausted her.’

  — CHEKHOV, ‘A Visit’

  Irina, the youngest Prozorov sister, is doubly afflicted: she dreams constantly of love, and of work too — until her romantic desire runs up against
the hardness of fact, and, after having had at least two jobs, she bitterly deplores their lack of ‘poetry’. Meanwhile Olga works hard at her school, and is worn out by her diligence.

  The cry ‘Work! for we must work!’ is heard throughout the last plays. In almost every case the character is speaking out of desperation, not conviction; to claim that the orchard is being lost because the family’s ancestors scorned work is both silly and false.

  In a masterstroke of Chekhov’s artistry in Three Sisters, he has Irina accept Tuzenbakh, whom she doesn’t love but admires; she then suffers his loss when he is killed in a duel. Chekhov’s genius lies in his avoiding the temptations the situation throws out, and which a lesser playwright would have snatched. Such a dramatist would doubtless have portrayed Irina and Tuzenbakh as passionately in love, so that Irina’s loss would appear more wrenching. That Chekhov conceived Irina as having matured enough to accept a loveless marriage, after giving up her idle dreams of a lover-to-come in Moscow, the site of potential happiness for Olga and Masha, also makes Tuzenbakh’s death all the more poignant.

  One of the most heartrending moments in drama is Tuzenbakh and Irina’s farewell. In less gifted hands it surely would have been sentimental, even maudlin; in Chekhov it’s stringent with the truest feeling. The baron is going off to the duel, which we and all the characters sense will be fatal. As he makes ready to go, they stand irresolute, struggling for words. Finally, he speaks lyrically about the vagaries of life, and notices a dead tree that still sways with the others. So, too, he would still be ‘taking part in life’, even after his death. She suddenly says, ‘I’ll come with you’, alarming Tuzenbakh into flight.

  Then in one of the most piteous speeches in all drama, he turns round and says, ‘I didn’t have any coffee this morning. Will you ask them to make me some . . .’

  The simplicity and matter-of-factness of this utterance, in the face of all the horror we know will come, is exactly what gives the words their extraordinary power to move us. Chekhov takes one more step to ensure that nothing banal or bathetic will occur: he moves the duel so far offstage that the fatal shot can barely be heard.

  The play’s other affecting — and necessarily ill-fated — love story is Masha and Vershinin’s. Chekhov lets their romance develop slowly and rather quietly, with only a few amorous declarations on each side. Their leave-taking is even quieter, with Vershinin simply slipping away after Olga assures him she’ll look after Masha and, a lovely note, Vershinin’s family too.

  Uncle Vanya, the play that followed The Seagull, has received the widest range of critical interpretations of all Chekhov’s plays. But among the multiplicity of readings, many containing bits of truth, but none entirely satisfying, we can be certain of one thing: the play is NOT a drama about weak, helpless people, ‘losers’ in our current jargon. David Magarshack’s assertion in his pioneering study that Uncle Vanya’s principal theme ’is not frustration, but courage and hope’ may have overstated the case, but was closer to the truth than all those views of the play as a study of failure, wasted or ruined lives, a picture of disappointment and despair.

  Vanya Voynitsky and Dr Astrov are usually considered the heroes of this play, Prof. Serebryakov the villain. Stanislavsky went so far as to proclaim that ‘talented people like Vanya ... and Astrov rot away in dark corners’ while Serebryakov ‘is shown up as a fraud.’

  No such exposure occurs. Vanya labels him a fake but, unpleasant and self-centred as he is, Serebryakov is not shown to be fraudulent. Similarly, while Astrov may have some talent (he does have considerable charm), Vanya, for all his protestations of having been cheated out of his potential greatness by Serebryakov — ‘I might have been a Schopenhauer, a Dostoyevsky’ (he names, significantly, a pair of most gloomy giants!), seems entirely talentless, an injustice-collector who seizes on Serebryakov as an excuse for his own emptiness.

  The play’s neglected heroes are its women, Yelena and Sonya. Yelena, with whom both Vanya and Astrov are smitten, is thoroughly misunderstood both by her would-be lovers and by critics like Eric Bentley, ordinarily so sagacious, but as wrong as possible when he calls her ‘artificial, sterile, useless’.

  Yelena does complain about being bored and having nothing to do, but this is, I believe, as so often in Chekhov’s plays, a defence against revealing deeper or more dangerous feelings and conditions: how uncomfortable she feels in this house, how unhappy she is in her marriage, how insulted by Vanya’s and Astrov’s amorous importunities.

