SOURCE: "Chekhov and the Craft of Theater," in Anton Chekhov, translated by Edith Tarcov, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972, pp. 62-84.

[In the essay below, Melchinger investigates the ways Chekhov overthrew the theatrical conventions of his day.]

In 1902, Chekhov wrote to Alexander Tikhonov:

You say you wept over my plays. You are not the only one. But I did not write them for this. It was Stanislavsky who made them so tearful. I intended something quite different.

Chekhov's judgment of Stanislavsky's productions of the Chekhov plays—as numerous passages from letters and witnesses' observations testify—can be summarized in a sentence he wrote about the production of The Cherry Orchard a few weeks before his death: "Stanislavsky has ruined my play."

It is said that dramatists cannot judge the productions of their plays. That may be true of those who do not understand the theater, but not of Chekhov, who knew and understood the stage. When he was still an adolescent in Taganrog his favorite pastime was attending the theater. When he went to Moscow as a nineteen-year-old, to study medicine and to rescue his family from their poverty-stricken life, the theater attracted him more than anything else. He wrote his stories to earn a living. Now that a heavily edited draft of Play without a Title (Platonov)—on which he must have worked for a long time and with much passion—has been found among his posthumous papers, we know what really was in his thoughts.

When Chekhov was writing this play, he had a plan, a program for the theater. Later, for a while, he abandoned this plan and made concessions to the conventional stage. But in his major works he returned to his Platonov plan. His contemporaries found the newness and innovation of this plan so strange and shocking that they hooted two Chekhov plays off the stage on opening nights. Not one of his plays was a success in its first production. His works needed time to succeed. The reason was not, as their later success has proved, a lack of dramatic effectiveness, but rather their unusualness. There were times when Chekhov went daily to the theater, to study the conditions of the stage and the conduct and attitudes of the actors. One of these periods occurred while The Sea Gull was in rehearsal. His understanding of actors was extremely astute. After all, he eventually was to be married to an actress. One of his contemporaries who worked in the theater reported: "Every false note, every cliché, every fatuous or vulgar nuance made Chekhov wince.… Often he would interrupt the actors and plead, 'Please, no theatricality! Let it be simple, just simple!'"

So far, Chekhov's judgment of Stanislavsky's Chekhov theater has not been taken seriously. The Chekhov tradition as originally conceived by the Moscow Art Theater became dated not because there was a quest for the kind of theater Chekhov really had in mind, but rather because of the great changes in theater in general throughout the world. Surprisingly, some of the Chekhov productions in recent years are closer to the concepts of the true Chekhov theater than is the conventional style for producing Chekhov, whose alleged authenticity originated with Stanislavsky. I have in mind: the Milan production of Platonov, directed by Giorgio Strehler; the Stock-holm production of The Sea Gull, directed by Ingmar Bergman; The Three Sisters, produced in Stuttgart under the direction of Rudolf Noelte and, also produced in Stuttgart, The Cherry Orchard, directed by Peter Zadek; and the Prague production of The Three Sisters, under the direction of Otomar Krejča.…

While Chekhov was still alive, the true plan and character of Chekhov's work was recognized by some of the younger people. Among those who early appreciated the true Chekhov was Vera Kommissarzhevskaya. She was Chekhov's favorite among the actresses who worked in his plays. (She was the first Sea Gull in the unfortunate Saint Petersburg production that was booed off the stage.) She was among the young rebels who broke early with Stanislavsky. Chekhov wanted to write a play for her after she had left Stanislavsky's ensemble. In her own theater, which she and her brother directed, she provided Meyerhold with a chance for his revolutionary experiments. Meyerhold, another of the young rebels, also had been an actor of the Art Theater and a student of Stanislav sky. He had portrayed Treplev in the famous Sea Gull production of 1898. Meyerhold discovered in Chekhov's dramatufgy "new paths that are closed to the methods of psychological realism." He sharply criticized Stanislavsky's overuse of the scenic details that he loved so (an "ocean of objects"), and the sentimental atmosphere, which had made Stanislavsky's production of The Cherry Orchard so intolerable to Chekhov. For the third act, in which a ball is taking place while the news about the sale of the cherry orchard is expected, Meyerhold demanded a cold and hard delivery, the projection of a "nightmare," a "horror"; he wrote to Chekhov, "Your play is abstract like a symphony." When Meyerhold in the style of that period spoke of "symbolism" or even "mysticism," he meant to characterize the antirealistic element in Chekhov's plays, the "rhythmic movement" of the work as a whole.

