Anton Chekhov

The squalour of his provincial community is hardly enough to justify Platonov's sense of superiority; he appears to have no ideals outside his own creature com­forts. Did Chekhov intend a send-up of the superfluous man? Characteristically, he would make his initial forays into a new genre by parodying it. His first experiments with a iong short story' were The Futile Victory (1882), a spoof of the popular Hungarian romancer Mor Jokai, and A

Hunting Drama (1884), a detective story in the style of Gaboriau. If Platonov is meant as parody, that would save it from being a failed attempt at a society melodrama in the style of Shpazhinsky or Dyachenko. Then again, it may not be a case of either/or: the immature dramatist was unsure of the direction to take. He may have seriously intended to explore certain social issues, but was ineluctably drawn to the comic side of things. He himself was aware of the ambivalence: 'However much I try to be serious, I don't succeed, in me the serious is constantly mixed up with the vulgar. I suppose it's my fatality' (to Yakov Polonsky, 22 February 1888).

Even if Platonov were a serious try at a 'superfluous man,' the type could not hold up when juxtaposed with closely-observed real life. Irony swamps Platonov's claims to heroic stature; under the microscope, he looks shoddy and despicable. Platonov himself is prone to making high-flown comparisons, fancying himself Hamlet, 'a sec­ond Byron' and 'a prospective Cabinet minister and a Christopher Columbus'; but he is somewhat shamefaced to reveal his paunchy schoolmaster presence to a former girlfriend who had put him on a pedesal. He has not even graduated from the university, although this does not prevent him from lecturing others on their spiritual and moral failings. Since most of the men in the community are grotesque buffoons or flaccid weaklings, he seems in contrast a paragon, and hence a lodestone to women.

Four of themille e tre this village Don Giovanni numbers in his catalogue of conquests are drawn in detail. His wife Sasha is a long-suffering homebody, whom he forces to read Sacher-Masoch's Ideals of Our Times.³ Sasha waits long hours for Platonov to return from parties, and when her nose is rubbed in his unfaithfulness, she twice attempts suicide. Chekhov is unable to withhold a smile from repeated suicide attempts, so that Sasha's laying herself on the railway tracks and then drinking an infusion of sulphur matches are more farcical than pathetic. Twenty-year-old Mariya Grekova is first offended by Platonov's brutal behaviour, then secretly smitten; and when he writes her an irresistibly abject letter of apology, she melts at once and abandons her lawsuit against him. The sophisticated widow Anna Petrovna openly puts herself on offer, and when she finds that he has made her daughter-in-law Sofiya his mistress, deals with the facts coolly, refusing to break off their liaison. Sofiya, the most deeply committed, having jeopardized her marriage and compelled Platonov to elope with her, finally, in a fit of jealousy on seeing him and Mariya together, takes up a handy pistol and shoots the philanderer. If Mariya is the Donna Elvira, then Sofiya is the Donna Anna of this prose opera.

Osip the horse-thief does not play Leporello to Platonov's Giovanni; rather, he is a kind of double on the plebeian plane. Chekhov is not very indulgent to the lower classes in this play; Anna's servants are lazy and insolent, preliminary sketches for Yasha in The Cherry Orchard. Marko the messenger from the district court is dense, if honest. But Osip, like Platonov, tries to set himself above his fellows, keenly appreciative of his own intelligence. 'Let's say ever'body knows, let's say, that I'm a thief and a robber too,' Osip laughs, 'but not ever'body can prove it . . . Hm . . . These plain folks don't dare nowadays, they're fools, no brains I mean . . . Scared of ever'thing . . 'A nasty underhanded, puny bunch . . . Ignoramuses . . . Don't feel sorry if folks like that git hurt.' Osip prides himself, as does Platonov, on being superior to his fellows, but his superiority is expressed in a sub-Nietzschean amorality. He hires himself out as an assassin and sets on nocturnal pedestrians, the criminal equivalent of

Platonov's egoistic manipulation of others' feelings. At the end, both are destroyed by the people they contemned: Osip is lynched by the peasants, and Platonov is shot by a cast-off mistress. The similarities are so great that when Platonov and Osip grapple in the schoolroom, it is like a man fighting his shadow or mystic double. Perhaps Osip reneges on the murder contract because he recognizes their symbiosis.