I regard the stage of today as mere routine and prejudice. When the curtain goes up and the gifted beings, the high priests of the sacred art, appear by electric light, in a room with three sides to it, representing how people eat, drink, love, walk, and wear their jackets; when they strive to squeeze out a moral from the flat vulgar pictures and the flat vulgar phrases, a little tiny moral, easy to comprehend and handy for home consumption; when in a thousand variations they offer me always the same thing over and over again—then I take to my heels and run, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower, which crushed his brain by its overwhelming vulgarity. … We must have new formulas. That's what we want. And if there are none, then it's better to have nothing at all.

This striking indictment of the naturalist theatre, an indictment which in seventy years has lost none of its force, is not, one had better begin by emphasizing, Chekhov's own. It is a speech which he gives to the young writer Constantine Treplef in The Seagull. Chekhov perhaps felt very much in this way (although from external evidence his literary position would seem to be more represented in The Seagull by Trigorin than by Treplef), but I do not wish to play the dangerous and tiresome game of identifications. The outburst, which has a characteristic late nineteenth-century ring, is better worth quoting as a first step in the analysis of some of Chekhov's plays, and as a preface to some remarks on the relation of the naturalist drama to fiction, and on the “symbolism” which naturalist dramatists have developed.

“Ibsen, you know,” Chekhov wrote to A. S. Vishnevsky, “is my favourite author”. And this affiliation is a point which the critic can no longer doubt. It is true that in England the public projections of Ibsen and Chekhov are very dissimilar. So acute an Ibsenite as William Archer could see nothing in The Cherry Orchard but empty and formless time-wasting. The devotees of Chekhov in the theatres of England, on the other hand, acclaim his work as “really lifelike and free from any tiresome moralizing”. Taken over, as he has been, by a sentimental sect, he has even been welcomed, astonishingly, as “naturalism without politics”. In this connection, one might hazard a supplementary remark to the sentence quoted from Chekhov's letter: “The Wild Duck, you know, is my favourite play”; and imagine Chekhov saying, as Ibsen said of The Wild Duck:

The characters, I hope, will find good and kind friends … not least among the player-folk, to whom they all, without exception, offer problems worth the solving.

For the buttress of Chekhov's popularity in England has been his popularity with that kind of actor and atmosphere, with “the high priests of the sacred art”.

In Ibsen's The Wild Duck the crucial point for an evaluation of the play is a study of the function of the title-symbol. The same is true of The Seagull, where the “symbol”, indeed, has passed even beyond the confines of the work to become the emblem of a new movement in the theatre. Chekhov introduces the seagull in the second act, at a point where Treplef's play has failed, and where his beloved Nina is about to pass from his influence to that of the more famous Trigorin:

[Enter TREPLEF hatless, with a gun and a dead seagull.]
TREPLEF:
Are you alone?
NINA:
Yes.
[TREPLEF lays the bird at her feet.]
NINA:
What does that mean?
TREPLEF:
I have been brute enough to shoot this seagull. I lay it at your feet.
[She takes up the seagull and looks at it.]
TREPLEF:
I shall soon kill myself in the same way. …
NINA:
You have grown nervous and irritable lately. You express yourself incomprehensibly in what seem to be symbols. This seagull seems to be another symbol, but I'm afraid I don't understand. I am too simple to understand you.

It is an incapacity—this failure to understand the symbol—which, it becomes clear, the author does not intend the audience to share. Trigorin makes the next point:

A subject for a short story. A girl—like yourself, say—lives from her childhood on the shores of a lake. She loves the lake like a seagull, and is happy and free like a seagull. But a man comes along by chance and sees her and ruins her, like this seagull, just to amuse himself.

Since this is exactly what Trigorin is going to do to Nina—we are often reminded of this prophecy—the point will doubtless be regarded as subtle. It is a subtlety which stops perhaps a little short of the diabolic—at the deadly.

When Nina has been seduced and abandoned by Trigorin she writes regularly to Treplef:

TREPLEF:
Her imagination was a little disordered. She signed herself “Seagull”. In Pushkin's “Rusalka” the miller says he is a raven, so she said in her letters that she was a seagull.