Especially revealing are the observations of Gorky, whom Chekhov loved as a human being, whose talent he recognized at once, and whom he reprimanded for his carelessness as an artist (he has no sense of architecture, doesn't know how to build). "Do you know what you are doing?" Gorky wrote to Chekhov in 1900. "You are flogging realism to death! And it will soon be dead for a long time." Gorky sensed the fundamental tension between the musicality and the coldness in these plays and recognized, above all, their great art of simplicity: "You are a man who can create a character with a mere word, and with a sentence tell a story." This brings to mind Chekhov's words: "The most important thing is to construct a sentence." Gorky said of Uncle Vanya that he saw more meaning in this play than others did, something "powerful," which he too called "symbolism." Chekhov, in turn, wrote that Gorky deserved great merit for being the first writer in Russia and in the whole world to express contempt and revulsion for the meshchanstvo (usually translated as "petty bourgeoisie," or as "that conservative stratum of society that stagnates in personal egotism," or as "the establishment") and so stimulated the protest of others. Chekhov shared in this protest, but he wanted to do more—he wanted to provoke this protest in the audience. After writing the lines to Tikhonov, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Chekhov continued:

I wanted to say simply and honestly, "Look at yourselves, look how badly and boringly you lead your lives!" The most important thing is that people come to recognize this. As soon as they understand it, they will have to live differently and better. I will not live to see it, but I am convinced that life will be quite different then, not to be compared with that of today. But in the meantime I will not stop from repeatedly saying to people: "Just look how boringly and badly you are living!" Yet what is there to weep about?

Chekhov's is "a theater that shows, that exposes," to quote from Ilya Ehrenburg's essay, in which he pleaded that the modern and contemporary quality in Chekhov be recognized.

Gorky expressed it thus:

Chekhov understood, with a high measure of art, how to recognize and describe the trivial in life.… "The trivial always found in him a severe critic.… This great, wise man, who observed everything, who encountered this boring, gray mass of weak people, looked at the lazy inhabitants of his homeland and said to them, with a sad smile and in a tone of mild but profound reproach, with an expression of hopeless sorrow,—"Ladies and gentlemen, you are living badly!"

Vakhtangov, another revolutionary of the Russian theater, who directed Gerhart Hauptmann's Friedensfest ("the Feast of Reconciliation") in the Studio, was reprimanded by Stanislavsky's partner Nemirovich-Danchenko because he brought out the "shrill tones" too sharply. Gorky stood by the young director. Gorky severely opposed the "mania to muffle and mute everything," which had angered him previously in Stanislavsky's production of The Lower Depths. He demanded instead, in the sense of Chekhov, "genuine art"—the art of protest.

