Anton Chekhov

Rose Whyman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136913631
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism in Drama

Anton Chekhov offers a critical introduction to the plays and productions of this canonical playwright, examining the genius of Chekhov's writing, theatrical representation and dramatic philosophy.

Emphasising Chekhov's continued relevance and his mastery of the tragicomic, Rose Whyman provides an insightful assessment of his life and work. All of Chekhov's major dramas are analysed, in addition to his vaudevilles, one-act plays and stories. The works are studied in relation to traditional criticism and more recent theoretical and cultural standpoints, including cultural materialism, philosophy and gender studies.

Analysis of key historical and recent productions, display the development of the drama, as well as the playwright's continued appeal. Anton Chekhov provides readers with an accessible comparative study of the relationship between Chekhov's life, work and ideological thought.

Part I
Life and context

OVERVIEW

Over a hundred years after they were written, Anton Chekhov’s plays fill theatres throughout the world, his stories are continually reprinted and retranslated and critical material on Chekhov is produced in abundance. However, Chekhov’s personality and his work apparently continue to mystify critics, audiences and readers. Narratives about his life persistently refer to the ‘elusiveness of Chekhov’ (Turkov 1995: x), the ‘enigma’ of Chekhov (Llewellyn Smith 1973: x) and present descriptions of him that are full of paradoxes and contradictions. For example, Gillès states ‘this gentle face of a young Christ … masked a strange resolution’ (1968: 44), Karlinsky refers to ‘the gentle subversive’ (Chekhov 1973: 1) and Troyat to ‘the agnostic’ with ‘ardent faith in the future’ (1987: 50). Rayfield portrays a Don Juan who could be vindictive, writing ‘cruel parody’ of people he knew (1998: 376, 352). Kelly describes him as ‘deeply subversive … a figure whose originality is as yet poorly understood’ (1999: 171). Chekhov’s expression of own persona was ambiguous: he was deliberately self-abnegating, he wrote little about himself, admitting to, as he styled it, ‘autobiographophobia’ (Chekhov 1973: 366). He presented himself in different ways to different correspondents, as analyses of his letters demonstrate (see O’Connor 1987). ‘His “sociability” particularly as expressed in his enormous correspondence, was one of his most successful disguises’ (Miles 1993: 187). He was very hospitable, filling his family homes with guests, while complaining in letters that his visitors gave him no peace to write; those who knew him well spoke of his friendliness, his sense of humour and his deep reserve (Gorky et al. 2004: 49).

The problems for biographers and critics, both western and East European, have been compounded in the past by a lack of access to all the material and information on the context in which Chekhov wrote. Karlinsky has described layers of censorship, including both state censorship and editorial choices made to protect privacy by Chekhov’s sister, in the publication of papers after his death (Chekhov 1973: xii). Previous restrictions have now been lifted and the emergence of new material from archives in Russia that have opened since perestroika in the 1990s has resulted in new translations, and in new biographical studies such as those by Donald Rayfield, Rosamund Bartlett and Alevtina Kuzicheva. This has facilitated new approaches to the work, such as A. A. Chepurov’s re-examination of the first performance of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, and Galina Brodskaya’s account of the cultural background to Stanislavsky’s and Chekhov’s lives and work. Critiques of Chekhov’s work from feminist and other theoretical standpoints, such as Peta Tait’s analysis, combining studies of gender theory, emotion and phenomenology, John Tulloch’s analysis of the work as theatrical event and Michael C. Finke’s psychoanalytic approach, have supplemented biographical approaches to Chekhov scholarship, such as that of Ronald Hingley or David Magarshack. The main subjects for critical material on Chekhov remain the multiplicity of possible interpretations of his work, its autobiographical significance, its relationship to literary movements such as naturalism and symbolism, his worldview and his use of language. In general, the extent of the intertextual allusions and literary references, and the subtlety of Chekhov’s use of language have only relatively recently begun to be fully analysed (see de Sherbinin 1997: 3, Senderovich and Sendich 1987, Stepanov 2005) and much work continues to present a Chekhovian persona that is informed by the bias of the writer (McVay 2002: 64, 77).

