SOURCE: "Introductory," in Chekhov the Dramatist, Hill and Wang, 1960, pp. 13-49.

[In this essay, Magarshack explores Chekhov's views on art and the Russian theater of his day, as expressed in his letters and occasional writings.]

Chapter I

The plays of Chekhov, like those of any other great dramatist, follow a certain pattern of development which can be traced through all its various stages. His last four plays, moreover, conform to certain general principles which are characteristic of the type of indirect-action drama to which they belong. Chekhov himself was fully aware of that. Already on November 3rd, 1888, in a letter to Alexey Suvorin, he clearly stated that all works of art must conform to certain laws. "It is possible to collect in a heap the best that has been created by the artists in all ages," he wrote, "and, making use of the scientific method, discover the general principles which are characteristic of them all and which lie at the very basis of their value as works of art. These general principles will constitute their law. Works of art which are immortal possess a great deal in common; if one were to extract that which is common to them all from any of them, it would lose its value and its charm. This means "that what is common to them all is necessary and is a conditio sine qua non of every work which lays claim to immortality."

Chekhov did not claim immortality for his plays. He was too modest for that. What he did claim for them, however, was something that any immortal work of art is generally supposed to possess, namely, the power so to influence people as to induce them to create a new and better life for themselves. "You tell me," Chekhov said to the writer Alexander Tikhonov in 1902, "that people cry at my plays. I've heard others say the same. But that was not why I wrote them. It is Alexeyev (Stanislavsky) who made my characters into cry-babies. All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realise that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: 'Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!'

"What is there in this to cry about?"

The misinterpretation of Chekhov's plays by the Moscow Art Theatre led to constant conflicts between their author and its two directors. These conflicts became particularly violent during the production of The Cherry Orchard. "The production of The Cherry Orchard" Olga Knipper, Chekhov's wife and one of the leading actresses of the Moscow Art Theatre, wrote, "was difficult, almost agonising, I might say. The producers and the author could not understand each other and could not come to an agreement." Chekhov himself wrote to Olga Knipper: "Nemirovich-Danchenko and Alexeyev positively see in my play something I have not written, and I am ready to bet anything you like that neither of them has ever read my play through carefully." And to a well-known Russian producer Chekhov said: "Take my Cherry Orchard. Is it my Cherry Orchard? With the exception of two or three parts nothing in it is mine. I am describing life, ordinary life, and not blank despondency. They either make me into a cry-baby or into a bore. They invent something about me out of their own heads, anything they like, something I never thought of or dreamed about. This is beginning to make me angry." And what is true of Chekhov's Russian producers is even truer of his English and American producers, though in their case the idea that the characters in Chekhov's plays represent curiously unaccountable "Russians" adequately conceals their own confusion and helplessness.

This general bewilderment would have been fatal to the popularity of Chekhov's plays were it not that, being a playwright of genius, Chekhov paints his characters with so exquisite a brush that no caricature can strip them of their essential humanity. If neither the spectators nor those responsible for the production and performance of the plays can see the wood for the trees in them, the trees themselves are so brilliantly delineated that they are quite sufficient to ensure the comparative success of any of Chekhov's famous plays. It must not be forgotten, however, that their success is only "comparative", for so far Chekhov has failed to become a really "popular" playwright either in England or America, and it is doubtful whether one in a thousand of the regular playgoers in these countries has ever seen a play of his or, indeed, knows anything about it.

Nor has Chekhov been particularly fortunate in his critics. Disregarding the host of critics in and outside Russia whose aesthetic appreciation of Chekhov derives entirely from their own sensibilities and who seem to delight in losing themselves in a welter of half-tones and feelings too exquisite for anyone but themselves to detect, two critical appreciations of Chekhov as a playwright sum up an attitude that is still prevalent among the more thoughtful admirers of Chekhov's genius. One of them comes from Tolstoy. Peter Gnyeditch, a Russian novelist and playwright who was for some years in charge of the repertoire of the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg, recounts the following observation made by Tolstoy to Chekhov in his presence: "You know I can't stand Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse. Shakespeare after all does seize his reader by the collar and lead him to a certain goal without letting him get lost on the way. But where is one to get to with your heroes? From the sofa to the … and back?" And to Gnyeditch himself Tolstoy remarked that Chekhov had not "the real nerve" of a dramatist. "I am very fond of Chekhov and I value his writings highly," Gnyeditch reports Tolstoy as saying, "but I could not force myself to read his Three Sisters to the end—where does it all lead us to? Generally speaking, our modern writers seem to have lost the idea of what drama is. Instead of giving us a man's whole life, drama must put him in such a situation, must tie him in such a knot as to enable us to see what he is like while he is trying to untie it. Now, as you know, I have been so bold as to deny the importance of Shakespeare as a playwright. But in Shakespeare every man does something, and it is always clear why he acts thus and not otherwise. On his stage he had signposts with inscriptions: moonlight, a house. And a good thing too! For the entire attention of the spectator remains concentrated on the essential point of the drama; but now everything is the other way round."

And in an interview published in the Russian journal Slovo on July 28th, 1904, about a fortnight after Chekhov's death, Tolstoy summarised his objections to Chekhov's plays in these words: "To evoke a mood you want a lyrical poem. Dramatic forms serve, and ought to serve, quite different aims. In a dramatic work the author ought to deal with some problem that has yet to be solved and every character in the play ought to solve it according to the idiosyncrasies of his own character. It is like a laboratory experiment. But you won't find anything of the kind in Chekhov. He never holds the attention of the spectators sufficiently long for them to put themselves entirely in his power. For instance, he keeps the spectator's attention fixed on the fate of the unhappy Uncle Vanya and his friend Dr. Astrov, but he is sorry for them only because they are unhappy, without attempting to prove whether or not they deserve pity. He makes them say that once upon a time they were the best people in the district, but he does not show us in what way they were good. I can't help feeling that they have always been worthless creatures and that their suffering cannot therefore be worthy of our attention."

The Seagull, it is interesting to note, Tolstoy roundly dismissed as "nonsense." Alexey Suvorin, the well-known Russian newspaper publisher and a life-long friend of Chekhov's, records in his diary on February 11th, 1897, that Tolstoy told him that the play was "utterly worthless" and that it was written "just as Ibsen writes his plays."

"The play is chock full of all sorts of things," Tolstoy declared, "but no one really knows what they are for. And Europe shouts, 'Wonderful!' Chekhov," Tolstoy went on, "is one of our most gifted writers, but The Seagull is a very bad play."

"Chekhov," Suvorin remarked, "would die if he were told what you thought about his play. Please, don't say anything to him about it."

"I shall tell him what I think of it," Tolstoy said, "but I shall put it gently. I'm surprised that you think he would take it so much to heart. After all, every writer slips up sometimes."

Tolstoy, according to Suvorin, thought that Chekhov should never have introduced a writer in The Seagull. "There aren't many of us," he said, "and no one is really interested in us." Trigorin's monologue in Act II he considered the best thing in the play and he thought that it was most certainly autobiographical, but in his opinion Chekhov should have published it separately or in a let ter. "In a play it is out of place," he declared. In his short story 'My Life,' Tolstoy concluded with what, if he only knew, would have appeared to Chekhov the most devastating criticism of his play, "Chekhov makes his hero read Ostrovsky and say, 'All this can happen in life,' but had he read The Seagull, he would never have said that."

Apart from his purely moral objections to Chekhov's characters Tolstoy's main criticisms of Chekhov's plays concern their structure and their apparent lack of purpose. Accustomed to the drama of direct action, Tolstoy expected the unravelling of the knot which the playwright ties round his hero to supply the key to his character, to reveal the man as a whole. He also expected a play to solve the problems society has so far failed to solve and in this way supply the answer to the question: where does it all lead to?