But we must beware of being unjust. Stanislavsky's historical merit cannot be ignored. It will not be diminished by the observation that he led the Russian theater in a direction different from the one Chekhov had in mind. Perhaps even, considering the course of history, his was the only direction possible. Chekhov's goals were perhaps too much in advance of the times to be comprehensible to his contemporaries. His aggressive opposition to the theater as he found it was as clear as that of Stanislavsky. It was the aggressive opposition of their generation—that of the youth of that epoch in Europe. In 1881, when Chekhov was in the process of finishing his work on Platonov, Zola wrote, urging that naturalism be utilized for the stage. He expressed what moved them all: anger toward the pompousness, the dishonesty, the cor ruption of the theater, a theater that was dominated by the pathos with which the tragedies were presented and the overacting of the stars. The new password was: reality and truth. But years were to pass before reality and truth would reach the Russian stage: in 1887 it would reach the Théâtre Libre in Paris (Antoine); in 1889, the Freie Bühne in Berlin (Otto Brahm, Hauptmann); in 1892, the Independent Theatre in London (Grein, Shaw); in 1896, the Moscow Art Theater. Reading Stanislavsky's memoirs, one gains some insight into the many difficulties and obstacles he had to overcome, from the day he founded the Moscow Society for Art and Literature (in 1888), whose niveau Chekhov hardly took seriously, until he could finally back up his opposition to the present state of the theater with a viable program for the future. Perhaps he would not have been able to achieve this had he not met Nemirovich-Danchenko, his intellectual and literary collaborator. Taking all this into account, one has to admire even more the genius of Chekhov. The Platonov play of the twenty-one-year-old Chekhov was written before the publication of Zola's pamphlet, and at a time when Stanislavsky was still dreaming of nothing but operettas and vaudevilles.

The Russian theater, of course, had an advantage over that of the rest of Europe. Since Gogol and Stchepkin, and the first production of Gogol's Government Inspector in 1836, it had a tradition of realism. This satirical comedy was even part of the repertoire of the Imperial Theater. It is indeed astonishing that its performance was tolerated in this land where despotism ruthlessly suppressed the slightest expression of an independent impulse. But the Czar was amused when he saw civil servants satirized. The aristocracy, more and more hard-pressed by the rising bourgeoisie, encouraged derision of the new capitalist class. And so Ostrovsky could become the program director of the Imperial Theater. It was in the year of Ostrovsky's death that Tolstoy wrote the naturalistic peasant drama The Power of Darkness. However, it was not to be performed until 1889, and then in Paris, by Antoine, not in Russia.

The form of satire seduced the Russian dramatists and actors into caricature. But in Chekhov's plan there was no place for caricature. "Even if it were in the interest of the theater to caricature human beings, it would be a lie. It is simply unnecessary. A caricature, of course, will sharpen an image and so be more easily understood. But it is better to work out the drawing of a sketch with care than to smear it up with showy and shoddy strokes."

Caricaturing actors have a tendency to hamming. In their indignation at the low niveau of the Russian theater Stanislavsky and Chekhov were in agreement. The actors were despised by society and often led slovenly, debauched lives. Many of them became alcoholics. Only those who were able to rise to a position in the Imperial Theaters were guaranteed a measure of respectability. But even there conditions were in an unbelievable state of muddle and slovenliness. Chekhov believed, … that the major cause of the scandalous uproar and failure of the 1887 premiere of Ivanov was that the actors did not know their lines and that they were drunk by the last act. He reported that what had been recited on the stage was unbelievable. In 1882 this was his judgment: "The Russsian actor has everything—except education, culture, and manners, in the good sense of the word." Besides the slovenly bungling, he found the stars' method of upstaging the rest of the cast, the acting up front before the footlights, especially distasteful. And exactly this, despite all his admiration, he had already criticized in 1881 in the acting style of Sarah Bernhardt, who was the rage of the Moscow audience when she played there on tour: "She wants to be striking, to amaze." It was the style of the coup de théâtre, the objective of which was to exhibit the virtuosity of the stars. The coup de théâtre was the style of La Tosca and La Dame aux Camélias and other plays by Sardou and Dumas fils. These writers had given up romantic melodrama and were devoting themselves to what was considered realistic theater at the time. But what they deemed "dramatic" was identical with effect. The material was taken "from life," not because it was life that was to be shown, but because this material yielded effects with which a Bernhardt could bring an audience to their knees. The same exaggeration that blurred and hammed up what was truly comic also blurred and hammed up the tragic. With the one it became carica ture; with the other it resulted in coup de théâtre.

