SOURCE: “Chekhov and the Contemporary Theatre,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, September, 1981, pp. 357-66.

[In the following essay, Hubbs discusses the various dimensions of themes and characterization in The Three Sisters.]

In recent years we have seen a new appreciation of Chekhov's plays on the part of general audiences as well as students of drama. Directors have emphasized Chekhov's contemporary quality, and critics have attempted to define elements in his dramatic techniques that link him with Beckett, Pinter, and other contemporary playwrights. In this updating of Chekhov, the nature of his dramatic realism has been a subject of increasingly enlightened debate. Bernard Beckerman, in a recent article in Modern Drama on “The Artifice of ‘Reality’ in Chekhov and Pinter,” begins with a summary of the two main sources of “reality” in the drama as a starting point for a discussion of Chekhov's contemporaneity. The first is “the impress of reality which comes from our habit of relating a play or a scene to some broader context.” The second source of “reality,” which Beckerman identifies with the theatre of Chekhov and Pinter, is the presentation itself, “the structure of the action scene by scene”—the reality which the character on the stage projects in “recurrent activities,” fixed routines.¹ Until recently, as Beckerman points out, the audiences at a Chekhov play—like his director Stanislavsky and the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre—seemed to respond only to the first source of “reality,” the “ground” of the action and the apparent subject of the plays: the decay of old landed families, the aimlessness of all classes in society, the pathetic longings of the characters. Now, however, as Chekhov seems at last to be finding the right directors and audiences, with repeated exposure to his plays and those of recent playwrights whose techniques are similar, we have come more and more to differentiate the “‘figures of action’” that control the structures of the plays from “the background of forlornness and decay.”² My purpose is to define the “real” ground of the action in Three Sisters and to consider the major implications, both thematic and technical, of the separation of figure and ground, and to do this in the context of the work of some contemporary dramatists—with a view to suggesting not only a new reading of Three Sisters but a new perspective on the structures and themes of all of Chekhov's major plays.

Beckerman's comparison of Chekhov and Pinter suggests some of the ways in which not only Pinter but other contemporary playwrights have prepared us to respond to Chekhov's nonnaturalistic techniques. The circumstances of a Chekhov play appear “familiar, almost trite,” whereas with Pinter, Beckerman points out, we must seek “the context through the self-contained action of a sealed world.”³ But the surface familiarity of Chekhov's worlds is deceptive. Like Pinter's rooms, the Chekhov estates comprise little worlds of their own, and the individuals within these worlds are to a great extent self-absorbed and self-contained. Their failure to connect with the larger world and with one another is the subject of the plays. The characters' separation from a stable point of reference and communion—the magic lake, mother Moscow, the cherry orchard—more than any other single factor accounts for the extreme pathos of Chekhov's plays and the patterns of repetition which constitute their structures.⁴ The desperate attachment to an imagined or remembered world which the characters obsessively attempt to rejoin in their repeated patterns of speech and action separates them from one another and from the emotional communion which Chekhov suggests is finally the only possible ground of their being. In their present isolation they cannot effectively respond to the others' repeated pleas for emotional sympathy. Despite their intense desire and attempts to find love and human understanding, in their ritualized routines they seem dulled to all but their own suffering and the unfulfilled desire to break out of their isolation.

We know from the study of psychology—and our own experience—that the sense of separation, of isolation, is the major source of human anxiety. A modern audience, much more accustomed than the audience of Chekhov's time to a literature of existential despair and a “theatre of the absurd,” responds to the situation of a Chekhov play with considerably more awareness than the characters on the stage display. In The Art of Loving Erich Fromm writes:

Man—of all ages and cultures—is confronted with the solution of one and the same question: the question of how to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one's own individual life and find at-onement. … The question is the same, for it springs from the same ground: the human situation, the conditions of human existence. The answer varies. The question can be answered by animal worship, by human sacrifice or military conquest, by indulgence in luxury, by ascetic renunciation, by obsessional work, by artistic creation, by the love of God, and by the love of Man. While there are many answers—the record of which is human history—they are nevertheless not innumerable. On the contrary, as soon as one ignores smaller differences which belong more to the periphery than to the center, one discovers that there is only a limited number of answers which have been given, and only could have been given by man in the various cultures in which he has lived. The history of religion and philosophy is the history of these answers, of their diversity, as well as of their limitation in number.⁵