Curiously enough, English criticism, too, seems to regard the same apparent lack of purpose as characteristic of Chekhov's drama, though, unlike Tolstoy, most of the critics consider that as something praiseworthy. Discussing The Seagull, Mr. (as he then was) Desmond MacCarthy¹ asks: "What is it all about?" and his answer is: "It is a question more than usually difficult to answer in the case of The Seagull. I am obliged to turn it aside," he goes on, "and say that it is a beautiful study in human nature, penetrating, detached, and compassionate.… It has no theme." Still, the critic admits that he often said to himself that "a work of art to have any value must somewhere carry within it the suggestion of a desirable life," which he does not apparently find in Chekhov's plays, and he therefore suggests that it is to be found "in the mind of Chekhov himself, in the infection we catch from the spirit of the whole play; in the delicate, humorous, compassionate mind which observed, understood and forgave." The same critic, in another notice of The Seagull eleven years later,² answers the same question: "What is The Seagull about?" as follows: "It is a study of a group of people, penetrating, detached and compassionate." As for the purpose of the play, "the point that The Seagull drives home," he writes, "is that the person who possesses what another thinks would make all the difference to him or her is just as dissatisfied as the one who lacks it. By means of these contrasts Chekhov shows that what each pines for makes no difference in the end."

As for Uncle Vanya,³ Mr. MacCarthy finds that Chekhov's "favourite theme is disillusionment and as far as the kind of beauty he creates, beneath it might be written 'desolation is a delicate thing'." Generally, Chekhov's play, according to the same distinguished critic, reveals "an atmosphere of sighs and yawns and self-reproaches, vodka, endless tea, and endless discussion." And thirteen years declared later, the same critic, writing of Uncle Vanya again,⁴ declared that "though Chekhov was far from ineffectual himself, the ineffectiveness of his generation was his inspiration. And his final conclusion about the play is: "Besides inventing the play without plot and theatrical effects, Chekhov was also the poet and apologist of ineffectualness."⁵

Discussing The Cherry Orchard,⁶ Mr. MacCarthy states as a matter of fact ("we all know") that "the essence of Chekhov's drama" is "the rainbow effect, laughter shining through tears." And in a notice The Three Sisters⁷ he finds Chekhov's heroines to be of "forlorn, ineffectual young women" and comes to the conclusion that "Chekhov's supreme gift was to bring the observation of character to a most delicate sense of justice," and that his method was "to develop character and situation by means of a dialogue which follows the broken rhythms of life, and by making every remark, every gesture of his characters reflect the influence of group relations of the moment."

While disagreeing entirely with Tolstoy about the value of Chekhov's plays as works of art, Mr. Desmond MacCarthy, who in this respect represents English criticism as a whole, agrees with him about the absence of a well-defined aim in them as well as about the general ineffectualness of their characters. The only trouble about this now widely held view is that Chekhov himself dissented violently from it. Before, then, deciding whether Chekhov or his critics and producers are right, it is necessary to find out what Chekhov thought the final aim and form of a dramatic work ought to be, and what his attitude to contemporary drama was. For Chekhov had very definite ideas about both, and these most certainly influenced his work for the stage.

Chapter II

Chekhov was not, as is generally supposed, a great short-story writer who took up drama seriously only during the last seven or eight years of his all too short life. He was a born dramatist whose first works of importance were three full-length plays, two written in his late teens and the third in his early twenties. He took up short-story writing for two reasons: first, because he had to support a large family which was entirely dependent on him, and the writing of short stories was the quickest way of doing it; secondly, because the state of the Russian stage in the eighties and the nineties of the last century was such that no serious playwright could hope to have his plays performed, let alone earn a decent living in the theatre. Even Alexander Ostrovsky, whose reputation as a playwright had long been established, was not able to do so. It was indeed this hopeless position of the serious playwright in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century that made Chekhov look on fiction as his "legal wife" and the stage as "a noisy, impudent and tiresome mistress." But the remarkable fact about a Chekhov short story is that it possesses the three indispensable elements of drama: compactness of structure (Chekhov's term for it was "architecture"), movement, that is dramatic development of plot, and action. "The reader," Chekhov wrote to the writer Ivan Leontyev on January 28th, 1888, "must never be allowed to rest; he must be kept in a state of suspense." The dialogue in Chekhov's short stories is essentially dramatic dialogue and that is what chiefly distinguishes them from the short stories of other fiction writers. Many of these short stories, particularly the early ones, have been adapted for the Russian stage, but the "adaptation" consisted mainly in lifting Chekhov's dialogue and using the descriptive passages as stage directions. Chekhov himself "adapted" five of his short stories for the stage on the same principle, that is, he merely lifted the dialogue, adding his own stage directions, and, if his story was too short, expanding it to the necessary length of a one-act play. Commenting on a play by the Norwegian playwright Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson in a letter to Suvorin on June 20th, 1896 (that is, after he had written The Seagull), Chekhov remarked that it was of no use so far as the stage was concerned because "it has no action, no living characters and no dramatic interest." This is surely the best comment ever made on the distortion the plays of Chekhov have suffered on the stage, and especially on the English and American stage, by being denied just the quality Chekhov himself valued most both as playwright and as short-story writer, namely, action.

Chekhov, then, was a born playwright and his knowledge of the stage, too, was first-hand. As a boy in his native town of Taganrog he had often appeared on the amateur and professional stage and earned general recognition as a talented actor. Replying on March 4th, 1893, to an invitation to take part in a literary evening, Chekhov pointed out that he was a bad reader and, what was even worse, suffered from stage-fright. "This is silly and ridiculous, but I can't do anything about it," he wrote. "I have never read in public in my life and never shall. A long time ago I used to act on the stage, but there I concealed myself behind my costume and make-up and that gave me courage." And writing to Suvorin on April 18th, 1895, about an amateur performance, of Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment, planned by a number of Moscow writers in aid of some charity, in which he had agreed to take the part of the peasant, Chekhov declared: "I used to act quite well in the past, though now I fear my voice will let me down."

His purely professional attitude towards drama (as opposed to the now so common "literary" one) can further be gauged from the fact that he did not consider a play of his completed before it had been thoroughly revised by him at rehearsals. Thus he wrote on November 27th, 1889, to the poet Pleshheyev who had asked his permission to publish The Wood Demon, "I never consider a play ready for publication until it has been revised during rehearsals. Wait, please. It is not too late yet. When the play has been revised at the rehearsals, I shall take advantage of your kind offer without waiting for an invitation."

Chekhov's only reason for writing a play was the likeli-hood of its being performed on the stage. Moreover, when writing a play he usually bore in mind the actors who were most likely to appear in its leading parts and, as in the case of Ivanov, he never hesitated to alter a play radically if a different actor or actress took a part he had originally intended for someone else.

"I sent you two versions of my Ivanov," he wrote to Suvorin on January 7th, 1889. "If Ivanov had been played by a resourceful and dynamic actor, I should have altered and added a lot. I felt in the mood for it. But, alas, Ivanov is played by Davydov. That meant that I had to write shorter and duller dialogue, keeping in mind that all the subtleties and 'nuances' will be overlooked, become ordinary and tedious. Can Davydov be gentle one moment and firrious another? When he plays serious parts there seems to be a kind of handmill turning round and round in his throat, dull and monotonous, which is speaking instead of him. I am sorry for poor Savina who has to play the part of my uninspiring Sasha. I would gladly have altered it for Savina, but if Ivanov mouths his part, I can't do anything for Sasha, however much I alter her part. I am simply ashamed that Savina will have to play goodness knows what in my play. Had I known earlier that she would play Sasha and Davydov Ivanov, I should have called my play Sasha and made everything revolve round this part and just attached Ivanov to it. But who could have foreseen that?"