And when Trigorin comes on a visit:

SHAMRAYEF:
We've still got that thing of yours, Boris.
TRIGORIN:
What thing?
SHAMRAYEF:
Constantine shot a seagull one day, and you asked me to have it stuffed for you.
TRIGORIN:
Did I? I don't remember.

Immediately afterwards Nina returns to see Treplef:

NINA:
… I am a seagull … no, that's wrong. I am an actress. Yes, yes … I am a seagull. No, that's wrong. … Do you remember you shot a seagull? “A man comes along by chance and sees her, and, just to amuse himself, ruins her. … A subject for a short story.” …

As she leaves, the stuffed seagull is brought in and placed on the table, with Trigorin still murmuring:

I don't remember. No. I don't remember.

At this moment Treplef shoots himself. (“I am still adrift in a welter of images and dreams. … I have been brute enough to shoot this seagull”)

Now in Ibsen's The Wild Duck Hedvig, when told to shoot the wild duck, shoots herself. She identifies herself with the bird. In The Seagull the story of Nina's seduction and ruin is similarly identified with the bird. In The Wild Duck the bird is also used to define other characters and the whole atmosphere of the play. Similarly, in The Seagull, the bird and its death, and its stuffed resurrection, are used to indicate something about Treplef, and the general death of freedom which pervades the play. In this comparison, I am not attempting to prove plagiarism. All authors steal (it is only, it seems, in an industrial society, that this has been reckoned as wrong), and a good trick is always worth playing twice. I am trying, rather, to assess the function and validity of the device. The function is surely clear. The seagull emphasizes, as a visual symbol—a piece of stage property—the action and the atmosphere. It is a device for emotional pressure, for inflating the significance of the related representational incidents. After Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Spirit (1888), which had both failed, Chekhov, we are told by Princess Nina Andronikova Toumanova,

for seven long years gave up the stage, although the search for a new dramatic form unceasingly occupied his mind. He meditated upon a realistic play in which he could introduce a symbol as a means of communicating to the audience his deeper and inner thoughts.

This is the frank orthodox description of the form. The symbol, as we now know, came to hand biographically, and Chekhov commented on the seagull which his friend Levitan had shot:

Another beautiful living creature is gone, but two dumb-bells returned home and had supper.

In the play the symbol is illustrative, and the centre of emotional pressure. I have described it as “inflating the significance of the incidents”, which may seem to beg the question. But this very characteristic naturalist device is clearly a substitute for adequate expression of the central experience of the play in language. It is a hint at profundity. At a simple illustrative level it is precise. The correspondences, as we have seen, are established explicitly and with great care. At any other level, and at the symbolic level at which it is commonly assumed to operate, it is essentially imprecise; any serious analysis must put it down as mainly a lyrical gesture.

The Seagull is a very good example of the problem with which the talented dramatist, in a predominantly naturalist period, is faced. The substance of his play is settled as a representation of everyday life; and the qualities which Chekhov saw in everyday life were frustration, futility, delusion, apathy. This weary atmosphere, moreover, was characterized by an inability to speak out—an inability of which almost every notable writer in the last seventy years has complained. Major human crises are resolved in silence, or are indicated by the slightest of commonplace gestures.

Let us [Chekhov wrote to Suvorin] just be as complex and as simple as life is. People dine and at the same time their happiness is made or their lives are broken.

Fidelity to the representational method, therefore, compels the author to show people dining, to depict their conversation in minor commonplaces. But if he is seriously concerned with experience, he cannot leave it at this. Either one or more of his characters may—for some reason—have an ability to speak out, to indicate the underlying pattern. In The Seagull, Trigorin, particularly, and Treplef, who are both writers, possess this faculty. Even then the author may not be satisfied; a total pattern has to be indicated, for since the characters are conceived as absolute, as “real persons”, their statements may be merely personal and idiosyncratic. Here, in the final attempt to resolve the difficulty, is introduced such a device as that of the seagull.

That is an early play, and Chekhov was to go beyond it. But in one respect, this relation between what is felt and what can be said is decisive in all his work. There is no modern dramatist whose characters are more persistently concerned with explicit self-revelation: the desire and the need to tell the truth about oneself are overpowering. Yet this self-revelation can be very different in purpose and effect, as the following examples show:

TREPLEF:
Who am I? What am I? Sent down from the University without a degree through circumstances for which the editor cannot hold himself responsible, as they say; with no talents, without a farthing, and according to my passport a Kiev artisan; for my father was officially reckoned a Kiev artisan although he was a famous actor. So that when these actors and writers in my mother's drawing-room graciously bestowed their attention on me, it seemed to me that they were merely taking the measure of my insignificance; I guessed their thoughts and felt the humiliation.

