SOURCE: "Chekhov and the Bubble Reputation," in Chekhov Then and Now: The Reception of Chekhov in World Culture, edited by J. Douglas Clayton, Peter Lang, 1997, pp. 5-18.

[The following is the text of an address Senelick delivered at a 1994 symposium on Chekhov's reception. Senelick traces shifts in the author's reputation over the years.]

When Douglas Clayton asked me to deliver the keynote address to this illustrious assemblage, my first impulse was to entitle it "Confessions of an Inveterate Chekhovian." From my earliest memories, as the grandchild of Russian émigrés and in particular of an ochen ' kul'turnaia babushka, as a child playgoer and a child actor in a company based on the Method, I was surrounded by people who venerated Chekhov, and who thought nothing in the world more fulfilling than to be associated with a production of his plays. "Hallowed awe" is the term Ivan Voinitsky applies to his mother's infatuation with Professor Serebriakov, and it seems equally applicable here. This veneration persisted in college, three years of Russian classes culminating in the translation of Vishnevy sad. It led me, as a graduate student at Harvard, to learn from Nils Åke Nilsson a more objective, more technical approach to the works. For nearly forty years, I have translated Chekhov, written about him from the standpoint of a theatre historian, a literary critic, a biographer, taught him to undergraduate and graduate students alike, lectured on him at conferences and congresses in several languages, directed my own productions of his plays and acted in other people's, and served as advisor, dramatist or reviewer on still others. In the course of this time, I have traversed acres of cherry orchards, met whole dynasties of uncle Vanias, hearkened to the longings of endless sororal trios, and been the sitting target for flocks of transitory seagulls.

I elaborate on my bona fides simply to attest to the fact that after all this study I continue to find Chekhov inexhaustible. Wherever one plunges the probe, it meets solid matter: the texture of a Chekhov work is so tightly inter-woven, so devoid of the extraneous, that it always yields gratifying results to the assiduous student. However, at the risk of offending my learned colleagues here assembled, I have to state that, when it comes to Chekhov's drama, I have usually found the plays in production and the remarks of directors, designers and actors more illuminating than most academic critical studies. This is even the case when the production is, necessarily, partial and poorly realized. The pressures of the rehearsal room, the actual configuration of bodies in space, the adventitious discoveries of a performer's imagination can force insights un-available in the closest reading. The only comparable experience is to translate a play, paying close attention to such things as lexical repetition, sentence structure and levels of discourse. Watching even the most hopeless staging of Chekhov, I have come upon connections and insights that eluded me in years of poring over texts.

Let me give one recent, unvarnished example, still fresh in my mind. Ron Daniel's production of The Cherry Orchard at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. was not very good: he had set it amid geometric shapes in primary colours, evocative of Kazimir Malevich but signifying nothing. Claire Bloom's Ranevskaia was a brisk, business-like woman getting on with her life, amid a very uneven cast, ranging from hammy veterans of British rep to raw tyros straight from the acting class. There was a certain amount of what I call "post-modern" speaking of the dialogue, in which any line reading will do, divorced from any connection with character psychology or a directorial intention. And yet—at the beginning of the party scene, when Simeonov-Pishchik felt for his borrowed money, he went through the most genuine and detailed agonizing over its possible loss that I have ever seen. It stuck in the memory. Then, at the top of Act IV, when Lopakhin offers Trofimov a loan, and Trofimov proudly refuses it, the actor playing Trofimov, a black youth in dreadlocks, felt for the money he claimed he had received for a transla tion, and a brief flash of panic crossed his face. Not that he had lost any money: his claim was a lie enforced by vanity, but he had no way of proving it to Lopakhin, and Lopakhin knew it. The complexity of their relationship was lit up, forgive the jargon, paratextually. Moreover, the visual association with Pishchik, instantaneous though it was, efficiently sustained the obbligato of money matters and impecuniousness that that previously dominated the play; it also stressed the theme of fortuity (on which Peter Brook had based his whole production) by aligning Trofimov, buffetted by fate, with the clownish Pishchik, always waiting for something to turn up. These aperçus were fleeting, possibly fortuitous themselves, undetermined by directorial choice, but nonetheless enlightening.