  After the play appeared, an amateur actress named Marianna Pobedimskaya wrote to Chekhov asking if Yelena was ‘an intelligent woman ... thinking and decent ... or is she an apathetic, idle ... incapable of thinking or loving? I cannot reconcile myself to [this latter view] ... I see her as a reasoning, thinking person ... made unhappy ... by dissatisfaction with her present life.’ Chekhov replied, ‘Your opinion of Yelena . . . is completely justified.’ Actually, Yelena, the victim of male chauvinism, has a sharp wit, a fine sensitivity and a generous spirit. One of Chekhov’s central perceptions is that her decision to stay true to her vows by remaining with her tiresome husband wouldn’t be approved of or understood by her fellow characters or the world at large.

  As is so often true in these plays, the unmistakable focus of Uncle Vanya’s moral and spiritual life is a woman, Sonya. Before looking at her position I need to say something about what I believe to be Uncle Vanya’s origin.

  In a story of 1887, ‘The Enemies’, Chekhov wrote of the ‘subtle, elusive beauty of human grief, a beauty which would not be understood ... for a long time ... Kirilov and his wife [whose small son has just died] were silent; they were not crying. It was as if they were conscious of the lyricism, as well as the burden, of their loss.’

  The heaviness and simultaneous beauty of loss or sorrow suffuse Chekhov’s last three plays, most pointedly in Uncle Vanya, where it presents itself with artistic splendour in Sonya, another figure of existential or ontological sobriety. It should be noticed that from the moment she learns that Astrov doesn’t love her she never speaks of love again, never gives the slightest sign of her inward suffering. This isn’t simple stoicism, but a mark of her self-control and generosity of spirit: she’ll trouble no one with her sorrow.

  The play’s final moments rank among Chekhov’s most memorable. In one production I saw, Sonya cradles Vanya’s head in a Pietà-like tableau as she delivers her great last speech. Her words are rightly felt as a prayerful utterance, but I think it a mistake to interpret them as formally religious. Instead, they constitute a kind of spiritual music, the lyricism of grief; what makes up grief’s burden is painfully obvious. Magarshack’s optimistic reading is, I think, based squarely on Sonya’s compassion, her honesty, and her generous heart; she suffers more than any other character, but accepts her joyless future and sustains her poor sad Uncle Vanya as she goes.

  TIME

  The inherent problem Chekhov faced in Three Sisters was, I think, how to write a drama about time, not simply taking place in time — all plays do that — but about how we exist in and with it as though it were a place and a being. Beckett’s ‘double-headed monster of damnation and salvation’, the cradle and ground of all we do, home of our myths, imaginings and actualities. Time as place, place as time, Proustian, Einsteinian, a pact among the tenses, the scene of an appointment for which we’re always too early or too late.

  Odd as it may sound, Three Sisters may be described as a ‘replica of time’: how it feels to live in it, play with it, spend it, waste it, ‘kill’ it, trisect it into past, present and future. It is, paradoxically enough, a plotless play with many subplots: the only ’story’ we can pluck from it is a negative one — the sisters’ failure to get to Moscow. In that regard the writer William Gerhardi wrote in the 1920s a piece of fatally obtuse criticism, a tiny primer for misunderstanding Three Sisters and Chekhov: ‘Good God! How can there be such people? Why can’t people know what they want and get it?’ Which is rather like asking, about Hamlet, ‘What’
s wrong with that fellow? Why can’t he make up his mind?’ or saying about Lear, ‘What that chap needs is a sharp estate planner.’ Gerhardi’s breathtaking insensitivity, his plain dumbness, would, I think, have driven Chekhov, that model of patience, to despair.

  Well, why don’t the sisters get to Moscow? The simple answer is that they don’t get to Moscow because the play they’re in is about not getting there. Just as Godot doesn’t arrive in Beckett’s drama, so Moscow isn’t attained in Chekhov’s. Waiting for Godot’s original French title was En attendant Godot, or While Waiting for Godot; Beckett himself unfortunately, and unaccountably, left out the En in his English translation, thereby considerably reducing the play’s complexity from its densely ontological original form — characters like Didi and Gogo, our surrogates, it can be said, are the ones for whom Godot doesn’t come — and we are shown how they fill up the time while waiting, ad-libbing for their very lives. In much the same way the Prozorov sisters, who also represent us, are the ones who don’t get to Moscow, and we are shown how they live until their illusory dreams of salvation in Moscow are ended, which is the end of the play. If there is a villain in Three Sisters it is surely Natasha, who steadily ousts the family from their home. She’ll be living there with her cowed husband (and maybe that lovely, unseen fellow Protopopov) when the sisters leave. Incidentally, a very inept critic of the period was named Protopopov.