One might add that the history of modern literature is the history of the variety of ways in which the question has been posed. Chekhov suggests that the “answer” to the problem of human existence is in the achievement of human communion. All other possible answers—particularly obsessive work—are shown not only to be inadequate in themselves but to stand directly in the way of communion. The audience is held by the stage “reality” created by the repetitive patterns of Chekhov's plays and by familiarity with the emotional condition of his characters; and at the same time it is kept at a distance by the artificial quality of the series of unincremental repetitions of speech and action which constitute the plays' structures. This is the basis of Chekhov's dramatic irony: “Look at yourself,” Chekhov says. “Look at your representatives on the stage caught up in a pattern of routine, who also lack the sense of a ground, a sense of communion.”

One useful way to explore this separation between the apparent ground and the foreground of the action is to compare what I see as the parallel relationship, as best we can understand it, between ritual and myth, since, to the displaced characters in Chekhov's plays, the longing appears to be for a time and place of mythic wholeness and emotional harmony, and their obsessive behavior resembles ineffective rituals. The task presents some problems, particularly when it is limited to a short essay. The first and most difficult problem is a lack of agreement on the nature and origin or ground of myth and ritual itself (and their relation to the origins of drama)—a question to which there appears to be no “scientific” answer. As René Girard points out, “The presence of a religious element at the source of all human societies is indubitable: yet of all social institutions, religion is the only one to which science has been unable to attribute a genuine objective, a real function.”⁶ We can perhaps agree that myth is a dramatic rendering of those experiences which are deepest in man, and ritual is the “acting out” of myth.

In drawing our parallel between ritual (repeated and obsessive behavior indicating some underlying need) and myth (that which would give the ritual meaning) on the one hand, and figure and ground—foreground and context, stage “reality” and contextual “reality”—on the other, we see that the characters in the foreground of a Chekhov play behave as if caught up in ritual bondage since the context which would provide meaning to their ritualized behavior is missing. This being so, they repeat their speeches and their routines to no effect. Such behavior can be funny, as in Beckett; but more often it is pathetic. (Of course it is often both.) In their isolation from a ground of being, the characters lack spontaneity and are consistently, though in general unintentionally, cruel.⁷ Their rituals have become habit; and habit, as Vladimir says in Waiting for Godot, is the “great deadener.”⁸ Tolstoy, who, like Chekhov's characters, stressed the efficacy of work, was one of the first to complain of the repetitiveness of Chekhov's “actionless” drama in which the heroes incessantly but with apparent aimlessness move “from the sofa to the privy and from the privy back to the sofa.” “Where does it all lead to?”, he complained of Three Sisters, a play he could not bring himself to finish reading.⁹

In fact, despite the apparent disjointedness and actionless quality, there is a remarkable internal consistency and coherence in tone and structure in a Chekhov play. To understand better some of the reasons for this, it will be useful, before looking briefly at the mythic background and ritual pattern of Three Sisters, to mention one further implication of the parallel between myth and ritual and figure and ground, namely the relation of history and myth as it is presented in Chekhov's plays. At the back of the plays is the ritual of the year drama and behind that the edenic myth of a lost paradise—an absence of change in historical time. The characters long for a state of being beyond attainment. What might be attained, human communion, the secular equivalent of religious myth, is also unattainable in the context of the action precisely because of the heroes' obsession with a return to a sacred place and time and a divine model. As sociological analysis has shown, the process of westernization and industrialization resulting in the fall of the gentry class lies at the background of Chekhov's drama and conflicts with the desire for a return to or attainment of a “golden age.” Having fallen into duration, history, the characters are, in Hegel's word, “free.” Unable to live in this state of freedom, they attempt to live for the future (although their thoughts remain in the past)—to make themselves the exemplars, as it were. “We must work. …”

