Anton Chekhov

Attractive young Yelena is married to an old, ailing, famous professor, and feels frustrated. She is wooed by two men: Voynitsky, a sour malcontent who feels he has wasted his life in supporting the Professor, and Fyodor Orlovsky, a rich young wastrel, whose father dotes on him. The professor's daughter by an earlier marriage, Sofiya, is intelligent but drily rationalistic. She is loved by Doctor Khrushchyov, nicknamed the Wood Demon for his work in reforestation and conservation; she returns his affection but they mistrust one another's attitudes. Sofiya is hope­lessly courted as well by the young landowner Zheltukhin, whose sister Yuliya has long loved Fyodor Orlovsky from afar, but cannot get him to change his wild ways. This lack of reciprocity and sympathy is, for Chekhov, more than a means of complicating the plot; it sounds the thematic note for the unbearable life these people lead. As Yelena says to Voynitsky, 'Everyone's warring against everyone else. Ask yourself, what's the sense of this war, what's it for?' The situation worsens to the point that Voynitsky shoots himself and Yelena runs away, and it is the task of the fourth act to unravel these misunderstandings and pose a solution.

'The world will be destroyed not by robbers and thieves,' declares Yelena, 'but by covert hatred, the enmity between good people, all these nasty squabbles.' Therefore, these good people must set things right, by casting aside narrow-minded distrust. Krushchyov complains that his neighbours unthinkingly define him as 'a populist, a psychopath, a phrase-monger, - whatever you like, but not a human being!'; and when Sofiya labels him a 'democrat' and a 'Tolstoyan', he explodes, 'That's no way to live! - Whoever I am, look me straight in the eye, clearly, without ulterior motives, without programmes and try to find the human being in me first, or else there'll never be peace in your relations with people'.

Baldly put, this formulates the play's ideology, and the happy ending that Chekhov boasted of comes about as the characters discover this idea for themselves. The couples who had been divided by mutual distrust now link up, and stand on the brink of a new life full of truth.

In the first version of The Wood Demon, this was not entirely clear and Chekhov worked hard to remove similarities to Ivanov. He radically changed the character of Zheltukhin, whom he had portrayed as a typically liberal, slogan-spouting landowner, prone to quote the populist poet Nekrasov. In Chekhov this is always a sign of insincerity: he later links it with Arkadina in The Seagull and the mendicant tramp in The Cherry Orchard, and elements of Zheltukhin's phrase-making recur there in Gayev. Sofiya was made to complain that her neighbours were all museum-pieces: 'Populists in embroidered peasant-shirts, district doctors who resemble Bazarov [in Fathers and Sons]. . . Tolstoyans who when they pay a call insist on coming through the kitchen or the back way'. Chekhov struck all this out lest he be accused of the very labelling for which he rebukes his characters.

In the produced version, the characters are pretty obviously divided between the self-centred rationalists, (Voynitsky, his mother, Zheltukhin, the Professor and Sofiya before her reformation); and the pure-in-heart, who avoid self-analysis and are direct and open in their reac­tions (the Orlovskys, Yuliya, Waffles). Chekhov strove hard to change the play's ending in order to point up this schism. Originally, the Professor was to undergo a change of heart, see the error of his ways and forgive Yelena, whereas Fyodor who had carried her off would behave like a hotheaded duellist until he receives news of his father's death. Instead, the naive Waffles was made to abduct Yelena, and Orlovsky senior did not die of shock. In the final version, it is Fyodor who undergoes a rather sudden and unconvincing conversion to simplicity and sensitivity, while the Professor remains unyielding to the end.

Khrushchyov the Wood-demon⁷ lends his name to the play, not because he is the pivotal figure but because his epiphany in the last act is the summation of the play's meaning.

There's a wood-demon lurking in me, I'm petty, untalented, blind, but even you, professor, are no eagle! And at the same time the whole county, all the women see me as a hero, a progressive, and you are famous throughout Russia. Well, if people like me are seriously taken to be heroes and if people like you are seriously famous, that must mean there's a shortage of human beings and every Jack's a gentleman, there are no genuine heroes, no talents, no people who would lead us out of this darkling wood, who would put right what we ruin, no real eagles with a right to respect and fame . . .