Anton Chekhov

Gradually, the bridegroom's bad conscience overwhelms him and he begins to imagine that Tatyana is there beside him in the church, while her colleagues from the theatre pray for her soul's rest and make disdainful comments about her seducer. When the wedding party finally departs, the remaining clergymen are startled by a woman in black who staggers out from behind a column; she has poisoned herself a la Repina and incoherently wavers between fatalism and the desire to be saved.

lady in black: . . . Everybody ought to take poison . . . (Groans and rolls on the floor.) She's in her grave, while he ... he ... To offend a woman is to offend God ... A woman has perished . . .

father ivan: What blasphemy against religion! (Flinging

up his arms.) What blasphemy against life! lady in black (jtears at herself and screams): Save me! Save me! Save me! . . .

CURTAIN

and the rest I leave to A. S. Suvorin s imagination.

Suvorin's Tatyana Repina is interesting for foreshadow­ing The Seagull. Chekhov's favourite character in Suvorin's play was the journalist Adashev, who denigrates his profession as a man of letters in a manner which Chekhov replicated in the Trigorin-Nina interview in The Seagull. It is Adashev, a raisonneur, who tells Tatyana, after she has, unbeknownst to him, already taken poison, his opinion that suicide is cowardice.

Among us suicide has really become something epidemic. There's no shortage of gunpowder for good people. Children rush for the revolver when they get low grades, grown-ups on account of trifles . . . They fall out of love - a bullet through the brain. Their vanity's been bruised, they aren't appreciated - they shoot themselves. What's happened to strength of character?³

Chekhov picks up this notion and carries it to its logical conclusion; he also carries it into his later works. Treplyov's suicide at the end of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya's abstraction of morphine must be viewed in this light. After Ivanov, Chekhov treated suicide as an act of weakness, an unwillingness to cope with life's demands.

Nina in The Seagull is a development of the Tatyana Repina model. In Suvorin's play, the young actress, forlorn in a suburban pleasure garden, hears her ex-lover singing at his bachelor supper.

tatyana: He? Wait . . . Yes, yes, that's his voice . . . l'amour qui nous . . . It's he, he . . . {Listens intently. )⁴

This is Tatyana's lowest ebb, the decisive factor in her self-destruction. In the last act of The Seagull, Nina overhears the laughter of Trigorin in the dining-room, runs to the door and states, 'He's here too . . . Why, yes . . . Never mind . . . Yes'. But Nina's confrontation with this spectre of her past confirms her in her decision to jettison the persona of the seagull.

Chekhov's Tatyana Repina however, a pastiche not a parody, is most intriguing as an experiment in polyphonic structure; in miniature, it practices the intricate interweav­ing of melodramatic pathos and crass diurnalism that was to become the trademark of Chekhov's major plays. Not just the suicides, but the mismatched marriages, failed careers and dashed hopes that will, in the last plays, be jumbled amid meals, card-games and dirty galoshes are adumbrated here. Tatyana Repina is a quintessence of Chekhov's notion of stage naturalism: not a slice of life copied from reality, but a reconstitution of the casual interconnections that tangle lives together.

'A Tragedian In Spite Of Himself

Chekhov had promised Varlamov another acting vehicle and turned to his story One of Many (1887) about a paterfamilias who must spend his time shunting back and forth between the dacha where his nearest and dearest are summering and the town where he carries out their innumerable commissions. For the sake of the stage, Chekhov altered the list of errands, deleting among other items 'a child's coffin', and racy remarks that could pass in print but would never get past the dramatic censor.

Varlamov did not in fact appear in the play, so that the first actor to create the harried family man was M. I. Bibikov at an amateur performance at the Petersburg German Club on 1 October 1889. Basically, A Tragedian remains a comic monologue, with the officious friend acting as straight man.