(The Seagull)

UNCLE Vanya:
I am intelligent, brave, and strong. If I had lived normally I might have become another Schopenhauer, or Dostoyevsky.

(Uncle Vanya)

OLGA:
I'm always having headaches from having to go to the High School every day and then teach till evening. Strange thoughts come to me, as if I were already an old woman. And really, during these four years that I have been working here, I have been feeling as if every day my strength and youth have been squeezed out of me, drop by drop. And only one desire grows and grows in strength. … To Moscow, as soon as possible.

(The Three Sisters)

SHIPUCHIN:
As I was saying, at home I can live like a tradesman, a parvenu, and be up to any games I like, but here everything must be en grand. This is a Bank. Here every detail must imponiren, so to speak, and have a majestic appearance.

(The Anniversary)

GAYEF:
I'm a good Liberal, a man of the eighties. People abuse the eighties, but I think I may say that I've suffered for my convictions in my time. It's not for nothing that the peasants love me. We ought to know the peasants, we ought to know with what …
ANYA:
You're at it again, Uncle.

(The Cherry Orchard)

Treplef and Olga are outlining their explicit situation; their speeches are devices of the author's exposition, which, because of the large number of characters he handles, is frequently awkward, as in The Three Sisters. There is also, with Olga and Treplef, a sentimental vein (with real persons it would be called self-pity) which depends on their explicitness. While retaining the manner of conversation, they are doing more, or attempting more, than conversation can ever do. In Uncle Vanya, this has become the full sentimentality, as it is also in Gayef. But in Gayef, the device is satiric. We are evidently not “intended to accept the character's sentimental interpretation of himself”. Shipuchin is a more unequivocal comic figure, but then The Anniversary—a short piece—is a less equivocal play: it is farce without strings. One's doubts about even the best of Chekhov's plays are doubts about the strings.

But then, as this response becomes clear, we have to put the critical question in a different way. We have to discover the relation between this particular convention—of an explicit self-revelation, at times awkward and sentimental, at other times negotiated as satire or farce—and Chekhov's actual structure of feeling. And what we then see is an important change, from both Ibsen and Strindberg. It is not the passionate overt conflict of early Strindberg, nor the savage internal inquiry, the fixed distortions of an alienated group, of Strindberg's later world. Again, in the comparison with Ibsen, there is a crucial difference, beyond the surface similarities. Chekhov saw, as clearly as Ibsen, the frustration and stagnation of the available forms of social life; his difference, in his mature work, is that he does not set against these, even in defeat and failure, an actively liberating individual. In Ivanov this liberal structure is still present: an isolated, struggling man, against the habits of his group; breaking, and breaking others in his fall. For that structure, the dramatic methods of Ibsen were still relevant, and in The Seagull, where again a break is being attempted, by Treplev, they are still partly relevant. But in The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard something new has happened: it is not the liberating individual against the complacent group; it is that the desire for liberation has passed into the group as a whole, but at the same time has become hopeless, inward-looking—in effect a defeat before the struggle has even begun. Chekhov, that is to say, is not writing about a generation of liberal struggle against false social forms, but about a generation whose whole energy is consumed in the very process of becoming conscious of their own inadequacy and impotence. The dramatic conventions of liberal struggle had been clear: the isolation of the individual; his contrast with his group; and then an action which took this forward—not to the point of change, which Ibsen could not see happening, but to the point where the effort and the resistance, the vocation and the debt, reached deadlock: the hero died still climbing and struggling, but with the odds against him. As we have seen, this deadlock was never merely external: the limiting consciousness of the false society—“we are all ghosts … all of us so wretchedly afraid of the light”—was seen, by Ibsen, as inevitably entering the consciousness of the man who was struggling: the deadlock with a false society was re-enacted as a deadlock within the self. The methods of Ibsen's last plays, particularly, are related to this internal deadlock.