In the first act of Three Sisters, Vershinin, the new battery commander and old family friend from Moscow, summarizes the tone and structure of this and Chekhov's other major plays; he not only describes the characters' behavior but suggests Chekhov's answer to their repeated question:

I often wonder what it would be like if we could start living all over again, knowing exactly what we were doing. Suppose our past life could be just the rough draft, so to speak, and we could start the new one on a fresh sheet of paper. Then we'd all try hard not to repeat ourselves, I imagine. We'd create different surroundings for ourselves anyway, and see we had somewhere to live like this with flowers and all this light. [Italics added.]¹⁰

By the opening of the second act the light is gone. Natasha, who controls the light—and, symbolically at least, time itself—is in full command. She will successfully attempt to eliminate any attempts at spontaneity and reduce the life of the household to an inviolable routine, her routine. Much like Lopahin, the “destroyer” of the cherry orchard (though more sinister), Natasha, as an agent of change, lives in the present. She has little sympathy for or understanding of the family's attachment to a mythic past. Whereas the sisters' only “reality” is Moscow—hence their present stasis—Natasha acts in the present. Because the sisters, like Andrew, are ready to resign themselves to her routine, she encounters little resistance.

Vershinin's appearance brings the sisters the renewed hope of a return to a life of wholeness and an escape from the deadly boredom to which Andrew has already largely succumbed when the play opens. In order to live, Vershinin insists, one needs a vision, something to work for, a ground upon which to base one's life in the present; but the sisters' insistence on work as an end in itself has blinded them to Vershinin's appeal. For the kind but insensitive Kulygin, it is enough to imitate the headmaster and fix his life in tiresome and tiring patterns of work. But the sensitive and educated sisters need something more. Here, as in the other late plays, Chekhov suggests a downward spiraling cycle: because life is “passing them by,” the characters seek to give it coherence through the pattern of repeated behavior. In so doing, they isolate themselves further; and time, which is their enemy and which they are merely killing, seems to accelerate. As they grow older, their ability to act in a meaningful way progressively diminishes. In Andrew, the process is accelerated during the course of the play. For Chebutykin, meaningless routine has already destroyed everything but the vague memory of a past love and the desire to retain some hold on it.

The members of the Prozorov family, removed from what now seems to them the sacred and timeless world of Moscow, regard themselves as prisoners in a provincial backwater. In the opening stage directions, Chekhov suggests the sisters' isolation from one another as well as from their own “real” world; and in the opening speech, he reveals the cause. Against a background of cheerful sunshine and a ballroom with a table being laid for a dinner party, each of the three sisters is lost in her own world. Vershinin's entrapment seems more hopeless than that of the sisters, but he is the one character aware of the possibilities of overcoming the inertia of boredom and routine. His appearance suggests the sisters' life may take a new direction. When Masha learns that Vershinin is from Moscow, her mood changes and she agrees to stay for Irina's party. Vershinin, however, insists that Moscow in fact was not so special—“a depressing place when you're on your own.” What is needed is to bring the wholeness of the past to the present. But all the sisters' hopes of love and a genuine life are associated with Moscow. “I've been waiting for us to move to Moscow all this time,” says Irina, “thinking I'd meet my true love there. I've dreamed about him, loved him, but that was sheer foolishness as it's turned out.” Here any suggestion of love is so inappropriate as to be laughable—like Natasha's costume and behavior and Chebutykin's embarrassing displays of affection, a remnant of his love for their mother in Moscow. In the seasonal structure of the play, the action regresses, from spring to winter, from the promise of renewal to death. Irina's final speech: “We must work and work and think of nothing else. I'll go off alone tomorrow to teach at a school and spend my whole life serving those who may need me. It's autumn now and it will soon be winter, with everything buried in snow, and I shall work, work, work [italics added].” The association of isolation and repeated meaningless work is clear.

Time passes; the routine of work brings dullness, forgetfulness, psychological cruelty, and, finally, death. Olga's first speech:

It's exactly a year ago today since Father died—on the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina. It was very cold then, and snowing. I thought I'd never get over it and you actually passed out, fainted right away. But now a year's gone by and we don't mind talking about it any more. You're wearing white again and you look radiant. [The clock strikes twelve.] The clock struck twelve then too. [Pause.] I remember the band playing when they took Father to the cemetery, and they fired a salute.