Some years ago at a round-table discussion in Moscow, one scholar/apparatchik proposed a conference whereat it would be determined which method of staging Chekhov was the correct one. I rounded on her with the objection that if such a thing were possible, it would mean that Chekhov was the least of dramatists, of no relevance or resonance to posterity whatever. In fact, he has in a mere hundred years shifted shapes and taken on the form and impress of the times to a remarkable degree.

I am now completing a cross-cultural history of Chekhovian mises-en-scène over the past century and throughout the world, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. In part Rezeptionsgeschichte, in part the tracing of fashion and concept in directing, it treats the oscillation of Chekhov's reputation and the metamorphoses his dramatic work has undergone in the theatre. The fact that we are drawn here from across the globe to examine his creativity bespeaks the present high-water mark of estimation for Chekhov. But let us not forget that this high estimation is essentially an acquired taste and that he remains caviare to the general.

The attitudes towards Chekhov held by the present age can be summed up by two newspaper cartoons I have pinned to the corkboard in my study. One, by Ben Sargent, showed a wild-haired professor erupting into the office of the president of Enormous State University. "I've tolerated the state of affairs around here long enough, sir," he protests. "I finally realized I had to speak out! Sir, we're turning out graduates who don't know anything! They've got diplomas but they can't read! They can't write! They can't think!" The president interjects a curt "Outrageous!" "I realized, sir," the professor thunders on, "the humanities had hit bottom when one of my students identified Anton Chekhov as a defensive guard for Indiana!!" "Appalling", responds the president and then, leaning across his desk, "Uh—who did he play for?"

This cartoon, in addition to feeding our contempt for our administrative masters, should remind us that, to the world at large, Chekhov is at best a name, perhaps a character in Star Trek, but certainly not a household word. In the literary world, however, his name remains one to conjure with, as the other cartoon, "Influences" by S. Harris, sardonically illustrates. The three boxes depict an author at his desk, a mechanic in his garage, and a baseball player leaning on his bat. The bespectacled writer is speaking to an invisible interviewer, saying "Mainly the short-story writers—Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and, of course, Chekhov." Then comes the mechanic: "There was a teacher in high school, and the owner of the first garage I worked in. Then, of course, Chekhov." And finally, the ball player: "I had a great batting coach in the minors, and I try to emulate the great outfielders, like DiMaggio and Mays. And, of course, there's Chekhov."

This is the inevitable Chekhov, the Chekhov who pervades any discussion of modernism in fiction or theatre, the Chekhov who has become a graven image on the Mt Rushmore of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities. I would like to devote the remainder of this address to surveying the shifts in his reputation which have preceded and led up to this state of affairs. Here I limit myself to Chekhov the dramatist, because I believe that it is as a dramatist that Chekhov has persisted most indelibly in the collective consciousness. While his fiction still exercises an influence on the literati and is still fodder for academic dissection, he is thought of first and foremost as a play wright. And the ordinary citizen is more likely to en counter him in a theatre than in a library.

Shortly before Chekhov's death, if you asked anyone who was the greatest living Russian writer, the answer would no doubt have been, "Lev Tolstoy." Tolstoy's imposing position as a moralist and reformer, his eminence at the panoramic novel, the genre most honoured by the nineteenth century, which preferred monumentality, his political stance as the unassailable opponent of autocracy—these and other features made the sage of Yasnaia Poliana the voice of humanitarian culture to the world at large.

