ANTON CHEKHOV
Since Anton Chekhov is the gentlest, the subtlest, and the most dispassionate of all the great modern dramatists, it is open to argument whether he properly belongs in this discussion at all. I believe that his title as a rebel playwright can be effectually — if only partially — established; even this, however, remains to be proved. Certainly, the surface of Chekhov’s art is not promising evidence of his rebellious inclinations. A seemingly arbitrary arrangement of landscape, character details, aimless dialogue, silences, shifting rhythms, and poetic mood, this surface constitutes the most convincing attempt at dramatic verisimilitude in the entire modern theatre; and rather than being ruffled by the energies of dissent, it strikes many observers as singularly smooth and placid. On the other hand, the Chekhovian surface is deceptive, and for all its thickness and texture, it is not impenetrable. Beneath lie depths of theatricality, moral fervor, and revolt; and between the surface and this substratum there is a constant ironic tension. This does not mean, however, that the Chekhovian surface can be ignored; it is much too essential to the wholeness and harmony of his art to be considered a mere subterfuge. In seeking to understand Chekhov’s inner motives and intentions, we must be careful not to slight his more obvious aesthetic achievements; in trying to unearth the sources of his revolt, we must dig gently lest we unsettle that delicate balance where reality and rebellion coexist in perfect poise and equilibrium.
For Chekhov’s revolt takes an entirely different form than anything we have yet considered. It is revolt by indirection — muted, objectified, dispassionate. Ibsen and Strindberg, both nourished on a revolutionary Romanticism, were occupied with the friction between their personal rebelliousness and the opposing forces of the social, religious, and metaphysical reality. But Chekhov, excluding personal affirmations entirely, is totally uninterested in an even indirectly autobiographical art. As well as being the most modest and unassuming of men (“Forgive me,” he begs Suvorin in a characteristic tone, “for forcing my personality on you”), Chekhov is the most impersonal of playwrights. And rather than quarreling with the reality principle, he is content to make reality the sum and substance of his art. Thus, Chekhov uses the drama neither as a vehicle for individualistic self-realization (Ibsen) nor as a means of exorcistic self-expression (Strindberg) but rather as a form for depicting that fluid world beyond the self, with the author functioning only as an impartial witness.
This sounds like Naturalism, and, indeed, Chekhov (in the early part of his career at least) usually defines his aims according to Naturalistic principles. “Literature is called artistic,” he writes in 1887, “when it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is absolute and honest truth.” Elsewhere, he declares that the writer must be “as objective as a chemist,” renouncing “every subjective attitude” in recapturing the quality of “life as it is.” In his resistance to subjective Romanticism, Chekhov goes even further. He asserts that fictional characters must have an existence completely independent of an author’s personal judgments and opinions. As he writes in 1888:
The artist should not be a judge of his characters or of what they say, but only an objective observer. I heard a confused, indecisive talk by two Russians on pessimism and so must convey this conversation in the same form in which I heard it, but it is up to the jury, i.e., the readers, to give it an evaluation. My job is only to be talented, i.e., to be able to throw light upon some figures and speak their language.
The job of being talented, then, consists in being an ideal eavesdropper — a neutral court reporter who communicates facts to a “jury” without distortion or comment: “Let the jury pass judgment on them,” he adds, two years later, “it is my business solely to show them as they are.” This is the language of the literary scientist (Strindberg and Ibsen each made similar scientific claims in the course of their careers), and Chekhov certainly earns his right to consider himself a scientific writer. Whatever modifications occur in his aesthetic creed, he never abandons his selfless devotion to the natural nor his commitment to “absolute and honest truth.”
Yet, Chekhov is not really a Naturalist at all. Despite his detachment — despite his extraordinary capacity for imitating reality — he cannot entirely suppress his personal attitudes or refrain from judging his characters. His plays reflect both his sympathy for human suffering and his outrage at human absurdity, alternating between moods of wistful pathos and flashes of ironic humor which disqualify them from being mere slices of life. For if Chekhov is a detached realist, permitting life to proceed according to its own rules, he is also an engaged moralist, arranging reality in a particular way in order to evoke some comment on it: “When I write,” he affirms in 1890, “I count upon my reader fully, assuming that he himself will add the subjective elements that are lacking in the telling.” Chekhov the moralist hovers in the depths of his plays, expressing himself through a hidden action which sometimes breaks into melodrama and a satiric attack which sometimes bursts into farce. But however subterranean he may be, the moralist is always dictating character, action, and theme, while the realist is reworking these so as to exclude whatever seems mannered, subjective, or unnaturally theatrical. As David Magarshack has correctly observed, even Chekhov’s Naturalist aesthetic changes later in his career, for his concern with “life as it is” is eventually modified by his growing conviction that “life as it is” is life as it should not be.1
This conviction, as we shall see later, is the basis for Chekhov’s revolt. But before examining the particulars of this revolt, it might be wise to investigate wherein Chekhov differs from the rebel tradition, as represented by Ibsen and Strindberg. For it is largely Chekhov’s resistance to the Romantic drama that determines the unique form of his own, and that gives his own rebellion its special poignancy and originality.
It is clear, first of all, that Chekhov’s antipathy to subjective rebellion strongly affects his attitudes towards dramatic form. Ibsen and Strindberg, occupied with finding new postures by which to dramatize their changing relations to the outside world, are both singular for their formal experimentation. But Chekhov’s forms are fixed. Shunning self-dramatization, he seems more concerned with refining an unchanging vision of objective reality — generally embodied in the same class of characters, the same kind of plot, and the same homogeneous structure; the four-act realistic play. Magarshack distinguishes Chekhov’s work into “direct action” plays (Platonov, Ivanov, The Wood Demon) and “indirect action” plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard), but although this distinction is extremely valuable in suggesting how Chekhov made his conflicts more and more recessive, it indicates a refinement of technique rather than a radical revision of form. As a matter of fact, Chekhov’s first and last full-length plays show more formal consistency than any two successive works of Ibsen or Strindberg: his tools get sharper, but his materials remain essentially the same. In trying to weave a convincing illusion of reality, Chekhov applies his technical resources to the ruthless excision of the false and the melodramatic rather than to the discovery of new modes of dramatic art. After writing The Cherry Orchard, he boasts — significantly — not that the play is a formal breakthrough but that there is “not a single pistol shot in it.”
Though it is dangerous to seek his opinions in his work, it is possible that Chekhov’s attitudes towards formal experimentation are expressed in The Seagull — a play which deals, to a large extent, with the function of the creative artist. In the dream play of Treplev — a budding Symbolist playwright who travels “a picturesque route without a definite goal” — Chekhov may be satirizing the fashionable experiments of the Maeterlinckian avant-garde who “depict life not as it is, and not as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams.” This, at least, is Treplev’s artistic credo, and one of the purposes of the play is to bring him to some realization of the vanity of his experiments: “I come more and more to realize that it is not a question of new and old forms, but that what matters is that a man should write without thinking of forms at all, write because it springs freely from his soul.” We may safely assume that Chekhov approached the drama this way: trusting that by expressing his vision honestly, the proper form would evolve of itself. Technically, of course, such an approach created tremendous problems. For the drama, by its very nature, demands compactness and emotional climaxes, and Chekhov had to learn how to recreate life on the stage in a natural, yet ordered and interesting manner. Chekhov’s solution for this dilemma, one of the great technical achievements of the modern stage, was to achieve a synthesis between theatricality and reality, guiding events which seem to have no visible means of propulsion, and developing a form which seems to be no form at all. Through conspicuous theatrical experimentation, the author becomes more important than his materials, and Chekhov was determined to avoid even such indirect manifestations of his personality.
Reluctant to signal his presence through the manipulation of form, Chekhov is even more reluctant to do so through his characters. All his plays proceed without raisonneurs or author’s surrogates, and his mature work even lacks clear-cut central characters: the four major dramas are group portraits of rural middle-class life from which individuals occasionally detach themselves for solos, duets and trios without ever assuming the prominence of a protagonist. Chekhov, for obvious reasons, cannot identify with any character enough to make him central; but even if he could, the character would undoubtedly remain firmly unheroic. For unlike Ibsen — who also tried to create ensemble plays about average contemporary types, but who could never quite do without a protagonist — Chekhov has no secret admiration for heroic behavior. In fact, he finds conventional dramatic heroes to be inflated, romantic, and melodramatic, which is to say, out of keeping with observable behavior:
The demand is made that the hero and heroine should be dramatically effective [he writes]. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, running after women or men, talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage. A play ought to be written in which the people should come and go, dine, talk of the weather, or play cards, not because the author wants it but because that is what happens in real life. Life on the stage should be as it really is, and the people, too, should be as they are and not on stilts.
