SOURCE: "Turgenev's Plays 1834-1848" and "Turgenev's Plays 1848-1850," in Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev, Grove Press, Inc., 1983, pp. 116-38, 139-69.

[In the following excerpt, Worrall analyzes all of Turgenev's plays except A Month in the Country.]

Turgenev's reputation as a dramatist, in the English-speaking world, rests largely on a single play—A Month in the Country—the only one of his plays to be widely available in translation. Yet he was a far more prolific dramatist than Gogol. There are, in fact, five other substantial works which deserve to be considered in the same company: 'Where It's Thin, There It Breaks,' The Parasite, The Bachelor, 'Lunch with the Marshal of the Nobility' and 'A Provincial Lady' plus two other shorter, but nonetheless interesting works: 'Indiscretion' and 'Moneyless'. This still does not take into account early works such as Styeno and the incomplete 'The Temptation of St Antony' or the minor one-act plays 'Evening in Sorrento' and 'Conversation on the High Road'. In addition to the above, there exist titles and planned outlines of several other plays which were abandoned when Turgenev turned permanently to prose writing. His friend, the poet and editor Nekrasov, thought Turgenev as capable a dramatist as he was a short-story writer and novelist, even going so far as to say that it would be an advantage if he turned his hand permanently to the writing of plays.

His best plays were written in France, mostly during the late 1840s, including The Parasite, intended for Shchepkin's benefit but banned on the grounds that it was prejudicial to the good name of the landed gentry. A Month in the Country, completed in the early 1850s, was also banned, mainly on moral grounds. Nearly all his plays ran into problems of varying degrees of gravity with the censor, ranging from requests for excision and revision to outright bans on publication and performance. Disheartened by official reaction and by public response to his plays generally, disappointed by indifferent performances of his work in the theatre, Turgenev eventually turned his back on playwriting for good. He revised his existing work from time to time but otherwise turned his attention to the creation of novels and short stories. There is little doubt that he wished to make his mark as a dramatist. It was to drama, after all, that he addressed himself in the first instance. Prose writing had been a secondary attraction. There is also little doubt that Turgenev, like Gogol, although severely limited by the conditions of the theatre of his day, sought to reform the art of theatre and to mould a new form of dramatic writing. Instead he learned, if not exactly to despise the theatre, then seriously to underrate his achievement as a dramatist and, in later years, he was painfully dismissive of work which had cost him dearly in terms of patient creative effort.

Styeno

Literary critics and historians had known of the existence of Turgenev's Romantic drama, Styeno, written in the 1830s, but for a long time it was considered lost. It was rediscovered by the Turgenev scholar M. O. Gerzhenson and published in the magazine Voices of the Past in 1913. The adolescent Turgenev began work on the play in September 1834, and completed it in December the same year. It is a substantial work in terms of scale as well as ambition and runs to fifty pages of the 1970 edition of his poems and verse. The handling of the iambic verse form is rather uneven throughout and there are several inconsistencies of scansion (a point which was made to him at the time). Years later, when writing Rudin, Turgenev gave some of his own feelings about Styeno to the character Lezhnyov:

You perhaps think I didn't write verses? I did, sir, even a complete drama in the style of Manfred. Among the characters there was a ghost with blood on its breast, and not his own blood mark you, but the blood of mankind in general.

In later life, Turgenev admitted to having worshipped Byron in his youth and Styeno certainly bears the marks of this idolatry, with many scenes from Manfred finding their way into it in barely concealed form.

'The Temptation of St Antony'

The text of the uncompleted play 'The Temptation of St Antony', about which Turgenev had written to A. A. Bakunin in 1842, was eventually located and published in the Revue des études slaves, vol. 30 (1953), by the French scholar André Mazon. Work on the play belongs to the spring of 1842 and the date on the first page of the manuscript is 8 March. In a letter to Bakunin, in early April, Turgenev described how he was 'seeing the play in my sleep'. The first three scenes (the largest) were, he said, complete and there was a character, Annunziata, who, although she was the devil's mistress was, nevertheless, 'an extremely amiable [prelyubeznaya] girl etc. etc … ' (The word suggests a possible pun on the Russian for 'fornicator'—prelyubodei.) At the end of April, Turgenev announced that work on the play was proceeding in fits and starts and mostly by night. That is the last that was heard of it, except for the song which Annunziata sings towards the beginning:

Under the window of the beautiful 'donna'
For more than an hour, in full moonlight
     There walks a youth in love
   Clad in a black velvet cape …

which appeared in another play, 'Two Sisters', set in Spain, which Turgenev started work on in 1844 and then abandoned. The song took a slightly different form in the second play but what is interesting about both variants is that they prefigure the basic situation in the drama which became 'Indiscretion'.

The basis of the rather fantastic plot of Turgenev's 'The Temptation of St Antony' was the original legend, but the subject had been suggested to him by Prosper Mé-rimée's comedy The Devil Woman, or The Temptation of St Antony; Mérimée had included this in his volume of plays called The Theatre of Clara Gazul, which was a hoax in the form of the works of an imaginary Spanish woman playwright, but which had been taken as a kind of French manifesto of Romanticism. Critics had also detected traces of a new realistic direction in the work, which seems to have appealed to Turgenev who, by 1842, had already shed most of his youthful Romantic leanings. The Romantic style in the manner of Styeno is both recalled and made fun of in this play, which is in no sense a mere re-working of the Mérimée original but stands as a totally independent work. It parodies the clichés of the saintly life and contrasts realistic scenes set in the boudoir of the courtesan, Annunziata, with romantically fantastic scenes on the seashore, involving devils, imps, clouds and waves (all with speaking parts). In a seemingly complete overthrow of the values enshrined in Styeno, Turgenev appears to exalt the real over the ideal and 'exposes over-fervid religious ecstasy'. The experimental aspect of the play is important in so far as it shows Turgenev bent on destroying old forms and reaching forward to a dramatic world which anticipates something akin to Strindberg's A Dream Play.

The play, as it exists, occupies twenty pages of the 1970 edition of Turgenev's poems and verse and breaks off part way through Scene 3 at a fairly crucial point in the development. The only substantial gaps are in the 'Chorus Of The Waves', in Scene 3, where Turgenev was clearly having problems with the verse and left some of the lines incomplete. Most of the play is in prose dialogue, except for the songs and choruses. One whole scene of reminiscence between the hermit Antony and his former comrade-in-arms, Carlo Spada, is composed in verse form. The title page describes it as a 'drama in one act'.

'Indiscretion'

Turgenev's first published dramatic work, like 'The Temptation of St Antony', was a direct result of the influence of Prosper Mérimée's The Theatre of Clara Gazul. 'Indiscretion', described as a 'comedy in one act', is a typical product of the Spanish theatre with its serenading under balconies, culminating in a bloody drama of jealousy and murder.

The play was first published in 1843 and its only stage production to date was in 1884 when a German company in St Petersburg performed it on two or three occasions in a German version. Belinski recognized a similarity between the 'conversion' of the hero, Victor Alexeyevich (in Turgenev's long poem, Parasha) to that of Don Pablo in 'Indiscretion'. When Victor marries Parasha he changes from a Byronic hero into a conventional land-owner, just as the perpetrator of a crime passionel, Don Pablo, metamorphoses into a respectable civil servant in the epilogue to 'Indiscretion'. Just as Belinski saw Parasha to be 'full of inner content and distinguished by humour and irony', so the parodistic conjunction of ultra-romantic passion with elements of the comedy of manners was seen to characterize 'Indiscretion'.

One of the interests of the play is that it works in several different modes at once—farcical, romantic and realistic. There seems a clear debt to Molière in the marriage of a young wife to an old husband and in the depiction of the serenading lover who climbs fences and balconies, is threatened by a drunken gardener with a club and a pack of dogs, who hides behind trees to escape detection and, generally, cuts a fairly undignified figure. In the romantic mode there is the crime of passion commited by Don Pablo, as well as elements of Don Rafael's wooing of Donna Dolores. On the realistic level there is an element which can be seen to underlie Mozart's Don Giovanni, and which relates to the contemporary position and treatment of women. In this sense, Donna Dolores occupies a position similar to that of Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in the opera. It is probably true to say that, had 'Indiscretion' been known to the Feminist Movement, it would not have remained neglected.

Donna Dolores (her name signifies her condition) is twenty-seven and married to a man nearly thirty years her senior. She lives in a house which is guarded like a fortress and which seems to be surrounded by an outer stone wall and an inner picket fence, through which the only access is a gate kept permanently locked and guarded by Pepe, the gardener. Inside the house, Margarita, an old servant, acts as additional guard to Donna Dolores and, when necessary, locks her in her room whenever her husband is away. Dolores has led a permanently sheltered life, having been educated in a convent, and her view of alternatives to her humdrum existence has been gained from romantic novels. It is in this condition, at night on her balcony, that we and the would-be seducer, Don Rafael de-Luna, discover her at the beginning of the play.