Chekhov, on the other hand, was regarded as a purely local phenomenon. Within the Russian Empire, his reputation was fragmented among various publics. The common reader remembered him chiefly as the author of a number of funny stories. The intelligentsia regarded him as a chronicler of its own malaise, particularly in the plays staged by the Moscow Art Theatre. Factions on the right and left dismissed him as a fence-sitter, what American politics called a "mugwump," too cowardly to take sides in the ideological battles that dominated the pre-revolutionary scene. Outside Russia, he was viewed at best as an exotic petit-maître, trading in doom and gloom. The Poles patriotically neglected him, the Germans interpreted him as another exponent of doleful Schicksalstragödie, and the Georgians noted sarcastically of his characters that only ethnic Russians would fritter away their lives so trivially. In France, the standard works on Russian literature in 1900 dismissed Chekhov: Waliszweski described his drama as "completely devoid of action and psychological differentiation of characters," while Melchior de Vogüé declared the full-length plays too pessimistic for the French, full of impotent heroes with "enigmatic Slavic souls."¹ (This may signal the first time that deadly but undying remark was made.) In the first two English-language reference books to gloss Chekhov, both published the year before his death, those same dramatic characters were cited as "fit subjects for the psychiatrist" and "a strange assemblage of neurotics, lunatic and semi-lunatic," obsessed with solving the problem of life.²

Whatever respect and affection were bestowed on Chekhov, due in part to his untimely demise, began to evaporate almost immediately. At the jubilee celebrations in 1910, dissenting voices could be heard above the chorus of praise. At a meeting of the St Petersburg Literary Society, the prominent feminist author Olga Shapir renewed the charge that he was a poet of gray, humdrum depressives, and added the complaint that his women especially lacked clear outlines or strong emotion, despite the fact that since the 1880s women had been in the forefront of political reform movements.³ In a period of activism and engagement, Chekhov's deliberately peripheral stance grew increasingly distasteful. It would culminate in the Bolshevik rejection of Chekhov after the October Revolution.

That rejection was due in part to Chekhov's inextricable association with the Moscow Art Theatre, a symbiosis rich in ironies. It was ironical that Chekhov, who deeply admired professional acting technique, should have been imposed on the cultural consciousness of his times by a troupe of amateurs and semi-pros. (Shortly before his death, when asked whom he considered the best actors in his plays, Chekhov provocatively left out the Art Theatre and named only three members of the Imperial Alexandra troupe: Komissarzhevskaia as Nina, Davydov as Ivanov, and Sazonov as Shabelsky.⁴) It was ironical that Stanislavsky, who had trained in Shakespeare, Schiller and musical comedy and whose dearest ambition was to stage historically veristic productions of the classics, should find his most important challenge and success in recreating the dreary world of his contemporaries, and, along the way, inevitably ennoble Chekhov's characters. It was ironical that a theatre whose founders intended to it to be a school for a mass public should find itself explicating the intelligentsia to the intelligentsia. It is perhaps the irony of ironies that the Art Theatre, having discovered its most successful modus operandi in its staging of Chekhov, tried to apply it to all sorts of unlikely authors with the to-be-expected failure; while Chekhov himself chafed at what he felt were willful departures from his meaning and technique.

Whatever the discrepancy between Chekhov's vision and that of the Art Theatre, what struck the spectators of the original productions most forcefully was that, like the Maly Theatre in the palmy days of its Ostrovsky premieres, company and author seemed to be totally and intimately amalgamated, the plays seemed to be written and staged by the same person. When the actors at provincial theatres simple-mindedly played Chekhov in a dismal tone, the result was boredom; whereas the Art Theatre revealed the covert, repressed feelings underlying the bad jokes and banal conversation. What distinguished Chekhov's drama from all other plays at the time was what Stanislavsky called the "submarine" course of the through action, which renders the dialogue nearly allegorical. Every individual scenic moment was carefully worked out in terms of the integrality of the entire production, to create a seamlessness. Quotidian or material reality went beyond mere naturalism to achieve the famous nastroenie (mood). Stanislavsky's layering of "mood" or "atmosphere" is essentially a symbolist technique: just as the words "Balzac was married in Berdichev" overlay another, more profound emotional reality, so the tableaux of everyday-life, abetted by sound and lighting effects, conduced to an emotional au-delà, another realm of more intense reality.