Chekhov, therefore, removes the “stilts,” observing his characters in the trivial and commonplace routine of everyday life, and seeking the ordinary gesture even in the lives of the most gifted men.2
He also dispenses with villains. Chekhov’s plays are not without malevolent figures, but the author invariably emphasizes their more commonplace characteristics. This assault on conventional character categories is a conscious intention, and he expresses pride whenever he achieves it. After writing Ivanov, for example, he boasts: “There is not a single villain or angel in my play (though I did not resist the temptation of putting in a few buffoons).” For while buffoons are perfectly compatible with Chekhov’s ironic sense of life, heroes and villains are the stereotypes of melodrama, a genre he particularly detested. Chekhov, in fact, often ridicules the hero-villain mystique which he had inherited from the traditional stage, primarily by contrasting stereotyped concepts of character with more natural and human ones. In Ivanov, for example, the play revolves around the various factitious interpretations of Ivanov’s behavior. Sasha, an impressionable young girl, and Dr. Lvov, a narrow uncompromising man, both classify him according to literary conventions: Sasha sees Ivanov as a Hamlet, a superior man to be worshiped and redeemed, while Dr. Lvov regards him as an inhumane and selfish Tartuffe, to be punished and exposed. Chekhov’s point, however, is that Ivanov is neither a hero nor a villain but simply an ordinary weak man, consumed with self-pity and subject to neurotic impulses beyond his control.3
This suggests another reason for Chekhov’s antagonism to heroes and villains: his more sophisticated and inward conception of character. Ibsen and Strindberg, influenced by the dualistic Christian tradition, sometimes conceive an action in terms of good and evil, and divide their characters accordingly: Brand vs. the Mayor; Doctor Stockmann vs. Peter Stockmann; the Captain vs. Laura. Chekhov, scorning conventional moral categories, is more in the tradition of the Greeks as Westernized by Racine, because he envisions a world where neither good nor evil exist as external forces but rather manifest themselves in confused internal struggles. In consequence, Chekhov’s characters — like Racine’s Phèdre (and Turgenyev’s Natalia in A Month in the Country) — often seem in conflict less with some other character than with their own weak wills; and like the characters of many Russian novels and plays, they are so self-involved that they often appear not to be listening to each other. (The common Russian interpretation of Hamlet as a victim of his own indecisive nature suggests a national tendency towards the internalizing of conflicts.) Actually, Chekhov has not abandoned the external conflict; it is proceeding relentlessly in the depths of his plays. But on the surface, he seems to be analyzing the psychological feelings of his characters, as they vacillate between hysteria and fatigue, and struggle with uncontrollable unconscious impulses.
Another sign of Chekhov’s antipathy to subjective rebellion is his reluctance to introduce his own discursive ideas or philosophical concepts into his plays. Ibsen and Strindberg can occasionally be accused of dramatic ventriloquism — Chekhov almost never. For while Chekhov may, indeed, support some of the opinions reiterated from play to play (those, for example, on the therapeutic power of work),4 these opinions never seem like personal utterances; they are the exclusive property of the persons who hold them, and serve primarily to reveal character. As for the characters themselves, Chekhov is scrupulous in keeping them separate from himself. They are born, as he tells Suvorin in a famous letter, “not out of ocean spray, or preconceived ideas, not out of ‘intellectuality,’ and not by sheer accident. They are the result of observation and the study of life.”
Thus, it is a dangerous practice to try to pry loose Chekhov’s intellectual position from his plays, for he is totally unconcerned with conceptual ideas. As the perceptive Professor Kovalevsky wrote after a meeting with the playwright: “He has not a trace of so-called philosophical training. . . . As for his own philosophy, I wouldn’t say he had any. His attitude towards those things in Russia called burning questions was indefinite.” Ibsen has his Kierkegaard and Strindberg his Nietzsche, but Chekhov cries “To hell with the philosophy of the great of this world!” — and locates his own intelligence in the fact that “I don’t lie to myself and don’t cover my own emptiness with other people’s intellectual rags. . . .” Always trying to defend his work against those “who look for tendencies between the lines,” he dissociates himself from all ideologies except the “ideology” of art: “I am not a liberal and not a conservative, not an evolutionist, nor a monk, nor indifferent to the world. I would like to be a free artist — and that is all. . . .”5
As a free artist, Chekhov will introduce political, social, and philosophical discussions into his work, because these are threads in the fabric of reality. But he is careful neither to take sides nor to hint at solutions. “It is the duty of the judge to put the questions to the jury correctly,” he observes, employing his favorite courtroom metaphor, “and it is for members of the jury to make up their minds, each according to his taste.” Even these unanswered questions, however, are subordinate to Chekhov’s careful presentation of objective reality. For just as he tries to protect his characters from conventional moralistic interpretations of their behavior, so he tries to preserve their integrity as complicated human beings against narrow ideological definitions of them as political animals.6 Thus, Chekhov will provide his characters with class roles, political convictions, and philosophic attitudes, but he will never completely define them by these elements, even when they so wish to define themselves. Much of Chekhov’s humor, in fact, proceeds from the ironical contrast between a character’s opinions and his behavior, as if the political animal and the human being were somehow mutually incompatible.
Chekhov is equally adverse to religious affirmations: he is, perhaps, the most secular playwright in the entire theatre of revolt. “Long ago I lost my faith,” he writes to Diaghilev. “It is with perplexity that I look upon religious people among the intelligentsia.” Having lost God, Ibsen and Strindberg sought something to take His place; but in Chekhov the messianic impulse seems never to have awakened. Instead of dramatizing the death of God, Chekhov is content merely to suggest the metaphysical void and to analyze its consequences on human character. In his plays, therefore, one feels a vast emptiness, expressed through the melancholy aimlessness of his characters, but no sense of transcendence whatever. Because he is a medical man, Chekhov seems to have little belief in radical cures. Writing in 1892, he affirms that he is a “true physician,” and, therefore, “fully, almost cynically, convinced that from this life one can expect only the worst.” This pessimism does not reflect back on the author, since Chekhov, excluding himself from his plays, does not number himself among his sick patients. But this doctor, nevertheless, is very helpless — as helpless as the doctors in his fiction. Confronted with an incurable disease — a disease proceeding from loss of faith, of hope, of value — he is unable to prescribe anything more effective than valerian drops. Thus, he will lecture the patient about his responsibility for his present state of health, but he can only suggest a few nostrums as preventatives against despair. For while Chekhov’s profound humanity makes him sympathetic, his tough intelligence tells him there is little hope.
In all these ways, then — the modesty of form, the sophistication of character, the subordination of idea — Chekhov diverges from the modern tradition of dramatic revolt. And in each case, we find his disciplined impersonality in sharp contrast with the engaged, subjective dissent of Ibsen and Strindberg. As suggested earlier, though, Chekhov’s impersonality is a surface characteristic; and beneath this surface is a satiric, admonitory moralist, shaping, selecting, and even judging in much the same way as the other rebel dramatists. Chekhov the realist pretends to have no other aim than the faithful representation of reality; but Chekhov the moralist is always conscious of a higher purpose than mere imitation. In the same year, in fact, that he writes “The artist should not be a judge of his characters,” he amends this to “The artist . . . must pass judgment only on what he understands.” And defending himself against the charge of purposelessness, he adds:
The artist observes, chooses, guesses, combines — these acts in themselves presuppose a problem. . . . If one denies problem and purpose in creative work, then one must concede that the artist is creating undesignedly, without intention, temporarily deranged. . . .
You are right to require a conscious attitude from the artist towards his work, but you mix up two ideas: the solution of the problem and the correct presentation of the problem. Only the latter is obligatory for the artist.
(Letter to Suvorin, 1888)
Chekhov, in short, “observes, chooses, guesses, combines” for a special purpose — not to remedy particular evils but to represent them accurately — and it is through this representation that he exercises, indirectly, the moral function of his art.
Chekhov prefers always to keep his moralism underground; but he admits it openly, at least once, when he breaks out to the writer, Alexander Tikhonov:
All I wanted was to say honestly to people: “Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!” The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: “Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!”
Despite the fact that an admission like this is rather uncharacteristic of Chekhov, what he states here is implicit in all his major plays. Russian life is “bad and dreary.” It can lead only to decay, dissolution, and destruction. And if it is not reformed through some effort of the will, an avalanche will come to clear it all away.
Thus, Chekhov’s revolt is directed against the quality of contemporary Russian life. But it is double, taking two, seemingly contrary directions. First, and most obviously, he is in rebellion against the indolence, vacuity, irresponsibility, and moral inertia of his characters — and, since these characters are typical of provincial upper-class society, also against the social stratum that they represent. Chekhov’s judgment on these characters is often suggested by his extra-dramatic comments on them. Ivanov is a “whining hero” who lacks “iron in the blood”; Treplev “has no definite aims and that has led to his destruction.” In his Notebooks, he observes: “It seems to me that we — worn-out, stereotyped, banal people — have grown quite moldy. . . . There is a life of which we know nothing. Great events will take us unawares, like sleeping fairies.” Here Chekhov includes himself in his indictment, and Princess Toumanova has emphasized, in her biography (Anton Chekhov: The Voice of Twilight Russia), how much Chekhov suffered from the laziness, the sense of drift, and, especially, the boredom that afflict his dramatic characters. Yet, Chekhov was appalled by these feelings (“I despise laziness,” he wrote, “just as I despise weakness and sluggishness of the emotions”), and successfully overcame them through meaningful work. Not so his provincial aristocrats, however, who have become idle and useless — charming aesthetes with no aim in life beyond their own satisfaction — whose directionless careers have broken their wills.
In one sense, though, Chekhov does align himself on the side of his characters: that is, insofar as they constitute the last stronghold of the enlightenment against the spreading mediocrity, vulgarity, and illiteracy of Russian life. And it is against these forces of darkness — the environment of his plays — that Chekhov directs his most vigorous revolt.7 Chekhov himself was passionately addicted to “culture” — by which he meant not intellectuality (he finds the intelligentsia “hypocritical, false, hysterical, poorly educated, and indolent”), but rather a mystical, indefinable compound of humanity, decency, intelligence, education, accomplishment, and will. And it is by these standards that he usually measures the value of human beings. In a long letter to his brother Nikolai, Chekhov begins by accusing him of an “utter lack of culture,” and then proceeds to define the characteristics of truly cultured people in a very significant manner. Among other things, he notes, such people “respect the human personality and are therefore always forebearing, gentle, courteous, and compliant. They will overlook noise, and cold, and overdone meat, and witticisms, and the presence of strangers in their house. . . . They are sincere and fear untruth like the very devil. . . . They do not make fools of themselves in order to arouse sympathy. . . . They are not vain. . . . They develop an aesthetic sense.” Cautioning Nikolai “not to fall below the level of your environment,” Chekhov counsels him: “What you need is constant work, day and night, eternal reading, study, will power.”
