Anton Chekhov

Private commercial banks were a relatively new feature in Russian life; the State bank itself dated back only to the reforms of 1866. The financial institution in Chekhov's farce is about to celebrate its fifteenth birthday, on which occasion the bank manager Shipuchin will receive a gift from grateful shareholders. While he prepares a speech of thanks and his clerk Khirin is, with an ill will, drawing up statistics, their work is interrupted by Shipuchin's giddy and garrulous wife and old Mrs Merchutkina nagging on behalf of her civil servant husband. The more the women talk, the more the men are driven to distraction. The deputation arrives with its testimonial scroll and silver tankard to behold a vision of chaos: the manager's wife fainting on the sofa, the old lady collapsing in the arms of a babbling Shipuchin, and Khirin threatening the females with mur­der.

The peculiar position of The Jubilee lies halfway between the unsuccessful experiment of The Wood Demon and Chekhov's transitional play The Seagull. Once again founded on a published short story, A Defenceless Creature (1887), it was written in December 1891, but not per­formed until the Chekhov evening at the Moscow Hunt Club in 1900. By the time The Jubilee reached the stage, Chekhov was already known to the general public as the author of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters; many were upset by what seemed a throwback to comic anarchy. The Moscow News referred to it as 'a strange play' that ended with 'the bank manager making an insulting gesture at his bookkeeper, while the latter tears books and files to pieces, tossing the ravaged pages in the manager's face.'⁵ Chekhov was later to transform this finale to the Gogolian tableau that greets the astonished delegation of stockholders.

The first St. Petersburg production on the stage of the Alexandra in May 1903 was even more questionably received. Although the audience was dying with laughter at the antics of Varlamov as Khirin and the hilarious comedienne Levkeyeva as Merchutkina, certain critics won­dered at the crude vulgarity of it all, and speculated whether such a piece had a place in a national theatre. They could not reconcile its extravagant humour with the Checkhov they had grown to expect.

There is a savagery to The Jubilee that exceeds even the contumely of The Wedding. Each member of the comic quartet is despicable: both women are portrayed as idiotic chatterboxes, the clerk is a crabbed misogynist, and the bank manager Shipuchin an ineffectual ass. The setting enforces hypocrisy: as Shipuchin says, 'At home I can be a philistine and a parvenu and indulge my own little habits, but here everything has to be on a grand scale. This is a bank!' The impending ceremony creates a temporal pres­sure that propels the mounting hysteria. The result is Homeric laughter, not at all what the textbooks call 'Chekhovian.'

'The Night Before The Trial'

In 1886, Chekhov had published a story by that title, and he returned to it in the early 1890s to convert it into a play. In the process, he intensified the guilt of the main character Zaytsev, causing him to come to trial not simply for bigamy and a series of beatings, but for bigamy, forging his grandmother's will and attempted murder. The scene in which he plays mock doctor to 'examine' the woman in the room next door was considerably enlarged; so was his sleasy courtship of her, and her own character was dark­ened to make her seem an experienced coquette ready to cuckold her husband. But, because the play was left unfinished, Zaytsev's farewell the next morning and his payment for his 'honest labour' were never worked out, nor was the climax, the scene in court when Zaytsev is surprised to find that the Public Prosecutor is in fact the deceived husband.

Why Chekhov gave it up is a matter for speculation. Perhaps he realised that the seduction would be hard to get past the censorship or that the necessary division into two or three scenes would defeat the comedy's economy as a curtain-raiser. As it stands, Night Before the Trial is close to

French boulevard farce in its sexual emphasis. The tone is more insistently vulgar than in any of Chekhov's short plays other than The Wedding; bedbugs and fleas are omnipres­ent, a dramatic legacy from Gogol, no doubt, but empha­sised here ad nauseam. The mock doctor's examination could easily coarsen into an American burlesque sketch. The Aesopic names Gusev and Zaystev (Goose and Hare) suggest a clown show, and the 'gags' are part of a long popular tradition. Zaytsev (who may in fact be guilty of the crimes he is charged with) contemplates suicide if the verdict goes against him.