Anton Chekhov

The allusion to Moliere in the title alerts one to the extreme contradictions of the protagonist Tolkachov. Described as 'the father of a family' he begins the play by calling for a pistol to commit suicide and ends it by quoting Othello, demanding the blood of his interlocutor. Between these two poles, the banal situation he describes comes less from the world of tragedy than that of existential absurdity. His multifarious errands require him to live in a muddle of inanimate objects. 'For instance, how are you going to lump together a heavy copper mortar and pestle with a lamp-globe or carbolic acid with tea? How are you going to combine beer bottles and this velocipede?' This surrealistic melange, followed by a detailed comparison of married life with the Israelites' labour in the Egyptian brickyards and the Spanish Inquisition, creates a manic impression of an ordinary middle-class existence as Bosch's hell. Although firmly in the Gogol tradition, Chekhov here moves halfway to Jarry and Ionesco.

'The Wedding⁹

Chekhov characterised The Wedding as 'a scene in one act,' thus distinguishing it from his other short comedies; it differs too in being based on real experiences and indi­viduals in Chekhov's past. The Greek confectioner Dymba was modelled on a clerk in his father's grocery store in Taganrog; the flirtatious midwife he had met when acting as best man at a wedding in 1887. Between 1885 and 1886 he had lived in a Moscow flat beneath the quarters of a caterer who rented our rooms for weddings and balls. At times, he seemed obsessed with weddings, which are the subject of many of his stories written in the 1880s. The one-act was first played at the Art and Literary Society at the Moscow Hunt Club on 28 November 1900, as part of a Chekhov evening; Tolstoy, who was there, laughed till he cried.

The Wedding is a masterful exhibition of the dissolution of social convention. Every pretence kept up by one character is demolished by another; no one's secrets are safe. Over the course of the play, we discover that the groom has married the bride for the sake of a paltry dowry, which has yet to be paid; that the bride herself is totally insensitive to her situation; that her parents are the most narrow and parsimonious of philistines; and that the guests bear no particular good will to the happy pair. The play revolves around one principal deception: to dress out the banquet, a 'General,' that is, a high-ranking official, is required as guest of honour. The bride's mother has charged a friend with this task; he has pocketed the money and brought a deaf naval captain, who assumes that he has been invited. The mother discovers the swindle and turns the old man out without further ado. At that moment, the farcical tone of the play disappears. The old captain, disabused and stripped of any consideration, can only gasp in horror, 'What a shabby trick! What a shabby trick!' After the old man's exit, the guests and hosts revert to their squabbling. The moment of genuine feeling has made no dent in their thick hides.

Again, Chekhov employed the comic device of the gap between the characters' aspirations and reality. Hoping to sound refined, they mangle French and mispronounce polysyllabic words. Zmeyukina, a midwife whose profession is of the earthiest, constantly demands 'atmosphere' and delicate feeling; she quotes Lermontov in anticipation of Solyony in Three Sisters. The bride's father invariably dismisses anything unfamiliar with contempt, branding it 'monkey business.' The main oration of the evening is delivered by a Greek who cannot speak Russian:

dymba (rises, bashful). I talk sometings, is no? ... Is Russia. And is Greece. Now in Russia is such a peoples, and in Greece is such a peoples . . . And peoples on ocean is sailing sheeps, in Russian means boots, but on land runs all sorts wildroot drains. I understanding good, is no?

Yet when a Russian does rise to speak, it is the Captain, whose naval lingo is every bit as incomprehensible; assum­ing that he is entertaining the company, the old salt bores the guests into stupor and then mutiny. Over the entire action hangs a sense of affectlessness, no character ever making true contact with any other. Relatively realistic as it is, The Wedding subjects the lower-middle-class to the merciless derision of a Daumier.

'The Jubilee'