Chekhov, who had peasant blood himself, foresaw that cultured individuals might arise from any class of society, however humble, but he did not (like Tolstoi) idealize the peasantry, and the crude utilitarianism of the middle class filled him with disgust. If he is aggrieved by any general fact of Russian life it is the cancerous growth of slovenliness, filth, stupidity, and cruelty among the mass of men; and if he despises the sluggishness and indolence of his upper-class characters, then this is because they, too, are gradually being overwhelmed by the tide, lacking the will to stem it. For if the Russian gentry represents beauty without use, the Russian environment is characterized by use without beauty; and those with the necessary will power are often utterly without the necessary culture cr education. The conflict between the cultured upper classes and their stupefying environment — between the forces of light and the forces of darkness — provides the basic substance of most of Chekhov’s plays, as he alternates between the two sides of his double revolt.
Thus, while David Magarshack somewhat overstates the case by saying that Chekhov’s mature plays are dramas of “courage and hope,” he is perfectly right to emphasize the moral purpose behind Checkhov’s imitation of reality. Chekhov never developed any program for “life as it should be.” Like most great artists, his revolt is mainly negative. And it is a mistake to interpret the occasional expressions of visionary optimism which conclude his plays as evidence of “courage and hope” (they are more like desperate defenses against nihilism and despair). Yet, it is also wrong to assume that Chekhov shares the pessimism which pervades his plays or the despondency of his defeated characters. Everyone who knew him testifies to his gaiety, humor, and buoyancy, and if he always expected the worst, he always hoped for the best. Chekhov the realist was required to transcribe accurately the appalling conditions of provincial life without false affirmations or baseless optimism; but Chekhov the moralist has a sneaking belief in change. In short, Chekhov expresses his revolt not by depicting the ideal, which would have violated his sense of reality, and not by merely imitating the real, which would have violated his sense of moral purpose, but by criticizing the real at the same time that he is representing it. He will not comment on reality; he will permit reality to comment on itself. And so it is that while the surface of his plays seems drenched with tedium vitae and spiritual vapors, the depths are charged with energy and dissent.
I have already described some of the characteristics of the top layer of Chekhov’s art; now let us look at the deeper layers, for it is there that Chekhov’s revolt can be most clearly detected. As I have already suggested, this revolt takes two forms. It is directed 1) against the characters, and 2) against the environment, or the forces that are dragging the characters under. For the first type of revolt, Chekhov generally uses farce; for the second, melodrama.
Both farce and melodrama are highly theatrical modes of the kind Chekhov deplores as unnatural; nevertheless, he secretly uses them as much as any of his contemporaries, though they are generally carefully disguised. Both David Magarshack and Eric Bentley have drawn our attention to the farce element in Chekhov’s drama, generally ignored by Stanislavsky in production and overlooked by inattentive readers too much occupied with Chekhovian pathos. A superb vaudevillian, Chekhov uses farce freely and openly in his one-act sketches: “In one act things,” he advises Suvorin, “you must write absolute nonsense — there lies their strength.” In his full-length work, however, farce functions less for its nonsense value than for ironic effect. Chekhov’s plays, of course, are teeming with buffoons. In fact, with the exception of his innocent young heroines (Nina, Sonia, Irina, Anya), almost all of Chekhov’s characters have their clownish side. Treplev’s stammering confusion after his quarrels with his mother; Vanya’s hopelessly bungled attempt at murder; Trofimov’s tumble down the stairs after his outraged departure from Madame Ranevsky — these are only a few examples of how Chekhov will deflate his characters in order to render a comic judgment on them. For Chekhov uses farce as a satiric device, to alienate us from a character so that we will not become too sympathetically involved with his spurious self-pity or melancholy posturing.
More interesting, because more subtly hidden, is Chekhov’s use of melodrama. And I refer not only to melodramatic devices. (Many observers have already commented on Chekhov’s weakness for effective act curtains, often brought down after a pistol shot: a killing, a suicide, or an attempted murder occurs in every play except The Cherry Orchard, where a sound like a broken harp string and the noise of an axe replace the zing of bullets.)8 I refer, rather, to Chekhov’s use of the melodramatic formula. For each of his mature plays, and especially The Cherry Orchard, is constructed on the same melodramatic pattern: the conflict between a despoiler and his victims — while the action of each follows the same melodramatic development: the gradual dispossession of the victims from their rightful inheritance.
This external conflict can be more easily observed if we strip away everything extraneous to the (hidden) plot, ignoring for a moment Chekhov’s explorations of motive and character. In The Seagull, Trigorin seduces and ruins Nina; Madame Arkadina spiritually dispossesses Treplev, her Hamlet-like son. In Uncle Vanya, Yelena steals Sonia’s secret love, Astrov, while Serebryakov robs Sonia of her inheritance and produces in Vanya a soul-killing disillusionment. In The Three Sisters, Natasha gradually evicts the Prozorov family from their provincial house. And in The Cherry Orchard, Lopahin evicts Madame Ranevsky and Gaev, taking over their orchard and turning it into summer estates. In each case, the central act of dispossession is symbolized through some central image, representing what is being ravished, stolen, or destroyed. In The Seagull, it is the bird which Treplev kills, identified with Nina who is also destroyed by a man with “nothing better to do.” In Uncle Vanya, it is the forest, “a picture of gradual and unmistakable degeneration,” associated with the lives of the family, degenerating through sheer inertia. In The Three Sisters, it is the Prozorov house, eventually hollowed out by Natasha as though by a nest of termites. And in The Cherry Orchard, of course, it is the famous orchard, hacked to pieces by the commercial axe. With the possible exception of The Seagull, each play dramatizes the triumph of the forces of darkness over the forces of enlightenment, the degeneration of culture in the crude modern world.
What prevents us from seeing these melodramatic configurations is the extraordinary way in which they have been concealed. Technically, Chekhov’s most effective masking device is to bury the plot (Magarshack’s concept of the “indirect action”), so that violent acts and emotional climaxes occur offstage or between the acts. In this way, Chekhov manages to avoid the melodramatic crisis and to obscure the external conflict, ducking the event and concentrating on the dénouement. Secondly, Chekhov concludes the action before the conventional melodramatic reversal — the triumphant victory of virtue over vice; in its place, he substitutes a reversal of his own invention, in which the defeated characters, shuffling off the old life, begin to look forward to the new. Most important, however, he refuses, as we have already noted, to cast his characters in conventional hero-villain roles. In the buried plot, Chekhov’s despoilers act while his victims suffer; but by subordinating plot to characterization, Chekhov diverts our attention from process to motive, and makes us suspend our judgment of the action. Thus, while Trigorin’s impregnation and desertion of Nina are the familiar tricks of the dastardly Victorian seducer, he is too flabby and submissive to qualify as a villain,9 and, anyway, his rejection of Nina takes place between the acts. Similarly, Serebryakov seems more like a harmless, cranky hypochondriac than a malevolent figure; and Lopahin is firmly characterized as a helpful, purposeful, sympathetic friend of the family. Only Natasha, in The Three Sisters, can be accused of deliberate villainy; but Chekhov has carefully buried her more repulsive qualities under other character traits in order to obscure her baleful influence on the Prozorovs.
Chekhov also dilutes the melodramatic pathos by qualifying our sympathy for the victims. In most cases, they seem largely responsible for whatever happens to them. This is not to say, as some have said, that we do not sympathize with their unhappy lot, but since Chekhov highlights their inertia, irresponsibility, and waste, we also deplore their helpless inability to resist their fate. Thus, we remember not only Trigorin’s bored amorousness and Arkadina’s selfishness, but Nina’s naïveté and Treplev’s aimlessness; not only Serebryakov’s fraudulent pomposity and Yelena’s indolence, but Vanya’s dependency and Astrov’s alcoholism; not only Natasha’s vulgarity and greed but the Prozorovs’ futile illusions about Moscow; not only Lopahin’s triumph but Madame Ranevsky’s ineffectuality and extravagance. In each case, Chekhov — carefully balancing pathos with irony — avoids the stock responses of conventional theatre by deflecting the emphasis from the melodramatic to the natural and the atmospheric, wrapping layers of commonplace detail around extremely climactic events.
And this is precisely the effect that Chekhov aimed to achieve: “Let the things that happen on stage,” he writes, “be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal at the table, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.” The placid surface of existence, then, is to be a masking device for his controlled manipulation of human fatality; the trivial course of the daily routine is to disguise his sense of process, development, and crisis. Chekhov is so successful in achieving these goals that Anglo-Saxon critics often condemn his plays as vague, actionless, and formless. Walter Kerr, in America, for example, finds them moody, nerveless, untheatrical, while Desmond MacCarthy, in England, complains that they “have no theme except disillusionment and an atmosphere of sighs, yawns, self reproaches, vodka, endless tea, and endless discussions.” The stimulus for these superficial observations, of course, is Chekhov’s extraordinary atmospheric power; and though producers, following Stanislavsky,10 have tended to exaggerate Chekhov’s use of rhythmic sound effects (scratching pens, guitar music, sneezes, songs, etc.), there is no question that Chekhov evokes, through these means, a poetic illusion of fluid reality.
On the other hand, as recent critics have emphasized, Chekhov’s work has the tensile strength of a steel girder, the construction being so subtle that it is almost invisible. Thus, while his characters seem to exist in isolated pockets of vacancy, they are all integral parts of a close network of interlocking motives and effects. And thus, while the dialogue seems to wander aimlessly into discussions of cold samovars, the situation in Moscow, and the temperature of the earth, it is economically performing a great number of essential dramatic functions: revealing character, furthering the action, uncovering the theme, evoking in the spectators a mood identical with that of the characters, and diverting attention from the melodramatic events which are erupting under the smooth surface of life. Through this completely original and inimitable technique, Chekhov manages to exercise his function both as realist and moralist, and to express his resistance to modern life in enduring aesthetic form.
To illustrate the foregoing remarks, let us now examine two plays in some detail, each of which illuminates a different aspect of Chekhov’s revolt. All four of Chekhov’s mature works, of course, are masterpieces, but The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are considered, by consensus, his highest achievements, from a thematic and technical point of view. And while they differ enough from each other to form an interesting contrast, they are both similar enough to his other plays to give us a comprehensive, if not thoroughly exhaustive, idea of Chekhov’s dramatic approach.