It was from this point that Chekhov began. He attempted the same action, and made it end in suicide. But he came to see this as “theatrical”: a significant description of one of those crucial moments when a structure of feeling is changing, and when the conventions appropriate to it come suddenly to seem empty. As Chekhov explores his world, he finds not deadlock—the active struggle in which no outcome is possible—but stalemate—the collective recognition, as it were before the struggle, that this is so. Virtually everyone wants change; virtually no-one believes it is possible. It is the sensibility of a generation which sits up all night talking about the need for revolution, and is then too tired next morning to do anything at all, even about its own immediate problems.

This world, this new structure of feeling, is very powerfully created in The Three Sisters and in The Cherry Orchard. In The Three Sisters it is the longing to make sense of life, to have a sense of a future, in a stagnant and boring military-provincial society. In The Cherry Orchard it is an attempt to come to terms with the past: to live without owning the orchard and its servants. In neither situation is any real success possible: what happens is not to change the situation, but to reveal it. The counter-movement, against what would be simple fantasy (the desire to be in Moscow, although they would be the same people there) or simple nostalgia (the desire to have the orchard and yet to be free to go away), is an emphasis on redemption, effort, work. Characteristically, these cannot materialize as events; they can only be spoken about:

They will forget our faces, voices, and even how many there were of us, but our sufferings will turn into joy for those who will live after us. … Your orchard frightens me. When I walk through it in the evening or at night, the rugged bark on the trees glows with a dim light, and the cherry-trees seem to see all that happened a hundred and two hundred years ago in painful and oppressive dreams. Well, we have fallen at least two hundred years behind the times. We have achieved nothing at all as yet; we have not made up our minds how we stand with the past; we only philosophise, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It is so plain that before we can live in the present, we must first redeem the past, and have done with it; and it is only by suffering that we can redeem it, only by strenuous unremitting toil.

Characteristically, this last speech is by Trophimov, who does practically no work. This does not mean that he is wrong, or that what he says can be disregarded: it is the dominant emotion of the play. But there is this precise paradox, in Trophimov and in the others, between what can be said and what can be done; what is believed and what is lived.

Inevitably, such a man, such a situation, such a generation can seem comic; it is easy to laugh at them and at what Chekhov calls their “neurotic whining”. At the same time, to get even the strength to see what is wrong, to sit up talking to try to get it clear, can be, in such a time, a major effort. In its inadequacy and yet its persistence it is heroism of a kind, an ambivalent kind. It is then this feeling—this structure of feeling—that Chekhov sets himself to dramatize.

The consequences in method are important. First, there will be no isolated, contrasting characters; the crucial emotion is that of a group. Second, there will, so far as possible, be no action: things will happen, but as it were from outside: what happens within the group is mainly gesture and muddle. Third, the contradictory character, of the group and its feelings, has to be conveyed in the tone: a kind of nobility, and a kind of farce, have to co-exist. (This is not, by the way, a cue for the usual question: are we supposed to laugh or cry at such people and such situations? That is a servile question: we have to decide our response for ourselves. The point is, always, that the characters and situations can be seen, are written to be seen, in both ways; to decide on one part of the response or the other is to miss what is being said).

As we come to see that this is what Chekhov is doing, we are faced with very difficult critical problems. He is attempting to dramatize a stagnant group, in which consciousness has turned inward and become, if not wholly inarticulate, at least unconnecting. He is attempting to dramatize a social consequence—a common loss—in private and self-regarding feeling. It is, inevitably, a very difficult balance, a very difficult method, to achieve.

Now certainly, Chekhov's representation of living action is impressive. The structure is more finely and more delicately constructed than that of any of his contemporaries. The same method achieves, in his fiction, very valuable results. But the method, I would say, is ultimately fictional. In the bare, economical, and inescapably explicit framework of drama the finest structure of incident and phrase, left to itself, appears crude. The convention of general description, which in the novel is essentially a whole structure of feeling, is very difficult to achieve, in this kind of play. And then the miniatures are left suspended; there is a sense, as in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, of disintegration, which springs directly from this absence. A gap must be filled, and to the rescue, as before, comes the unifying pressure of a device of atmosphere. It is a poor compromise. The characters, which in fiction are more than their separated selves, now dissociate, outline themselves, by the conditions of dramatic presentation. Delineation degenerates to slogan and catchphrase, to the mumbled “and all the rest of it” with which old Sorin ends his every speech in The Seagull. For of such is a “character” built. The just comment is Strindberg's, in the Preface to Lady Julie:

A character on the stage came to signify a gentleman who was fixed and finished; nothing was required, but some bodily defect—a club-foot, a wooden leg, a red nose; or the character in question was made to repeat some such phrase as “That's capital”, “Barkis is willin'”, or the like.

