Anton Chekhov

Chekhov's art is allusive, syncretic, rich in ambivalence: his standard practice when rewriting was to excise lines that seemed tautological or overly explicit. Stanislavsky's view of art was more Victorian: he meant it to illustrate, inform, and explain. In addition, Nemirovich-Danchenko empha­sised the social purpose of drama. Consequently, a Moscow Art Theatre production treated a play not so much as the imaginative fruits of an individual author's sensibility as a segment of real experience, to be probed in depth. Because Chekhov's plays are grounded in reality and his characters are accretions of closely-observed psychological detail, the Moscow Art Theatre approach yielded successful results, but the success was only partial. Contemporary audiences of intelligentsia were enthralled to see themselves and their malaise reflected with such authenticity, yet Chekhov felt, with some justice, that his reticence, ambiguities, and comic pacing were lost in the process. The Moscow Art Theatre rendered photographically what had been meant as pointillism.

In his director's book for The Seagull, Stanislavsky noted that a laugh offstage coming in the last act after Nina's quotation from Turgenev would be 'a vulgar effect.' But he could not resist it, because it was effective, and so it remained. Stanislavsky's whole approach to directing was to erect signposts to explicit meaning, and translate ambiguity into easily apprehended stage messages. Ulti­mately the Art Theatre's greatest gift to Chekhov was its insistence on ensemble playing, or in Stanislavsky's words, 'today Hamlet, tomorrow a walk-on'. Since Chekhov's casts are integral units, unstratified into leading characters and comprimario roles, he could be most faithfully per­formed by a company that devoted as much time to creating an inner life for Ferapont as it would for Vershinin.

This became clear when Chekhov's plays entered the repertory of other theatres. At the State-subsidised Alex­andra in St. Petersburg, when the characters began to dance at the Shrovetide party in Three Sisters, Davydov, who played Chebutykin, came downstage centre and performed a Cossack dance as a music-hall turn, to audience applause.¹ Such was the custom, even in realistic drama. Under these circumstances, even if the Art Theatre somewhat distorted Chekhov, he was fortunate that it existed to launch his plays in a far less compromised form that they might otherwise have assumed. The Moscow Art Theatre style was copied by provincial theatres, and became the model for producing Chekhov, even in China and Japan.

Chekhov left no school. The poet Aleksandr Blok specifically stated that 'he had no precursors, and his successors do not know how to do anything a la Chekhov'. 'Lyricism is especially prevalent in Chekhov's plays,' he continued, 'but his mysterious gift was not passed on to anyone else, and his innumerable imitators have given us nothing of value.'² One of those who tried to perpetuate Chekhov's so-called lyricism was Boris Zaytsev, whose The Lanin Estate was put on by a group of students under the leadership of Stanislavsky's favourite disciple Yevgeny Vakhtangov in 1914. Audiences of the eve of Revolution found it an irrelevant threnody.

After the Revolution, Chekhov went out of fashion in Russia, for his plays too were dismissed as irrelevant to Soviet society. Along with the Moscow Art Theatre, they were condemned as relics of an obsolete bourgeois way of life, appealing only to the same ineffectual types that peopled his drama. The leftist poet Mayakovsky, in a prologue to his agit-prop play Mystery-Bouffe, sneered, You go to the theatre and 'You look and see/- Auntie Manyas and Uncle Vanyas flopping on divans./Neither uncles nor aunts interest us, / We can get uncles and aunts at home'.³ Another complaint was that Chekhov was too pessimistic at a time when 'active progressivism' was the byword. By the 1930s, only the vaudevilles and The Cherry Orchard were revived, with Trofimov and Lopakhin exalted as heralds of the Revolution.