The Three Sisters was completed at the beginning of 1901, four years after Uncle Vanya. It was written mostly in the Crimea, where Chekhov had retired to recuperate from the tuberculosis which was soon to prove fatal to him. One year before, he had published “In the Ravine,” a short story with enough similarities to the play to suggest it might have been a preparatory sketch. The location of the story is a provincial village called Ukleyevo, so ordinary and banal that it is identified to visitors as the place “where the deacon ate all the caviare at the funeral” — nothing more stimulating has ever happened there. Yet, as usual with Chekhov, extraordinary events take place in this commonplace setting. The most important development, for our purposes, is the progress of the woman, Aksinya — married to one of the two sons of Tsybukin, an elderly, generous shopkeeper. Aksinya, contemptuous of the family, parades wantonly about the town in low-necked dresses, and is openly conducting an affair with a rich factory owner. When Tsybukin’s unmarried son weds a girl named Lipa — a quiet, frightened, gentle peasant woman — Aksinya becomes intensely jealous; and when Lipa gives birth to a boy child, Aksinya scalds it with a ladle of boiling water, killing both the infant and the hopes of the family. Instead of being punished, however, Aksinya continues to flourish in the town, finally turning her father-in-law and his family out of their own house.
From this story, Chekhov apparently derived his idea for Natalya Ivanovna, the lustful, ambitious, and predatory woman who eventually disinherits the gentle Prozorovs — an action played out against the background of a provincial town so petty, vulgar, and boring that it has the power to degrade its most cultured inhabitants. The Three Sisters is richer, more complex, and more ambiguous than “In the Ravine.” Chekhov smooths the melodramatic wrinkles of the story by toning down the adulterous villainy of Natasha-Aksinya; and he enriches the story by adding a military background and transforming the petty bourgeois Tsybukins into the leisured upper-class Prozorovs. But the basic outline is the same; and so is Chekhov’s careful balancing of the internal and external influences on character, an element of all his mature work. In Ivanov, the decline of the hero was mostly determined from within, and Borkin’s theory that “it’s your environment that’s killing you” was rejected as a thoughtless cliché. But in The Three Sisters, environment plays a crucial role in the gradual defeat of the central characters, while their own psychological failings are kept relatively muted.
The forces of evil, in fact, are quite inexorable in this work, making the Chekhovian pathos more dominant than usual. Chekhov, according to Stanislavsky, was amazed at the first reading of the play by the Art Theatre, because, in the producer’s words, “he had written a happy comedy and all of us considered the play a tragedy and even wept over it.” Stanislavsky is probably exaggerating Chekhov’s response. Rather than considering it a “happy comedy,” he was very careful to call The Three Sisters a “drama,” the only such classification, as Magarshack notes, among his works. The play is certainly no tragedy, but it is the gloomiest Chekhov ever wrote. Certainly, the author introduces very little of his customary buffoonery. Though the play has its pantaloons, they are too implicated in the events of the house to evoke from us more than occasional smiles: Kuligin, for example, with his genial pedantry and maddening insensitivity to sorrow, is nevertheless a rather pathetic cuckold; and the alcoholic Tchebutykin, for all his absurdity, eventually develops into a withdrawn and nihilistic figure. Furthermore, an atmosphere of doom seems to permeate the household, lifted only during brief festive moments; and even these are quickly brought to an end by the ominous Natasha. Despite Magarshack’s desire to read the play as “a gay affirmation of life,” there is little that is gay or affirmative about it. Chekhov displays his usual impatience with the delusions of his central characters, but they are more clearly victims than most such figures. And while they undoubtedly are partially responsible for their fates (which explains why Chekhov did not want Stanislavsky’s actors to grow maudlin over them), much of the responsibility belongs to Natasha, who represents the dark forces eating away at their lives.
For Natasha is the most malevolent figure Chekhov ever created — a pretentious bourgeois arriviste without a single redeeming trait. Everyone emphasizes her vulgarity, vengefulness, and lack of culture, and even Andrey, who leans over backwards to be fair, sees “something in her which makes her no better than some petty, blind, hairy animal. Anyway she is not a human being.” Women, to be sure, often play a destructive role in Chekhov’s plays. But while Madame Arkadina could easily have turned into a Strindberg heroine (she has the same desire to dominate men), and Yelena, that “charming bird of prey,” bears a surface resemblance to Ibsen’s Hilda Wangel, Chekhov usually resists the temptation to characterize them so baldly. Natasha, on the other hand, is unique in the blackness of her motives. She might be a member of the Hummel family of vampires: sucking up people’s nourishment, breaking foundations, speculating in houses. She is a malignant growth in a benevolent organism and her final triumph, no matter how Chekhov tries to disguise it, is the triumph of pure evil. Despite the thick texture of the play, then, neatly woven into the tapestry is an almost invisible thread of action: the destruction of the Prozorovs by Natasha. From the moment she enters the house, at the end of Act I, to accept Andrey’s proposal of marriage, until she has secured her control at the end of the play, the process of dispossession continues with relentless motion.
It takes place, however, by steady degrees. The dispossession begins when Andrey mortgages the house to the bank in order to pay his gambling debts, but Natasha, a much more dangerous adversary than a bank, takes over from there. Not only has she “grabbed all the money” (presumably the mortgage money), but she is engaged, throughout the play, in shifting the family from room to room, until she has finally shifted them out of the house entirely. Natasha’s ambitions proceed under the guise of maternal solicitude and love of order; and never have such qualities seemed so thoroughly repellent. In the second act, she prepares to move Irina into Olga’s room so that little Bobik will have a warmer nursery; in the third act, she prepares to evict Anfisa, the old family servant, because she has outlived her usefulness (Natasha’s unfeeling utilitarianism is among her most inhuman traits); and in the last act — with Olga and Anfisa installed in a government flat and Irina having moved to a furnished room — she is preparing to move Andrey out of his room to make way for baby Sophie. Since Sophie is probably the child of Protopopov, Natasha’s lover, the dispossession has been symbolically completed. It will not be long before it is literally completed, and Andrey, the last of the Prozorovs, is ejected from the house altogether.
Chekhov illustrates this process through a careful manipulation of the setting. The first three acts take place in interiors which grow progressively more confined; the third act being laid in the room of Olga and Irina, cramped with people, screens, and furniture. But the last act is laid outdoors. The exterior setting tells the story visually: the family is now out of their own home; Andrey pushes the pram around the house in widening circles; and Protopopov (never seen) is comfortably installed inside, in the drawing room with Natasha. Natasha, however, has not yet finished, for she is determined to violate the outdoors as well. Popping out of the house for a moment, she expresses her determination to cut down the fir and maple trees that Tusenbach admires so much, an act of despoliation that foreshadows a similar act in The Cherry Orchard.
The contrast between Natasha and the Prozorovs is demonstrated, as Magarshack has noted, in the episode of the green sash, where Natasha revenges herself for an imaginary slight by critizing Irina’s sash over three years later; and her vulgarity is amply documented by her French affectations and her abuse of the servants. An even better contrast is provided during the fire that is raging in town at the beginning of the third act. In this scene, Chekhov sets off Natasha’s parvenu pretensions against the instinctive humanity of the Prozorovs by comparing their attitudes towards the victims of the conflagration. In accordance with Chekhov’s description of the cultured in his letter to Nikolai (“They will overlook . . . the presence of strangers in the house”), the sisters generously offer their hospitality to those without homes, but Natasha is more occupied with fears that her children will catch some disease. When she considers the homeless, she thinks of them as objects to be patronized — “One ought always to be ready to help the poor, it’s the duty of the rich” — and begins chattering about joining a committee for the assistance of the victims, that impersonal, dehumanized approach to charity invented by the middle class less out of generosity than out of status-seeking and guilt.
Since the fire is an external crisis introduced to heighten (and at the same time draw attention from) the crisis occurring within, it also illustrates Natasha’s destructive tendencies. The fire, as Magarshack has noted, is closely identified with that conflagration which is destroying the Prozorov household; the fate of the victims anticipates that of the family (they are out on the street); and Natasha symbolically links the two events. As Natasha marches through her room with a candle, Masha suggests this link by saying: “She walks about as though it were she had set fire to the town.” But at the same time that Natasha is a symbolic arsonist, she is also a symbolic fire extinguisher. “Always . . . on the lookout for fear something goes wrong,” she stalks through the house, snuffing out candles — snuffing, too, all laughter and pleasure in the family. Pleading baby Bobik’s health, she puts an end to the Carnival party; for like Serebryakov (who similarly throws cold water on the musical interlude planned by Yelena and Sonia in Uncle Vanya), she functions to extinguish joy, and to spread gloom and despair.
The conflict between Natasha and the Prozorovs, needless to say, is always kept very indistinct. Andrey and the sisters are either too polite or too deeply involved in their own problems to comment much on Natasha’s activities, and while she and the family brush each other frequently throughout the play, they never break into open argument. Instead of dramatizing the Prozorovs’ relations with Natasha, Chekhov defines them against the background of their surroundings, concentrating on the wasting away of this potentially superior family in a coarse and sordid environment. On the other hand, Natasha is really the personification of this environment — a native of the town who lives in the house — and so both she and the environment are actually related forces converging on the same objects. Thus, the surface and the depths of The Three Sisters follow parallel lines of development. The gradual dispossession of the Prozorovs by Natasha is the buried action, while their gradual deterioration in their surroundings proceeds above. In each case, the conflict between culture and vulgarity provides the basic theme.
This conflict is clear from the opening lines of the play, when the three sisters — a doleful portrait in blue, black, and white — first reveal their dissatisfaction with the present by reflecting, nostalgically, on the life of the past. A highly educated Moscow family, the Prozorovs were geographically transplanted eleven years before when their father, a brigadier general, took command of an artillery unit in the provinces. As the action proceeds, Chekhov shows how the family, following the father’s death, has tried to adapt to their new surroundings: Olga by teaching school, Masha by marrying the local schoolmaster, Irina by working in a variety of civil jobs, Andrey by marrying Natasha and joining the Rural Board. All these attempts at assimilation are, however, unsuccessful. And regarding their present life as a kind of involuntary banishment, they are now uncomfortably suspended between their idealization of the past and resentment over their depressing provincial existence.