Such an attitude may appear curious to a modern playwright, but that is only because the modern playwright has become detached from the stage. To Shakespeare or (in Russia) to Alexander Ostrovsky, to playwrights, that is, whom Chekhov called "specialists of the stage," such an attitude would not have appeared at all strange, and indeed both of them wrote their plays for and around well-known members of their companies.

What was Chekhov's attitude to the theatre? What did he think of the actors of the Imperial and private stage in Moscow and Petersburg? What were his views on the problems of acting and did he think a play ought to have a well-defined aim of its own, an aim that should be intelligible to the spectator? What, finally, were his ideas on the form and structure of a play and what did he consider to be the playwright's place in the theatre?

These questions occupied Chekhov's mind continually and were of decisive importance to his whole career as a dramatist.

Chekhov left a scathing description of the state of the theatre in Moscow in an article he contributed to the Petersburg weekly Fragments in 1885. What Chekhov found so appalling about the Moscow Imperial stage was the reign of mediocrity on it. "At the Bolshoy Theatre," he wrote in his article, "we have opera and ballet. Nothing new. The actors are all the old ones and their manner of singing is the old one: not according to the notes, but according to official circulars. In the ballet the ballerinas have been recently joined by Noah's aunt and Methuselah's sister-in-law." The state of affairs at the Moscow Imperial dramatic theatre, the Maly Theatre, was no better. "Again nothing new," Chekhov declared. "The same mediocre acting and the same traditional ensemble, inherited from our ancestors." As for the Moscow private theatre owned by Korsh where Ivanov was soon to be given its first try-out, it bore, Chekhov wrote, "a striking resemblance to a mixed salad: there is everything there except the most important thing of all—meat." There were two more private theatres in Moscow at the time, one near the Pushkin memorial, known as the Pushkin Theatre, where plays were performed for only half the season, and the theatre owned by the famous impresario Lentovsky. "Whether Lentovsky's theatre," Chekhov wrote, "will be given up to operettas, pantomimes or tragedies, or whether the celebrated clown Durov will be showing his learned pig there, is so far unknown to Lentovsky himself, who is at present preoccupied with designing vignettes for some grand, stupendous, nebulous enterprise." There were, besides, "fifty thousand amateur theatres," but Chekhov had no use for them, and even the foundation three years later of the Society of Art and Literature by Stanislavsky and the actor and playwright Fedotov was looked upon by Chekhov with unconcealed derision, the pretentiousness of the name of the society being sufficient to make Chekhov sceptical about its founders.

In a letter to Suvorin on February 14th, 1889, Chekhov roundly dismissed the Russian theatre as it existed at that time as "nothing but a sport. I don't believe in the theatre as a school without which it is impossible to exist," he declared. In "A Boring Story" which he wrote between March and September, 1889, Chekhov discussed the vexed problem of the theatre as a place of entertainment at greater length and came to the conclusion that such a theatre was a mere waste of time. "A sentimental and credulous crowd," he writes, "can be persuaded that the theatre in its present state is a 'school'. But anyone who knows what a school is really like will not be deceived by such a facile statement. I don't know what the theatre will be like in fifty or a hundred years, but under present conditions it can serve only as entertainment, and as entertainment it is too expensive to be worth while. It deprives the State of thousands of gifted young men and women who, if they did not dedicate themselves to the theatre, could have become good doctors, farmers, teachers, army officers; it deprives the public of its evening hours—the best time for intellectual work and fireside chats. Not to mention the sheer waste of money and the moral injury suffered by the public from seeing a wrongly presented case of murder, adultery or libel on the stage."

This criticism of the theatre as entertainment Chekhov puts into the mouth of the hero of his story, an old professor of medicine, and Chekhov was always very careful to make his heroes speak and think "in character". But there can be no doubt that, though Chekhov himself would not have expressed these ideas in so extreme a form, they were substantially his own ideas on the theatre of his day. It was certainly Chekhov the playwright who was speaking through the mouth of his hero when he condemned the music played in the intervals between the acts of a play as "quite unnecessary" and "as adding something utterly new and irrelevant to the impression created by the play." It was only with the foundation of the Moscow Art Theatre that this "unnecessary and irrelevant" custom was abolished.

Chapter III

Three notices which Chekhov contributed to Moscow journals in 1881, that is to say, at the very beginning of his literary career, reveal him as a thoughtful student of the stage and a merciless critic of bad acting. Two of these deal with Sarah Bernhardt who was on tour in Russia and appeared on the Moscow stage in December of 1881. Chekhov was not an admirer of the divine Sarah. While dramatically effective, he found her too artificial. "Every sigh of Sarah Bernhardt's," he wrote, "her tears, her convulsions in the death scenes, her entire acting is nothing but a cleverly learnt lesson. Being a highly intelligent woman who knows what is and what is not dramatically effective, and who, besides, possesses most excellent taste and a knowledge of the human heart, she knows how to perform all those conjuring tricks which at one time or another take place in the human heart at the behest of fate." Chekhov's strongest objection to Sarah Bernhardt's acting was based on the fact that the great French actress always acted herself. "She transforms everyone of her heroines," Chekhov wrote, "into the same kind of unusual woman she is herself." Furthermore, Chekhov found that Sarah Bernhardt was not anxious to be natural on the stage (an interesting and highly significant criticism this). "All she cares about," he declared, "is being unusual. Her aim is to startle, astonish and stun. There is not a glimmer of talent in all her acting, but just an enormous amount of hard work." It was Sarah Bernhardt's hard work that, Chekhov thought, provided the clue to her great success on the stage. "There is not one trivial detail in her big or small parts," he wrote, "that has not passed through the purgatory of hard work." And after expressing his "most respectful admiration" for Sarah Bernhardt's "industry", Chekhov advised the Russian actors to take a lesson from her. "That the majority of our actors do very little," he wrote, "can be gathered from the fact that they all seem to stand still: not a step forward—anywhere! If only they worked as hard as Sarah Bernhardt, if only they knew as much as Sarah Bernhardt, they would go far. But, unfortunately, where the knowledge of the art of the stage is concerned, our big and small servants of the Muses lag far behind and, if an old truth is to be believed, knowledge can only be achieved by hard work.

"We watched Sarah Bernhardt," Chekhov sums up his impressions of the French actress, "and we were thrown into raptures by her great industry. There were moments in her acting which almost moved us to tears. If our tears did not flow it was only because the whole charm of her acting was spoilt by its artificiality. But for that confounded artificiality, those deliberate conjuring tricks and over-emphasis, we should most certainly have burst into tears, and indeed the whole theatre would have shaken with thunderous applause. Oh, genius! Cuvier said that genius was always at loggerheads with mere agility, and Sarah Bernhardt is certainly very agile."

There was one important quality of acting, however, that Chekhov did appreciate in Sarah Bernhardt: it was her ability to listen. That ability, though, was shared by the rest of her French company. They were all excellent listeners, and that was why, Chekhov thought, they never felt out of place on the stage. It was different with the Russian actors. "This is how we do it:" Chekhov wrote, "when Mr. Mashkeyev is saying his lines on the stage, Mr. Wilde, who is listening to him, has his eyes fixed on some far-away point and keeps coughing impatiently, and as you watch him, you cannot help feeling that what he is thinking of at the moment is: 'That has nothing to do with me, old man'!"

What Chekhov admired, therefore, and what he demanded from his actors, was natural acting, the sort of acting for which the great Russian actor Shchepkin became famous and which Stanislavsky later on made into the cornerstone of his own system of acting. He realised, as Stanislavsky did many years later, that such acting required a great deal of hard work as well as observation of life. "Our actors," Chekhov complained in a letter to Suvorin on November 25th, 1889, "never observe ordinary people. They know nothing of landowners, business men, priests, or Civil Servants. On the other hand, they are quite capable of representing billiard markers, rich men's mistresses, drunken card-sharpers, and generally those individuals whom they happen to observe incidentally during their pub-crawls and drinking-bouts. The real trouble is that they are so frightfully ignorant."