A military band plays again when the curtain falls. This time it is for the three sisters, who must go on living, but how and for what reason they do not know. Olga's final speech:

[embraces both her sisters.] Listen to the band. What a splendid, rousing tune, it puts new heart into you, doesn't it? Oh, my God! In time we shall pass on for ever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices and how many of us there were. But our sufferings will bring happiness to those who come after us, peace and joy will reign on earth, and there will be kind words and kind thoughts for us and our times. We still have our lives ahead of us, my dears, so let's make the most of them. The band's playing such cheerful, happy music, it feels as if we might find out before long what our lives and sufferings are for. If we could only know! If we could only know!

Charles du Bos has said that Chekhov's originality in the “slice of life” technique “is that he shows the depths at the very instance when the surface reflects them. …”¹¹ By looking intently at the surface, the stage reality, we can perhaps begin to see the concealed depths of the play in the outline of a lost myth: cut off from Moscow, their cultural as well as ontological home, the family lacks viable archetypes; their “rituals” are meaningless. In their new home they repeat or attempt to repeat the same gestures which they distantly remember from their time in Moscow. Only the military officers, their last and indirect connection with Moscow and their former life, are invited to their ceremonies. When the last army unit marches “gaily” away at the end of the play (matching the “gay” sunshine of the opening scene in which Olga remembers the military band at her father's funeral a year earlier), the sisters lose their last contact with their former home. The irony in the three sisters' closing speeches is fully as terrible as that of Sonia's in Uncle Vanya. As they stand huddled together, they repeat, one after the other (and after Sonia), “We must go on living.” This despite the fact that in the more than three years of the play's action none of them has taken a genuinely active part in life. The “profane” Natasha, who lives in the present, has evicted them from their temporary home, and the last representatives of Moscow, their “spiritual” home, are gone. The major tension of the play, then, is between profane ritual and lost myth.

The suggestion that Chekhov's is a ritualized theatre of unintentional cruelty in which the characters look backward in an isolating search for emotional communion is not, I think, a startling one. But my purpose is not only to attempt to gain a new perspective on Chekhov's plays through attention to his structural techniques, based on his characters' ritualized behavior in an attempted return to the lost unity of myth, but to suggest how recent developments in the theatre may have made us more responsive to these techniques. To examine further Chekhov's use of an “inverted” mythological framework, it will be helpful to compare Chekhov's use of myth with the more conventional use by Artaud—who has been called the bridge between the naturalistic theatre of Chekhov's time and the “absurd” theatre of our own. In direct contrast to Chekhov, Artaud (like Chekhov's characters) looked to myth for a lost unity, a symbiosis of figure and ground. His theatre is “cruel” because it fails in its goal: it brings the audience face to face with its permanent anxiety, with its separation from a ground of being and the consequent emotional disharmony. The only hope of overcoming the void which culture conceals, Artaud insists, is to become intensely aware of the Mal. Gratuitous cruelty forces us into such an awareness. Theatre takes us back to the “double,” where the actor enters into his own symbol and thus into contact with life itself. But the dichotomy of spirit and matter, the sacred and the profane, remains unresolved. The theatre, says Artaud, causes men “to see themselves as they are, it makes the mask fall, it uncovers lies, flabbiness, baseness, and hypocrisy; it shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter.”¹²