The past, of course, is closely identified with Moscow, seen through a haze of memory as a city of sun, flowers, refinement, and sensibility — in short, of culture — as opposed to the cold, stupidity, and dreariness of their town. Their vision of Moscow, like their hopes of returning, is, of course, delusionary — an idle dream with which we are meant to have little patience — and their endless complaining is neither courageous nor attractive. Still, their shared apprehension of the pettiness, drabness, and conformity of their provincial district is terrifyingly accurate. As Andrey describes it (Act IV):
Our town has been going on for two hundred years — there are a hundred thousand people living in it; and there is not one who is not like the rest, not one saint in the past, or the present, nor one man of learning, not one artist, not one man in the least remarkable who could inspire envy or a passionate desire to imitate him. . . . And an overwhelmingly vulgar influence weighs upon the children, and the divine spark is quenched in them and they become the same sort of pitiful dead creatures, all exactly alike, as their fathers and mothers. . . .
In this speech — which may have been intended as an attack on the audience (Chekhov stipulated that Andrey, while speaking it, “must almost threaten the audience with his fists”) — Andrey is clearly expressing Chekhov’s revolt against the appalling conditions of the provincial town.11 It is a place in which any man of sensibility is bound to feel “a stranger, and lonely”; for it is without culture, without art, without humanity, without excellence; and its “overwhelmingly vulgar influence” has the power to brutalize all who live within its circumference. The influence of the town, in its most extreme state, is shown on Tchebutykin, who takes refuge from his disillusionment in alcohol and newspapers and from his professional incompetence in a profound nihilism: “Perhaps it only seems to us that we exist, but really we are not here at all.” For just as the Prozorovs respond to their surroundings by weaving the illusion of Moscow, so Tchebutykin responds by declaring that nothing in the world is real, and that “it doesn’t matter.”
The Prozorovs are aware that the town is brutalizing them, too, which accounts for their growing despair. Masha — dressed in black to illustrate her depression — is perpetually bored; Irina is perpetually tired; and Olga suffers from perpetual headaches. As for Andrey, their gifted brother, he trails his life along with no apparent aim, followed by the senile Ferrapont, as by an ignominious Nemesis. In this lifeless atmosphere, they are drying up, their culture falling from them like shreds of dead skin — each, in turn, will ask, “Where has it all gone?” For whatever might have made them seem unusual in Moscow is here merely a superfluous layer — useless, unnecessary, and gradually being forgotten. Andrey, carefully trained for a distinguished university career, holds a position in which his education is meaningless. Masha, once an accomplished pianist, now “has forgotten” how to play — just as Tchebutykin has “forgotten” his medical training — just as the entire family is forgetting the accomplishments of their hopeful youth. Thus, the Prozorovs alternate between hysteria and despair, their hopes disintegrating in an environment where everything is reduced to zero:
IRINA (sobbing): Where? Where has it all gone? Where is it? Oh, my God, my God! I have forgotten everything, everything . . . everything is in a tangle in my mind. . . . I don’t remember the Italian for window or ceiling. . . . I am forgetting everything; every day I forget something more and life is slipping away and will never come back, we shall never, never go to Moscow. . . . I see that we shan’t go. . . .
Life is slipping by, and time, like a cormorant, is devouring hopes, illusions, expectations, consuming their minds, souls, and bodies in its tedious-rapid progress towards death.12
While their culture is being forgotten, however, the Prozorovs do try to preserve a pocket of civilization in this dreary wasteland; and their house is open to limited forms of intellectual discussion and artistic activity. Generally, the discussions at the Prozorovs’ reflect the banality of the surrounding area (Solyony’s and Tchebutykin’s heated argument over tchehartma and tcheremsha is typical); but occasionally, genuine ideas seem to come out of these soirées. Attending the discussions are the Prozorovs’ cultural allies, the military officers stationed in town. Chekhov, according to Stanislavsky, looked on the military as “the bearers of a cultural mission, since, coming into the farthest corners of the provinces, they brought with them new demands on life, knowledge, art, happiness, and joy.” Masha suggests Chekhov’s attitudes when she observes the difference between the crude townspeople and the more refined soldiers: “among civilians generally there are so many rude, ill-mannered, badly-brought up people,” but “in our town the most decent, honourable, and well-bred people are all in the army.” Her attraction to Colonel Vershinin is partially explained by his superior refinement, for he is associated in her mind with the old Muscovite charm and glamor. In part, he probably reminds her of her father (also identified with culture), for he lived on the same street, was an officer in her father’s brigade, and has now taken command of her father’s old battery. Attracted to educated men (she married Kuligin because she mistakenly thought him “the cleverest of men”), Masha unquestionably finds a suitable intellectual companion in Vershinin; even their courtship reveals their cultural affinities — he hums a tune to which she hums a reply. Magarshack calls this “the most original love declaration in the whole history of the stage” — actually, Congreve’s Mirabel and Millamant employ much the same device, when he completes a Waller verse which she begins — but in both cases, the couples signify their instinctual rapport, and their superior sophistication to other suitors.
While Masha tries to find expression through an extramarital affair which is doomed to failure, Irina tries to discover a substitute commitment in her work. In this, her spiritual partner, though she doesn’t love him, is Tusenbach, because he too seeks salvation in work, finally, in a Tolstoyan gesture, resigning his commission for a job in a brickyard. Irina’s faith in the dignity of labor, however, is gradually destroyed by depressing jobs in a telegraph office and on the town council — in this district, work can have no essential meaning or purpose. In the last act, Irina looks forward to “a new life” as a schoolteacher; but we have Olga’s enervating academic career as evidence that this “new life” will be just as unfulfilling as the old. And when Tusenbach is killed in a duel with Solyony (his despoiler), even the minor consolations of a loveless marriage are denied her.
Everything, in fact, fails the family in The Three Sisters. And as their culture fades and their lives grow grayer, the forces of darkness and illiteracy move in like carrion crows, ready to pick the last bones. There is some doubt, however, whether this condition is permanent. And the question the play finally asks is whether the defeat of the Prozorovs has any ultimate meaning; will their suffering eventually influence their surroundings in any positive way? The question is never resolved in the play, but it is endlessly debated by Vershinin and Tusenbach, whose opinions contrast as sharply as their characters. Vershinin — an extremely unhappy soul — holds to optimistic theories, while Tusenbach — inexplicably merry — is more profoundly pessimistic.13 This conflict, though usually couched in general terms, is secretly connected with the fate of the Prozorovs. When Masha, for example, declares, “We know a great deal that is unnecessary,” Vershinin takes the opportunity to expound his views:
What next? . . . I don’t think there can be a town so dull and dismal that intelligent and educated people are unnecessary in it. Let us suppose that of the hundred thousand people living in the town, which is, of course, uncultured and behind the times, there are only three of your sort. It goes without saying that you cannot conquer the mass of darkness round you; little by little as you go on living, you will be lost in the crowd. Life will get the better of you, but still you will not disappear without a trace. After you there may appear perhaps six like you, then twelve and so on until such as you form a majority. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, marvelous.
Vershinin, in short — anticipating the eventual transformation of the surrounding area by people like the Prozorovs — believes in the progressive march of civilization towards perfection. And this perfection will be based on the future interrelationship of the benighted mass and the cultured elite (“You know, if work were united with culture, and culture with work”) — a synthesis of beauty and utility.
Tusenbach, on the other hand, is more skeptical. Seeing no special providence in the fall of a sparrow or the flight of migratory cranes, he doubts the ability of anyone to influence anything:
Not only in two or three hundred years but in a million years life will be just the same; it does not change, it remains stationary, following its own laws which we have nothing to do with or which, anyway, we shall never find out.
Vershinin’s view awakens hope that there is some ultimate meaning to life; Tusenbach’s leads to stoicism and tragic resignation. It is the recurrent conflict between the progressive and the static interpretation of history, and its outcome is as insoluble as life itself.14
In the last act, in fact, both views are recapitulated without being reconciled. The military is leaving the town — a sad departure, because it signifies not only the end of Masha’s affair with Vershinin, but also the disintegration of the last cultural rampart. Tusenbach anticipates that “dreadful boredom” will descend upon the town, and Andrey notes (reminding us of Natasha’s symbolic role), “It’s as though someone put an extinguisher over it.” The end of the Prozorov way of life has almost come. Masha has turned obsessive and hysterical; Olga is installed in a position she loathes; Andrey, likened to an expensive bell that has fallen and smashed, has become hag-ridden and mediocre. Only Irina preserves some hope, but even these hopes are soon to be dashed. The entire family is finally facing the truth: “Nothing turns out as we would have it” — the dream of Moscow will never be realized, the mass of darkness has overwhelmed them. In the requiem which concludes the play, the three sisters meditate on the future, just as, in the beginning of the play, they reflected on the past, while Andrey pushes the pram, Kuligin bustles, and Tchebutykin hums softly to himself.
Their affirmations, showing the strong influence of Vershinin’s view of life, are inexplicably hopeful and expectant. Masha expresses her determination to endure; Irina has faith that a “time will come when everyone will know what all this is for”; and Olga affirms that “our sufferings will pass into joy for those who live after us, happiness and peace will be established on earth, and they will remember kindly and bless those who have lived before.” The gay band music played by the military evokes in the three sisters the will to live. But the music slowly fades away. Will hope fade away as well? Olga’s anxious questioning of life (“If we only knew — if we only knew!”) is — as if to suggest this — antiphonally answered by Tchebutykin’s muttered denials (“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter!”), the skepticism of Tusenbach reduced to its most nihilistic form. And on this double note — the dialectic of hope and despair in a situation of defeat — Chekhov’s darkest play draws to its close.