Chekhov's dissatisfaction with the state of the Russian stage of his time is expressed even more forcibly in a notice on a performance of Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre which he wrote on January 11th, 1882. It is the only dramatic criticism of a Shakespearean performance Chekhov ever wrote, and for that reason alone it deserves to be quoted at length. Chekhov begins his notice with a parable of a sage who could not be dragged away from his books but whom one of his disciples discovered one night in "a far from respectable place" with a pretty French girl on his knees, sipping champagne.

"What are you doing, Herr Professor?" his disciple exclaimed in dismay, turning pale with surprise.

"A foolish thing, my son," the sage replied, pouring out a glass of wine for his disciple. "I am doing a very foolish thing."

"But why?" the disciple asked.

"To let in a little fresh air, my son," the sage replied, lifting his glass. "To wine and women!"

The disciple drank, turning even paler with surprise.

"My son," went on the sage, stroking the hair of the pretty French girl, "clouds have gathered in my head, the atmosphere has grown heavy, and lots and lots of things have accumulated. All that has to be aired and purified and put in its proper place. It is to do that that I am committing this piece of folly. Folly is a regrettable thing, but very often it does freshen things up. Yesterday I felt like rotting grass, but tomorrow morning, O bone discipule, I shall be as fresh as a daisy. Three cheers for an act of folly committed once a year! Viva stultitia!"

"If folly," Chekhov continues, "sometimes acts in so refreshing a manner, how much more must it be true of its opposite extreme." And he goes on to explain that nothing needed refreshing so much as the Russian stage. "Its atmosphere," he writes, "is leaden and oppressive. It is covered inches-thick in dust and enveloped in fog and tedium. You go to the theatre simply because you have nowhere else to go. You look at the stage, yawn, and swear under your breath."

But, Chekhov contends, it is impossible to put new life into the stage by an act of folly because the footboards are all too used to acts of folly, as it is. It must be brought to life by the opposite extreme, and, he adds, "this extreme is Shakespeare. I have often heard people ask whether or not it is worth while performing Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre," Chekhov writes. "It is an idle question. Shakespeare must be played everywhere for the sake of letting in fresh air, if not for the sake of instruction or some other more or less lofty purpose."

Hamlet, Chekhov was glad to report, was accorded a delighted welcome by the audience of the Pushkin Theatre which seemed to enjoy itself hugely. Chekhov goes on to criticise the performance, and again in these criticisms a clue can be discovered to his own ideas of acting.

"Mr. Ivanov-Kozelsky,"⁸ he writes, "is not strong enough to play Hamlet. He understands Hamlet in his own way. Now, for an actor to understand a character in his own way is not a fault, provided the actor does not let his author down. Mr. Ivanov-Kozelsky whined through the whole of the first act. Hamlet never whined. No man's tears are cheap, and certainly not Hamlet's. On the stage," Chekhov declares, as though in anticipation of the fate that would befall his own characters, "tears must not be shed without reason. Mr. Ivanov-Kozelsky," he goes on, "was frightened of the ghost, so greatly frightened indeed was he that I felt sorry for him. He made a hash of Hamlet's speech to his father. Hamlet was an irresolute man, but he was no coward, all the more so since he had already been prepared for the meeting with the ghost. The scene in which Hamlet invites his friends to swear on the hilt of his sword was not successful: Ivanov-Kozelsky did not speak but hissed like a gander chased by boys. His conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lacked dignity. He gave himself airs in their presence. It is not enough," Chekhov goes on, again as though in anticipation of the way in which his own characters would be mangled and distorted on the stage, "it is not enough to feel and to be able to convey one's feelings correctly on the stage; it is not enough to be an artist; an actor must also possess a great fund of knowledge. An actor who undertakes to play Hamlet must be an educated man. The scene between Hamlet and his mother was excellently played. So was the scene in the churchyard. There was a great deal of charm in Ivanov-Kozelsky's acting, but all this charm was due to his ability to feel, and to that alone. He underlined every word, watched his every movement, counted his steps. This is the fault of every beginner. Hamlet's death in horrible convulsions and a fearful voice should have been replaced by a natural one."

As for the other actors, Chekhov found that "Claudius was not bad," and, he added significantly, "he knew how to kneel." On the other hand, "the queen, the ghost, Horatio and the rest were bad. Still, the First Player was good enough and though I am told that Ophelia had a better voice than Miss Baranova, she did not play so badly."

After criticising the small stage, the bad scenery and costumes, and the unnecessary cuts, Chekhov concludes his notice by praising "the genius of the man who first suggested a performance of Hamlet on the stage of the Pushkin Theatre. Far better," he declares, "a badly acted Shakespeare than some dreary trash."

This being Chekhov's opinion of the Russian stage and the Russian actors, what did he think of the Russian audiences? There were moments when the Russian audiences made him lose heart. "Why and for whom do I write?" he exclaims in a letter to Suvorin on December 23rd, 1888. "For the public? But I do not see it and I believe in it less than in house demons: it is uneducated, badly brought up, and its better elements are unfair and ill-disposed to us. I can't make up my mind whether this public does or does not need me." But he drew the line at blaming the Russian audiences for the bad state of the theatres. "The public," he wrote to Suvorin in November of the same year, "is everywhere the same: intelligent and foolish, generous and ruthless, all depending on its mood. It always was a herd in need of good shepherds and dogs and it always went where the shepherds and dogs made it. You profess to be outraged that it should laugh at silly jokes and applaud high-sounding phrases; but it is the same audience that packs the theatre to see Othello and that weeps when listening to Tatyana reading her love letter in Eugene Onegin. However foolish it may be, it is in general more intelligent, more sincere and more good natured than Korsh or any actors and playwrights, while Korsh and the actors imagine that they are the more intelligent ones. A mutual misunderstanding."

Chapter IV

A scathing description of the type of playwright who was all too common in his day, was given by Chekhov in 1886 in a small sketch under the title of "Dramatist." The playwright, "a dim personality with lustreless eyes and a catarrhal physiognomy," is shown paying a visit to his doctor. His complaints include breathlessness, belching, heartburn, depression and a bad taste in the mouth.

"What do you do for a living?" asked the doctor.

"I am a playwright," the individual replied not without pride.

The doctor, filled with respect for his patient, smiled deferentially. Since such an occupation implied great nervous strain, he asked his patient to describe his mode of life. The playwright told him that he usually got up at twelve, and at once smoked a cigarette and drank two or three glasses of vodka. After breakfast he again had some beer or wine, the choice depending "on his finances". Then he usually went to a pub and after the pub he had a game of billiards. At six o'clock he went to a restaurant to have his dinner, but his appetite was so bad that to stimulate it he was forced to have six or seven glasses of vodka. Then at the theatre he felt so nervous that he again had to consume large quantities of drink. From the theatre he went to some night-club where he usually stayed till the morning.

"And when do you write your plays?" asked the doctor.

"My plays?" the playwright shrugged. "Well, that depends …"

Asked by the doctor to describe "the process of his work," the playwright gave this illuminating, though not by any means exaggerated, account of the way "popular plays" were usually written in those days: "First of all, I get hold of some French or German piece either by accident or through some friends (I haven't got the time to keep an eye on all the new foreign plays that are published myself). If the play is any good I take it to my sister or hire a student for five roubles. They translate it for me and I, you see, adapt it for the Russian stage: I substitute Russian names for the names of the characters and so on. That's all. But don't run away with the idea that this is easy. It isn't at all easy!" the "dim individual" declared, rolling up his eyes and heaving a sigh.