The most striking aspect of Donna Dolores is her vulner-ability in relation to the predominantly masculine world around her. To Don Rafael she is an innocent fool to be sexually exploited. To her husband (until his feelings of security are undermined) she is an object of consumption, or a fetishist plaything. For Don Pablo Sangre (whose name suggests his bloodiness) she serves as the focus of all his frustrated passions which exist irrespective of their object and which can just as easily turn to mad destructiveness. Even for Margarita, she is the personification of all her class frustrations in a world where the servant sees 'riches' as of prime importance. She even blames the innocent Donna Dolores for the evil effects of such values on her own daughter. The actual causes of both their sufferings are shown to be the men who control their lives and the male-dominated society which exists to perpetuate these forms of control. The metaphor used to describe the relationship between the male characters in the play and Donna Dolores is that of cat to mouse. Don Balthasar d'Esturiz says, as he contemplates the prospect of Donna Dolores awaiting his return:

I remember, when a good juicy, ripe pear was given to me, I did not eat it right away like any other foolish boy or scapegrace … no, I would sit down, stealthily take the pear out of my pocket, examine it from all sides, kiss it, stroke it, put it to my lips, take it away again—admire it from a distance, admire it close to, then, at last, shut my eyes and bite into it. Ah, I really should have been born a cat.

Later, when Don Pablo is contemplating murder, he describes Donna Dolores as being 'in his claws' and there is a sense in which Don Rafael's playful asides to the audience, as he comments on the naïveté of his victim, also convey a predatory aspect to the seduction.

The men in the play are revealed as inferior, passionately, to Donna Dolores. The double fence which surrounds her is more a barrier to their own male fear of passion than it is a bar to female feeling. The 'weak spot' in the barrier, which has to be built higher and stronger, refers more to their own incarceration in a prison of suppressed emotion than it does to the suppression of women. (Turgenev uses this image of a barrier, or dam, built against the release of emotion in 'Where It's Thin, There It Breaks' and also in A Month in the Country.) Don Pablo's love, which has turned to destructive hate, appears as a direct product of this involuted self-suppression.

The final scene of the play contains the confrontation between the insane Don Pablo and Donna Dolores. He confesses his love and recognizes that she has nothing but contempt for him. The intention to murder her has been there from the outset and the prolongation of the scene becomes a form of perverse luxury. When faced with death, Donna Dolores, who has been conscious of a sense of fate, is superbly and pathetically defiant. A final irony is her declaration of love for the pitiful Don Rafael. In a denouement reminiscent of Lessing's Emilia Galotti, the male murderer stands holding the knife over the murdered female but here the real tragedy is obscured by the selfconscious melodramatization of the male protagonists, who experience the situation as an illustration of their own tragic destiny, in a manner which anticipates Ibsen. An epilogue of a few lines, depicting the scene ten years later, sets the seal on the 'comedy':

Scene: The Office of an important official. A secretary at the table. Enter Don Pablo Sangre, Count of Torreno.

Count Pablo: (busily to the secretary) Are my papers ready? It's time for me to. …

Secretary: (respectfully) Here they are, your Highness. (Both go out.)

Not only has the murder gone unpunished but Don Pablo appears to have been elevated to the rank of Count. Aristocratic and bureaucratic life goes on over the corpses of the victims. Commenting on this façade, Don Pablo had earlier remarked:

True, some eccentric person might think a crime was being committed in the house, or was about to be committed. … But that's all nonsense. Here are living modest, quiet, settled people. …

'Moneyless'

Nothing appears more surprising than Turgenev's decision in 1845, following the composition of 'Indiscretion', to turn his attention to a pure Russian vaudeville. The main influence in his attempt to exploit a debased genre appears to have been the example of Gogol, especially in the choice of milieu and in the conception of the central characters, Zhazikov and Matvyei. Another influence can be seen in the increasing popularity, during the 1840s in Russia, of vignettes of Russian life in prose form, in which the manners and mores of specific classes were depicted with considerable fidelity—the so-called 'physiological sketches' of the Natural School which Russian criticism refers to, and which find a counterpart in the pictorial art of the period. In 'Moneyless', however, Turgenev exploits vaudeville only superficially; the play is devoid of the traditional couplets, the conventional love intrigue and only retains one typical device—the string of creditors who call at Zhazikov's apartment, but here each is a carefully delineated social type, not a caricatural mask.

The Russian title 'Bezdenezh'e' literally means 'one without money' and the play is, indeed, about money and the lack of it. At the same time, it is like a kaleidoscope through which can be observed the changing patterns of a whole social system. Through the close-up technique of the vaudeville-cum-physiological sketch, Turgenev offers a view of a complete social process and a changing society. The play's subtitle is 'Scenes from the Petersburg Life of a Young Nobleman'. The young nobleman (clearly modelled on Khlestakov [in Gogol's The Inspector General]) and his servant (very like Osip) occupy an apartment on an upper (that is, inferior) floor of a St Petersburg tenement house. The life-style of the young man is at odds with his claim to the title of nobleman. He is penniless and the apartment is modest. During the course of the action various representatives of the emerging class of city tradesmen, the petty bourgeoisie, call on him virtually non-stop in an attempt to retrieve debts, while the master feigns absence and leaves his servant to deal with the callers. Finally, an acquaintance from the country appears, who lends him some money, and the play ends with a comment from the servant on how times have changed.

At the centre of the play is Zhazikov. He has left his family estate in the country in charge of his ageing mother and has settled in St Petersburg, the centre of everything epitomizing the truly noble existence in early nineteenth-century Russia. The implication is that the estate is rapidly deteriorating, while Zhazikov squanders family money. He appears to represent the culmination of a process of profligacy and waste, but acts as if no change at all were taking place and the status of the nobility unaffected; as if this concept were in some miraculous fashion separable from the possession of money. The play sets out to demonstrate the vacuousness of the notion of 'the nobleman' once the basis of superiority, in the form of property and wealth, is absent. Zhazikov and Matvyei retain and act out their roles as master and servant in circumstances which are ludicrously inappropriate, and yet their identities depend entirely on this notion of role-playing. The actual reversal of these roles, with the pattern of their necessary maintenance for the parties concerned, is conveyed with superb comic effect. Whenever a creditor calls, this is accompanied by the persistent ringing of a bell. The aristocrat (the conventional ringer of the bell to summon a servant) starts like a frightened hare on each occasion and runs for cover. It has become an almost Pavlovian motif by the end of the play as we observe the nobleman reduced to his reflexes. Meanwhile, Matvyei assumes the role of the master in confronting the creditors, as well as becoming the spokesman for aristocratic values.

The comedy of the piece is skilfully contrived and is mainly based on contradictions and contrasts within what is said and between the various characters who come and go, three of whom are never seen by the audience. Turgenev makes great play with the spectator's imaginative capacity to envisage the character behind the highly flavoured speech patterns and is particularly successful in the case of the invisible merchant—anxious about his money and constantly returning to the topic with mechanical variations on the same phrase: 'There's none lying around by any chance?', and torn between not wishing to appear presumptuous or over-pressing and a natural impulse to lay his hands on what is owed him.

The arrival of Blinov, the acquaintance from the country, highlights a principal social theme of the play—the contrast, but at the same time the fundamental connection, between town and country. The country, for Matvyei the servant, represents tradition and a secure master and serf relationship whose lineage he describes in the family as he remembers it in Zhazikov's grandfather's and in his father's time. 'Things are not what they used to be', says Matvyei; 'Your grandfather, Timofei Lukich, blessed be his memory, was a very tall man', he declares, as if the present were composed of midgets. In fact, the terms of Matvyei's description of the members of the family are reminiscent of the decaying grotesques who populate Gogol's Dead Souls. Zhazikov, by contrast, has nothing but contempt for the country, where he sees 'lack of education' and unattractive girls. An ironic point here is that his range of choice in St Petersburg appears to extend all the way from one 'Verochka' to the laundry girl who calls with a bill. Matvyei wants to be a serf, and a serf is not a serf in town. Zhazikov wants to be an aristocrat—and how can one be an aristocrat in the country?

In an extended soliloquy, Zhazikov eventually manages to convince himself that things are not so bad in the country after all—a recognition of the need to return and try to get the estate into some sort of order. But the contemplated return becomes a nostalgic turning-back of the clock, as if the process of superannuation, so obviously present in the context of the city, did not extend to include the landed estates which were now rapidly being engrossed by a new entrepreneurial class with business acumen.

Blinov represents the new type. His description of the prolonged legal wrangling about estate boundaries, which he is disputing with his neighbour, and which he has come to the capital to settle in court, suggests just how closely the apparent opposites of town and country are linked. We also gain an insight into what St Petersburg actually represents for Zhazikov. He shares Blinov's eagerness to combine going to the theatre to see 'a tragedy' with dining out at 'a cafe with an organ' and visiting the circus to watch big fat 'mamzelles' who 'ride standing on horses'. There is an element of condescension in Zhazikov's expression of his willingness to introduce Blinov to these delights, but they appear to represent to him the apotheosis of city culture.

The play ends with Zhazikov and Blinov going off to the tragedy and to the circus. Now that he has been lent some money, the country can 'go to the devil'. Matvyei concludes the action with an ultra-conservative remark addressed at the back of the departing Blinov, whom he recognises as the new breed of master:

Gone is the Golden Age! How changed is the nobility!

'Where It's Thin, There It Breaks'

In 1847, Turgenev attended a performance of Alfred de Musset's 'proverbe', Un Caprice in Paris. The dramatic form of the 'proverbe' was originally that of a charade designed to illustrate the proverbial saying which formed the last line of the play and it was this form which Turgenev adopted for his next comedy, written in 1848, for the St Petersburg actress V. V. Samoilova. The work is conceived in an altogether different style from his previous plays. The emphasis is on the subtle psychological interplay of feeling which underlies the surface of salon-play dialogue. A more genuine level of reality surfaces when the flimsy veil ruptures at its most vulnerable points.