One can imagine what a great impression the Meininger troupe, during their 1885 tour, made on the young Russians, who had read Zola and wished to see resurrected on the Russian stage what once Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenev had realized—and what Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky now were achieving in the novel (1877, Anna Karenina; 1880, The Brothers Karamazov; 1886, The Death of Ivan Ilyich). In the troupe's performances seriousness, accuracy, and discipline worked in ensemble: it was a "holiday of art," as Stanislavsky wrote. Their productions, with their spirit of solidity and seriousness, made a lasting impression on the young Russians interested in drama. Yet people, even Stanislavsky, also took exception to the exaggeratedly emotional acting of the Germans.

These two principles—solidity and seriousness—were to form the cornerstone of the Moscow Art Theater. And Chekhov understood well what an advance these new standards would bring about in the Russian theater. To have them succeed was a historical feat and accomplishment, and Chekhov did not withhold recognition of this achievement. He never did like Stanislavsky, though he later respected him, but he felt warm sympathy for Nemirovich-Danchenko. He felt even more warmth for the actors, whose esprit de corps and sense of ensemble-playing he praised. He would have felt much warmth toward them even if he had not found his future wife, Olga Knipper, among them. What these actors did on the stage for the sake of art and truth moved him deeply. "One must wrest the stage out of the hands of the merchants," he said, "and give it over into the hands of literary people; otherwise it will perish." Yet it was clear to him, from the time of the production of The Sea Gull in 1898 to that of The Cherry Orchard in 1904, that the director and the actors of the Art Theater took the path to his plays "without me." They believed they knew bet ter than he did. And their success seemed to prove them right. Stanislavsky—who always thought of himself as "a slow one"—deserves respect for describing the late insight he gained while writing his memoirs in 1925—an insight that, as he wrote, gave him "new horizons":

The works of all geniuses who, like Chekhov, represent a cornerstone, outlive generations; generations do not outlive them.… It is possible that some of what is Chekhov, in this or that work, may appear dated and for the postrevolutionary era no longer valid—yet Chekhov, in how he has presented his material, has not even begun to come to full flower in our theater. The chapter about Chekhov in the history of our theater is far from finished; we have not yet studied him thoroughly enough, have not yet penetrated to his inner essence. We have closed the book prematurely. We must open it anew, to study it thoroughly and read to the end.

Stanislavsky had not understood the how in Chekhov. He had distorted the how because of his fixation on elements that, though contained in Chekhov's work, he had interpreted wrongly. He directed theater of atmosphere—mood theater—and the mood, which dominated this theater, was that of ennui. In Chekhov, mood is an element among others, though one he knew how to use as few have before him. And ennui was for him the opposite of what Stanislavsky made of it. That is, it was not to Chekhov tearful, melancholic, elegiac, sentimental. It was something hateful, as it would be for a man who suffered bitterly from ennui after he was forced (by his physicians) to endure it—a man who, according to Gorky, conceived of work as the basis of all culture and civilization. What Chekhov brought to the stage as boredom or "ennui" is best translated as "emptiness." This ennui, this boredom of his epoch, is only superficially different from that of today: we, of course, have the added element of noise.

The consciousness of emptiness, then as today, is numbing. And it is as hateful today as it was then because those who suffer it have no desire and no courage to face the truth, as it is, and to draw from that the necessary conclusions. It is this which Kierkegaard calls "indifference"—and nothing enraged Chekhov more, as we know, than to be accused of "indifference": "I hate lies and violence in any form.… Don't I protest, from the beginning to the end, against the lie?" This hateful thing has to be protested, as Gorky had demanded and Vakhtangov had done. The worst one can do with it is to transform it into mood. To lull the audience into a sniveling, tearful sentimentality relieves it of the task which Chekhov meant to confront it with. As he so often said,

They [the audience] shall be the jury: they have to reach the verdict. The artist's task is to observe, to choose, to unmask, to sum up. And these tasks pre-suppose a question. If there is no question asked to begin with, there is nothing to unmask, to expose, to select.… Those are right who demand that the artist must have a conscious relationship to his work. But they often confuse two concepts: the solution of the question, and the right way of asking it. The commitment of the artist is only to the second task.… It is the duty of the court to formulate the problem correctly, but it is up to the members of the jury to solve it, each according to his own insight.