The Russian stage in the eighties and nineties of the last century was indeed flooded with such "adaptations" of, mostly, French plays, and one of Chekhov's own brilliant one-act comedies actually owed its origin to one such adaptation of a French play.

Two years later Chekhov gave the following description of an original Russian play by E. P. Karpov, who was later to become the producer of the Petersburg Alexandrinsky Theatre and who was chiefly responsible for the failure of The Seagull:

"The other day I saw Crocodile Tears, a rubbishy fiveact play by a certain Karpov, author of On the Meadow, The Agricultural Board, The Free Bird, etc." he wrote to Suvorin on November 11th, 1888. "The whole play, even if one overlooks its wooden naivety, is an utter lie and travesty of life. A dishonest headman of a village gets a young landowner, a permanent member of the local agricultural board, into his power and wants him to marry his daughter, who is in love with a clerk who writes poetry. Before the marriage a young, honest land-surveyor opens the eyes of the landowner, who exposes his would-be father-in-law's crimes, the crocodile, i.e., the headman of the village, weeps, and one of the heroines exclaims: "And so virtue is triumphant and vice is punished!" which brings the play to an end.

"Horrible! After the play Karpov stopped me and said: 'In this play I have shown up the liberal milksops and that is why it was not liked and was abused. But I don't care a damn!'

"If ever I say or write anything of the kind, I hope that you will hate me and have nothing to do with me any more."

And in a letter to Leontyev on the same day Chekhov wrote:

"You want to have an argument with me about the theatre. By all means, but you will never convince me that I am wrong about my dislike of these scaffolds where they execute playwrights. Our contemporary theatre is a world of confusion, stupidity and idle talk. The other day Karpov boasted to me that he had shown up 'the silly liberals' in his third-rate Crocodile Tears and that that was why his play was disliked and abused. After that my hatred of the theatre grew more violent and I grew even more fond of those fanatics who are trying to make something decent and wholesome out of it."

It was in another letter to Leontyev that Chekhov summed up his attitude to his contemporary playwrights in these words: "Our gifted writers have a great deal of phosphorus, but no iron. We are, I am afraid, no eagles, but just pretty birds who know how to sing sweetly."

It is an amazing fact that the accusation of lacking "iron", which Chekhov brought against the writers of his own day, should even in his lifetime have been brought against him by those who were so influenced by this general absence of a clearly perceived aim in their own writings that they naturally assumed that Chekhov, too, was like them. And yet there was no more outspoken a critic of this contemporary trend in literature than Chekhov. Writing to Suvorin on October 27th, 1888, Chekhov declared: "I dislike everything that is being written today. It makes me feel bored. Everything in my own head, however, interests, moves and excites me—and from this I conclude that nobody is doing what ought to be done, and that I alone know the secret of how to do it." Chekhov was quick enough to modify this seemingly arrogant statement from a young man of twenty-eight by adding that he supposed every writer thought the same, but in his case it happened to be true. Among his contemporaries, that is to say, among the young popular writers of the eighties and nineties, he was the only one to demand from the creative artist "a conscious attitude towards his work", though at first he insisted that it was not the business of a writer to provide a solution of social problems. "In Anna Karenina and Eugene Onegin," he wrote to Suvorin in the same letter, "not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely because the problems in them are formulated correctly. It is the duty of the judge to put the questions to the jury correctly, and it is for the members of the jury to make up their minds, each according to his own taste." In another letter to Suvorin earlier in the same year Chekhov is even more specific. "The creative artist," he writes, "must not set himself up as a judge of his characters or of their opinions, but must be an impartial witness. If I happen to hear a rather confused discussion about pessimism which does not solve anything, I have to report this conversation in the form in which I heard it, and it is for the members of the jury, i.e. for my readers, to express an opinion about it. My business consists in being talented, that is, in being able to distinguish the important depositions from the unimportant ones and in being able to throw light on my characters and to speak their language.… It is time that writers, and particularly those of them who are artists, should admit that it is impossible to make anything out in this world, as indeed Socrates and Voltaire so admitted. The mob thinks that it knows and understands everything, and the more stupid and ignorant it is, the wider does the scope of its knowledge and understanding seem to stretch. But if an artist in whom the mob believes is bold enough to declare that he does not understand anything of what he sees around him, then that alone will be a big step forward."

The vexed problem of the ultimate aim of art is of particular importance so far as Chekhov the playwright is concerned. Chekhov's insistence on the absolute objectivity of the writer led him at first to assume a standpoint which is barely distinguishable from that of the art-forart's sake school. Indeed, it led him to write the only purely naturalistic play he ever wrote—"On the Highway," a play that was forbidden by the censor on the ground that it was "sordid". The failure to differentiate between Chekhov's plays of direct-action and his later plays of indirect-action is to a certain extent due to the failure to realise that Chekhov's attitude towards the ultimate aim of art underwent a complete change during the seven years that separate his last play of the direct-action type from his first play of the indirect-action type. It is not only the purely structural form of the plays that underwent a change but also their inner content. If during his first period as a playwright Chekhov seemed to assume that artistic objectivity was incompatible with the presence of a "message" in a work of art, it was due mainly to his own struggles to achieve personal freedom and eradicate all traces of slavishness which his upbringing by a bigoted and despotic father had left on his mind. "My holy of holies," he wrote to the poet Pleshcheyev on October 4th, 1888, "is the human body and brain, talent, inspiration, love and personal freedom—freedom from force and lies, whatever form the last two may take. That is the programme I should like to have followed if I were a great artist.… I am not a liberal, or a conservative, or an evolutionist, or a monk or an indifferentist," he declares in the same letter. "I should like to be a free artist and—that is all.… I hate lies and violence of any kind. Phariseeism, stupidity and licence are to be found not only in middle-class homes and police stations; I see them in science, in literature, and among our young people. I consider a label or a trade-mark of any kind to be a prejudice." In a letter to Suvorin on January 2nd, 1889, he replied to the assertion of the Russian novelist Dmitry Grigorovich who wrote to him that "talent and freshness will overcome everything". It was much truer to say, Chekhov declared, that "talent and freshness may spoil a great deal. For in addition to the profusion of material and talent, something no less important is required. First of all, a mature mind and, secondly, a feeling of personal freedom, which I did not possess before."

But even during the period when Chekhov drove his conception of the creative artist's objectivity to the extreme of denying that a work of art must possess what is commonly known as "a message", he deeply resented any accusation of being merely a naturalistic writer. In reply to the criticism of his short story "Slime" (an early story published in September, 1886) by Maria Kisselev, an old friend of his, who accused him of being too much preoccupied with "dunghills" and urged him to concentrate on finding "the pearl in the dunghill", Chekhov made a detailed statement on his attitude to literature and the aims that should animate a serious writer in clothing contemporary life in an artistic form, a statement that is of the greatest possible significance to his early work for the theatre.

"I do not know who is right," Chekhov wrote on January 14th, 1887, "Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega or, in general, the ancients who were not afraid of rummaging in 'dunghills' but were much more steadfast than we are so far as morals are concerned, or our contemporary writers who are prudes on paper but cold cynics in spirit and in life. I do not know whose taste is worse: the taste of the ancient Greeks who were not ashamed of glorifying love as it really is, or the taste of the readers of Emile Gaboriau, Eugenia Marlitt or Peter Boborykin?" At the age of twenty-seven Chekhov did not feel himself competent to give an answer to this question, just as he felt incompetent to give the right answer to the question of nonresistance to evil or the freedom of conscience. His correspondent's references to Turgenev and Tolstoy, who, she claimed, avoided the "dunghill" Chekhov brushed aside as irrelevant. "Their fastidiousness," he wrote, "proves nothing; after all, the generation of writers before them considered even descriptions of peasants and low-grade civil servants as beneath their dignity. And, besides," he goes on, "one period of literature, however rich in content, does not give us the right to draw any conclusions in favour of one literary movement or another. References to the corrupting influence of a certain literary movement do not solve the problem, either. Everything in the world is relative and approximate. There are people whom even children's books will corrupt and who seem to derive delight from reading the piquant passages in the Psalms and Solomon's Proverbs. But there are also people who remain unaffected by 'dirt'; indeed, the more familiar they become with it, the cleaner they are. Publicists, lawyers, and doctors, who are familiar with all the secrets of life are, as a rule, much more moral than bishops. And, finally," Chekhov maintained, "no literature can possibly outdo life by its cynicism: you can't make a man drunk on a glass of liquor if he has already drunk a whole barrel."