Musset's theatre was very popular in Russia at the time and continued to be so. Later, Tchaikovsky is said to have been wildly enthusiastic about his work. Even plays which were not popular in Paris were highly successful in St Petersburg and, in fact, the triumphant de Musset revival at the Comédie Française, which really began with the production of Un Caprice witnessed by Turgenev, owed much to the championing of his cause by the Russian actress A. M. Karatygina.

'Where It's Thin, There It Breaks' depicts the attempts of Vera Nikolayevna, the daughter of a rich landowning widow, Anna Vasilyevna Libanova, to get Gorski, the son of a female neighbour, to marry her. The action is set against the background of the Libanova country house, a resplendent eighteenth-century edifice of Italian design in the Russian countryside. Vera's romantic view of love and marriage is opposed by Gorski's more cynical realism, and the plot concerns the latter's emotional vacillation—first romantically susceptible and then prosaically disinclined. The action climaxes in Vera's frustrated acceptance of the proposal of the naïve and lovesick Stanitsyn, an action which contains, as part of its intention, an attempt to pierce the protective shell of Gorski's egotism. In the background hover a third suitor, Mukhin, the governess Mlle Bienaimé, a Captain Chukhanov, who is a permanent guest in the Libanova household, and Libanova's companion and relation, Varvara Ivanovna.

The play's first performance was given on 10 December 1851, and was not a success. It was revived at the Alexandrinski Theatre in 1891 and, more successfully, at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912, with Olga Knipper and Vasili Kachalov. Kachalov acted Gorski as someone whose ideas and desires are weakened by coldness of spirit, exhausted by egotism and fruitless activity of the mind. This view of the character corresponds to a tendency in Russian criticism to see Gorski as one of the first dramatic embodiments of the 'superfluous man'. Typically, he is a scion of the upper class, cut-off intellectually from that class and from society as a whole, doomed to agonize self-obsessively over every action and to sully everything of worth with which he comes into contact, either from a sense of world-weary cynicism or in a spirit of casual destructiveness. The prototype of the species is considered to be Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Turgenev wrote his own 'Diary of a Superfluous Man' in 1850 and the type is well described by Alexander Herzen:

The distinguishing feature of our epoch is grübeln [to deliberate]. We do not wish to take a step without first having thought about it; we constantly delay, like Hamlet, and think, think … There is no time to act; we chew interminably over both the past and the present, everything which is happening to us and to others; we seek justification, clarification, enquire into ideas and truths.

The play can be described as Turgenev's version of Gogol's Marriage. At one point Gorski declares that he will not, like Podkolyosin, leap out of the window but will leave quietly by the door into the garden. The irony is that he sees this as superior behaviour when, in fact, Turgenev implies that the leap from the window had something to recommend it. It was at least unconventional. Everyone in the play is in the grip of convention. Everything is codified by rules and regulations. The characters appear to be trapped between two worlds—the world of Nature on the one hand and the world of art and artifice on the other, between romantic ideals and prosaic realities. The only way in which they chart a course between the 'Scylla' of the one and 'Charybdis' of the other (to borrow Gorski's mythological terminology) is through the establishment of civilized rules and conventions. But these merely succeed in parodying the 'higher', more spiritual, sides of the equation while suppressing the connection with the 'lower', more prosaic and physical sides of reality—an aspect of severance from the natural world in general. The characters exist in a kind of limbo, part flesh, part spirit, struggling half-heartedly towards a higher unity of opposites. As in Gogol's play, the symbol of that desired unity is marriage, seen by some as an end in itself, recognized by others as an evasion. Ideal marriage involves the unity of opposites. Actual marriage is a ritualized and conventionalized hollow unity masking an essential separateness.

Critics usually see Vera as in some sense superior to Gorski—she a kind of Don Quixote, he a Hamlet figure. The truth, however, is that Vera's positive, almost Shavian, drive towards improving the species through marriage with Gorski is revealed as a parodied version of natural and instinctive drives, just as his retreat into the world of the mind in order to counter her assault on his emotions is revealed as a parodied version of the world of intellect and imagination. Both are entirely conventional creatures whose egos just happen to be more strongly developed than others. The desirable conflict, leading to a unity of opposites, is presented as a petty egotistical affair which, instead of leading to a synthesis on a higher plane, leads to a false unity on a lower plane—the marriage between Vera and Stanitsyn.

As well as being a very Gogolian play, we are reminded of Turgenev's interest in the Hegelian dialectic but, in this instance, the conflicts are presented in all their hollowness. There is much talk of winning and losing, which metaphorically links the world of human action with talk of military conflict and with game-playing. Losing and winning have become the human by-products of a petty and meaningless conflict. The recognition of the necessity of battle is implicit within the play, but winning or losing in a conventional sense is shown not to be the point. For the most part, the characters evade the recognition of necessary struggle, or take part in activities which merely parody it. They view life in a petty, individualistic way where there can only be the see-saw oppositions between 'higher' and 'lower', 'winner' and 'loser'. Never, it seems, can the conflict be converted into a higher synthesis through concerted human struggle. The 'break' in the play occurs at the thinnest point between opposites—between winning and losing, between male and female, between the ideal and the real, between art and nature. It is as if the fabric of life were being tugged from opposed ends, destructively, instead of being co-operatively woven into clearer and more durable form. Because there exists no co-ordinated and conscious recognition of the pattern and purpose of struggle, its parodied version takes the form of the love duel and games of chance, where there is opposition but no genuine conflict and the outcome is based on arbitrariness and hazard.

There are two symbolic gestures in the play which appear as intended parallels. Vera plucks a rose to give to Gorski but is then prevented from doing so by the presence of Mukhin. She ends by throwing aside the rose, which Gorski later picks up and puts in his pocket. The parallel is with the action of Captain Chukhanov. He is kept on sufferance in the Libanova household as a permanent guest and to make up a third at card games. He has been picking mushrooms in the garden, which he then offers to Libanova in his hat. Her response is to tell him that a hat is no place for mushrooms; they belong on a plate. The mushrooms have been stooped for at ground level, are then placed in something taken from the head and, in this form, are offered in a gesture of self-effacing generosity. The only dialectic appreciated by Libanova is a connection between mushrooms and plates as an aspect of conventional propriety. Although only a modest moment of synthesis, the significance of Chukhanov's gesture evades her consciousness entirely. Turgenev intends that it should not escape us. By contrast, the rose is offered in a totally different spirit. Vera intends it as a symbol, which implicates her feelings for Gorski and his for her. The presence of Mukhin forces her to lie and say that she picked it for herself. But the lie contains a truth. She did, in fact, pick it for herself, because she is symbolized by it and projects her own feelings into the rose as symbol. It is a gesture of pure egotism. Once its extraneous value is redundant, she casts the rose aside and the original plucking of the flower can now be seen as a wilfully destructive action. Gorski's placing it in his pocket merely compounds the desecration. He will produce the rose at the end of the play, wilted, merely in order to humiliate Vera with a reminder of the evanescence of her feelings for him.

The figure of the captain is allied with that of the companion, Varvara Stepanovna. They are the dialectical opposites of Gorski and Vera but occupy an equivalent position of importance in the play. Varvara Stepanovna appears to count hardly at all in the scheme of things, like Ivanov in The Parasite. She and the captain say very little but, in the triangular card game, it is she who appears to deliberately 'lose' in order that the captain should 'win'. Their saying nothing, or next to nothing, becomes the dialectical opposite of the pointless garrulousness of the protagonists. Their possessing nothing is the opposite of the others' possessing everything. They emerge, strangely, as the hero and heroine of the play, linking arms in military formation at the end when the group prepares to march 'out there', into the forest. The two are linked together by the notion of service. The captain's final words are 'Ready to serve'. Excursions into the outer world appear brief and hazardous. The captain, like Zhevakin in Marriage, has made these sorties and knows what it is to 'storm a fortress'—a version of the eternal conflict which has its own lessons to teach about the capacity of humans for violence and suffering. The others venture out timidly in the rain and sun and have to scurry back to the protective confines of their Rastrellian dwelling. What could better exemplify the absurd challenge which one form of art lays before nature than the erection of a Rastrellian mansion in the wilderness of the Russian countryside? The more permanent forms of challenge, or transcendence, are made by poetry and music, the first of which Gorski despises, the second of which Vera merely dabbles in.

Poetry appears to occupy an equivalent position in this play to the rose plucked by Vera. It is only seen to exist as an appendage of the egos of the characters. The most poetic moment is the evocation, by Gorski, of the moonlit night on the lake where he has rowed Vera Nikolayevna and when, as he describes it, he almost lost control of himself under the spell of her physical proximity and the moonlit setting, even going to the lengths of delivering himself of some verses by Lermontov. The first thing to note is that Gorski's recounting of this magical moment is in a mood of cynical disavowal and shame, now that the spell has worn off. It is also a betrayal of Vera's confidence, which he calculates Mukhin will relay to her and so precipitate the untying of the emotional knot he fears has been made by the shared experience. What we also note is another kind of betrayal in the egotistically false note of the poetic evocation. Nature is reduced to a mere theatrical backdrop for the posings of the characters. The lake becomes reduced to a modest-sized pond and the light on the scene comes as much from the candle held by the watchful Mlle Bienaimé on the balcony as it does from any actual moon.

The musical moment comes later, when the two egos of Vera and Gorski clash, again under the watchful eye of Mlle Bienaimé, as Vera accompanies herself on the piano (a Clementi sonata) while carrying on an accusatory conversation with Gorski. The beauty of the music is incidental to her self-expression and she even uses the music, in the manner of the rose, to add symbolic emphasis to what she is saying by 'beating hard on the keys' or 'playing gently' when she is being more seductive. The comic irony here is that she seems to be a merely average dilettante. The tête-à-tête is interrupted by Mlle Bienaimé's dry cough and her pointed remark that the sonata 'sounds difficult to play'.

