Anton Chekhov

'The difference between a full-length play and a one-act is simply quantitative,' Chekhov once remarked (to Suvorin, 14 October 1888). The generic term he used was vaude­ville, 'a one-act drama or comedy', but his short plays are not technically vaudevilles, since they lack two standard features of that form: intrigue, in the French sense of an articulated plot whose donnees are established at the start, and songs, verses set to familiar tunes that express the characters' intimate feelings. Often Chekhov termed his short comic plays shutki, jokes not unlike the squibs he submitted to comic papers in his early days as a writer.

Tn one-act pieces, one has to write nonsense - therein lies their strength,' he declared. But at the same time, he refused to consider such an activity as frivolous.

Sergeyenko is writing a tragedy on the life of Socrates. These pigheaded boors always latch on to greatness, because they don't know how to create something small and they have disproportionately grandiose pretensions, in default of literary taste. It is easier to write about Socrates than to write about a young girl or a cook. (To Suvorin, 2 January 1894, shortly before starting on The Seagull, which has in it both a young girl and a cook.)

His basic formula for a successful farce was compounded of: (a) a complete mix-up; (b) everyone on stage a clear-cut character, speaking his own language; (c) no long drawn- out passages; and (d) uninterrupted action (to A. S. Lazarev, 15 November 1887). Even when Chekhov begins with a hackneyed ploy, he manages to instill fresh vigour into it through well-observed characters, and, perhaps less apparent in translation, juicy dialogue.

Conflicts arise from breakdowns in communication, the misuse of ordinary units of meaning. The device of a business-like conversation going off on a tangent and seldom coming home is a time-honoured one in Russian comic literature: it is practically the underlying principle of Gogol's narrative technique. A character in Gogol's first version of The Inspector General, the ancient military man Rastakovsky, rambles on interminably about past cam­paigns; Chekhov revives the device in the deaf naval officer of The Wedding. In Turgenev's hilarious farce, Luncheon with the Marshal of Nobility, the obtuse biddy Kaurova repeatedly disrupts a 'peaceable settlement' with her vagaries; Chekhov would make her the model for the harridan Merchutkina in The Jubilee.

Almost every one of Chekhov's vaudevilles begins with a hoary stage tradition, a major character explaining at length to the audience his present circumstances. This bald exposition sets the scene for the ensuing complications. Usually two characters of differing temperament work at cross-purposes, their actions accompanied by the commen­tary of a third, less involved character. The Bear and The

Proposal derive much of their fun from such an arrange­ment.

Even in those simple forms, Chekhov was relying on a context that he would exploit more authoritatively in The Wedding, The Jubilee, and Tatyana Repina: a familiar social ritual to set off the satirical point. A period of mourning, a marriage proposal, a wedding ceremony, a nuptial banquet, an anniversary presentation are all rela­tively formal occasions, whose basic outlines are familiar to every member of a society. Each person knows how he is expected to behave at such times. But in Chekhov's one-acts, under the duress of monomania and personal stress these rituals collapse, revealing the frailty of their shared assumptions. The putative relationships prove to be faulty, the bonds of affection or sympathy wanting. In these shorter works, Chekhov's vaunted objectivity resembles impassivity, and he seems almost cruel to his creatures.

The finales of the farces are, in the earliest works, conventional enough: a wedding in the offing or an invitation to a drink, the standard New Comedy termina­tion. Endings gave Chekhov a hard time:

I've got an interesting plot (syuzhet) for a comedy, but I haven't yet come up with an ending. Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. Trite endings don't work! The hero either gets married or shoots himself, there's no other way out. . . Each act I finish like a story: I carry on the whole act peacefully and quietly, and at the end give the spectator a sock in the jaw (to Suvorin, 4 June 1892).

The development to be traced in his dramatic finales, from the suicides in Ivanov and The Seagull, the engagements in The Wood Demon, to the open-ended continuum of his final masterpieces, is conspicuous in the one-acts as well. Life goes squalidly on in The Wedding, life is startled into a frozen tableau in The Jubilee. A neat disposition of the characters' fates is no longer possible.