As for his correspondent's claim that it was the duty of literature to dig for "the pearl" in "the dunghill", that, Chekhov contended, meant disowning literature itself, for literature, he wrote, "is a creative art just because it shows us life as it is. Its purpose," he went on, "is absolute and honest truth, and to narrow down its functions to such a specialised field as the extraction of 'pearls' is as fatal as, for instance, compelling Levitan to paint a tree without showing its dirty bark and yellow leaves." Chekhov was ready to admit that the "pearl" was an excellent thing in itself, "but a writer," he insisted, "is not a confectioner, a cosmetician or an entertainer. He is a man who has to fulfil certain duties; he is a man who has entered into a contract with his conscience and his sense of duty, and however much he may hate it, he must overcome his fastidiousness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life … To a chemist," Chekhov went on, "the notion of dirt does not exist. A writer must be as objective as a chemist. He must renounce every subjective attitude to life and realise that dung-hills play a very honourable part in a landscape and that vicious passions are as much a part of life as virtuous ones." On the other hand, Chekhov admitted that writers must observe the rules of decency, but, he added, "it is only that that we are entitled to demand from the realists."

Chekhov concluded his letter by deploring any outside interference with literature. "The fate of literature would be lamentable indeed," he declared, "if it were left to the mercy of personal prejudice. That is first of all. Secondly, no police exists that could possibly consider itself competent in literary matters. I admit that self-restraint is necessary, for charlatans, too, find their way into literature, but, however much you tried, you could never invent a better police for literature than the critic and the author's own conscience. People have been inventing all sorts of things since the creation of the world, but they have not invented anything better than that."

This letter was written shortly before Chekhov wrote Ivanov, his last direct-action play, and the views expressed in it are therefore important in assessing the literary merits of his plays of that period. He had acknowledged himself to be a realist pure and simple and had taken for his watchword the phrase "life as it is". But it would be a grave mistake to think that Chekhov never budged from this position. Indeed, the seven years that separate The Wood Demon (1889), the play in which he had unsuccessfully attempted to find a different approach to drama, from The Seagull (1896), the first play in which he was supremely successful in his new medium of indirect action plays, were years of great heart-searchings for Chekhov, years in which his formula "life as it is" underwent a profound change. His endless recasting of Ivanov and his final dissatisfaction with the play, to which he began to refer in his letters as Bolvanov (bolvan meaning "blockhead" in Russian), shows that even at that early date Chekhov was beginning to be conscious of the dilemma inherent in the strict adherence to the principle of complete objectivity. In his letter to Suvorin of October 27th, 1888, he summed up the problem in these words: "If one were to deny the problem and the intention in creative art, then one would have to admit that the artist worked without premeditation under the influence of some mental aberration, and if, therefore, some writer were to boast to me that he had written a story without any previously thought out design but just by inspiration, I should call him a madman." But he still insisted that while it was right to demand from an artist a conscious attitude towards his work, it was only "the correct formulation of the problem" and not its solution that was compulsory for him. Two years later, however, in reply to Suvorin's criticism of his short story "Thieves," he admitted that "no doubt it would be pleasant to combine a sermon with art," but, he pointed out, he found such a combination personally impossible for technical reasons. "For to depict horse-thieves in seven hundred lines," he wrote on April 1st to Suvorin, "I have to think and talk all the time in their tone and feel as they do, otherwise, if I were to add subjectivity, my characters would become blurred and the story would not be as compact as all short stories ought to be. When writing I rely entirely on the reader to add the missing subjective elements in the story."

But Chekhov soon discovered that it was impossible to rely on the reader to draw the right moral from his stories. Indeed, one of the "fat", i.e. "highbrow", monthlies in Moscow, Russian Thought, to which he was to become a regular contributor later on, had so misunderstood the whole purpose of his writings that it bluntly accused him of being "an unprincipled writer". That was the last straw. On April 10th, 1890, Chekhov wrote a furious letter to Vukol Lavrov, the editor of the monthly, in which he repudiated the accusation of lack of principle as a libel which made any future business relations between them and the usual civilities of acquaintanceship impossible. This letter is important in that it reveals the inner conflict that was going on in Chekhov's mind at that particular time. Indeed, his defence against Lavrov's criticism is rather lame, and the fury of his letter must be chiefly ascribed to his own realisation of its lameness. "I have never been an unprincipled writer," he declared, "or, which is the same thing, a scoundrel. It is true that my whole literary career is an uninterrupted sequence of mistakes, sometimes gross mistakes, but that is explained by the limitation of my gifts and not at all by my being a good or a bad man. I have never blackmailed anyone, I have never written anything of a libellous nature, I have never informed on anyone, flattered anyone, or lied to anyone, or insulted anyone—in short, I have never written a single line of which I need be ashamed. If I were to assume that by 'unprincipled' you have in mind the melancholy fact that I, an educated man, who have often appeared in print, have done nothing for those I love, and that my activity has vanished without a trace, without, for instance, being of the slightest use to our agricultural boards, our new courts of justice, the free dom of the press, and so on, then Russian Thought ought in justice to consider me as its colleague and not accuse me, for it never did more than I—and that not because of any fault of mine."

Chekhov went on to defend himself against an accusation which obviously hurt him to the quick by claiming that even if he were to be judged as a writer pure and simple, he did not deserve to be publicly stigmatised as unprincipled, and he advanced the curious plea that he was really a doctor and not a writer at all, and that even as a writer he had so far got on excellently with all his literary friends. Finally, he pointed out that in the conditions of the strict censorship that prevailed at the time, it showed a peculiar lack of tact on Lavrov's part to bring such an accusation against writers.

Chapter V

Chekhov's reference to the stringent censorship was the only valid argument he used to rebut Lavrov's criticism. In his great plays he had to resort to all sorts of evasions in order to circumvent that particularly obnoxious obstacle. But his letter undoubtedly reveals a great uneasiness of mind and is indeed an indirect admission that there was some justice in Lavrov's accusation. His fury with Russian Thought was short-lived. He was, above all, honest with himself. On November 25th, 1892, in a letter to Suvorin he redefined his position as a writer by finally relinquishing his standpoint of strict objectivity and placing the "aim" of a work of art, i.e. its moral purpose, at the head of all its other distinguishing marks.