Gorski turns out to be contemptuous of poetry and poetic natures: 'Long live mockery, hilarity and malice', he declares, 'Now I am again in my element'. (The phrase he uses translates literally as 'on my own plate again'—a conscious echo of the earlier episode with the mush-rooms.) In opting out of marriage, he has opted out of the dialectic into singleness and has thrown away the poetic part of himself, just as earlier he had cast aside the novel he was reading, the contents of which seemed to him to be just obvious foolishness. He can only joke at the end of the play. 'Welche Perle warf ich weg!' (What a pearl I've thrown away!)—the retreat into a foreign language being part of the evasion. He has also thrown the more precious part of himself away but can only melodramatize his situation—the gall and bile which rise in his throat being the consequence of egotistically wounded pride where Vera's sword-thrust (her engagement to Stanitsyn) can be seen to have found its mark. Words are the only protection he has against his own nullity, which he chooses to think of as complexity: 'Don't tear the last decisive word out of me …' he begs Vera as he dodges this way and that to escape definition, because in his heart of hearts he suspects that in veering between one state and another he has ended up as nothing.

Gorski is very fond of attributing everything to Fate or Chance and wondering whether Fate is laughing at him or assisting him. He plays a game on his own whereby the chance potting of a billiard ball will be seen to determine his fate. Recognizing this as mere childishness, he throws the cue aside. Yet the tripartite pattern of the game itself is important, although Gorski does not recognize the fact. He has earlier said in conversation with Mukhin that his task was to chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis. The point becomes the active charting of a course and not the leaving of matters to chance, just as the skill in billiards involves a relationship between three elements and maintaining those elements in play.

What, finally, is the implication of the proverb which forms the title to the play? What does Mukhin mean when he quotes it at the end? He would seem to be referring to a 'break' in Gorski's ego which his manifestation of high spirits is not quite managing to disguise. Anyone who attempts to exist through mere singularity (and all are single in this play) constructs the world purely in terms of the self, the most extreme manifestation of which is egotism. The finale produces the harnessing of couples—a realignment of forces within a group—for the march to the forest. However, allying yourself to another, or forming ranks, does not automatically over-come the problem, but can constitute other kinds of weakness, or thinness. The relationship between Vera and Stanitsyn seems especially vulnerable. Between the captain and Varvara Ivanovna there is a kind of unity of relationship, although not a particularly profound one, which is synthesized in a third element—that of 'service'. Anna Vasilyevna simply represents indomitable egotism and it is apt that she joins ranks with Gorski in the finale. The case of Mlle Bienaimé appears to be slightly different. She is not just a governess and watchdog but has something of the spiritual guardian about her as both worker and educator. The most striking images of her presence in the play are when she is seen holding a candle on the balcony, providing a third element in this moment of epiphany, this Moonlight Sonata, and also, when she sits, working a pattern on canvas, during the piano-playing scene. She appears to be a comic version of a dialectical trinity, the three in one, offering work, service and enlightenment. One of her final actions, in order to 'win' Mukhin, is to engage him in a game of billiards which she 'loses' (we suspect that she ensures that he wins).

As well as the debt to de Musset, we are reminded of how steeped in the work of Shakespeare Turgenev had been since childhood. The subtitle of this, his most Shakespearian, as well as his most de Musset-like play, might well be Much Ado about a Midsummer Night's Dream of Nothing.

The Parasite

Turgenev's second major play for the professional theatre, The Parasite, was written at the request of Shchepkin and completed, in France, in 1848. Like the pictures in the album which Mukhin contemplates in 'Where It's Thin, There It Breaks' of 'views from Italy'—with the suggestion of a reciprocal process, both 'views of and 'views from'—this play is a view of Russia 'from abroad', where one of the characters, Tropachov, always intends going but, instead, has to make do with lithographs in an album. The play was immediately banned, ostensibly because, according to the censor, it presented the Russian nobility in a 'contemptuous light'.

The Parasite circulated in manuscript and achieved quite wide popularity. It was first published in The Contemporary, in 1857, under the title Alien Bread and the first performance was permitted in 1861. During the nineteenth century and, occasionally since, the two-act play has been presented as a one-acter, leaving out the whole of the second part and concluding with the revelation of Kuzovkin's paternity at the end of Act 1. The actor V. N. Davydov was among the first to appreciate what a travesty this was when he wrote:

I cannot understand how Russian actors have not been able, and are still unable, to understand the beauty of the second act, finding it faded and pale, even un-necessary. The second act is unconditionally stronger and more artistic than the first. It is full of incomparable psychology.

The parasite in question is Vasili Semyonich Kuzovkin, who has lived on the estate of the Korin family for the past thirty years, fourteen of which have been spent in the company of the daughter of the deceased owners and an aunt who looked after the girl following the death of her mother. Olga Petrovna, the daughter, moved to St Petersburg at the age of fourteen and is now returning to her family estate seven years later in the company of her newly acquired husband, a thirty-two-year-old, town-bred collegiate councillor, Pavel Nikolayevich Yeletski. Kuzovkin still lives on the estate, which continues to be staffed by a retinue of servants, because of a prolonged legal wrangle surrounding the settlement of his own inherited property which has gone on for the past twenty years or so. In Korin's time, Kuzovkin appears to have served as a butt for the cruel humour of a tyrannical master who, as well as being consistently unfaithful to his wife, was an unpredictable and violent man. The memory of Kuzovkin's role as 'estate fool' is revived by the arrival of an old friend of the family, the neighbour Tropachov, who has come to greet the newly-weds. [In this scene, Kuzovkin is] … baited into recounting the history of his abortive litigation, mocked at and, finally, crowned with a fool's cap. His response to this revival of earlier humiliations is to declare in the presence of the young husband, and within earshot of the daughter, that he is, in fact, her real father.

The second act deals with the aftermath of this revelation, in which Kuzovkin first declares this admission to have been madness and then, in private conversation with Olga, says it is true. Out of a sense of loyalty to her husband, Olga conveys this to him. He, in turn, seeks to remove Kuzovkin from the house by buying his confession to having told a lie, giving him enough money to purchase his estate from in chancery and over the head of rival claimants—the heirs of a German called Hanginmester. Olga eventually persuades Kuzovkin to accept the money, and his departure is explained by the announcement that he has finally 'come into his estate'. He leaves, having reached an agreement in confidence to have private conference with 'his daughter' whenever he should visit the Yeletski estate in future.

The first production opened on 30 January 1862, at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, for Shchepkin's benefit performance and with a strong cast. The play was revived at the Alexandrinski Theatre in 1889 for V. N. Davydov's benefit, when only the first act was presented, then again in 1916 when it was acted in its entirety. The first act was given as part of the Moscow Art Theatre's Turgenev Evening, in 1912. Just before his death, Davydov revived his performance as Kuzovkin during the 1924-25 season at the Maly Theatre, Moscow. In an otherwise lukewarm review in Pravda, the critic Pavel Markov described Davydov's performance as:

… material for research not only into the art of the actor, but into the lives of the insulted and the injured such as Davydov shows us in the parasite Kuzovkin.

The reference to the 'insulted and injured' is a common one in Russian criticism of the play which places it, as Marc Slonim has pointed out [in Russian Theater from the Empire to the Soviets, 1963], in a line which 'stems from Gogol's "little man", later taken up by Dostoevski', with Akaki Akakyevich, in 'The Overcoat,' as a forerunner.

Davydov was right when he pointed to the wealth of psychological matter in the play. At the same time, most critics would seem to be wrong in regarding it as a defence of the 'little man', in addition to its being a criticism of feudal Russia. English translators tend to evade a recognition in the play's title, Nakhlebnik, of a direct meaning of 'parasite' in favour of the more neutral The Boarder, A Poor Gentleman, or The Family Charge. Foreign translations opt for the even more neutral Alien Bread. However, the true significance of the play needs to be seen to depend upon the recognition that the meanings of nakhlebnik are negative. It is a Gogolian play, but its roots lie less in 'The Overcoat', as is generally thought, than in the Gogol work which Tropachov refers to indirectly in Act 2 when he speaks of the Emperor or China, namely The Diary of a Madman. Seen in this light, the play becomes an altogether different and more original, as well as more profound, artistic work.

The themes of the play can be stated, in general terms, as social breakdown and fragmentation accompanied by loss of meaning and individual identity. The loss of connection in the social world is paralleled in the more intimate world of personal and family relationships. People move and respond to the dictates of natural instinct and appetite, or to the mechanical and tyrannical demands of convention and habit, or out of a grossly distorted sense of their own individual significance—an aspect of an attempt to counter the prevailing sense of a loss of individual meaning. In this situation, those at the bottom of the heap serve to confirm the identity of those at the top. A psychological means of asserting one's own value is to imagine oneself, like Gogol's madman, to be the Emperor of China. Those at the top of the heap can only tolerate this destabilization of hierarchical order by describing the claim as mad. To a certain extent, this is what happens when Kuzovkin makes a claim for his own worth, by asserting a consanguinous relationship with the wife of a 'high Petersburg official'. The complication arises from the fact that, whereas we recognise Poprishchin's claim to be the Emperor of China as 'false', there are less good reasons for doubting Kuzovkin's claim to be Olga's father. Yet, the situation which Turgenev portrays is a form of madness. The division between social and personal worlds is given poignant significance through the making public of the claim. To 'go out of one's mind', in this sense, is to make generally public knowledge that which was hitherto personally intimate. The reason Kuzovkin 'goes out of his mind', lies in the fact that the claim to paternity has less to do with the fact of intimate feeling and blood relationship, than with his claim for his own individual significance in this kind of world. In brilliant fashion, Turgenev dramatizes the claim for, and the attribution of, identity of an inherently false kind, as well as the simultaneous destruction of true identity in the human connection between father and daughter. To declare that Kuzovkin is mad, as he frequently describes himself to be, and as he is frequently described by others, flies in the face of generally accepted readings of the play, but madness, social and personal, appears to be its crucial theme.