Chekhov once observed that it would seem very agreeable to combine art and sermon, and then to put the whole burden on "the gospel" that is being preached, without first bringing the reader or the audience to the point where they can believe in that gospel. For him, he said, this would be simply "technically impossible." He said, "When I present a horse thief, they want me to say, it is bad to steal a horse. But everyone knows that well enough, without my saying so."

Chekhov's basic principle is scientific: it is objectivity. Its application demands extreme coolness. "Only he who is cool is just." True justice determines the organization of the material, which has to be presented both objectively and convincingly, if "the jurors" are to discover the truth. In this, above all, the controversy with Stanislavsky came to a head. For Stanislavsky believed that it was the task of the director to reinforce the mood, to make it as inescapable as possible, through details and stage effects.

Meyerhold reported that in the scene in The Sea Gull in which Arkadina says farewell to the servants, Chekhov had specified that there be three of them. Stanislavsky, however, had a whole mass of people come onto the stage, among whom was a woman with a crying baby in her arms. "Why this?" Chekhov asked him. The answer was, that this was "just like in real life" and "realistic." Chekhov laughed, "So, this is realistic!" After a brief silence he continued: "But this is the stage—and the stage is art! If you take a good portrait painting, cut out the nose, and put into the hole a real nose, that is realistic—but the painting is ruined."

As for the crying baby Chekhov said, "This is superfluous. It is as if you play pianissimo on the piano and the lid falls, crashing down on the keys." Again, the answer was that it was often like this in real life, and that often a forte, suddenly, breaks into a pianissimo.

"Undoubtedly," Chekhov replied. "But the stage has its own conditions. Don't you know that you don't have a fourth wall? The theater is art; it expresses the quintessence of life. It is unnecessary to fill it up with superfluous details."

The quintessence is contained in the text. What is not in the text must not be brought onto the stage. He was cross when the actors begged him to explain their parts to them. "It is all written down in the text. I am just a doctor." It was indeed all written down in the text.

This is how Chekhov described one part of his Platonov plan:

In real life people don't spend every minute shooting each other, hanging themselves, or making declarations of love. They don't dedicate their time to saying intelligent things. They spend much more of it eating, drinking, flirting, and saying foolish things—and that is what should happen on the stage. Someone should write a play in which people come and go, eat, talk about the weather, and play cards. Life should be exactly as it is, and people should be exactly as complicated and at the same time exactly as simple as they are in life. People eat a meal, and at the same time their happiness is made or their lives are being ruined.

That has sounds of Zola. But what is decisive is not the goal, not the imitation of reality, but the method. It is the opposite of the "well-made play," the piéce-bien-faite, as, from Eugéne Scribe (1791-1861) to Henrik .Ibsen (1828-1906), it has been "dramatically" developed.

Chekhov was not fond of Ibsen: "He doesn't understand anything about life." Ibsen himself admitted that he had learned his dramatic technique from that of the well-made play. According to its pattern, he had constructed his plot, which, by means of its dramatic climax, proved its effectiveness as theater. Chekhov believed that plot is unimportant for the stage. He rejected "the dramatic" when it was the result of calculated effect. His friends in the theater rebuked him because, allegedly, he did not understand "dramatic" as they understood it. Six years after writing Platonov he was ready to make a compromise—in Ivanov. It failed—because the gap between the truth he sought to show and the stage effects he was utilizing could not be bridged.