Nothing is more surprising, in the genuine detail of experience which Chekhov so finely achieves, than the appearance—the repeated appearance—of that kind of fixed, external device of personality. Moreover, that separable “personality” is the more contradictory in that what Chekhov is essentially expressing is a common condition. It is this that is missed or weakened when personality declines to an idiosyncrasy or a “human vignette”.

On the other hand, Chekhov attempted to develop a new kind of dialogue which, paradoxically, would express disintegration without weakening the sense of a common condition. Such dialogue is very hard to read and to play, and it is, I think, only intermittently successful. But where it does succeed, something very original and in its own way powerful has come into modern drama. An unfamiliar rhythm is developed, in which what is being said, essentially, is not said by any one of the characters, but, as it were inadvertently, by the group. This is not easy to illustrate, since the printed convention, separating and assigning the speeches, usually breaks it up. The major example, I think, is the second act of The Cherry Orchard, which as a theme for voices, a condition and an atmosphere created by hesitation, implication, unconnected confession, is more complete and powerful than anything else Chekhov wrote. A briefer example, from The Three Sisters, may allow the method to be seen more clearly (I omit the names of the speakers so that the form of a connected dialogue—connected, paradoxically, to show disconnection—can be followed):

We do not seem to understand each other. How can I convince you? Yes, laugh. Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philsophise as much as they like, only they will fly …

Still, is there a meaning?

A meaning? Now the snow is falling. What meaning?

It seems to me that a man must have faith, or must search for a faith, or his life will be empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why babies are born, why there are stars in the sky. Either you must know why you live, or everything is trivial, not worth a straw.

Still, I am sorry that my youth has gone.

Gogol says: life in this world is a dull matter, my masters.

And I say it's difficult to argue with you, my masters. Hang it all.

Balzac was married at Berdichev. That's worth making a note of. Balzac was married at Berdichev.

Balzac was married at Berdichev.

The die is cast. I've handed in my resignation.

As we listen to this, it is obvious that what is being expressed is not a dealing between persons, or a series of self-definitions; it is a common, inadvertent mood—questioning, desiring, defeated. To the degree that we separate the speeches out, and see them as revealing this or that particular character, the continuing rhythm, at once tentative and self-conscious, superficially miscellaneous and yet deeply preoccupied, is quickly lost. And of course, in performance, such continuity, such timing, is very difficult to sustain, if each actor sees himself as acting a separate part. It is the final paradox, in Chekhov's work, that the local identifying features, of the members of his dramatic group, are truly superficial, yet are the constant cues. What comes through or can come through is a very different voice—the human voice within and beyond the immediate negotiation and self-presentation. But within his conventions, and this is usually accentuated in performance, this human voice is intermittent and inadvertent; an unusual silence has to be imposed, if it is ever to be properly heard.

What Chekhov does then, in effect, is to invent a dramatic form which contradicts most of the available conventions of dramatic production. To perform him with any success at all, as we know from the record, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had to find new methods of acting and design: to substitute an altered internal, suggestive method for what had been explicit, presented, articulate. It was a major development in the theatre, and is still, after seventy years, influential. But it is no surprise to find Chekhov dissatisfied, when he saw what was being done. In his persistent honesty, his scrupulous fineness of detail, he was presenting problems which could only ever be partially solved. The inherited conventions were either crude and loud, or, where they were refined to express individuality, were only partly relevant to his purposes. What happened in the theatre was that another kind of talent—a producer's talent—took over his work and found a way of presenting it, but, as can be seen from Stanislavsky's notes on his production of The Seagull, by adding and altering, to achieve a stageable effect. It is a significant moment, in the history of modern drama, for it shows a writer of genius beginning to create a new dramatic form, but in ways so original and so tentative that it is in constant danger of breaking down, and another kind of art has to be invented to sustain it. It is now seen as the triumph, but must also be seen as the crisis, of the naturalist drama and theatre.