Chekhov, too, wished to use the theatre to uncover “shabbiness,” but he has none of Artaud's aversion to the material world. In fact, in each of his plays, as in Three Sisters, he shows us that the indifference and consequent cruelty of his characters come in large part from their attempts to escape the immediate material world into an imagined or remembered one. Thus Chekhov's is a theatre of “antimyth” and therefore considerably more subtle and complex than Artaud's theatre of “unperverted pantomimes.” Whereas Artaud's conception of cruelty is metaphysical, Chekhov's concern is with the human cruelty resulting from isolation in habit and routine. If the audience, unlike his characters, can discover that the individual belongs to the collectivity rather than to a lost world of myth, that the figure and the ground are in fact one, the pattern of emotional isolation and consequent cruelty will perhaps be broken. Whereas Artaud's declared purpose was similar to that of a behavioral psychologist, to effect a patient's cure “by making him assume the apparent and exterior attitudes of the desired condition,”¹³ Chekhov said his only purpose in the theatre was to say to his audience: “Have a look at yourself. …”¹⁴ From the audience's point of view, Artaud's theatre is one of extreme collective involvement; Chekhov's is one of ironic detachment. Both are based in myth and ritual. For Artaud, the myth is real; for Chekhov, only the ritual is “real.” The contrast is complete.

Artaud was convinced that any attempt to reproduce ancient myth on the modern stage would be pointless since it would not captivate the audience; and since the survival of culture depends on myth, new myths must be brought into being to replace those that are now dead, mere “literature”: modern man's rational, scientific development has in one sense given him a clearer understanding of his relationship to nature—but as a consequence, he has lost his sense of participation in mystery. Whereas archaic man recognized his place in nature, modern man is alone, unaided by an alliance with God, nature, or even himself. In Artaud's theatre the characters as well as the audience are aware of the separation between man and nature, hence the “cruelty.” The spectator in Artaud's theatre is, in Bettina Knapp's words, “filled with nostalgia for the primordial condition he once knew—and which he has nearly forgotten. To reach the deepest levels, a march inward, to discover unity with the cosmos, must be made.”¹⁵ But Artaud's theatre is inhuman and cruel because it is finally a reflection of man's inner as well as outer life in which “everything that acts is a cruelty.”¹⁶

The “reality” of Chekhov's theatre, as I have argued earlier in this brief comparison with Artaud, is a surface reality, a stage reality, which is in contrast to the verisimilitude of the naturalistic stage. The apparent reality of one emphasizes the apparent reality of the other. Artaud would have us rediscover myth; Chekhov's purpose is to bring about an awareness of myth's absence and the human consequences of the denial of the immediate material world. When that awareness occurs, one assumes that the characters would regain the ability to love and rediscover the “true myth” of collective communion. But, repeatedly, Chekhov's characters fail to connect.

Finally, then, Artaud, in direct contrast to Chekhov, presents us in his mythic theatre with a set of symbols that invite not communion but the sense of universal separation. Chekhov's heroes desire intensely, although their desire is seen to be misplaced. The characters in Beckett's drama seem to have accepted the cruelty, the inability to connect, that Artaud insists is the nature of the human condition. In René Girard's words, “The hero who experiences the greatest desire is succeeded by the hero who experiences the least desire.”¹⁷ Thus we see that Artaud, in his use of ritual and myth, does in fact provide a bridge between the passionately desiring (but ineffectual) characters of Chekhov and the carefully cultivated indifference of the characters in the dramas of Genet, Pinter, or Beckett.

In Three Sisters and his earlier plays, Chekhov's irony effectively demolishes the myth if not the memory of a lost but perhaps regainable golden age of meaning and unity, the basis of Artaud's theatre. Beckett's tramps in Waiting for Godot are both trapped in routine, like Chekhov's characters, and deliberately cruel, like Artaud's. Although they resemble the sisters in that they are vaguely waiting for something, they have no real hope that Godot will come. They do not expect—and even fear—an answer to “why we live, why we suffer. …” Significantly, the first self-conscious attempt to pass the time in Waiting for Godot is a halfhearted discussion of Christ and the two thieves who were crucified with him. As with Chekhov, we have a series of rituals repeated in the absence of a validating myth. Like the sisters, the tramps are “not from these parts,”¹⁸ but the memory of Paris, “a million years ago in the nineties,”¹⁹—unlike the sisters' memory of Moscow—is nearly forgotten. And aside from being “respectable,” there is no suggestion that their situation then was better than now. The cruelty is no longer unintentional and psychological but often violent, like Artaud's. Lucky's brilliantly incoherent speech on progress, the myth of a future golden age and the scholastics' “proof” of the existence of God, brings a violent response. Like the play itself and Lucky's speech, man's labors are left “unfinished.”

