Anton Chekhov

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

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

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

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

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

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