Anton Chekhov

The play turned out boring, pieced together like a mosaic, . . . nowhere in the whole play is there a single lackey or peripheral comic character or little widow. There are eight characters in all and only three of them are episodic. As a rule I tried to avoid superfluity, and I think I have succeeded' (to Suvorin, 14 May 1888).

The Wood Demon was read by the committee that passed on plays for the Petersburg state theatres, whose members included Grigorovich, the critic who had per­suaded Chekhov to be a serious writer. Its devastating and unanimous decision was unanimously to reject The Wood Demon as 'a beautiful dramatised novella'.⁵ However, the play was solicited by Chekhov's boyhood friend Solovtsov, who had left Korsh's to start a new theatre in Moscow with Madam Abramova. So The Wood Demon, with a hastily rewritten fourth act, was first presented at Abramova's private theatre on 27 December 1889, in a very weak production. The role of Yelena was taken by the corpulent actress Mariya Glebova, and, as Mikhail Chekhov remem­bered, 'to see the jeune premier, the actor Roshchin- Insarov, making a declaration of love to her was positively incongruous; he called her beautiful, yet he could not get his arms round her to embrace her. Then the glow of the forest fire was such that it raised laughter'.⁶ Dissatisfied, Chekhov withdrew the play, which had been at best received with indifference.

But Chekhov's dissatisfactions related more directly to its internal imperfections than to its faulty staging. The problem with The Wood Demon is that it tries very hard to make a positive statement. It had been preceded by the novella A Boring Story, whose central characters, a played-out scientist and his ward, a despairing actress, have reached an impasse in life. No way out of the sterility that confronts them seems possible. Adverse critics had been dwelling on Chekhov's so-called pessimism, and it was beginning to get under his skin.

During work on The Wood Demon Chekhov enunciated his most eloquent statement of political non-alignment:

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I would like to be an independent artist, except that I'm sorry God hasn't given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all their guises . . . Phariseeism, obtuseness and despotism do not prevail only in merchants' households and lockups, I see them in science, literature, among the young . . . Trademarks and labels I consider to be prejudice. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most abso­lute freedom. This is the programme I would adhere to if I were a great artist (to A. N. Pleshcheyev, 4 October 1888).

Personal integrity was more important for Chekhov than political adherence; he was no joiner.

Yet he was drawn to the increasingly popular teachings of Tolstoy, even though he rejected such tenets as ascetism and passive resistance to evil. In The Wood Demon he subscribes to the Tolstoyan notion of universal love as a means of cutting through the Gordian knot of social problems. The cast of characters he had drawn up for Suvorin had included two Tolstoyan characters: Anuchin, an old man, who as the result of a public repentance became the happiest person in the district, and the pilgrim Fedossy, a plain-speaking and optimistic lay brother of the Mt. Athos monastery. All that survives of these characters in The Wood Demon is a last act speech of Orlovsky Senior who relates his mid-life crisis and regeneration. By shout­ing 'My friends, my good people, forgive me, for the love of Christ!', he has become a paragon of loving-kindness and contentment.

That was the mood Chekhov intended to pervade the play. 'I filled the comedy with good, healthy people, half sympathetic, and a happy ending. The general tone is entirely lyrical' (to Pleshcheyev, 30 September 1889). Like many of Strindberg's late dramas, it is a play of conversion, but without overt religious references or a confessional tone. For the development of Chekhov's playwriting skills, the most important new feature is the suppression of a prominent hero in favour of a closely interrelated group. On this provincial estate the ties that bind the characters are more intricate than those in Ivanov.