To paraphase a remark of von Clausewitz, the Art Theatre approach was the carrying-on of literature by other means. This scenic extension of the Russian realistic literary tradition enabled the intelligentsia to behold its hopes and fears on stage in terms it readily adopted. As Osip Mandelshtam wrote in 1923,

For the intelligentsia to go to the Moscow Art Theatre was almost equal to taking communion or going to church …

Literature, not theatre, characterized that entire generation … They understood theatre exclusively as an interpretation of literature … into another, more comprehensible and completely natural language.

… The pathos of the generation and of the Moscow Art Theatre was the pathos of Doubting Thomas. They had Chekhov, but Thomas the intellectual did not trust him. He wanted to touch Chekhov, to feel him, to be convinced of his reality.⁵

The illusion of life created by Stanislavsky, his emphasis on subtext and context, provided that reality, and gave Chekhov a novel-like amplitude that satisfied the intelligentsia's need for theme and Tendenz.

The Bolsheviks had extra-literary uses for the theatre. No less tendentious, they fomented performance that was stark, immediate and viscerally compelling. The new demands made on art in the aftermath of the October Revolution had a Medusa-like effect on the Art Theatre: it froze in place. Locked into its aging repertory, it found itself and Chekhov both repudiated as irrelevant excrescences of an obsolete bourgeois culture. Sailors at special matinees for workers shouted, "You bore me, Uncle Vania!" while ideologues and the press called for his suppression in favour of a vital, swashbuckling, romantic drama. Although it would later become an article of faith that Lenin had attended the Art Theatre Vania and endorsed it (quoth Krupskaia laconically, "He liked it"), at the time émigrés spread the tale of his dissatisfaction: "Is it really necessary to stir up such feelings?" Lenin is reported to have complained. "One needs to appeal to cheerfulness, work, joy."⁶ Such vital animateurs of Bolshevik theatre as Vakhtangov and Meyerhold turned to the vaudevilles when they sought to stage Chekhov, and the only full-length play of his to be regularly performed was The Cherry Orchard, treated as a satiric farce mocking the estate owners and their parasites. In Lobanov's version of 1934, Act II was set in a seedy restaurant; a tipsy Trofimov was thrown out by the waiters in the course of his harangue, which he continued in a bath-house packed with gymnasium students of both sexes.

While Chekhov languished at home, abroad he was promulgated by a diaspora. The 1920s and '30s are the decades of the émigrés' Chekhov; fugitives from the Revolution saw themselves as Ranevskaias and Gaevs, expelled from a tsarist Eden. The tours of the Moscow Art Theatre and its offshoot the Prague Group disseminated the style and look of the original, now aging, productions, while defectors from the Art Theatre, such as Peter Sharoff and Richard Boleslavsky, perpetuated a Stanislavskian approach in Europe and America. But émigrés tend to preserve their abandoned culture in amber: we should ask, in imitation of Ancient Pistol, "under which Stanislavsky, Bezonian, speak or die?" At what point the émigré director had encountered Stanislavsky in the restless evolution of his system determined which phase of Stanislavskianism was promulgated.

Even those refugees who had either rejected the Art Theatre approach or had never practiced it carried on under its banner—Theodore Komisarjevsky in England and Georges Pitoëff in France, who was lyrical, enigmatic, moonstruck and, above all, steeped in romantic nostalgia. If Stanislavsky's nastroenie had been that of a fin-de-siècle symbolist, evoking psychic states through physical means, the émigré's nastroenie hearkened back to a paradise lost. Chekhov, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, took on, in the eyes of European spectators, a tinge they held to be peculiarly "Russian." Émigré Chekhov was, above all, elegiac, wistful and, like Noel Coward's white elephants, "terribly, terribly sweet."