In The Three Sisters, Chekhov depicts the prostration of the cultured elite before the forces of darkness; in The Cherry Orchard, he examines the same problem from a comic-ironic point of view. Written while he was dying and with great difficulty, The Cherry Orchard is the most farcical of Chekhov’s full-length works, and so it was intended. In 1901, when the play was just beginning to take shape in his mind, he wrote to Olga Knipper: “The next play I write for the Art Theatre will definitely be funny, very funny — at least in intention.” The last phrase was probably a sally aimed at Stanislavsky (Chekhov deplored his tendency to turn “my characters into crybabies”), and though Stanislasvky did, in fact, eventually misinterpret The Cherry Orchard as a somber study of Russian life, Chekhov always insisted on calling it “not a drama but a comedy; in places almost a farce.”
The importance of the comic element in the play suggests that Chekhov is emphasizing the other side of his revolt. Instead of merely evoking sympathy for the victims of the social conflict, he is now satirizing them as well; and instead of blackening the character of the despoiler, he is drawing him with a great deal more depth and balance. The change is one of degree — Chekhov has not reversed his earlier position, he has merely modified it — and the dispossession of the victims still evokes strains of pathos which we should not ignore. Nevertheless, in The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov is more impatient with his cultured idlers; and their eventual fate seems more fitting and more just.
Chekhov’s irony is operative not only against his characters but against the situation in which they find themselves. The play functions, partly, as a satire on conventional melodrama, achieved through the reversal of melodramatic conventions. To illustrate this, let us contrast The Cherry Orchard with a work to which it bears surprising surface resemblances: Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859). Boucicault’s melodrama is located in the antebellum American South, a setting which permits the author to combine traditional stereotypes with a topical antislavery motif. Just as some of the perfunctory Abolitionist speeches in The Octoroon occasionally remind us of Trofimov’s harangues against Russian serfdom, so the Southern setting of the play is reminiscent of the feudal background of The Cherry Orchard. More important, for our purposes, are certain interesting parallels in plot and character. For like The Cherry Orchard, The Octoroon revolves around the sale, on mortgage, of an old ancestral estate — here called Terrebone. It is the property of Mrs. Peyton — a genial Southern aristocrat who recalls Madame Ranevsky in her identification with the culture and leisure of a dying caste. Also like Madame Ranevsky, Mrs. Peyton has an adopted daughter — Zoe, the octoroon — who, like Varya, acts as housekeeper to the family; a family friend — the cracker-barrel Yankee, Salem Scudder — who hangs around the house like Semyonov-Pishtchik; and even an old retainer — a Negro called Old Pete — who serves the family with the same doglike fidelity as old Firs. The development of the plot establishes an even stronger parallel between the two plays, for it concerns the efforts of Jacob McCloskey, a villainous overseer, to seduce the octoroon, and to gain control of Terrebone when it comes up for auction. Only the resolution of the Boucicault drama breaks the parallel: McCloskey is eventually foiled in his villainy, and the family is reestablished in its hereditary rights.
I am not suggesting that Chekhov was familiar with Boucicault’s play. But the materials are conventional enough, and Chekhov certainly knew the popular French “mortgage” melodramas which Boucicault used as his models, for they were the staples of the commercial Russian stage. Whether or not one believes literary parody to be one of Chekhov’s purposes in The Cherry Orchard, however, his departure from the melodramatic formula is still very instructive. The gentle victim (Mrs. Peyton) becomes the irresponsible and self-destructive Lyuba Ranevsky; the virtuous low-born ingenue (Zoe) becomes the weepy, nunlike Varya; the humorous friend (Salem Scudder) becomes the indigent buffoon, Pishtchik; the pathetic old servant (Pete) becomes the comically senile Firs; and the moustache-twirling villain (McCloskey) becomes the generous and warmhearted Lopahin. In each case, Chekhov succeeds in surprising the spectator by reversing the expected stereotype: neutralizing the victims, complicating the victimizer. Instead of the bald ravisher-ravished relationship of McCloskey and Zoe, Chekhov substitutes the pitifully bungled courtship of Lopahin and Varya, where the man is more passive than the woman. And the sale of the ancestral estate occurs not as the consequence of evil external forces (McCloskey’s theft of the mortgage money) but rather through the inertia and inadequacy of the family itself. Finally, of course, the expected melodramatic reversal is omitted entirely: the “villain” is not foiled; the estate is not returned.
Chekhov introduces additional surprise, however, by providing a parallel plot in which the expected reversal does take place — but in a totally trivial way. For just as Madame Ranevsky tried to pay the mortgage on her estate by borrowing money from the Countess, so Semyonov-Pishtchik borrows frantically from the family to pay the mortgage on his — the difference being that Pishtchik’s property is, temporarily, saved. “Some Englishman” has discovered “some sort of white clay” on his land, and Pishtchik has sold him the rights to dig it! Chekhov compounds the irony by having Pishtchik pay back part of the money he has borrowed — not, of course, enough to save the cherry orchard, and too late to do so if it were. What Chekhov seems to be saying is that in real life the unusual rarely happens; when it does, its effect is meaningless. For just as the suicide attempts of Vershinin’s wife are rendered trivial by the frequency with which they occur, so Pishtchik’s good fortune is too meager and ephemeral to save either him or the family. Thus, Chekhov works a brilliant convolution on the melodramatic formula: by introducing Pishtchik’s unexpected success, he manages to highlight the unexpected failure of the family.
Chekhov’s unique approach can be further illustrated by comparing The Cherry Orchard with another group of plays to which it bears some resemblance. For the social background of the work — the transfer of power from the feudal aristocracy to the rising bourgeoisie — relates it to a drama of social conflict and social change. In most plays of this type, the artist’s sympathies are enlisted on the side of the old order, while the rising class is generally criticized for disrupting degree and tradition. Shakespeare, for example, cruelly satirizes the efforts of the upstart Malvolio to climb beyond his station; Molière anatomizes with more sympathy for the middle class — but no less animus against the upstart — the aristocratic pretensions of Monsieur Jourdain; and the Restoration conflict between the truewit and the falsewit is really a defense of traditional aristocratic style against the vulgarities of middle-class imitators. In the nineteenth century, when the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie was almost established, and no amount of ridicule could stem the tide, the artist ceases to treat this subject satirically. Strindberg, in Miss Julie, views the war between the classes as a tragic struggle, barely concealing under a pretense of impartiality his sympathy for the fallen warrior nobility; and similar attitudes towards this conflict are later to be implicit in such movies as Renoir’s Grand Illusion, such novels as Faulkner’s The Hamlet, and such plays as Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire.
Chekhov, to be sure, shares some of the class sympathies of these artists, for even when he is exposing the cruelty and indifference of the old order, he is evoking nostalgia for it — partly because his aristocratic characters are so charming, partly because the past is seen through a filmy mist of memory and regret. To Firs — for whom the emancipation of the serfs was “the calamity” — the past was a time of grace, style, order, “horses all the way,” while the present is decayed, confused, gone to seed: “In the old days, we used to have generals, barons, and admirals dancing at our balls, and now we send for the post-office clerk and the station master and even they’re not overanxious to come.” In the old days, by his account, “the peasants knew their place and the masters knew theirs; but now they’re all at sixes and sevens, there’s no making it out.” The disorder perceived by Firs — where, to use Hamlet’s phrase, “the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe” — is richly illustrated in the play. Dunyasha is a “spoilt, soft” maidservant pretending to be a lady, so presumptuous in her affectation of upper-class dress and manners that even Lopahin is provoked to admonish her (“One must know one’s place”), while the sinister insolence of the mincing valet, Yasha, is an inevitable concommitant of his vulgar, pseudoaristocratic tastes, so similar to those of the valet, Jean, in Miss Julie. Everything, indeed, is at “sixes and sevens.” The house is run down; everyone sleeps too late; the servants have been permitting tramps to spend the night; and it is the clumsy clerk, Epihodov, who discourses, in the circumlocutory language of the autodidact, on culture, history, and literature.
The confusion of class roles is most pointedly dramatized in the central action of the play, for Lopahin, the son of a serf, also achieves his success by breaking out of a traditional social relationship. Though he is totally free from any pretensions (“A peasant I was, and a peasant I am”), he has come a long way since the beatings of his childhood; and though he is extremely sympathetic towards the family, he is, in effect, its executioner, inadvertently completing the destruction of the old way of life. Despite his generous character, in fact, he cannot restrain his class-conscious sense of triumph when he finally acquires the estate: “I have bought the estate where my father and grandfather were slaves, where they weren’t even admitted into the kitchen.” He is, by his own account, “a pig in a pastry shop,” smashing the fragile possessions of the house with his characteristic flailing of his arms: in the third act, drunk with power and cognac, he knocks over a table and almost upsets a candelabra, and in the last, of course, he chops down the cherry orchard, the very symbol of the cultured tradition he has concluded.
On the other hand, though Lopahin assumes the function of the Chekhovian despoiler, his character is inconsistent with his role. Gaev, who calls him a “lowborn knave” and a “money grubber,” and Trofimov, who compares him with a “wild beast” devouring “everything that comes in his way,” are both entirely wrong: both, like the insensitive Dr. Lvov in Ivanov, evaluate people by false and stereotyped standards. For unlike Natasha, Lopahin is utterly free from malice, spite, pretentiousness, or vulgarity; if his effect is destructive, his motives are completely innocent. Chekhov is careful to emphasize Lopahin’s excellent qualities in a letter to Stanislavsky: “Lopahin, of course, is only a merchant, but he is a decent person in every sense, should conduct himself with complete decorum, like a cultivated man, without pettiness or trickery. . . .” He is a “cultivated man,” because he has successfully risen above his environment, despite his lowly origins. And rather than being an enemy of culture and sensibility, he has excellent possibilities in that direction himself: even Trofimov, in a more generous moment, remarks on his “fine, delicate soul.”
