Anton Chekhov

In letters to would-be dramatists, Chekhov continually came back to the need to see and understand how plays worked in the theatre. He was reluctantly compelled to reject Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson's spiritual drama Beyond Human Power, which he found moving and intelligent, because 'it won't do for the stage, because it can't be played, there's no action, no living characters, no dramatic interest' (To Suvorin, 20 June 1896). (Incidentally, this is the same argument Nina advances against Treplyov's play in The Seagull.) However, no cohesive theory of drama is to be cobbled together from Chekhov's voluminous corre­spondence. When scrutinised closely, his criticism turns out to be hints on craft: 'avoid cliches,' 'be compact,' 'use realistic dialogue,' 'vary the characters,' 'put your climax in the third act but be sure the fourth is not anticlimactic.. .'. His eminently practical comments on Gorky's plays, for example, have to do with their effects on an audience and how 'points are to be made. Even his references to his own plays are meant to clarify particulars for the performers or react to specific performances. His legendary statement that 'on stage people dine, simply dine, and meanwhile their happiness is taking shape or their lives are breaking up'¹¹ is indeed a telegraphic synopsis of an aesthetic, but it is a symbolist aesthetic: beyond the commonplace surface of existing lurks the real life of the characters.

When Chekhov himself set about to write plays, he was torn between creating works that would be successful because of their conformity to accepted norms, and works that avoided the cliches and conventions of the popular stage. He also had to confront the fact that audiences expected the dramatic equivalents of his prose writings, either hilarious anecdotes or refined treatments of modern life. When The Seagull failed in St. Petersburg in 1896, one spectator observed that the reasons for its failure were manifold.¹² It exasperated the older generation of literary men by its novelty. It exasperated the younger writers by what seemed to them Chekhov's failure to write a purely symbolic drama. It annoyed the journalists who associated Chekhov with Suvorin and New Times and would attack any members of that faction.

The development of Chekhov's drama then progresses from a gradual liberation from the theatre's traditional demands to the expression of an idiosyncratic and original vision. Chekhov had to find a way to convey the subtlety and multi-layered nature of his compressed fiction into drama, which has no narrative. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that Chekhov's earlier efforts, those most wedded to the conventions of the problem play and current stage practice, were composed while he was deeply immersed in the literary life of the Russian capitals. As early as 1887, Chekhov was insisting that the author must control his play, select the cast and issue instructions for its production (to N. A. Leykin, 15 November 1887).

The first consistent example of his new art, Uncle Vanya, was the deliberate revision of a failed experiment; his first perfectly-orchestrated achievement, Three Sisters, was written for the Moscow Art Theatre, a company made up of educated individuals, devoted to ensemble playing and the evocation of 'mood'. The Cherry Orchard, a work whose shape breaks with both realistic social drama and the Art

Theatre's soulful atmospherics, would be written in Yalta far distant from the day-to-day activities of a theatre and the call of literary fashion.

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Journeyman Efforts

I don't believe in our intelligentsia ... I believe in individual people, I see salvation in individual personalities . . . Chekhov, to Ivan Orlov (22 February 1889)

The hammy hand of the contemporary Russian stage lay most heavily on Chekhov's earliest dramatic endeavours. The three full-length plays that preceded The Seagull reveal how Chekhov gradually mastered the dramatic form and how he sought to remodel it according to his own needs.

'Without Patrimony' ('Platonov')

While still in high school, Chekhov wrote a four-act play so full of incident, 'with horse-stealing a gunshot, a woman who throws herself under a train',¹ that a family friend described it as a 'drrama', the two 'r's' bespeaking its sensationalism. The critical consensus today regards it as the first draft of the work now known as Platonov.

Hopefully, the neophyte author sent the play, entitled Without Patrimony, to his literary brother Aleksandr in Moscow, and got back this critique (14 October 1878):