After the Second World War, Chekhov suffered, in Central and Eastern Europe, from being imparted as a basic cultural ingredient of the Soviet hegemony: he and the Art Theatre interpretation, now heavily adulterated by Socialist Realism, were thrust down the throats of Czech, Polish, East German and Hungarian audiences. Little wonder if, left to their own devices, they spewed him out again and sought to discredit and supplant the Stanislavsky legacy.

Chekhov's revivification in Europe is due to a Czech and an Italian—Otomar Krejca and Giorgio Strehler, both leftists, but of quite different stripe. At the Divadlo za Brano in Prague, Krejča worked in collaboration with his actors to realize what Gorky had called the cold and cruel Chekhov, an impassive creator who flung his characters into an absurd world. There they beat their wings futilely against the meaninglessness of existence. Without being either a programmatic existentialist or a doctrinaire absurdist, Krejča distilled his own experience as a victim of post-war Soviet domination into an interpretation of Chekhov that administered the shock of recognition to audiences in Prague, Düsseldorf, Louvain and London.

Strehler, for his part, employed elegance and metaphor in his 1956 Cherry Orchard, arguably the most influential Chekhov production of modern times. His white-on-white décor with its overhead membrane of petals in a diaphanous veil, breathing with the actors and audience, has influenced everyone from Andrei Serban to last year's staging at the Indiana Rep. Whereas Krejča proclaimed that every decision made in a production automatically gave it a bias that compromised the author's intention, Strehler sought to conflate all the levels of meaning in the play: the narrative, the socio-historical and the universally metaphoric. The toys in the nursery, for instance, went beyond veristic props to become emblemata of the characters' lost innocence and their retarded world. Strehler universalized the nostalgia of Komisarjevsky and Pitoëff by enlarging it beyond the private sphere, while Krejča's productions grew ever more schematic, insisting on the collective grotesque of the Chekhovian ethos.

In the Soviet world of the 1960s, Chekhov was co-opted by those actors and directors who revelled in the conflicts of Arbuzov, Rozov and Volodin. The opposition of a generation of idealists against one of cynics was read into Chekhov's plays, particularly Ivanov, which was revived on a regular basis. Echoes from the contemporary stage reverberated in works of Tsarist vintage: Oleg Efremov, for instance, within a three-year span, played Turgenev's Rudin in the movies, Vampilov's anti-hero Zilov on stage and directed Ivanov at the Art Theatre, all of them as variations on Lermontov's hero of our times. Antidomesticity was proclaimed by scenery that lacked walls and doors; manor-houses were made to look like skeletal prisons and the branches of the cherry orchard became sterile and gnarled.

The English-speaking world has been most resistant to extremist reforms in the presentation of Chekhov. Psychologized realism remains the preferred format, and the Chekhovian estate has been familiarized as the old home-stead or the derelict country house. "Chekhov has been ennobled by age," says Spencer Golub. "… He is as soothing and reassuring as the useless valerian drops dispensed by the doctors in all his plays … an article of faith, like all stereotypes … the Santa Claus of dramatic literature."⁷ This may account for the large number of American plays about Chekhov's own life, in which he turns into Drs Dorn, Astrov or Chebutykin, depending on the playwright's bent. But it is also the case that the English-speaking theatre has, until very recently, been one dominated by playwrights rather than directors. The Chekhovian influence is to be sought more in the plays of N. C. Hunter and Rodney Ackland, Robert Anderson and Tennessee Williams, than in extraordinary mises-en-scène. Which means that in the English-speaking world, the treatment of Chekhov is rather backward.

For, whether we look at the development of Chekhovian interpretation inside Russia under Efremov, Tovstonogov, Efros, Liubimov, Nekrosius, and more recently Ianovskaia and Pogrebnichko, or, in the Western world, under Brook, Pintiliè, Bergman, Sturua, Vitez, and Stein, we are looking at the work of directors. At least until the end of the nineteenth century, one could trace the stage history of Shakespeare or Molière through the actors and their treatment of individual roles. But Chekhov's career as a dramatist coincides with the rise of the director as prime mover in the modern theatre; and the integrality of his last plays derives in part from his awareness of what a director's theatre was capable of. Following the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, it required the integration of every component; the actors had to become an ensemble led by a virtuoso conductor. We can compare the Hamlets of Kean and Mochalov to some advantage and understanding; but to compare the Ranevskaias of Irene Worth and Jutta Lampe makes no sense outside the context of the visions of Andrei Serban and Peter Stein.

