[In the review below of the Theater Guild production of A Month in the Country, Krutch extols Turgenev 's penetrating psychological portraits of the characters.]

The Theater Guild's experiments with standard plays have not always been among its happiest efforts, but with A Month in the Country (Guild Theater) it has achieved a delightful production of a delightful play. Chekhov himself never imagined a more charming group of people than that which Turgenev has here brought together, and Chekhov himself never scrutinized character with a keener or more tolerant gaze. One will look in vain for that tumultuous despair which is commonly supposed to be inevitably a part of the famous Russian soul, but one will find in its place something which is, perhaps, hardly less characteristic—a gently bubbling gaiety just tinged with melancholy and a quiet, almost elegiac beauty. These people are, to be sure, all idlers; they have eaten of some lotus and they dream their lives away, content to watch the birches grow and to speak of love. But no one ever justified idleness more completely by making it graceful, for they talk divinely about nothing in particular, and they get the full savor of the tiniest, almost non-existent adventure. After two hours in their company it seems that life could not be more profitably spent than in such doings as these.

Natalia Petrovna, married to a gentle, ineffectual country gentleman, has a lover of long standing; but when a young tutor appears in the house she confesses a penchant for him. The tutor is flattered by the favor of the great lady, and the lover, tardily scrupulous now that he has been displaced, persuades him that they should leave together.

They say goodby after some nervous references to the delicacy of their honor, and the lady accepts their fare-well with an irony whose delicacy makes its deadliness almost imperceptible: "I am sure that you are both honorable men—very honorable men. In fact, I think that you are the most honorable men I have ever met." And that is all, but it is quite enough. Quite enough because, I think, both the author and his creatures are so exquisitely aware of every value which the situation contains. Turgenev sees through them all. He follows every turn of every individual's psychology. But he does not see through them any more completely than they see through themselves, or know them any better than they know themselves, for it is, indeed, in learning to do just that that they seem to have spent their lives. Self-knowledge, complete in the adults, may be still growing in the youths, but as one watches the keenness with which they note their own emotions, one is sure that their experiment with living will achieve the success at which it aims. Doubtless they will never do anything, and quite probably they will be unhappy. But they will be thoroughly familiar with their own souls, and they will get the full value out of every emotion. They will see it coming, they will know when it is there, and they will reflect upon it after it has passed—even though, perchance, they have never heard of the "hard and gem-like flame."

Turgenev and Chekhov are the only writers I know who have completely justified a pause on the road which leads from tragedy to comedy. Both have reached the detached and critical intelligence which belongs to the latter. Both are completely sophisticated and, in certain senses at least, completely disillusioned. Yet neither has even approached the brittle hardness of pure comedy. Each is knowing without being quite cynical, and though neither has any lingering tendency to find cosmic significance in man or his doings yet both feel with and for him. In them human nature is neither funny nor grand, but somehow, without being either, it is charming. And that perhaps is the secret of their fascination. Here for once one does not have to make one's choice between intelligence and feeling or be put off with comedy tinged with inappropriate sentimentality. The clarity of vision is never clouded; no veils are drawn in order to make people or things seem softer than they are. And yet their little joys and little sorrows take on a significance which is more than comic.

In such a play as this, where everything depends upon the evocation of a mood, it is obvious that only the most expert acting and the most expert direction will do, but the production at the Guild Theater leaves almost nothing to be desired. Nazimova, as Natalia Petrovna, gives a finely modulated performance which seems to me quite the best she has achieved since her return to the stage; Henry Travers and Dudley Digges are very fine in comic roles; and in fact the whole cast, including Eunice Stoddard, who was seen first in "Red Rust," is excellent. Moreover, the settings, modeled by Raymond Sovey upon the designs by M. S. Dobuzhinsky for the Moscow Art Theater production of the same play, contribute much. Perhaps the garden scene reveals the weakness of all attempts to treat outdoor scenes realistically with the aid of paper flowers and poisonous-looking grass, but the empire room, done in blue, is one of the loveliest I have ever seen.