Lopahin, in fact, is the most positive character in the play. It is he who labors, with ever-increasing frustration, to bring the befuddled family to its senses; and it is he alone who seems to possess energy, purpose, and dedication. One of the many ironies of The Cherry Orchard, in fact, is that while Trofimov theorizes about work (“One must give up glorification of self. One should work, and nothing else”), Lopahin quietly, and untheoretically, performs it. For despite Trofimov’s glorious affirmations about humanity and progress, generally delivered as if he were making a stump speech, he is the embodiment of sloth. Asleep when we first hear of him, he is a kind of intellectual somnambulist — a “perpetual student” who lacks the energy to obtain his degree. And though he inveighs against the “filth and vulgarity and Asiatic apathy” of the Russian intelligentsia, he is extremely unkempt and apathetic himself. Lopahin, on the other hand, gets up “at five o’clock in the morning” and works “from morning to night.” It is work that provides his identity, and it is work — not money or status or power — which is his life’s goal. Thus, he seems less like the sinister Natasha than like the genial Astrov, for like Astrov, he has been wasting his energies among aimless and vacuous people.
Chekhov, in short, softens the act of dispossession by complicating the character of the despoiler; he does so also by qualifying our sympathy for the victims. Certainly, Lyuba and Gaev are a good deal less pathetic than their predecessors, the Prozorovs. Both brother and sister are full of charm and sweetness. But Lyuba’s negligence is a determining factor in their present condition (it may even have been the cause of her child’s death by drowning), and her uncontrollable extravagance has brought the house tumbling down about their ears. As for Gaev, he is merely an artifact of the old aristocracy — nobility in decay. His orations to the bookcase suggest his pomposity and irrelevance; his relationship with Firs (who treats him like an eleven-year-old) suggests his childish dependence; his obsession with caramels suggests his wasteful self-indulgence; and the imaginary billiard game which always proceeds inside his brain suggests his inability to face reality. Although Chekhov is clearly sympathetic to the aristocracy, he is always careful to balance this sympathy with ironic glimpses into its less appealing side, just as he is careful to modify our nostalgia for the old life with some hard facts about its actual nature. (“Those were fine old times,” Lopahin ironically reminds Firs. “There was flogging anyway.”)
We may conclude, then, that despite certain similarities to the literary works mentioned above, The Cherry Orchard preserves a strict neutrality towards the class struggle, if, indeed, it deals with this struggle at all. Chekhov achieves his neutrality not by remaining aloof from controversy, but by alternating between the two sides. He believes both in the old way of life and the new — both in order and in change — and he disbelieves in them both as well. More than this, however, he documents the surface of his play so painstakingly that no struggle seems to be occurring. For just as he handles a melodramatic formula from an unmelodramatic point of view, so he writes a political play in a totally unpolitical manner. If one were to regard the characters of The Cherry Orchard exclusively as class symbols, as some critics have done, it would be necessary to see Madame Ranevsky and Gaev as the aristocracy that is going out; Lopahin as the capitalist bourgeoisie that is taking its place; Trofimov as the revolutionary intelligentsia, preparing for an even more violent class struggle in future;15 and possibly even Yasha as the new class which will eventually betray Trofimov’s revolution to bureaucracy, power politics, and self-interest. Yet, quite obviously, Chekhov is more concerned with humanity than with the symbols of humanity, and each character transcends his class role to assume a complex life of his own, baffling one’s efforts to classify him. Thus, while there are certainly social-political overtones in The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov is constantly discouraging any reduction of his characters to purely social-political categories.
I think we can now understand Chekhov’s remark to the effect that “great writers and artists must occupy themselves with politics only insofar as it is necessary to put up a defense against politics.” Chekhov occupies himself with politics by choosing a traditionally political situation as his subject matter; he defends himself against politics by demonstrating the inadequacy of narrow political interpretations. Modifying the general with the concrete, action with character, consequence with motive, he permits humanity to be seen in all its doubleness and ambiguity. On the surface, the basic material of The Cherry Orchard is less a war for dominance between two classes of society than a peaceful interlude during which some property changes hands after repeated warnings have been ignored. The dispossession of the upper-class characters is so pivotal that we are certain it has a more general significance; yet, Chekhov has so minimized conflict that the cherry orchard goes under the axe without evoking any feelings of class hatred. With the surface and the depths of the play following separate lines of development, the event seems both cruel and just, both significant and insignificant, both an end and a beginning.
Chekhov’s double attitudes are best illustrated through the resonant image of the cherry orchard itself — the central image of the play, embodying the play’s implicit theme. The importance of this image is suggested by its multivariousness: like Ibsen’s wild duck, it represents something different to all the leading characters. To Madame Ranevsky and her family, of course, it is the emblem of the culture, grace, and style of the old, leisured manor nobility, a dramatic contrast to the illiteracy, mediocrity, and vulgarity of the surrounding area: “If there is one thing interesting — remarkable indeed — in the whole province, it is our cherry orchard.” Lyuba’s affection for the orchard, however, has a more personal source than the fact that it is mentioned in the encyclopedia, for she associates it with her childhood among the Russian gentry. Always identified with the color white (“All, all white . . . the white trees . . . the white masses of blossoms”), the orchard reminds her of “my life, my youth, my happiness . . . my childhood, my innocence,” and also of “my mother,” whom she imagines walking “all in white down the avenue” of trees. But just as Lyuba’s innocence and childhood have yielded to adulthood, adultery, and experience, so the virility of the old aristocracy has now given way to weakness, effeminacy, and inertia. The cherry orchard, therefore, is the vestigial symbol of a once vigorous way of life — an aesthetic pleasure in a crude environment — but it also represents the deterioration which has now overtaken that life.
While Lyuba is reminded of innocence, Trofimov is reminded of guilt. For him, the orchard is merely a memento of slavery. Unwilling to idealize a way of life which was based on human suffering, he tells Anya of the apparitions which lodge in the white, ghostlike trees:
Think only, Anya, your grandfather, and great-grandfather, and all your ancestors were slaveowners — the owners of living souls — and from every cherry in the orchard, from every leaf, from every trunk there are human creatures looking at you. . . . Your orchard is a fearful thing, and when in the evening or at night one walks about the orchard, the old bark on the trees glimmers dimly in the dusk, and the old cherry trees seem to be dreaming of centuries gone by and tortured by fearful visions.
The “fearful visions” that Trofimov ascribes to the trees are, of course, the guilty dreams of the decaying aristocracy — Chekhov suggests these guilts through Lyuba’s conscience-stricken reaction to the ominous drunken tramp in Act II — for Trofimov sees the orchard in purely political and moral terms. Since his responses are general and abstract (“All Russia,” he tells Anya, “is our garden”), the singular possession of Madame Ranevsky is to him merely a symbolic extension of a cruel and exploitative aristocracy, now required to redeem the time.
To Lopahin, on the other hand, the orchard has neither political, moral, sentimental nor aesthetic significance. A practical man of the utilitarian middle class, for him the most important measure is use, and by this measure the orchard is no more than an object which has outlived its purpose: “The only remarkable thing about the orchard is that it’s a very large one. There’s a crop of cherries every alternate year, and then there’s nothing to be done with them, no one buys them.” The memory of the ancient Firs, however, extends to a time when the orchard was once a practical and a profitable proposition:
FIRS: In the old days, forty or fifty years ago, they used to dry the cherries, soak them, pickle them, make jam too, and they used —
GAEV: Be quiet, Firs.
FIRS: And they used to send the preserved cherries to Moscow and to Harkov by the wagonload. That brought the money in. And the preserved cherries in those days were soft and juicy, sweet and fragrant. . . . They knew the way to do them then. . . .
LYUBA: And where is the recipe now?
FIRS: It’s forgotten. Nobody remembers it.
The recipe is “forgotten” — forgotten like the culture of the Prozorovs — forgotten like the purpose and passion of the decaying Russian gentry. Once valuable both for beauty and utility, the justification for the existence of the orchard has now passed out of memory, and it must go the way of all useless things.16
Thus, both the orchard and the way of life it represents are cut down by the utilitarian axe, a process as inexorable as the progress of the seasons which, by the end of the play, have killed the blossoms with a chilling frost (the action begins in May, concludes in October). Yet, for all its inevitability, the event signifies the loss of something irreplaceable in life. What is coming to supplant such things is suggested in the second-act setting where beyond “an old shrine, long abandoned and fallen out of the perpendicular” are seen “in the distance a row of telegraph poles and far, far away on the horizon . . . faintly outlined a great town.” The urbanization and uglification of the countryside are the price which Russia will pay for its growing utilitarianism; and the hideous panorama of modern industrial life will hardly be beautified by the summer villas that Lopahin is preparing to build on the site of the orchard. Nor will the bustling middle class that is moving in have any culture to substitute for the old aristocratic civilization, now “fallen out of the perpendicular” as well.
On the other hand, if Lopahin is at all an accurate representative, the new class will, at least, be energetic, vigorous, and purposeful. And there is a vague chance that the new villas may even develop some compensations too. As Lopahin visualizes it, overoptimistically: “At present the summer visitor only drinks tea in his verandah, but maybe he’ll take to working his bit of land too, and then your cherry orchard would become happy, rich, and prosperous. . . .” Whatever the more general significance of their departure, moreover, Madame Ranevsky and her family have not been vitally affected, personally, by their eviction from the house. Lyuba is returning to her Paris lover; Gaev will work in a bank (until his inefficiency becomes too obvious); Varya will take another housekeeping job; and Anya will become a schoolteacher. None is really worse off than he was at the beginning; and though we must, as always, be skeptical about the “new life” that Anya anticipates, she, at least, has successfully sloughed off the debilitating inheritance of her class.17
To discourage sentimentality towards this departure, in fact, Chekhov concludes the play by reemphasizing the family’s indifference and irresponsibility. Lopahin — still worrying about time (train time now, not auction time) — has hurried the family out of the house, and the stage is empty for the entrance of Firs. He has been left behind, another victim of Madame Ranevsky’s habit of delegating authority to undependable individuals; and ill and failing, though still anxious to discharge his duties, he lies on the sofa to reflect upon the meaninglessness of his existence: “Life has slipped by as though I hadn’t lived. . . . There’s no strength in you, nothing left you — all gone! Ech! I’m good for nothing.” And thus having characterized not only himself but the whole household, he lies motionless as that ominous sound comes from the sky, like the breaking of a harp string, through the noise of the chopping, signifying the end of this useless and superfluous, though charming and civilized class.