But even that directorial dominance, or rather imposition of unity, is breaking down under the pressure of postmodernism and deconstruction. The acceptance of Chekhov as a readily recognizable cultural totem makes him available for all sorts of cooptation. Writing in 1960, the late Harry Levin pointed out that the opening of a New York apartment building called The Picasso signalled the domestication and hence end of modernism.⁸ When the enfant terrible becomes the elder statesman and new coinages have turned into clichés, efforts have to made to recapture the original shock effect. In the 1970s, the process of dismantling the Soviet Chekhovian icon continued: Efros converted The Cherry Orchard to a grave-yard and Iury Liubimov flung open the wall of the Taganka Theatre during his Three Sisters, to reveal the Moscow streets outside: "You yearn for Moscow?" he seemed to be saying. "Well there it is, in all its noise, grubbiness and squalor." Fifty years of false aspiration were debunked in one moment.

Currently Pogrebnichko recreates Three Sisters behind a velvet rope as a museum exhibit, cluttered with the detritus of the past, forcing the post-Soviet spectator to come to terms with a culture that has left him washed up on the shoals of the present; while Henrietta Ianovskaia puts her Ivanov on roller-skates to show how he attempts to evade the responsibilities of his own sordid situation.

In the United States, the experimental Wooster Group deconstructs Three Sisters by means of video screens and improvisations to deconstruct in turn the modern world of mass media and create a hybrid theatrical language. The seamless web of the Stanislavskian simulacrum is fragmented into jagged shreds of interrupted meaning and faulty recollection. Dramatists remote from both Chekhov's sensibility and his language, such as Pam Gems, Edward Bond, David Mamet and Trevor Griffiths, transmogrify him in new versions, refracting their own preoccupations: the Chekhov of Mamet is obsessed with sex, the Chekhov of Griffiths is an angry member of a British labour union. This need of English-speaking playwrights to wrestle Chekhov to the mat has become a rite of passage. There is something primitive and Oedipal in the recurrent cannibalizing of the one universally-admitted patriarch of the modern stage.

Chekhov as patriarch is a jarring image. To explain it, let me return to my earlier remarks about the replacement of Tolstoy by Chekhov as the man of letters par excellence. Even as late as the 1940s, György Lukács could emblazon Tolstoy as the bel idéal of the universal genius who transcended his otherwise hampering bourgeois milieu by the power of his demiurge-like creativity. In our less heroic age, however, Tolstoy seems unsympathetic at best; like Blake's Old Nobodaddy, he glowers at us disapprovingly from beneath his beetling brows. Tolstoy's creative attainments and his moral demands on us seem the titanic labours of a Golden Age, impossible for us puny mortals to achieve. They also exude a kind of confidence and self-righteousness which are luxuries too costly for the spiritually impecunious survivors of the twentieth century. Even his death was exemplary: Tolstoy's isolated expiration in the railway station at Astapovo is the stuff of tragedy, Lear succumbing on the heath, unreconciled with Cordelia.

Chekhov's death, which has so bemused his successors and been so often retold and reworked as fiction, is, in contrast, a comedy of errors. In a farcical mode, it too is exemplary, from his reported last words "It's a long time since I've had champagne," to his corpse being transported in the goods car marked "Oysters," to the military band straying from a general's funeral to double in brass at his graveside. Chekhov is the more accessible and more familiar figure. His irony has greater appeal than does Tolstoy's moral absolutism. His vaunted objectivity, not all that objective under scrutiny, is nevertheless more welcoming, less judgemental. His inability to write a novel, his preference for small forms, open endings, ethical ambiguities appeal to our post-modern fondness for the marginal, our wary distrust of the grand gesture. Tolstoy the schoolmaster stands over his text, ferule in hand, to make sure we have learned the lesson; Chekhov endears himself to the New Critic, the structuralist and the deconstructionist by modestly bowing himself out, protesting that it's all in the words.