The method Chekhov discovered as he designed the Platonov plan (more correctly, he rediscovered it, for the Greeks and Shakespeare had known this plan before him) was that of the dual planes of the stage—one of which is indirect. When people talk to one another, the truth usually is not contained in what they say but rather in what they do not say. They talk in order to talk. They talk, often without answering each other. They talk past each other, each preoccupied with himself. They talk, in order to deceive themselves. There is always a pause, because they either don't understand one another or they don't really hear one another. But in these pauses life goes on; decisive things can happen in these intervals of silence. And so Chekhov discovered (rediscovered) the dramatic meaning of silence.

This was both understood and misunderstood in the Moscow Art Theater. Indeed, Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky recognized the uniqueness in Chekhov's indirect method. Chekhov's method was to bring about a revolution in the art of the theater and was even to shed new light on the presentation of the works of a Sophocles or a Shakespeare. A contemporary of Chekhov's described the technique that evolved from this indirect method:

The inner dialogue, and the charm of that which is only half-expressed—this was what the performers of the Art Theater projected. Chekhov had abolished the old concept of plot and action, and now the theater discovered that the word is far from being the most important element in the art of the theater. The word is only an indication of inner emotions, one that is neither complete nor perfect but only a guide that can lead to the soul of the character. But often and at the most dramatic moments the word becomes mute and yields to silence. This silence is full of meaning, full of the whole energy of the spoken words that have gone before, and of the latent presence of the thousands of words that are to follow or that perhaps will never be said. This silence is stronger than the most violent scream, and it contains more meaning than a hundred words that are determined by a defined meaning. Thus the goal of the drama becomes his silence. And it must be acted out and projected so that it resounds and breaks out into a thousand colors.

The Moscow Art Theater staged Chekhov's silence in exaggerated ways. First, they padded it with innumerable details of silent acting, with such effects as the crying baby in the farewell scene in The Cherry Orchard, in their effort to achieve the "purest" reality. Second, they strove with all their resources to express emotions through silent acting, so that the audience simply could not overlook what went on in the "inner dialogue." Chekhov felt that this was not his but another kind of theater, and exactly the theater he wanted to avoid. Here is an example.

In the last scene of Uncle Vanya there occurs, again, a leave-taking. Astrov, the doctor, a central character, steps up to a map of Africa that hangs on the wall and says, "The heat must be awful in Africa now—just awful!" Olga Knipper wrote to her future husband how marvelously Stanislavsky played this scene: "How much bitterness, how much experience of life he expressed in that line! And how he pronounced the words, with a kind of bravura that was most exciting!" And she reported that he had also played the preceding love scene in this way. Chekhov was horrified. He answered:

You write that, in this scene, Astrov turns to Yelena like a passionate lover—"He holds on to his emotion like a drowning man to a straw." But that is wrong, all wrong! Astrov likes Yelena, he is attracted by her beauty. But in the last act he knows very well that nothing will come of it, that Yelena will disappear from his life, and he speaks in this scene in the same tone he uses when talking of the heat in Africa. He kisses her merely to while away the time.

Later, Chekhov wrote directly to Stanislavsky: "Astrov whistles, you see. He whistles. Uncle Vanya weeps, but Astrov whistles." After this Stanislavsky (and it indeed speaks well for him) changed his interpretation of the role. Yet this example demonstrates how right Chekhov was when he said that Stanislavsky was still seeking to present "old theater." The acting-out of silence was for Stanislavsky what once had been the old coup de théâtre.

Chekhov hated overexplanations; he admonished the young Meyerhold not to exaggerate in presenting the nervousness of a lonely man. "Let it be in the tone of your voice and in your eyes, but don't project it with your hands and feet. Do it with grace, with sparse, expressive gestures." On the same subject he wrote to Olga, "Most people are nervous, most of them suffer, and only a few feel acute pain. But where—on the street or in the house—do you see people nervously running back and forth and constantly clutching their heads?"

The word "grace" is curious and noteworthy. This is how Chekhov defined what he meant by the word "grace": "When a person performing a particular action uses a minimum of movement—that is grace."