The opening is almost pure 'theatre of the grotesque' and owes much to Gogol's fragment 'The Servants' Hall'. Presided over by the grotesque maitre d'hotel, Trembinski, who is given the physical attributes of a puppet and whose personal existence is merely instrumental to the requirements of a sanctioned hierarchy, the contemporary life of the estate moves to the mechanized rhythms of his motorized responses, seen in contrast to the patterns and rhythms of the past compounded of chaos and inertia. The superficial contrast is between the values of the town and those of the country, between the new values and the old—Trembinski insisting on a strict, mechanized division of labour and organization for their own sake, where the estate managers have been content to let matters go to rack and ruin while lining their own pockets in the absence of authority. The contrast between town and country is intensified by the arrival of the 'new man', the Petersburg councillor Yeletski, the new estate owner, for whom the language of estate management might just as well be Chinese. He too moves in the mechanical grooves carved out by utilitarian principles, conventional procedures and the dictates of social propriety, while emanating the mystifying aura of authority which attaches to his quasiaristocratic background and his hailing from St Petersburg.

Identity becomes a matter of passive submission to a preordained social role, whether that of servant or master, and yet there persist the claims for individual meaning and significance. Turgenev makes great play with people's names, a normal aspect of identity which is here thrown into disarray. 'Who are you?' Trembinski asks the baffled Pyotr and when the latter offers his name is told that his true identity is 'lackey'. The attempt to identify throughout is not to discover an authentic individuality, but to place in a social scale of higher and lower. This is especially true of the men. They deliberately forget each other's names, or get the right first name and the wrong patronymic as part of the pattern of social and self-assertion. All that appears to matter is the pecking order, while human connection is lost in the process. Humanity is commonly seen as being reasserted in the human claims voiced by Kuzovkin, but these are, in fact, part of that same process. A vestigial humanity persists only on the margins—in the person of the young servant, Masha, who laughs at the absurd ritual which welcomes the newly weds; in Kuzovkin's friend, Ivanov, who is a passive, almost silent witness to the underlying truth; and in Olga Petrovna herself, who is torn apart, finally, by her attempt to reconcile the claims of society, represented by her husband, and the claims of her nature, represented by her daughterhood.

The central character, Kuzovkin, exemplifies the schizophrenic nature of the society and embodies the split within himself. He is both the most self-effacing and the most self-assertive person in the play. He is at the bottom of the social heap, yet possesses the conventionally superior feelings of a nobleman. He is both the most inarticulate and the most rhetorical, the most self-important and the most self-demeaning. His existence is a surrogate existence. He is, in fact, a parasite. Kuzovkin is an integral part of the grotesque elements in the play; his habits of mind are entirely conventional and completely mechanical. His account of the legal proceedings surrounding the inheritance of his estate is presented in a manner which, ironically, justifies the 'cruel' laughter with which it is received. It is manic in its obsessiveness and in its command of intricate detail, as well as giving the impression of mechanical repetitiveness—in the recurrence of the word veksel (a bill of exchange), for example, and in the exhausted repetitions at the end of the long speech towards the end of Act 1 as the machine of his mind winds down. The process of litigation is relayed as a form of madness, a metaphor of breakdown, setting individual members of the same family against each other while dividing the estate 'to the fourteenth part'. The final attribution of blame to the ubiquitous 'Hanginmester', Turgenev asks us to note, actually represents the mechanical principle itself, as Kuzovkin wrestles with his name: 'Han-han-han-gin-mester'.

The irony of this pathetic scene, which culminates in the fool's cap being set on Kuzovkin's head, is that it is simultaneously his humiliation and his moment of glory. Being humiliated is an essential aspect of his identity. It is essential to his ultimate feeling of superiority to those who humiliate him. It provides him with opportunities for self-assertion as when, previously, he fathered the illegitimate child and, now, announces the fact. These scenes of abasement are the only moments in his life when his essentially selfconscious and theatrical personality finds itself at the centre of the stage, the focus of attention. This craving for attention might be explicable, even tolerable, in a disturbed child. In a fifty-year-old adult the signs are ominous. It is inevitable that the demand for social recognition cannot satisfy the claims of personal identity. These can only be harboured in the mind, as ideals. Once released into the light of day, the one claim cancels the other. The truth and reality of the father/daughter relationship can only be sustained as an ideal of the mind. Once it becomes instrumental in the claim for social recognition, its inherent quality is destroyed at the moment of its public utterance. Kuzovkin is, indeed, mad to have 'come out of his mind'. The accompanying stage direction is 'Olga disappears'. Yeletski's conventional recognition—'You're mad'—veils a perception at a deeper and more tragic level of this apparent comedy.

As usual, in Turgenev, the victim is a woman. Olga only exists to serve her husband's interests or as an aspect of Kuzovkin's identity. She is neither true wife nor true daughter. She is a victim of this instrumentality just as her dead mother was a victim of her husband's brutality. Olga is further humiliated by her husband in being made instrumental in buying off Kuzovkin. The latter will not accept the 10,000 roubles from Yeletski out of a sense of his dignity as a nobleman (a way of seeking a moral advantage over his ostensible 'superior'). Olga agrees to act as her husband's emissary in a tactical sense, and acknowledge her daughterhood, in order to force Kuzovkin to accept the money. In a brilliant dramatic stroke, Turgenev has Kuzovkin first drop the paper-bill and then accept it when it is physically pressed on him by Olga, who simultaneously says she believes him to be her father. At the point of genuine human contact, the promissory note comes between. The revelation of natural connection involves a simultaneous cancellation of that connection. Olga's recognition of Kuzovkin as a father in these terms actually severs her connection with him as a daughter. Because the acceptance of the money sanctions a social lie for propriety's sake, it also makes a lie of the personal relationship. The agreement to carry on an illicit, secret sense of their true kinship, under the umbrella of the social life, becomes both ironic and pathetic. It can possibly satisfy Kuzovkin who has 'come into his estate' as both owner and father. For Olga it can only be sacrifice and loss.

Kuzovkin believes he has gained his identity, when in fact he has lost it. He has 'come into his estate' only in the most meaningless sense. Olga is left to escape alone to her room to weep over her own loss, while Tropachov congratulates Yeletski on his decency and generosity, no doubt harbouring thoughts of seducing his wife at the first opportunity. He and his parasitic double, Karpachov, have already become semi-permanent guests and he will no doubt batten on the family flesh with the same relish with which he tackled the meal in Act 1—a parasite in a world of parasites. 'Nature … is the death of me', he announces at one point. Tropachov, is, indeed, symptomatic of dead nature in the debilitated world of the play as a whole.

The Bachelor

The Bachelor is unique among Turgenev's plays in having been written, published and performed all in the same year. It was also the first Turgenev play to be given a public performance. He composed it between January and March 1849 in Paris, from where he sent the manuscript to Shchepkin in Moscow. The play was permitted for the stage in October, although not before the censor had been to work with his blue pencil. A dialogue between Shpundik and Von Fonk about the difficult conditions prevailing in the countryside was excised, as was a speech by Moshkin in which he talked of the freedom and equality of women in marriage. All references to God were eliminated and certain names were changed—Von Fonk to Von Klaks and Belokopytova to Belonogova (literally Whitehoof to Whiteleg). The first performance was given for Shchepkin's benefit, on 14 October, at the Alexandrinski Theatre in St Petersburg with the beneficiary in the role of the minor official, Moshkin. It was a great success.

The basic situation in the three-act play concerns one Moshkin (moshka= midge), a fifty-year-old bachelor who has assumed the guardianship, since the death of her mother three years previously, of a nineteen-year-old girl, Masha. For more obscure reasons he has also assumed semi-parental responsibility for another orphan, Pyotr Vilitski, a twenty-three-year-old Petersburg minor official, and has contrived a match between them which is two weeks away from consummation at the opening of the play. During the course of the action Vilitski breaks off the engagement, largely under the influence of the above-mentioned Von Fonk, who appeals to his innate snobbery in suggesting that he could make a better match elsewhere. Dismayed by the outcome, Moshkin himself proposes marriage to his ward, a proposal which she half accepts, and Moshkin is left at the final curtain deliriously hopeful that something will come of this and that Masha will be happy.

Criticism and performance of The Bachelor appear bedevilled by some of the problems which also affect our understanding of The Parasite. In fact, the plays have a great deal in common, but not in the way in which these comparisons are traditionally made. The problem with the conventional way of seeing both The Parasite and The Bachelor seems to be the need to find positive elements in Turgenev's dramatic world with which to identify and sympathize. It has become traditional to see both Kuzovkin and Moshkin as representing a focus of moral opposition to the world around them. However, as in the case of Gogol, this is not the way in which Turgenev works. His method is essentially Gogolian in that the conflict is between negative elements in which the out-come is far from being so easily affirmative as criticism is inclined to suggest. The crucial element which has been missed in both The Parasite and The Bachelor is the way in which Turgenev has captured the spirit of Gogol's comedy of the grotesque and it is in this light that The Bachelor, in particular, needs to be viewed. To suggest that the play concerns another form of parasitism, that it is also about impotence and, again, about madness and that these themes are woven around the 'good' and 'kind-hearted' central character might raise a few eyebrows (possibly Turgenev's own). But this is the play he has demonstrably written and it is a much finer one than the play he is usually credited with being responsible for.