Yet, for all this modesty, over the course of a mere century Chekhov has reached the rank of Shakespeare. They are bracketed together as the greatest playwrights of all time. To cite only one such statement, Andrzej Wajda remarked, "Theatre in our European tradition derives from the word, from literature, the Greeks, Shakespeare, Chekhov."⁹ To depict the history of Western theatre as a mountain-range made up of three Everests, the Greeks, Shakespeare and Chekhov, is a breathtaking risk; but it is commonly attempted. Note the absence of Ibsen, who might deserve better, with his ambitious historical dramas and his endeavours to raise everyday experience to the heights of tragic treatment. Chekhov sedulously avoided the grandiose, the overtly poetic, the tragic pose; or else, he undercut them when they arose inadvertently.

Shakespeare, moreover, does put it all in the words. This is all ye know and all ye need to know. But Chekhov's special appeal comes from what he leaves out, another legacy from the symbolists, the pregnant pause. Of course, Stanislavsky, who distrusted the understated, amplified and multiplied the Chekhovian pause, turning it into a pretext for veristic stage effects; an actor who worked at the Art Theatre for one season in 1908/9 recalled that the pauses "were held precisely by the numbers and the actors were recommended to count the seconds mentally during the duration of the pauses."¹⁰ This mechanical rendition loses touch with the essence of the Chekhovian pause, itself a precursor of what Beckett, in his essay on Proust, refers to as the transitional zone in which being makes itself heard. Stanislavsky never succeeded with Shakespeare because he never realized that the playing must be done on the lines and not in-between them.

What then justifies the modern coupling of Chekhov and Shakespeare? I would suggest that Keats, in his famous 1818 letter on "negative capability," put his finger on it. Reacting to a performance of Edmund Kean as Richard III, he mused on Shakespeare's protean brilliance: "… at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.¹¹ Walter J. Bate paraphrases this to mean, "in our life of uncertainties, where no one system or formula can explain everything … what is needed is an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness."¹² Or to put it another way, Shakespearean mastery requires a negation of the writer's own ego, a sympathetic absorption in the essential significance of the writer's object. Chekhov seems to have attained that state of authorial absence.

For Keats, as for the English Romantics as a whole, Shakespeare's brilliance at negative capability was exhibited by his extensive gallery of characters, all equally vivid, multi-facetted and imbued with idiosyncratic opinions, speech-patterns, behaviour. Chekhov can hardly exhibit such variety or plenitude in his plays; the narrow, seemingly repetitive nature of his dramatic world was a ready target for satire and parody even in his lifetime. But another, earlier letter of Keats comes to our aid: in it he divided ethereal things into three categories: "Things real—things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare—Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit."¹³

Chekhov admits the existence of real things in his writings, but takes them for granted; however, his spirit is not so ready to greet semireal things such as love. Their existence remains problematic and nebulous for his characters. But the confines of the Chekhovian world teem with Keats's "Nothings" to be made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit. As Stanislavsky intuitively perceived, a samovar in Chekhov was not the same as a samovar in Ostrovsky: it, along with the pauses and sound effects and changeable weather, bespoke the overall tone, reflected the inner life of the characters. Leonid Andreev named this interrelationship of everything in Chekhov "panpsychism." The same soul animates whatever appears on stage:

On the stage Chekhov must be performed not only by human beings, but by drinking glasses and chairs and crickets and military overcoats and engagement rings … it all comes across not as items from reality or true-to-life sound and its utterances, but as the protagonists' thoughts and sensations disseminated throughout space.¹⁴

This goes beyond the sympathetic fallacy; it creates a distinctive microcosm, instantly recognizable whatever the vagaries of directors. It is the unifying factor that ties together even the most seemingly non-communicative dialogue and solipsistic yearnings.