The silence Chekhov prescribes is exactly the opposite of "the acting out of silence." It is nothing other than silence, motionlessness, concentration. The Japanese actors of the No theater have developed this art of "doing nothing" to its highest level. Chekhov surely never saw them. But for many years he had studied actors on the stage, and he knew how much they were able to say when they were silent. He had seen Eleonora Duse; and perhaps Yermolova, too, had done similar acting. He knew how ambiguous spoken words could be. He fashioned his dialogue with this in mind. His dialogue consists of what is said and what is not said (perhaps what cannot be said).

People have counted how often the word "pause" appears in Chekhov's stage directions. Yet such a count can only be superficial; the number of pauses in Chekhov is far greater than the overt instructions indicate. The pauses occur when the actor is walking or making gestures or emptily chattering away. Chekhov's "pauses" demand of the actor the highest degree of concentration, absolute motionlessness, a distillation of thoughts and emotions in which the character is to be immersed.

Stanislavsky's use of sound effects in the stagings of Chekhov's plays has become famous. In a play that was set on a summer afternoon in the country, the theatergoer himself was to experience the illusion that he himself was spending a summer afternoon in the country. And this is how Stanislavsky justified the innumerable details with which he elaborated Chekhov's stage directions.

Certainly, Chekhov's plays require more sound effects than were ever used before on the stage. However, the sound effects Chekhov prescribes are not illusion-creating but dramaturgic. They are not there to provide mood and atmosphere—they are there to "speak." By means of the Chopin waltz Treplev plays backstage in the last act of The Sea Gull, he is present on the stage—giving his commentary on the dialogue. The strange sound that is twice called for in The Cherry Orchard tears at one's nerves. It is, as Meyerhold has said, "symbolic," so far as the assonance to the "tearing of a string" [of a violin] is to be taken literally. It is part of the elements of a theater whose effects, exactly calculated, are chosen from all the possibilities available to the stage. This sound effect does not occur "by chance"; it is not an imitation of reality. It is part of a thought-out plan in a work of art, in which chance only exists when it is intended, in which everything superfluous has been eliminated.

As there must be no misunderstanding of Chekhov's concept and use of "mood" and "atmosphere," so there must be no misunderstanding of his concept and use of "simplicity," which is so prominent and important in his observations. He criticized the verbal "extravagance" of Gorky. "Strike out all adjectives … ," he said to him. "Write 'The man sat down in the grass.' Basta." Chekhov's simplicity is not the language of the "simple man"; it is, like his silence, a distillation.

Chekhov once wrote to the critic Menshikov apropos one of his articles: "There is something missing in your article. You have given too little space to the character of language. It is important for your readers to know why a primitive man or a madman will use only one or two hundred words, while a Shakespeare can make use of tens of thousands."

Gorky wrote to Chekhov, observing that his language had a "magical quality, both terse and powerful." Gorky also said that Pushkin, Turgenev, and Chekhov created the Russian language.

The art of Chekhov's language lies in its terseness and brevity—"The art of writing consists less in good writing than in cutting out what is bad writing." As he so often said, everything superfluous has to be cut out. When Olga wrote to him that she was coining to grips with a monologue in The Three Sisters, he cabled her, "Omit everything except one sentence: 'A woman is a woman.'" When the superfluous was cut away, what emerged was not naturalism but art.

His contemporaries, Stanislavsky among them, began early to perceive the musical quality of his dialogue. As Chekhov wrote to a woman writer, everything depends on the construction of the sentence. "One must take care," he added, "that it be musical." This musicalness is neither romantic nor sentimental. He hated prose that sounded like "poetry." And the always low-keyed tone in which the actors of the Moscow Art Theater spoke their lines got on his nerves. Like music, there is contrast in speech: there is forte, piano, diminuendo and crescendo, accelerando, ritardando and rubato. Whole scenes are as tightened and unified as one single bow and have to be played as such, while others are divided into exactly delineated, carefully composed parts. Pauses are parts of the composition—they are its fermatas and caesuras. Chekhov's plays have to be performed like musical compositions. (This was a goal that Stanislavsky, according to the report of his students, also set himself in his later years.)