It is the unfinished, “actionless” quality of Chekhov's plays which links them with Beckett's and those of other contemporary playwrights whom we associate with Beckett. Despite all his efforts, man knows nothing “beyond all doubt.” The “reality” of Chekhov's theatre, like that of Beckett's, is only a stage reality which is heightened by the naturalistic setting. The device of repetition which undercuts the conventional realism of his plays by drawing our attention to the characters' separation from “reality” is similar to Beckett's. The difference is that the mechanically repetitive stage routines of Beckett's characters are deliberate and rehearsed, whereas with Chekhov the deadening effect of routine is unsought and inescapable. In both the tension is between what Beckett calls in Proust the “suffering of being” and the “boredom of living.”²⁰ The tramps have deliberately opted for the latter. Whether work (and repeated dialogues) as in Chekhov or games (in the form of repeated dialogues) as in Beckett, whether unconsious as in Chekhov or conscious as in Beckett, the stage routines have taken on the quality of habit and thus are cruel because of the human isolation they produce. The stage routines, which I have called rituals but which are obviously not true rituals in that they lack a validating myth, establish a tentative “reality” but a reality which lacks a ground. A comparison of the circular patterns of the plays of Chekhov alongside those of Beckett and those in other contemporary nonlinear plays would lead to insights into some important aspects of developments in the modern theatre (and the elements of ritual): the breakdown of historical (clock) time and the devaluation of language in favor of gesture.

In this essay I have attempted to outline the basis for such a comparative study. The breakdown of language as a means of communication is related in Chekhov's plays to the breakdown of myth. Just as ritual without a rationalizing belief to sustain it is merely obsessive repetition, so language itself when emptied of its meaning becomes empty gesture. Thus we see that Chekhov's desacralized dramatic rituals not only produce a stage “reality” lacking in context but result in at least two important effects: for the participant they are means of artificially arresting time; for the spectator they appear only as empty comic and pathetic gestures—symbolic indeed of some deep desire (and herein lies much of the poetry) but empty nonetheless. This formulation is the basis of Chekhov's technique which is shared by later playwrights, including Beckett and Pinter. Artaud—and after him Genet, to take the most important example—patterns his rituals on truly sacred rituals so that the element of deliberate irony is missing.

In short, Chekhov's heroes embody the terror of history and thus exemplify the plight of modern, historical man, who, detached from nature, attempts to create meaning in history. But they are pulled back to the realm of myth, the world of archaic man and Artaud's theatre, in which suffering had a meaning since it corresponded to an order and to a prototype—a “source.” Their dilemma is ours because, as Eliade says, the world is “not entirely converted to historicism.”²¹

Notes

1. Bernard Beckerman, “The Artifice of ‘Reality’ in Chekhov and Pinter,” Modern Drama, 21 (1978), 153-154.

2. Beckerman, 155.

3. Beckerman, 158.

4. See Clayton A. Hubbs, “The Function of Repetition in the Plays of Chekhov,” Modern Drama, 22 (1979), 115-124.

5. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York, 1956), pp. 9-10.

6. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977), p. 92.

7. See Hubbs, op. cit.

8. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York, 1954), p. 58b.

9. Quoted from Harvey Pitcher, The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (New York, 1973), p. 1.

10. Anton Chekhov, Chekhov: Five Major Plays, trans. Ronald Hingley (New York, 1977), p. 211. Subsequent references will appear in the text.

11. Charles du Bos, “The Chekhovian Sense of Life: From the Journal of Charles du Bos,” trans. Leslie Jackson, in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Lewis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967), p. 191.

12. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York, 1958), pp. 31-32.

13. Ibid., p. 31.

14. Quoted from David Magarshack, Chekhov the Dramatist (New York, 1960), p. 14.

15. Bettina L. Knapp, Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision (New York, 1969), p. 92.

16. Artaud, p. 85.

17. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1965), p. 271.

18. Waiting for Godot, p. 15b.

19. Waiting for Godot, p. 7b.

20. (New York, 1931), p. 8.

21. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1959), p. 141.