Anton Chekhov

For all its overstatement, what makes Platonov a real portent of Chekhov's mature work is the unsteady listing from the comic side to the serious. It bespeaks a view of the cohesiveness of life, in which important issues and mean­ingless trivia co-exist. Chekhov's career as a professional humourist made him alert to the grotesque detail, the absurd facet of any situation; but more important is his ingrained awareness that the current of life, awash with the banal flotsam of everyday, sweeps away heroic poses and epic aspirations. A comic effect is natural when grandiose philosophical questions and emotional crises have to share space with the inexorable demands of the humdrum.

'Ivanov'

Ivanov, Chekhov's first work to be staged, was written at the prompting of Korsh and in the wake of the creative gust that had produced the important transitional story 'The Steppe'. Chekhov dashed off the play in a couple of weeks in October 1887, pleased with its 'unhackneyed subject' and its lack of longueurs. He defined his own originality this way: 'Modern dramatists start their plays exclusively with angels, cads and buffoons - try and find those elements anywhere in Russia! Sure, you'll find them, but not in such extreme guises as dramatists need. I wanted to do some­thing original; I didn't hatch out a single villain, a single angel (although I couldn't refrain from buffoons), I didn't accuse anyone, I didn't acquit anyone' (to Aleksandr, 24 October 1887). He intended to 'sum up everything that's been written so far about whining and languishing people, and in my Ivanov to put an end to this writing' (to Suvorin, 7 January 1889). This determination shows Ivanov to be not a reconstruction of Without Patrimony, but a counter­blast to it and its ilk.

Ivanov was first played at Korsh's Theatre in Moscow on 19 November 1887, for the benefit of Nikolay Svetlov who created Borkin; it enjoyed a great success. The actors' praise and the audiences' plaudits made Chekhov euphoric, and he wrote to Aleksandr, 'You can't imagine what's happened! From that insignificant turd that is my playlet. . . the devil knows what has occurred ... in his 32 years in the theatre the prompter had never seen anything like it'. He triumphantly signed himself, 'Schiller Shakes- pearovich Goethe' (to Aleksandr, 24 November 1887). But his younger brother Mikhail recalled the event dif­ferently. 'The success of the performance was spotty: some hissed, others, the majority, noisily applauded and called for the author, but in general Ivanov was not understood, and for a long time afterwards the newspapers were explicating the personality and character of its main hero.' The impressionable playwright gradually came to the conclusion that the audience had welcomed Ivanov himself as a distillation of the Zeitgeist. His mooning and moaning, his fits of self-castigation summed up for the generation of the 1880s its own pusillanimous torpor during the 'darkling decade,' a period of political repression and social inaction. His death provided a kind of vicarious expiation.

That was not what Chekhov had in mind. Superficially, Ivanov, his name the Russian equivalent of 'Jones', seemed another common- or garden-variety 'superfluous man,': 'a university graduate, in no way remarkable; a somewhat excitable, ardent nature, strongly inclined to honourable and straightforward enthusiasm, like most educated gen­try,' was how Chekhov described him. Like Platonov, his past is nobler than his present; his projects for serving the people, rational farming, higher education have evapo­rated. But Chekhov wanted to get away from the apotheosis of this disillusionment, by then a stale treat­ment, to an examination by the character himself of the reasons for his empty life and contemptible behaviour. Ivanov was to suffer through his own awareness of wasted potential and vestigial honour. A basic dramatic problem was to keep the audience from idealising Ivanov's pessi­mism and, at the same time, to keep Ivanov from looking like the immoralist that Doctor Lvov makes him out to be.

The stage portrayal of this complex inner turmoil was tricky for an inexperienced playwright, trying to employ age-old strategies of dramatic carpentry to contain a richly psychological subject. Basically, the 'plot' might have come from a society melodrama by Dyachenko. A scoundrel abandons his exploited wife in hopes of repairing his fortunes by wedding a young heiress: this sensational story-line is how Ivanov's actions look to outsiders such as Lvov. Ibsen had already managed to sublimate such a triangle into the internalised conflicts of Rosmersholm, with the bedevilled intellectual Rosmer torn between coequal calls to duty. Chekhov, however, was constrained to write long expository speeches, endless explanations, confessions, acts of contrition, to counter his audience's preconceptions of heroism and villainy.