Topical references have not been fully understood, especially in the west, and it is important in any consideration of Chekhov to have an understanding of the historical context in which he was writing. He was born in 1860, in a Russia under the autocratic rule of Tsardom, essentially a feudal system before reforms in 1861. He came from a family of serfs, peasants who were owned by the state or by the upper classes, but his grandfather had managed to buy his family’s freedom and Chekhov’s father subsequently became a merchant. Chekhov gained an education, training and working as a doctor as he also began to be known as a writer. His fame began to spread through fin-de-siècle Europe and he died in 1904, just before the first Russian revolution of 1905. Political currents after this eventually led to the overthrow of the Tsars in the revolution of 1917 and the establishment of communist rule in Russia. Chekhov’s formative years and working life, therefore, were in a Russia undergoing a period of political and cultural turmoil, which is examined in Chekhov’s work.

The complexity of interpretation is demonstrated by the wide variety of readings in the production history of the plays since their first chequered reception in Russia and the west (see Senelick 1997a). Labelled ‘The Voice of Twilight Russia’ (Toumanova 1937), Chekhov was considered by many in Russia and the west to be the poet of the decline of the nobility and the gentry in pre-revolutionary Russia. He was known first in the west as a short story writer, and was compared with French realist writers such as Guy de Maupassant; critics viewed his work as expressive of pessimistic philosophies (Emeljanow 1997: 2). Interestingly, in the Russia of his own time, the plays, though controversial, were hugely acclaimed, but thereafter for some time seen as examples of historical pessimism, presenting the past nostalgically in an idealized way (Simonov 1969: 23). After the 1917 revolution, there was an ideological imperative in Soviet times for the work to be interpreted as an exposition of the state of a dying class, a class that was the enemy of the proletariat or workers and had been vanquished by the revolution, out of keeping with the new Soviet age. New interpretations began from the 1940s in Russia (see Shakh-Azizova 2000) and in the west from the 1950s, but in the late 1970s, Trevor Griffiths asserted that the dominant western interpretation of Chekhov’s plays remained ‘plangent and sorrowing evocations of an “ordered” past no longer with “us”, its passing greatly to be mourned … ’ (2007: 266). Arguing that Chekhov’s was a coded revolutionary agenda, Griffiths and others have re-examined the political aspects of Chekhov’s work.

Class politics are very important; the presence of servants, of landowners and merchants, literati and artists, is central to Chekhov’s playwriting. The turmoil brought about by shifts in the class system as a result of the emergence of new ideologies and economies in Chekhov’s lifetime has echoes in many other contexts and has resulted in the adaptation, in recent years, of Chekhov’s plays to settings such as South Africa after apartheid, as in Suzman’s The Free State (2000), or Mustapha Matura’s Three Sisters, after Chekhov (2006), a reworking set in colonial Trinidad in 1941. Similarities between the situation in Ireland and that of Chekhov’s Russia have been drawn in many adaptations and the work of writer Brian Friel (see Pine 2006: 104–16, Kilroy 2000: 80–90).

Arguably, some of the appropriation of Chekhov – whether the lyrical English Chekhov, or the Soviet politicized Chekhov – results from a narrow view of the context in which he was writing. An understanding of context is important not so that the cultural context can be reproduced authentically in production – the work is open to a variety of performance styles – but to acknowledge that Chekhov’s work occupied a specific historical position and provided a perspective on the ideological thought of the time. Many stories and the full-length plays are a locus for the discussion of current philosophical and political ideas in the debates and attitudes of the characters, reflecting the ferment of the times. His work surveys the inheritance of nineteenth century romanticism and idealism and the nihilisms and pessimistic philosophies that characterized a strong strand of thought in his epoch, while also examining optimistic philosophies ranging from that of Tolstoy to Marx. Chekhov provides no answers, as he famously said, seeking rather to formulate questions correctly (Chekhov 1973: 117). Drawing on his own experience and observation of others, he questions the basis for people’s ideas of how to live life, and his writing, though discussing the cultural and political currents of a particular epoch, has resonances today.

This book seeks to survey the historical context, to position Chekhov in relationship to political ideologies and to contribute to the reappraisal of his work facilitated by new biographies and translations. In looking at selected productions, I will consider whether directors of widely differing interpretations of Chekhov are working from a socially and historically contextualized reading of Chekhov and how necessary this is to a production’s success.

1
Life, context and ideas

Art, politics and philosophy were entwined in the intellectual landscape for Chekhov’s work, as artists, critics and social agitators attempted to engage with political superstructures in the hope of bringing about reform in Russia. Chekhov’s own experience of life gave him a unique perspective on the problems of his society.