Chekhov began his letter by casting a critical eye over the successful writers and artists of his time. His main objection to them was that they lacked "alcohol" to make their readers "drunk and enthralled". Had any of these writers ever given the world "one drop of alcohol?" Were not "Korolenko, Nadson and all our modern writers just lemonade? Have the paintings of Repin and Shishkin," he asked Suvorin, "ever turned your head?" And he went on to characterise these writers in the phrase he later put into Trigorin's mouth: "Charming, talented. You are delighted," he wrote, "but at the same time you can't forget that you want to smoke." Comparing the achievements made in his day by science and technology, Chekhov could not help concluding that the writers of his time found life "flabby, sour and dull" and that they themselves, too, were "sour and dull. All this," he concluded, "is not caused by our stupidity or lack of talent or, as Victor Burenin⁹ thinks, by our self-conceit, but by an illness which is for an artist worse than syphilis or sexual impotence." These writers lacked "something", something very essential, something that made all the difference between mere entertainment and real art. What was that "something"? Chekhov went back to the classics in search of it. "Remember," he wrote, "that the writers whom we consider immortal or even just good, the writers who have the power of keeping us enthralled, all possess one highly important characteristic in common: they get somewhere and they call upon us to go with them, and we feel not only with our reason but with the whole of our being that they have some aim, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come back for nothing and did not trouble Hamlet's imagination for nothing. Some of them, according to how great they are, have aims that concern their own times more closely, such as the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, others have more remote aims, such as God, life beyond the grave, human happiness, and so on. The best of them are realists and depict life as it is, but because every line they write is permeated, as with a juice, by a consciousness of an aim, you feel in addition to life as it is, also life as it should be, and it is that that delights you. But what about us? We depict life as it is, but we refuse to go a step further. We have neither near nor remote aims and our souls are as flat and bare as a billiard table. We have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we deny the existence of God, we are not afraid of ghosts, and so far as I am concerned, I am not afraid of death or blindness, either. But he who wants nothing, hopes for nothing and fears nothing cannot be an artist." In another letter belonging to the same period, he wrote that the writers of his time were "like maniacs who are writing books and plays for their own pleasure. One's own pleasure is of course an excellent thing while one is writing," he declared, "but afterwards?"

So the great realisation had come at last, and though for the time being Chekhov pretended that he, too, was suffering from the same illness, it was merely his modesty speaking. Already in his short story "Ward No. 6," which he wrote shortly before his letter to Suvorin, he had shown "a consciousness of an aim" that entitled him to a place among the foremost creative artists in fiction, but that consciousness was already discernible in many of his earlier stories in spite of his adherence to the principle of strict objectivity. For objectivity is as much the hallmark of a great artist as the consciousness of a high moral purpose, and, as Chekhov points out, it is the combination of the two that is characteristic of all great art, or, in other words, of realism as opposed to mere naturalism.

Having reached that conclusion, Chekhov later not only refused to include "On the Highway" in the collected edition of his works, but entirely suppressed it. And the main reason for his bitter conflict with the directors of the Moscow Art Theatre was their failure to see the high moral purpose of his plays, a failure that is still characteristic of most of his producers in England and America. What differentiates Chekhov's early from his four last plays is not only a difference of technique. It is the much more important question of the final aim of the plays, the moral purpose that is absent from his early plays and forms so essential a part of his later ones. For it is these later plays that, in Chekhov's own words, "are permeated by a consciousness of an aim", and are meant to make the spectator see not only "life as it is", but also "life as it should be".

The greatest mistake English and American producers of Chekhov's plays have been making is to accept the view that Chekhov's drama is essentially a drama of frustra tion. This is only true of his two plays of direct action; of his last four plays the opposite is true: it is a drama of courage and hope. It was Stanislavsky who was mainly responsible for treating Chekhov's plays as plays of frustration and it was he who imposed this view on the rest of the world. But the bitter conflict between Chekhov and Stanislavsky is well known, and the most obvious mistake some producers make is in either overlooking this conflict altogether or drawing the wrong conclusion from it. They all ignore the final aim of the four great plays. Indeed, they usually go so far as to deny that such an aim exists and purposely play down or entirely ignore those parts of the plays which deal with this aim. Hence the spurious "Chekhovian" atmosphere which is laid on so thickly in every production of a Chekhov play. Ironically enough, it is they who, instead of expressing Chekhov's ideas, express the ideas of the Russian wornan critic Sazonova, which appalled Chekhov when he read her strictures of his letter to Suvorin of November 25th, 1892. Suvorin himself was so astonished to read Chekhov's views on the ultimate aims of a work of art, which were so much at variance with Chekhov's former views, that he sent his letter to Sazonova for her comment and then sent those comments on to Chekhov, whose reply to Suvorin is both illuminating and decisive.

"That the last generation of writers and artists had no aim in their work," Chekhov wrote to Suvorin on December 3rd, 1892, "is quite a legitimate, consistent and interesting phenomenon, and the fact that Sazonova was aghast at my letter does not mean that I was insincere or acted against my conscience. It is you yourself who have read insincerity into it, for otherwise you would not have sent her my letter. In my letters to you I am often unjust and naïve, but I never write anything I do not believe in. But if you want insincerity, there are tons of it in Sazonova's letter. 'The greatest miracle is man himself, and we shall never grow tired of studying him. ' Or 'The aim of life is life itself. Or 'I believe in life, in its bright moments, for the sake of which one not only can but also must live; I believe in man, in the good sides of his nature,' and so on. Do you really think this is sincere, or does it indeed mean anything? This is not an outlook on life, but sheer nonsense. She underlines 'can' and 'must' because she is afraid of speaking about what is and what must be taken into account. Let her first of all tell us what is, and then I shall be glad to listen to what can and must be done. She believes in 'life', which means that she does not believe in anything if she is intelligent or that she simply believes in the peasant's God and crosses herself in the dark as if she were a silly old woman.

"Under the influence of her letter," Chekhov goes on, "you write to me about 'life for life's sake'. Thank you very much. Why, her letter which is supposed to be so full of the joy of life is more like a graveyard than mine. I wrote that we had no aims and you rightly drew the conclusion that I considered them necessary and that I would gladly go in search of them, while Sazonova writes that it is wrong to tempt man with all sorts of benefits which he will never get—'you must be thankful for your present mercies', and in her opinion our misfortune consists solely in our looking for some more remote and higher aims. If this is not just female logic, then it is the philosophy of despair. He who is sincerely convinced that higher aims are as unnecessary to man as they are to a cow and that 'our whole misfortune' lies in having those aims, has nothing left but to eat, drink and sleep, and when he gets sick of all that, to take a good run and smash his head on the sharp edge of a trunk. I am not abusing Sazonova. All I mean is that she does not appear to be a very cheerful person."

Chapter VI

Mention has already been made of Chekhov's views on the paramount importance of action in a play. What are the other general conditions that Chekhov regarded as necessary to an aspiring playwright? First of all comes a thorough, first-hand knowledge of the stage. "Beginning with the next season," Chekhov wrote to a fellow-dramatist in March 1889, "I shall start visiting the theatre regularly and educating myself scenically." To his eldest brother Alexander, who had sent him a general outline of a play he was proposing to write, Chekhov wrote: "Don't forget to visit the theatre a few times and make a thorough study of the stage. You'll then be able to compare and that is important." Another rule that Chekhov was never tired of enjoining on his fellow-dramatists was the need for originality. "Try to be original in your play," he advised his brother, "and, as far as possible, intelligent, but do not be afraid to appear silly. Complete freedom of expression is necessary, but remember that only he is free to express his views who is not afraid to write stupid things. Incidentally, love declarations, infidelities by husbands and wives, and tears shed by widows, orphans and other people have been described long ago." In a further letter to his brother he gives another list of characters that a playwright should avoid: "Retired captains with red noses, drunken press reporters, starving writers, consumptive and hard working wives, honest young men without a blot on their characters, lofty-minded young ladies, and dear old nannies." Eleven years later, in a letter to Suvorin, he adds this illuminating note on the need for originality in a playwright's characters: "An educated nobleman who wants to become a priest—this is rather old-fashioned and does not arouse curiosity. You should have taken a young scientist, or a secret Jesuit who dreams of the union of the churches, or anyone else who would have cut a much more imposing figure than a nobleman who is about to take holy orders." Discussing another character in Suvorin's play, Chekhov remarks: "The father seems to have no weakness of any sort. He does not drink, he does not smoke, he does not play cards, and he is not ill. You ought to attach some kind of quality to him and give the actor something to hang on to." And he adds this rather significant note on the importance of sex in plays: "Whether the father does or does not know about his daughter's false step is not very important. Sex, no doubt, plays a great role in the world, but not everything depends on it, not by any means; and it is not everywhere that it is of decisive importance."