The first act introduces us to the milieu of Petersburg minor officialdom. The setting is Moshkin's apartment and Moshkin is at the centre of the action as he prepares a dinner party for the engaged couple and Vilitski's departmental colleague, Von Fonk. The dominant impression is of weirdness and eccentricity. The presence of both Masha and her aunt in what is a small bachelor apartment emphasizes the overcrowdedness. Moshkin's former sleeping accommodation appears to have been given over permanently to Masha, so that the reception room, where the first act is set, also functions as a bed-room for Moshkin—a corner of which is screened off. There is also a young servant, Stratilat, who, instead of occupying his traditional place in the hallway, appears to spend a good deal of his time lounging on his master's sofa. There is an all-pervading sense of curious incongruity. Under these conditions, cramped and chaotic, the master of the house manages his ménage in a fashion which might be appropriate in a country house, but which appears ludicrously out of place in the flat of a minor official in St Petersburg. The effect is of someone in thrall to the dictates of the values of his masters, whose ideals and codes of conduct he apes and aspires to emulate. The effect is of a moshka (midge) imitating a butterfly and the prospect is both absurd and grotesque.

The servant's speech at the opening of the play introduces us to the themes of education and enlightenment, which are referred to in various forms by several of the characters. Stratilat's level of 'enlightenment' consists in his struggling to pronounce that very word, syllable by syllable, in the book he is desperately trying to read, but which is frustrated by his constantly having to answer the bell. Moshkin's friend, Shpundik, is described by Turgenev as having 'pretensions to education'. Moshkin wishes to gain the approval of others by being associated with people of good upbringing and education. He wants Masha to be thought 'a queen' in society, as well as being anxious for Vilitski to work his way up the ladder of promotion in the civil service so that, eventually, Moshkin can claim a vicarious eminence through a form of kinship. Von Fonk represents that world of education and 'breeding'—the entirely false values which terrorize everyone else in the play and before which they pathetically abase themselves. This is represented through the forms of their dress, exaggerated to the point of caricature, their artificially mannered speech and in their sycophantic, intimidated humility in face of Von Fonk and everything he stands for.

The arrival of Shpundik, at the beginning of the play, also introduces the theme of 'Time'. In the world of the first act, everything is seen to move at a breathtaking, unnatural speed, with everybody consulting their watches and wondering what time it is from minute to minute. It all amounts to a portrait of Petersburg bureaucratic life, and its unnatural spirit is proportionately reflected in the artificial behaviour which such consciousness of time imposes on those whose movements are dictated by the tick of the clock. The manic impression is especially noticeable in the behaviour of Moshkin, whose characteristics are distinctly puppet-like. Against this is set the discussion of mortality between Shpundik and Moshkin, in which Turgenev is surely echoing that between Shallow and Silence in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2.

In Moshkin's account of how he met Masha and her mother, rendered in comic-grotesque detail and style, complete with clown-like actions, we are introduced to another sense of 'Time'. Moshkin is always referring to himself as 'an old man'. His life is seemingly fixated on his relationship with the young couple and his desire to see them married. Equally, the actual duration of their acquaintance seems to be disproportionately short. Moshkin behaves as if at a crisis point in his own life. Well into middle-age, he appears to be seeking to live out his own unlived life vicariously, through the lives of the young people, and precipitately, because he feels he has not much time left. Time is making itself felt in Moshkin's own life with peculiar force. The childless bachelor, who has been a petty official all his life, suddenly seizes on a chance to live and, in the process, imposes his own necessities on the lives of two orphans who are unable to resist the pressures he exerts. What appears as altruism is, when looked at more closely, a form of parasitism which is entirely, if unconsciously, selfish.

Moshkin is also obsessed with his own inferiority and lack of distinction. This sense stems directly from a total acceptance, even worship, of a false society's evaluation of what constitutes distinction and superiority. Again, he seeks these qualities vicariously through the ambition he has for Vilitski's advancement. 'He will soon be titled', he tells Shpundik in a confidential whisper, 'he has a good and extensive acquaintance' and 'he works along-side the minister himself.' Vilitski's marriage to Masha can be seen as calculated, less to confer status on this girl of 'inferior' birth than to confer potency and social status on Moshkin by proxy through its association with his own surrogate parenthood and tutelage.

The entry of Von Fonk introduces us to the values of that wider external world which exerts such intense pressures and exercizes such power over the interior world of the play. Moshkin is moved to tears for reasons which he cannot explain by the visit of this supercilious and punctilious bureaucrat. The reason is not far to seek. It is as if a monarch had condescended to visit his humble abode. Moshkin is touched for his own sake, not for Masha's. In the pre-lunch conversation, he reveals himself as the perfect would-be bourgeois in his conduct of the deadeningly banal conversation and in his attempts to cover up any hiatus in the flow, while preserving an impression of surface calm. Underneath, a kind of inner panic reigns in the hearts of all as they seek to impress the imperturbable Von Fonk. When the latter actually tells his story, which concludes with the profound observation that 'there are people who look alike', Turgenev reveals him for the superficial fool he is.

The underlying madness comes to the surface when the decorum is threatened by the cook, Malanya, who comes to announce that dinner is ready. The stage directions indicate that Moshkin runs to bar her entrance 'in a frenzy; placing his knee in her stomach' like a mad majordomo. He then turns rapidly to his guests and with sycophantic nicety asks: 'Does anybody require anything else?' as if the breach of etiquette had been a figment of everyone's imagination.

The opening of Act 2 shows us the impoverished conditions in which Vilitski lives and which he clearly wishes to climb out of. Again the sense of grotesque parody is apparent in the incongruity of setting and behaviour. Vilitski orders his pipe to be brought as if he were seigneur of a chateau, while his throwing aside of the book with the words 'upbringing is a very important thing' serves to underline the hypocrisy of his reasons for rejecting Masha, ostensibly on the grounds of her lack of education, when his decision is in fact dictated by social snobbery. At the same time, what seems simply affectation can also be seen as a form of resistance to Moshkin's imposition of a match which is not of his own choosing. The values which Vilitski accepts are those of Von Fonk, who is shown to be providing him with an education in these values. The irony is, that in essence, they are indistinguishable from Moshkin's and, in many respects, echo him:

I have already told you about my rule to avoid getting acquainted with people of the lower classes; from this rule, there naturally follows another, namely: try as hard as you can to become acquainted with people of the upper classes

says Von Fonk. And this is the path which Vilitski chooses to follow, a logical extension of Moshkin's own wishes for him, with the exception that Masha will need to be replaced by someone who will make 'a better marriage'.

In the scene between Masha and Vilitski at the latter's apartment, in Act 2, Vilitski is more conscious of his concealed and eavesdropping guests in the adjoining room than he is of Masha's emotional plea. The scene has a Dickensian element of caricature which Masha's mispronunciation of the word 'examine' as 'ixamine', followed by Vilitski's wincing response, emphasizes. Turgenev, to a degree, invites us to share the laughter of those in the next room who can scarcely contain themselves. During the course of the subsequent interview between Vilitski and Moshkin, it emerges that the latter is less troubled by whether Vilitski loves her or not, than by whether he intends going through with the wedding. It is 'what people will think and say' which principally concerns him.

Moshkin's anger, in Act 3, is of a similar order. It is manifested less for Masha's sake than for his own. It is his protégé, as he sees it, who has been rejected by society. His decision to challenge Vilitski to a duel is deliberately rendered comic, as well as absurdly inappropriate, by Turgenev. It is interesting that Moshkin's response is already more like that of a husband than a father, but this only serves to redouble the irony. His challenge is only apt if the opponent is seen as a rival in love. In this case, the rival has rejected the loved one. The whole is a grotesque inversion of any recognizable norm. In this context, the most grotesque aspect of all is Moshkin's decision to propose to Masha.

This is the most critical scene in the play. Despite her rejection, it is clear that Masha still loves Vilitski and hopes that he will change his mind. At the same time, she recognizes that there is little hope. She clutches at his letter like a drowning person. Moshkin already knows the contents but, in his present state of feeling, wants the contents to kill off the vestigial love. When she reads the confirmation of rejection, Masha stifles in that same moment the possibility of ever loving again. There is nothing left in life to hope for. Yet who is it who is responsible for evoking this love and inspiring this hope? Who is to blame? It is not Vilitski, but the man who stands before her offering himself as a substitute marriage partner.

Moshkin describes himself as 'losing his mind' and as 'a madman' and, indeed, in an important sense he is. It is plain that Masha has been merely instrumental in furthering his wider claims for recognition and significance. Now that this possibility no longer exists, the wider social ambition shrinks to the compass of the narrow arena of the apartment. In fact, fantasy takes over as a substitute for an unattainable 'reality':

All I want to do is to prove to the world, that to marry you is the height of happiness … That's what I want to prove to the world—that is, to Pyotr Ilyich … I offer you, then, peace, quiet, respect, shelter … Here, you will be a mistress, a madam, a lady …

and he adds, in pathetic acknowledgement of his own impotence which puts a seal on the barren prospects before her:

… and I … the screens, you understand, the screens, and nothing further …

Masha does not agree to marry him but agrees to stay for the time being:

You will not deceive me: you will not betray me. I can depend on you.