Chekhov's structures are so terse and severe that any tampering will shake their frame. Just as Stanislavsky failed because he padded out these concentrated forms, so modern directors have failed because of their rearrangements and deletions. When Chekhov said, "It is all written down in the text," he meant not only that nothing should be staged that was not written down, but also that nothing should be left out that was written down. How could he have reproached Gorky for understanding nothing of the architecture of writing, if he had not known so exactly what meaning good architecture has for a play?

The only material of which Chekhov's plays are built are life and truth. "In art, only in art," he used to say, "one cannot lie." The plan he set himself when he wrote Platonov, which developed in opposition to both the idealistic and the conventional theatrical styles, culminated in bringing onto the stage an "encyclopedia of life"—as he said at the time, of Russian life. Even in his later years he did not think it possible that his plays could be performed outside Russia. It is absurd to maintain that he wished to present a naturalistic picture of his epoch (Ehrenburg commented on this refreshingly and clarify-ingly), but it is equally absurd to assume that he wanted to bring the whole of Russia onto the stage. His was quite a different kind of material—and material that he knew exactly. When he criticized Tolstoy for being "ignorant," his argument was that Tolstoy wrote about syphilis while not knowing anything about how and what syphilis was. Behind the Russian foreground Chekhov presented the quintessence of all human life. Thomas Mann spoke of his uncanny gift for identifying himself with other human beings, for putting himself into their situations and condition. The writer Alexander Kuprin, who knew him well, said, "He saw and heard while looking into a person's face, hearing his voice, watching his walk, that which was hidden." Out of all this grew an "amalgam of personal observations and feelings, and of his experiences, his conjectures, and his power of imagination" (Ehrenburg).

Chekhov took over nothing exactly as he found it in life. He detested both subjectivism and naturalism. The art of composition for him boiled down to what he called his "encyclopedia," which he brought onto the stage in sparse and concentrated form. His models were Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Pushkin. Platonov got out of hand because the young Chekhov lacked the experience and mastery of so concentrating his material. In the next plays he was to write—Ivanov and The Wood Demon (out of which Uncle Vanya was to emerge)—he made up for this youthful lack of experience with concessions to the contemporary conventional theater's "dramatic" demands for "melodramatic" effect-filled scenes.

Finally, in The Sea Gull he succeeded in wringing out of his "encyclopedic" intention the conciseness that his vision demanded. He knew that the images that now emerged were truly art. Through distillation he shaped the rambling and accidental in true life into a form that enabled him to project the quintessence of life's truth. He let it show through the nonexisting fourth wall of the stage, so that the audience could see and recognize it. So the quintessence was brought before the audience, the jury that had to reach its verdict. Chekhov's theater, then, is one of showing, exposing.

Nothing is to be omitted if the encyclopedia is to be complete. Not illness, not chance, not dirt ("To the chemist nothing is dirty; the writer must be just as objective as the chemist"). The method of Chekhov's art was like that of a science, whose goal is the exact, precise, and subtle presentation of truth. He stayed cool as he wrote, though he loved the material with which he worked: human beings and life.

Whatever is said about Chekhov must be said in contradictions. He was a physician, yet he was also a patient and seriously ill. He "laughed through tears," as Gorky said. He wrote comedies, and they were played like tragedies. He looked through the manner and pretensions of his time and knew, and hoped, that everything was going to be different in the future, everything except that which no one can change: nature, the nature of mankind, and the nature of life.

In 1933 Gorky wrote of him:

He had such tired hands; when they touched things, they often seemed half reluctant, half unsure. This was also the quality of his walk. He moved like a doctor in a hospital in which there are many patients but no medicines—a doctor who is not really convinced that the patients should be cured.