A play, in Chekhov's view, must above all be compact. "The more compact and the tighter a play is," he writes to a fellow dramatist, "the brighter and more expressive it is." He warns the same dramatist against becoming a professional playwright, that is to say, a playwright to whom the mere tricks of the stage are more important than the subject matter of his plays. A playwright, he insists, must above all be a poet and an artist. He must conquer the stage and not let the stage conquer him. All the same, so keen was Chekhov's perception of the requirements of the stage that in a letter to another fellow dramatist he coined the aphorism: "You must never put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is going to fire it."

In addition to compactness and expressiveness, Chekhov laid great stress on "plasticity of phrase". He warned his brother against preciosity of language. He objected to the dialogue of one of Suvorin's plays because the language of its characters was "like a white silk dress which is all the time reflecting the sun and on which it hurts you to look. The words 'vulgarity' and 'vulgar'," he adds, "are old-fashioned now." Writing to Gorky in January 1899, Chekhov warned him against lack of gracefulness and restraint in his first play, defining "gracefulness" in these words: "When a man spends the least possible number of movements on some definite action, then that is gracefulness."

Another principle of writing plays Chekhov stuck to all through his career as a playwright concerned the elimination of what he called "the personal element". Writing to his eldest brother in May, 1889, he declared: "Your play will be no good at all if all the characters are like you. Who cares about your life or mine or about your ideas or mine?" A further principle, which is very characteristic of Chekhov's later plays especially, is that "an author must always be humane to the tips of his fingers". But admirable as this last principle is, it has undoubtedly been responsible for a great deal of "sensitive" criticisms of Chekhov's plays which tend to obscure their more important points.

There is another piece of advice Chekhov gives to his brother which is characteristic of the external form of a Chekhov play and which might as well be noted here. Every full-length play of Chekhov's has four acts and the importance of each act in its relation to the play as a whole was defined by Chekhov as early as May 8th, 1889, in a letter to Alexander: "The first act," he wrote, "can go on as long as an hour, but the others must not last longer than thirty minutes. The climax of the play must occur in the third act, but it must not be too big a climax to kill the fourth act."

It was Chekhov's custom first to produce a rough draft of a play and then go on improving it. With Ivanov and The Wood Demon (Uncle Vanya) this procedure was much more drastic, the two plays in their final form undergoing vital alterations. This process of re-shaping a play Chekhov considered required much greater ability from the playwright than the initial process of writing the play. In a letter to the poet Pleshcheyev on January 15th, 1889, written soon after the completion of the final draft of Ivanov, he referred to this particular aspect of the playwright's craft in connexion with the "tragic laugh" that was one of the characteristics of his friend and fellow dramatist Ivan Leontyev (Shcheglov). "No," he writes, "I do not envy Jean Shcheglov. I understand now why he laughs so tragically. To write a good play for the theatre one must possess a special kind of talent (one can be an excellent novelist and at the same time write bunglingly incompetent plays); but to write a bad play and then attempt to make a good one out of it, to resort to all sorts of tricks, to delete, re-write, insert soliloquies, resurrect the dead, bury the living—to do all that one must possess a much greater talent. That is as difficult as making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Here you will not only laugh tragically, but neigh like a horse."

One more important aspect of Chekhov's attitude to the stage still remains to be elucidated, namely his views on the playwright's place in the theatre. It was undoubtedly Chekhov's great good fortune that among the greatest admirers of his genius was Nemirovich-Danchenko, one of the founders of the Moscow Art Theatre, who prevailed on Stanislavsky almost by main force to put on The Seagull during the Moscow Art Theatre's first season, thus being responsible for Chekhov's close association with one of the most progressive theatres in Russia. But this association with Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko was also one of Chekhov's greatest misfortunes inasmuch as both producers were, at the outset of their stage careers at any rate, what is commonly known as producer-autocrats who brooked no interference either from their actors or from their authors and who quite honestly held the view (all too common among producers) that they had a right to interpret a play any way they liked. Ordinarily this would have brought about an early break between Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theatre, for Chekhov would never have agreed to his elimination from the production of his plays and the complete disregard of his own interpretation of them. As early as 1887, he insisted on the playwright's right to have a deciding voice in anything that concerned the production of his plays. Writing to Nicolai Leykin, editor of the humorous weekly Fragments to which he had been contributing regularly during the early years of his authorship, Chekhov made it quite plain that he would never resign his position in the theatre to the producer. Leykin had written to him: "An author who habitually interferes with the production is a nuisance to the actors, his instructions being mostly silly." To which Chekhov replied: "The author is the owner of the play and not the actors. Everywhere the casting is left to the author, provided he is not absent. Besides, till now all my instructions were helpful and the actors did as I told them. If the author is to be completely eliminated from the production of his plays," he concluded, prophetically as it turned out, "then goodness knows what will happen. Remember how Gogol used to fly into a temper when his play was being produced! Wasn't he right?"

Holding such views, how did it happen that Chekhov let Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko ride roughshod over his own conception of his plays? The answer to this question is simple: at the time his plays were being performed at the Moscow Art Theatre Chekhov was already a stricken man who could take no direct part in their production. He was condemned to live in the Crimea and the few rehearsals he managed to attend in Moscow were insufficient for him to correct the cardinal misunderstanding of his ideas by the two producers. (He did, however, take an active part in the rehearsals of The Three Sisters before the revival of the play in the autumn of 1901.) That was the reason for his frequent outbursts of anger during the rehearsals and his refusal to advise the actors how to play their parts. His stock reply to the actors, "You'll find it all in the text," was just an evasion forced on him by his complete helplessness to make his producers see the positive ideas he had taken so much pains to present in an artistic form. In face of such utter blindness on the part of his producers and their inability to raise themselves above the prevailing ideas of their time, Chekhov was powerless: he was too ill to do anything. The irony of it was that this cardinal misinterpretation of his plays seems to have agreed with the mood of that particular period in Russian history so that in spite of it the plays were (after a time) successful. There is, of course, the further fact that with so great a playwright as Chekhov the failure to grasp the ruling ideas of his plays, the inability to understand their structure, and even the plain distortion of their characters, leaves so much that is original and artistically true that the spectator has plenty left he can thoroughly enjoy. That, however, does not justify the view that Chekhov's outbursts of angry protests against the misinterpretation of his plays were merely the unaccountable tantrums of genius. Chekhov, as is plainly evident from his letters, does not belong to the type of writer who is devoid of critical ability. He was, in fact, a very profound literary critic as well as a man who possessed the invaluable capacity for self-criticism. It took him about seven years to work out his new formula of the play of indirect action, and there can be no doubt that he arrived at his new form of dramatic expression only after a careful and painstaking analysis of the technique of playwriting, including a thorough study of Greek drama,¹⁰ a fact of some consequence to the understanding of the structure of his last four plays.

Notes

¹The New Statesman, November 14th, 1925.

² Ibid., May 30th, 1936.

³ Ibid., May 16th, 1914.

⁴ Ibid., February 13th, 1937.

⁵ Ibid., January 27th, 1945.

⁶ Ibid., October and, 1926.

⁷ Ibid., February 5th, 1938.

⁸ A famous Russian actor.

⁹ A member of the staff of Suvorin's paper, Novoye Vremya.

¹⁰ Among the large number of well-thumbed books Chekhov sent to the public library of his native town of Taganrog were the best available translations of the complete plays of the Greek dramatists.