And she gives him cause for hope.

Once again, we see the woman as victim. For someone whose own hope, not to say her whole life, has been shattered to smithereens, faced with the person who is the Svengali-like cause of her suffering, Masha's offer to him of hope in return is fraught with irony. Moshkin's condition towards the end of the play is surely not the one traditionally rendered in performance. His manifestation of joy is close to dementia. Pryazhkina clearly thinks he has had a stroke:

Why, his face is all twisted, and his lips too. He has had a stroke.

He stands as someone condemned to hope and to the belief that his life may now begin to take on meaning. But he himself recognizes that ' … it's a dream, an illusion'. His final cry: 'She will be happy! She will be happy!' is less a cry of joyful determination than an attempt to drown the recognition of hopelessness and despair in the face of the ruin which is his own life, and the ruin he has brought on the lives of others.

'Lunch with the Marshal of the Nobility'

It is probably true to say that there is little evidence in his prose work that Turgenev was, potentially, a comic writer of considerable stature. There is certainly nothing in his novels or short stories which has the comic liveliness of his play 'Lunch with the Marshal of the Nobility', one of the funniest Russian comedies of the nineteenth century. Like 'Moneyless', it shows evidence of a strong debt to the techniques of vaudeville as well as to the plays and short stories of Gogol. In the humour of the quarrel over estate boundaries, the play anticipates the Chekhov of The Proposal, but without ever becoming quite as farcical.

The action of the one-act play takes place on the estate of Marshal of the Nobility, Balagalayev, whom the disputants, Bespandin and his widowed sister Kaurova, have turned to in the hope of a rapid resolution (rather than a protracted legal wrangle) of a problem over estate division. The marshalship, an honorary post, was subject to election on a short-term basis by the landowners of a specific region. Balagalayev's rival for the marshalship is one Pekhterev, who also becomes involved in the resolution of this particular dispute and introduces a subsidiary theme of the rivalry between the two marshals, incumbent and presumptive. A third theme is introduced in the person of Alupkin, newly arrived in the district from Tambov, who is in dispute with the district inspector, Naglanovich, as to whether it is one of his (Alupkin's) peasants who is responsible for stealing a goat. Beneath the surface of this farcical plot the currents of the play run deep.

It was originally written for Nekrasov's The Contemporary but was forbidden publication by the censor. Surprisingly, the play was passed for stage performance and the first production was given at-the Alexandrinski Theatre in December 1849. The subtitle of the first performed version was 'An Amicable Division', but, despite its success, it was not permitted publication until 1856, by which time Turgenev had revised it and weakened it considerably (this is the version which has come down to us). The first version is said to have been more actable than the final, published version. The original script contained very precise directions from the author as to intonations and group dispositioning on stage—for example at the moments when the map of the estate is consulted. Reference to a 'dumb-scene' (presumably influenced by The Government Inspector) is omitted from the published version, as is a story which Mirvoshkin (Mirvolin in the published edition) tells about his wife, and a scene where some of the characters imitate the gobbling of turkeys. Bespandin was depicted in far more grotesque fashion in the original, where he is described as stuffing his mouth with both hands while feeding, and spitting, whistling and so forth.

The background to the play involves last-ditch attempts by the authorities to prop up a collapsing feudal order by clarifying boundary divisions between estates. Where owners died intestate and there were several legal claimants to the estate, the resulting litigation as to the precise extent of what each inherited became a legal nightmare. Turgenev focuses the dispute on close relatives in order to reinforce a connection between a process of division and separation in the social sphere and the way in which this is reflected in internecine strife within families. The point which forms the centre of the action, and which is referred to at the end of the play, is not that an amicable 'settlement' has been reached (as M. S. Mandell's translation has it) but, ironically, an amicable 'division' or 'partition'. The agreement is to divide and separate, not to unite. The official appointed by the government to assist in the determination of these disputes appears as a deus ex machina at the end of the play but, typically and comically, is unable to resolve the difficulty.

The major theme of the play is division, in society and in the family. Within this sense of division there is also the theme of separation between male and female, as well as that of inheritance. Colouring each strand and interwoven with them is a refrain repeated from The Parasite and The Bachelor—that of madness. The amiable farce is concerned with disintegration and breakdown in both the social and personal spheres. We are, once again, in territory already made familiar by Gogol. The incipient insanity in the play is an aspect of the obsessiveness of the characters. Balagalayev is obsessed with his status and privately concerned with the personal advantage to be gained from the settlement which he is ostensibly superintending as impartial arbiter. His personality is inherently fragile and the chorus of conflicting demands produces an inner fragmentation in his being. He reaches the point of breakdown near the end:

I beg of you, my head's swimming … Division, a goat, obstinate woman, Tambov landowner, unexpected district inspector, a duel tomorrow, my conscience isn't clear, the estate, cut-price woods, lunch, noise, confusion … no, it's too much.

Alupkin is obsessed by four things—the goat which his peasant is supposed to have stolen, his dislike of women revealed through his attitude to Kaurova, his status as 'an old soldier', and the fact that he has managed to father a daughter. Pekhterev is obsessed with the marshalship. His apparent favouritism towards Kaurova has nothing to do with the merits of her case, but is a stance adopted simply in order to upset his rival, Balagalayev. He is also upset because the session has begun without him.

Bespandin is obsessed with winning the quarrel over the division of the estates. His apparent willingness to compromise is because he knows the cards are stacked against his sister as all the arbitrators present are male. He himself is unmarried. The only person who is not obsessed is the one who stands accused of incurable obstinacy, Kaurova. She is the only one who can conceivably be described as 'acting' the part she is playing—of 'stubborn female', 'helpless widow', 'put-upon litigant and faux-naif disputant'. The men are as if enclosed in the roles they play and unable to see beyond themselves to the insane ludicrousness of the situation. Kaurova not only understands but wilfully stretches the logic of the general insanity beyond the point where any normal person would go, just for the pleasure of watching the men pass beyond this point. She is far from being stubborn and is, in fact, so flexible that the men are incapable of noticing. There is a key point in the play, half-way through, immediately before the entry of Pekhterev. Up until this point, Bespandin's apparent flexibility has been countered at every turn by the sister's apparent stubbornness. They have reached a point of impasse. At this juncture Kaurova declares: 'I'll agree to anything. Let me have the papers. I'll sign anything you want me to!'—a remark which is completely ignored by all present.

Nearly everybody at some stage is described as 'mad'—Bespandin, his sister, Alupkin, even the aunt who left the will. Bespandin challenges Alupkin to a duel to defend the honour of his family, while simultaneously declaring that he doesn't give 'that much' for his sister. Pekhterev's suggestion that he make sacrifices because his sister is a woman, he answers with: 'That's only in theory'. Alupkin declares that nothing would surprise him any more—even if someone were to announce, 'I have eaten my own father!' Finally the desperate Balagalayev for-gives the cause of his despair, Kaurova, because she is a woman. In the atmosphere of exaggeration, charge and counter-charge, Kaurova chimes in with an assertion that her brother is a murderer who is prepared to cut her throat and has already tried to poison her several times. As the chorus mounts, the district inspector enters and is immediately assumed by the self-preoccupied Alupkin to be there on account of the goat. This individualistic interpretation signals the point of breakdown for Balagalayev, who lists the fragments of a fragmenting world in the speech already quoted.

A final irony concerns that which remains in dispute, namely the possession of 'waste land', which connects with Alupkin's inheritance of his wife's estate, described as 'absolute rubbish … just sand'. The play's last line: 'That's what I call an amicable division! …' underwrites the incongruity and absurdity of the action.

'A Provincial Lady'

'A Provincial Lady' was written in 1850 and published in Notes of the Fatherland in 1851, an event which had been preceded by public readings of the work given by Turgenev himself, with great success, at various private houses in St Petersburg and Moscow. Described as 'a comedy in one act', 'A Provincial Lady' looks at first glance, very much like a trivial French-inspired vaudeville.

The plot is certainly typical. Darya Ivanovna, the twenty-eight-year-old wife of Stupendyev, a very conventional district government clerk twenty years her senior, has lived the eight or so years of her married life in a boring provincial town with only a cook, a houseboy and a nine-teen-year-old male distant cousin for company, for the last-mentioned of whom she has assumed the role of benefactress. She, in her turn, was reared as a humble ward in the home of her benefactress, a local countess, since deceased, and retains memories of other ways of life as well as of her youthful ambitions. These are revived by a return visit to his country estate of the countess's son, Count Lyubin, now an ageing dandy of forty-nine who, some ten years previously, had flirted in a casual fashion with the young ward whilst on leave from the military. His affairs in St Petersburg appear to have taken a turn for the worse and he needs to consult the local district government officer (Darya's husband) about matters concerning his late mother's estate. The young wife exploits this opportunity to remind the count of their erstwhile connection and to exploit her now mature powers of sexual charm to gain for both herself and her husband, as well as her ward, positions in the more glamorous world of St Petersburg. This she manages to do, although her husband's jealousy (he is not informed of his wife's plot) nearly undoes the whole scheme as well as leading to the count's enlightenment as to the young wife's subterfuge. Despite this, the play concludes on a happy note as the group exits for dinner and the count looks forward to their next meeting—in the capital.