Thus, despite the thickness of the play, despite its complexity and ambiguity, Chekhov’s revolt still manages to find expression in his indictment of these cultured aristocrats, too will-less to resist their own liquidation — just as, in The Three Sisters, it is aimed against the dark environment which drags them under. In each play, Chekhov’s revolt remains two-edged, changing in emphasis and attack, but fixed always on the fate of the cultured classes in the modern world. This is the great “problem” of his plays — and it is a problem which, in keeping with his artistic creed, he undertakes not to solve but simply to present correctly. Confronting the same world as the other great dramatists of revolt — a world without God and, therefore, without meaning — Chekhov has no remedy for the disease of modern life. Ibsen speaks of the importance of one’s calling, and Strindberg of resignation. But even Chekhov’s panacea of work is ultimately ineffectual before the insupportable fact of death.
Still, despite the bleakness of his vision, Chekhov possesses a deeper humanity than any other modern dramatist. For while he never fails to examine the desperate absurdity of his characters, he never loses sight of the qualities that make them fully alive: “My holy of holies,” he writes, “are the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom — freedom from despotism and lies.” Chekhov himself embodies these qualities so perfectly that no one has even been able to write of him without the most profound affection and love; and he, the author, remains the most positive character in his fiction. Because of his hatred of untruth, Chekhov will not arouse false hopes about the future of mankind — but because he is humane to the marrow of his bones, he manages to increase our expectations of the human race. Coupling sweetness of temper with toughness of mind, Chekhov makes his work an extraordinary compound of morality and reality, rebellion and acceptance, irony and sympathy — evoking a singular affirmation even in the darkest despair. There are more powerful playwrights in the theatre of revolt — artists with greater range, wider variety, more intellectual power — but there are none more warm and generous, and none who bring the drama to a higher realization of its human role.
1 Actually, Magarshack asserts that Chekhov developed a concept of “life as it should be,” but this suggests a more concrete attitude towards the future than Chekhov ever displayed. Chekhov never formulated a program for social, political, or religious change, and it was against his principles to introduce such a program into his plays. Magarshack tries to support his argument by quoting the following letter which Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in 1892: “The best [Classical writers] are realists and depict life as it is, but because every line is permeated, as with a juice, by a consciousness of an aim, you feel in addition to life as it is, also life as it should be. . . . But what about us? We depict life as it is, but we refuse to go a step further. We have neither near nor remote aims and our souls are as flat and bare as a billiard table. We have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we deny the existence of God, we are not afraid of ghosts. . . . But he who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing cannot be an artist.” This passage shows Chekhov’s desire for a higher artistic purpose than mere representation, but it hardly proves that he possessed any idea of “life as it should be.” Quite the contrary, it indicates Chekhov’s awareness that his modern skepticism has destroyed, for him, the possibility of any political or religious idealism. I disagree with Magarshack on this and related issues, but I am deeply indebted to his perceptive study, Chekhov the Dramatist.
2 Chekhov, like so many modern dramatists, was attacked for refusing to idealize his characters. His reply is instructive: “I’ve often been blamed, even by Tolstoi, for writing about trifles, for not having any positive heroes — revolutionists, Alexanders of Macedon. . . . But where am I to get them? I would be happy to have them! Our life is provincial, the cities are unpaved, the villages poor, the masses abused. In our youth, we all chirp rapturously like sparrows on a dung heap, but when we are forty, we are already old and begin to think about death. Fine heroes we are!”
3 In a letter to Korelenko, Chekhov describes Ivanov in this way: “There are thousands of Ivanovs. He is a most ordinary man, not a hero at all. . . .” And in a letter to Suvorin around the same time, he ridicules the characters in the play who try to interpret Ivanov according to prejudices or stereotypes.
4 Chekhov’s letters are full of observations on the importance of keeping busy. He occasionally reflects, however, on the pleasures of idleness, too: “Life disagrees with philosophy, there is no pleasure without idleness; only the useless is pleasurable.” The conflicting claims of work and idleness — of use and beauty — are, of course, one of the central conflicts in his plays.
5 Gorky — as Ernest J. Simmons notes in his scholarly biography Chekhov — observed these qualities in Chekhov after his initial meeting with him: “You are, I believe, the first free man I’ve ever met, one who does not worship anything. How fine it is that you regard literature as your first and primary business in life.” Though Gorky found Chekhov’s dedication “fine,” however, he was himself a much more political writer, and Chekhov often chided him for his tendentiousness.
6 Simmons writes that, politically, Chekhov was “a gradualist with a pronounced sense of measure” — one who sympathized with the revolutionary ferment in Russia but who was profoundly suspicious of organized revolutionary movements. Chekhov believed in change not through parties but rather through gifted individuals: “I believe in individuals,” he writes in 1899. “I see salvation in individual personalities scattered over all Russia — they may be intellectuals, or peasants — for although they may be few, they have strength.” In this, Chekhov is rather like Ibsen.
7 Simmons observes that the “sentiment of revolt” began to grow in Chekhov around 1898, when it is expressed in a group of stories dealing with “the aspiration for freedom, freedom from all the stuffy conventions of life, from the regimentation of authority, the imbecility of functionaries, from everything that tyrannizes and debases the human spirit . . .” (Chekhov, p. 425).
8 Magarshack elaborates on this and related theatrical techniques, such as the Scribean love triangle which is central to every Chekhovian play except The Cherry Orchard (and even there it appears in the comic underplot involving Yasha, Dunyasha, and Epihodov). We should also note Chekhov’s persistent use of the interrupted love scene — a device he borrowed from Turgenyev. Only the most delicate handling of this device prevents it from seeming stagey (in Ivanov, it is stagey).
9 In My Life in Art, Stanislavsky makes reference to this character as “the scoundrelly Lovelace Trigorin” — which suggests that he misinterpreted the role when he played it for the Moscow Art Theatre. Chekhov, at any rate, was dissatisfied with his performance, writing that “it sickened me to watch him.”
10 Stanislavsky’s fondness for sound effects was always an amusing source of disagreement between him and the playwright. After Stanislavsky had introduced his usual noises into The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov remarked one day during a lull in rehearsal: “What fine quiet. How wonderful. We hear no birds, no dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no clocks, no sleigh bells, no crickets.” Stanislavsky thought these sound effects to be “realistic,” but as Chekhov once remarked to Meyerhold, “The stage is art. There is a canvas of Kramskoi in which he wonderfully depicts human faces. Suppose he eliminated the nose of one of these faces and substituted a real one. The nose will be ‘realistic,’ but the picture will be spoiled.” It is a pity that so many modern realists have followed Stanislavsky’s approach to reality and not Chekhov’s.
11 Chekhov had already expressed these views about provincial life in his story “My Life” (1897), where his protagonist has a speech very much like Andrey’s: “How is it that in not one of these houses has there been anyone from whom I might have learned to live? . . . Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and all that time it has not produced one man of service to the country — not one. . . . It’s a useless, unnecessary town, which not one soul would regret if it suddenly sank through the earth.” Chekhov’s dislike of the provinces probably stemmed from his feelings towards his birthplace, Tagonrog, which he described as “dirty, drab, empty, lazy, and illiterate.”
12 Chekhov heightens this effect by using a technique which Samuel Beckett will later imitate: he makes time pass while giving the impression that time is standing still. The action of the play covers three and a half years; yet, each act seems to follow the other as if no time had elapsed at all. There is another interesting parallel between Chekhov and Beckett, for Chekhov once planned a play with similarities to Waiting for Godot. As Simmons describes this unwritten drama, “During the first three acts the characters discuss the life of the hero and await his coming with great expectation. But in the last act they receive a telegram announcing the hero’s death.”
13 Chekhov is probably dramatizing a paradox here, which he once expounded to Lydia Avilova in the course of explaining the alleged gloominess of his themes and characters: “It has been pointed out to me that somber, melancholy people always write gaily, while the works of cheerful souls are always depressing.” Chekhov, like Tusenbach, is a cheerful soul with a gloomy point of view.
14 Chekhov’s letters occasionally suggest that he agrees more with Vershinin than with Tusenbach on the question of progress: “Modern culture,” he writes to Diaghilev, in 1902, “is only the beginning of an effort in the name of a great future, an effort that will continue perhaps for tens of thousands of years. . . .” Chekhov, however, is careful, as always, not to urge his own opinions on his dramatic characters.
15 Trofimov, as a matter of fact, is a revolutionary intellectual, sent down from the university for political agitation. Student strikes had occurred at Petersburg University a few years before The Cherry Orchard was written, and in 1901, a number of students had been expelled under the government’s arbitrary “Provisional Rules.”
16 Stanislavsky tells of Chekhov’s glee when he decided to change the title of his play from Vìshneviy Sad to Vishnéviy Sad. The movement of the accent introduces a subtle alteration in meaning, for while Vìshneviy Sad is “a commercial orchard which brings in profit,” Vishnéviy Sad is an orchard which “brings no profits [but] grows for the sake of beauty, for the eyes of spoiled aesthetes.” This suggests Chekhov’s demand that beautiful things must also have some function.
17 The relationship between Anya and Trofimov is very close to the relationship between Nadya and Sasha in Chekhov’s story, “The Betrothed” (1903). Nadya, a vital young creature, is taught — by her revolutionary relative, Sasha — to question the values of her dreary provincial existence. She finally breaks off an engagement to start a new and more meaningful life in St. Petersburg. It is one of the most hopeful conclusions Chekhov ever wrote, and may suggest that Anya’s expectations of the future are not without basis.