Chekhov’s life: serf’s son to intelligent in nineteenth century Russia

Chekhov was the first famous writer in Russia to emerge from his class. His Russia was a vast empire with extremes of wealth and poverty, diverse cultures and a predominantly rural economy. Three tsars of the Romanov dynasty ruled in his lifetime: Alexander II (1855–81), Alexander III (1881–94) and his son Nicholas II (1894–1917). It was, until the year after Chekhov’s birth, a feudal system, where the basis for the economy was the enslavement of the peasantry; the serfs (four-fifths of the population) paid ‘quit-rent’ in cash or labour services, whereas the gentry did not pay income tax. By the nineteenth century, there was a rigid, inefficient, and in some ways corrupt, centralized bureaucracy.

In the eighteenth century, a Table of Ranks for the civil and military services was established, ascent through which conferred hereditary nobility, an opportunity for commoners to become noble and rich. This established a hierarchical and careerist society, which Chekhov was to satirize in plays like The Wedding. He drew attention to the effects of living in such a status-ridden environment in stories such as The Death of a Government Official (1883), Anna on the Neck (1895) and characters such as Kulygin, a school teacher in Three Sisters.

In the 1860s, later than in western countries where more progressive economies were developing, a new intelligentsia, raznochintsy or ‘persons of other ranks’, who came from social classes other than the nobility began to emerge. (A member of the intelligentsia was called an intelligent.) Chekhov’s life typified the changes in Russia’s social strata. He was born in Taganrog, a bustling cosmopolitan port in southern Russia on the Azov Sea, an inlet of the Black Sea. His paternal grandfather had been a serf in the Voronezh region and became a foreman in his master’s sugar beet factory, saving to buy his freedom and that of his family. Yegor Mikhailovich then took a post as steward of an estate in Taganrog. His son, Pavel Yegorovich, Chekhov’s father, in turn had aspirations for his own family of six (one daughter died in infancy) to improve on their lowly beginnings, and Chekhov was sent to the Taganrog school for boys in 1868, which prepared him for university education. Pavel Yegorovich kept a grocery shop, in which Chekhov worked and bought himself into the ‘Second Guild of Merchants’. Pavel Yegorovich was an orthodox churchman and Chekhov had a religious education, was compelled to sing in the choir and undertake other church duties. His father often punished his children harshly. Brutality against women and children within the family was sanctioned in this patriarchal society.

In 1875, the older brothers left Taganrog to pursue their studies in Moscow, avoiding conscription. In the same year disaster fell. Pavel Yegorovich was having a house built, but was cheated and had to borrow to complete the project. The business was failing as railways were being extended through the steppe to Taganrog, ruining local tradesmen who had supplied farmers and waggoners (Miles 2008: 11), and in 1876, Pavel Yegorovich had to declare himself bankrupt. He left for Moscow, followed soon by other family members and at the age of sixteen, Chekhov was left alone in Taganrog in order to finish school, supporting himself by tutoring.

In 1879, Chekhov began his studies in the Faculty of Medicine at Moscow University with the aid of a scholarship. He saved his family from poverty; he began writing, solely to earn money at first – humorous stories, articles and sketches under pseudonyms such as ‘Antosha Chekhonte’ and ‘Brother of my brother’ – and recognition of his prose work increased through the 1880s. He began to write more for the theatre, and in 1896 (the year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis), by then a writer for seventeen years, he completed The Seagull. It was initially produced in St Petersburg, then by the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). This was the beginning of Chekhov’s connection with the theatre and Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Despite his illness, Chekhov’s dramatic writing reached its apogee towards the end of his life. On the Harmfulness of Tobacco first appeared in 1886, went through rewritings until the final one appeared in 1903, a demonstration of his mastery of the tragicomic. Uncle Vanya opened at the MAT in 1899 and Three Sisters in 1901. He married MAT actress Olga Knipper in May 1901. The Cherry Orchard was written slowly by the dying Chekhov from 1902 and was premiered in January 1904. He died in July that year in Badenweiler, Germany.

Views of Chekhov’s life

Chekhov emerged from the inheritance of serfdom, from poverty, violence and domination to become a famous artist and thinker in a repressed and troubled society. His work is a reflection on the complexity and problems of such a life. Biographical accounts have often simplified this reflection and present a variety of Chekhovs. The first Russian biographies such as Yermilov (1957) have a tendentious aspect: the myth of the great Russian artist in Soviet times promoted Chekhov as a sort of higher being, devoted to his family, always gentle and compassionate, emphasized his commitment to social change, and in keeping with Soviet puritanism, censored references to his sexual life in letters. Family memoirs such as About Chekhov by younger brother Mikhail aimed to protect the family, leaving out much per...