The play is far from being as superficial as the plot out-line may make it sound. In it, Turgenev reveals himself to be not only a precursor of a minor revolution in dramatic form, but also a forerunner of the master of domestic drama in the nineteenth century, Henrik Ibsen. Just as, through the surface texture of the domestic drama, Ibsen reaches beyond a surface realism towards something altogether more abstract, so Turgenev manages something very similar in 'A Provincial Lady', although the emotional colouring of the drama is much lighter than the darkness which can be detected in the Norwegian dramatist. Another important connection with later drama, and in particular with the Symbolists, lies in Turgenev's recognition of the puppet-show elements which underlie the ostensibly realistic surface of human actions.

There are strong parallels between the domestic worlds of 'A Provincial Lady' and A Doll's House, Hedda Gabier and even Rosmersholm. The connecting link is through the remarkable character of Darya Ivanovna. Through her, the play becomes a drama of the phenomenal and thwarted power of woman, but without the serious consequences which this is shown to have in Ibsen's plays. There is a persistent sense, in Ibsen, that the typical nineteenth-century woman sitting at her knitting, or at the embroidery frame, is simultaneously weaving the pattern of fate which will engulf the protagonists at the conclusion. In this respect, Darya Ivanovna possesses some of the power of Rebecca West in Rosmersholm and, at the outset, is shown sitting at her embroidery from where she appears to conduct the sequence of events which follows. She assumes the role of the man, just as Hedda and Nora Helmer do, and her relationship with her husband has much in common with that between the women and the conventional, weak men in Ibsen's plays. Everyone who comes within her reach comes under her extraordinary spell and moves in the way she wants them to, prompted by a hand gesture or a nod; or else they come under the magnetic influence of her powerful sexual attraction.

Although the play is a comedy and the resolution appears trivial and rather unsatisfactory, Turgenev manages to convey a sense, if not of tragedy, then of waste of human energy and paucity of ambition. It is stressed that the desire to leave this provincial backwater and move to St Petersburg is merely trivial. It is implied, that in this kind of society, the energy of a Darya Ivanovna either lies dormant or can only be purposeless and without direction, determined, to a large extent, by the ideological ambience of aristocratic taste which nurtures it and in which she has been reared. These values are both subconsciously recognized as worthless and, as if prompted by environmental determinism, simultaneously striven for. The resolution of the problem is not, as in Ibsen, on the level of tragedy but on a level of absurdity. It has the effect of reducing the world, as experienced by the central character, to the proportions of a puppet show in a fairground, a kind of bouffonade.

With brilliant originality, Turgenev manages to convert the realistic milieu into a kind of miniature 'theatre of the mind', which is a grotesque reflection of the ostensible normality of everyday appearances. Just as, in Hedda Gabier, the inner room with its curtains across it, which separate it from the rest of the setting and in which Hedda commits suicide, represents the theatre of her mind, similarly, in 'A Provincial Lady' everything appears filtered through the consciousness of the central protagonist. In the process, what emerges is a fairly light-hearted puppet show, in which Darya Ivanovna is revealed as the puppet master, while being herself subject to certain manipulative constraints.

Turgenev manages to suggest the reduction in physical scale, reminiscent of a fairground booth, through details of the stage setting, which suggest not only constriction but also diminution. It is the world of the doll's house as seen from the adult height of Darya Ivanovna, but where the rest of the characters are of a size proportionate to the environment. The garden, sad, is given in the opening stage directions as a sadik (tiny little garden), the table stol is described as a stolik (tiny little table), the piano is 'small', the screen 'low' and one can imagine the rest of the setting in equivalent terms. The puppet-show element is then carried over into the characterization. The houseboy (named Apollo) is kitted out in light-blue livery which does not fit him. He manifests one permanent emotion, fear, and keeps poking his head round doors, rapidly exiting into adjoining rooms or is seen emerging from them in flight. The count is described in terms of a doll. Not only is his every move dictated by Darya Ivanovna, but his hair is dyed and his face is powdered and rouged, like the painted image of a clown. When he gets down on his knees, it is as if his 'wooden' legs lack the muscle power to get him to his feet again. He eventually leaps up, apparently under his own volition, but the impression is of someone being jerked to his feet on strings. It is a critical moment. Darya Ivanovna's suppressed laughter threatens to make the grotesquerie of the characters permanent. In restoring the count to his feet (seemingly by an act of will on her part, not on his) and in laughing openly, demonstratively, Darya Ivanovna restores to some kind of normality the marionette world whose scenario she has written. The puppet-like nature of the husband has characteristics in common with the count. He wears a wig which, when removed, one imagines reveals a perfectly bald head, like that of a wooden doll. At one point he provides us with a glimpse of his marionette-like status when complaining about the cut of his coat: 'I feel as though I were being dragged up on a string'.

Movement in the play, when it is not precipitate, has all the formal characteristics of marionettes. People seem to be constantly propelled to their feet, jerkily bowing, materializing in doorways, parading up and down on seemingly involuntary impulse. The power of the theatre holds sway over all and the only person who is aware of this power and is consciously exploiting it is Darya Ivanovna. She is congratulated by the count, following the restoration of 'normality', on how well she has 'played her comedy'. People are provided with their roles and told when to make their entrances. At one point, Stupendyev enters before his cue. Darya Ivanovna is like a female Gulliver in Lilliput, pinned to the ground by constraining threads, but maintaining a hold on strings attached to each Lilliputian figure in the drama she has staged and directed.

There is the major problem of Darya Ivanovna's involvement in the world she ridicules. With part of herself she does seek to advance her husband's position in the social world of St Petersburg and 'save' him, as Nora does Torvald. In flirting with the count she is also, in a rather trivial way, seeking to confirm a sense of her own attractiveness at twenty-eight (which she sees as more than half-way to the grave). There is also a feeling that, in fairly petty fashion, she is avenging an earlier humiliation when the count appears to have trifled with her affections, evidence of which she retains in the form of a letter he once wrote to her. Her attempt to exercise power over him is experienced as a form of victory, whereas we have learned from a play such as 'Where It's Thin, There It Breaks' that to win can be, in fact, to lose and that there may be more to be gained from losing than from winning. She becomes part of this reduced world, significantly, when we see her on her own and when the stage in the theatre of her mind is occupied by the image of herself, soliloquizing while getting ready for 'battle', or posing before the mirror and dreaming of exchanging her simple dress for something in velvet, more in keeping with St Petersburg. This, of course, is also Hedda Gabier's problem—one of trivially snobbish ambition, and an aspect of the many contradictory sides to her nature which can only find resolution in suicide. There is a suggestion in 'A Provincial Lady' that the contemplated move to St Petersburg may be a form of suicide or, at least, will certainly end in disillusionment.

The actor at the Moscow Art Theatre who played the part of Darya's ward, Misha, in the 1912 production, A. D. Diki, suggests, in his published account of work on the play, that Stanislavski instinctively felt this sense of bouffonade and certainly managed to capture it in his portrayal of Lyubin. It is precisely this element of caricature which was criticized at the time by commentators who had come to expect their Turgenev to be served up in conventionally realistic fashion. It is interesting to note that the designer was M. V. Dobuzhinski who had designed Potyomkin's Petrushka for Meyerhold in St Petersburg, in 1908, in the style of a quasi-grotesque puppet show. In My Life in Art, Stanislavski suggests that there was a dispute between himself and Dobuzhinski over the kind of image Lyubin was to present, especially in the manner in which his face was to be made up. The implication is that the approach of the actors at this stage was in terms of their preparatory work on A Month in the Country (that is, within the psychologically realistic framework of Stanislavski's development of the 'system') and that Dobuzhinski's suggestion as to the physical make-up and appearance of the count was altogether more schematic and simplified, based, Stanislavski suggested, on unfamiliarity with the text and on insufficient knowledge of the theatre's working methods. However, that which finally emerged in performance appears to have been something closer to Dobuzhinski's schematicism than a clear product of the 'system'.

It was in a mood of doubt and despair that Stanislavski suggested that the cast put on a special performance for the theatre's other artistic director V. NemirovichDanchenko and, as a consequence of this, he was forced to re-think his whole approach to the play, and to move away from the previous style towards something altogether more original. 'Why did Turgenev call the play 'A Provincial Lady' and not "Provincial Life" or "A Provincial Story"? was the question posed by Nemirovich-Danchenko, and it was as a result of this that a shift in emphasis was brought about in the overall conception, more in keeping with the ironical intentions of Turgenev's writing. The theme then became the contrast between the provincial surrounding and the ultra-sophistication of the provincial lady herself. From playing Lyubin as an aristocrat, Stanislavski began to convert him into an image of 'provincialism' masquerading as aristocracy. Everything was now framed in contrast to Darya Ivanovna with the result that, although she was not the main focus of the production, the theme of provincialism which the director had wanted to stress all along was thrown into much sharper focus. Even the notion of St Petersburg itself, symbol of nineteenth-century Russia, was drawn into the theme of 'provincialism as a way of life, as a mode of being' with its banality, its lack of vision and its 'profound hostility to any ray of talent'. This was emphasized by the atmosphere of total boredom at the opening of the play and by stressing the clumsy gaucheness of the servants. Dobuzhinski's setting helped to convey the sense of a typically Russian provincial milieu, in which the dominant colour was a rather tasteless yellow with a view through the window of the town beyond, with its naive-looking church.

Stanislavski's approach to the role of Lyubin gradually developed away from the realistic portrayal of a decayed aristocrat towards the style of the bouffonade. Critics who noticed this took him to task for it while others closer to the Art Theatre, such as N. E. Efros, detected these elements in the play itself, quite rightly, and described Stanislavski's creation as a genuine work of art:

Stanislavski brought out in the character everything which was archetypically comic, everything which is close, namely, to the 'buffo' … The caricature grew to the level of an artistic creation.