In his book The Theatrical Event, David Cole refers to Mud tempus, an archetypal realm which the theatre must depict, "not so much when it first occurred as where it is always happening."'¹⁵ Whatever reality the estates and garrison towns of Chekhov's plays held for its original audiences, they have now taken on a wider semiotic function. They transcend a specific society to become archetypal realms. The spell-binding lake of The Seagull has more in common with the island of The Tempest than with a similar landscape in Turgenev; the rooms in the Prozorovs' home can expand to the dimensions of Agamemnon's palace or dwindle to the claustrophobic cells of Samuel Beckett. The first foreign critics of Chekhov could not have been more wrong when they condemned him as the poet of an obsolescent set, circumscribed by its own eccentricity. Just as the Shakespearean illud tempus shines through modern-dress and tendentious transpositions, the Chekhovian illud tempus gains in eloquent meaning from its disguises, even when Thomas Kilroy transfers The Seagull to the Ireland of the Celtic Twilight or Tadashi Suzuki plunges the officers of Three Sisters into Beckettian baskets or the Irondale Ensemble Project turns Uncle Vania into a 1940s radio announcer in Charlevoix, Michigan. Without shedding its specificity, the world of the Chekhovian intelligent has become as remote as Camelot and as familiar as Grover's Corners, as exotic as Shangri La and as homely as Bellow's Falls. It instantly conjures up a long vanished way of life that nevertheless compels us to adduce current counterparts. The persistence of this identifiable and idiosyncratic world suggests that he never stopped being Chekhov our contemporary.

Notes

¹ K. Waliszewski, Littérature russe (Paris, 1900): 426; de Vogüé quoted in lu. Felichkin, "Rol' teatra v vospriiatii tvorchestva Chekhova vo Frantsii," in Literaturnyi Muzei A. P. Chekhova: Sbornik statei i materialov. vypusk V (Rostov, 1969): 155.

² Leo Wiener, Anthology of Russian Literature (New York, 1903): II; A. Bates, The Drama (London, 1903): 73.

³ "V Peterburge," Chekhovskii iubileinyi sbornik (Moscow, 1910): 530.

⁴ A. la. Al'tshuller, "Chekhov i Aleksandrinskii teatr ego vremeni," Russkaia literatura, 3 (1968): 169.

⁵ Osip Mandel'shtam, Teatr i muzyka, 36 (6 November 1923).

⁶ Krupskaia quoted in Moskovskii Khudozhestvennyi teatr v sovetskuiu epokhu: Materialy i dokumenty, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1974): 124; V. A. Nelidov, Teatral'naia Moskva (sorok let moskovskikh teatrov) (Berlin-Riga, 1931): 426.

⁷ Spencer Golub, in Newsnotes on Soviet and East European Drama and Theatre, III, 3 (Nov. 1983): 2-3.

⁸ Harry Levin, "What Was Modernism?" (1960) in Varieties of Literary Experience, ed. S. Burnshaw (New York, 1962): 307.

⁹ Quoted in Maciej Karpinski, The Theatre of Andrzej Wajda, tr. C. Paul (Cambridge, 1989): 124.

¹⁰ A. A. Mgebrov, Zhizn ' v teatre, ed. E. Kuznetsov, I (Leningrad, 1920): 224-5.

¹¹The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins, I (Cambridge, Mass., 1958): 184.

¹² W. J. Bate, John Keats (New York, 1966): 249.

¹³ Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey (13 Mar. 1818).

¹⁴ Leonid Andreev, Pis 'ma o teatre (1912), trans, as "Letters on Theatre," in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, ed. and trans. L. Senelick (Austin, 1981): 240-1.

¹⁵ D. Cole, The Theatrical Event: a Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective (Middletown, Conn., 1975): 8.