Anton Chekhov

In 1873, when Chekhov was thirteen, the Taganrog management featured comic operas by Lecocq and Offen­bach: the latter's La Belle Helene, the first play Chekhov ever saw, was probably the most popular stage work in Tsarist Russia, and crops up repeatedly in Chekhov's writing. If we examine the repertory lists for 1876-79, when we know that Chekhov resorted regularly to the theatre to solace his loneliness, we find that he could have seen, among other presentations, four plays of Ostrovsky, a play apiece by Sardou and Dennery, one by Dyachenko, Offenbach's Perichole and Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka, a reference to which also surfaces in The Seagull .¹ The actors who played in these pieces belonged to a generation of flamboyant personalities who held an audience rapt by the virtuosity of their playing, little subordinated to the script.

For all its deficiencies, Chekhov could comprehend the appeal of the 'new drama', though he never put much stock in its attempts at social relevance and verisimilitude. At the same time, he mocked the conservatives who decried stage realism and hearkened back to the romantic past. In On Drama (1884), he showed a callous provincial magistrate pontificating on art:

Present-day dramatists and actors strive, uh, how can I put this more clearly . . . they strive to be life-like, realistic . . . On stage you see what you see in life . . . But is that what we need? We need expression, impact! [. . .] An actor used to talk with an unnatural gruff voice, beat his breast with his fists, howl, drop to the ground, and yet how expressive he was! And he was expressive in his speeches too! He would talk about duty, humanity, freedom. . .²

The impresario in the story The Jubilee (1886) declares that art is dead, because Today it's the thing to say the stage needs truth to life! . . . You can see that anywhere: at the inn, at home, in the market, but at the theatre give me expressiveness!'³ In fact, the new problem plays did retain enough of the romantic melodrama's emotionalism and rant to satisfy ordinary audiences.

Chekhov's years as a medical student in Moscow coin­cided with a period of transition in the drama. Increasing pressure from Ostrovsky and amateur groups for 'people's' theatres had led to the cancellation in 1882 of the monopoly held by the Imperial theatres. Many private theatricals went professional, appealing to new audiences and creating showcases for new playwrights, homegrown and imported. The young theatres Chekhov regularly attended were those of the 'Muscovite wizards and war­locks', Mikhail Lentovsky and Fyodor Korsh, who, in their separate ways, promulgated 'new forms'.

Chekhov's brother Nikolay worked for Lentovsky as a scene-painter, so they had free entry to the Hermitage Pleasure Garden, which he managed, and its 'Fantasy Theatre', a derelict mansion overgrown with weeds, but rendered romantic by moonbeams and electric fairy lights, chimes, a hidden orchestra, and a small stage where

Lentovsky could present the latest music hall attractions from Paris and Vienna. In 1886, with money from the merchant class that supported him, Lentovsky founded the Skomorokh or Mountebank Theatre, hoping to present a prestigious repertory. He even negotiated with Tolstoy, a supporter of 'people's' theatre, to mount The Power of Darkness, but the censor forbade it. Plays of Gogol and Ostrovsky and even Hamlet could be found there, but gradually the bulk of the repertory was translated farces, melodramas and feeries, including the Offenbach-Verne Trip to the Moon with illuminated panoramas. Lentovsky's productions abounded in pyrotechnical displays, explo­sions, fires, collapsing bridges, and the whole impedimenta of sensationalism. Of The Forest Tramp (1883), Chekhov wrote, 'Thanks to this new, bitter-sweet, German Lieber- gottic rubbish all Moscow smells of gunpowder'.⁴

Although his personal relations with Lentovsky, whom he credited with some sense and ingenuity, were good, Chekhov filled his newspaper columns with hilarious sallies at the mixtures of fustian and flash powder the director served up. He composed two absurd skits, Unclean Trage­dians and Leprous Playwrights and A Mess in Rome (both 1884), which riotously flayed the entrepreneur's choice of material, stagecraft and actors. Basically Chekhov's com­plaint was that Lentovsky's extravaganzas compromised heightened realism with flashy trickery; they were junk- food rather than true nourishment for the imagination. When Lentovskyan fireworks explode in a play of Chekhov's like Planonov, they are there to contrast with the damp squibs of the characters' unachieved yearnings.