Chekhov, page 17
“Your holiness,” she said in a shrill voice … “uncle, mother and all of us are left very wretched…. Give us a little money, do be kind, Uncle darling.”
Suddenly after this meal the bishop is ill. Perhaps the fish he has eaten at dinner is the cause? He notices that his legs are numb and he cannot understand what he is standing on. At night he cannot sleep, for Sisoy, a rough servant-monk who is in the cell next door, mutters and snores loudly without a break. The bishop’s mind wanders over trivial incidents of his early years in his village, remembering priests who got drunk and saw green snakes, and the nephew of the priest whose task, at services, was to read out the names of the parishioners who were ill and who needed prayers for their souls. Memories of childhood and youth come back, “living, fair and joyful as in all likelihood it never had been.” Perhaps in the life to come, he thinks, we shall remember our “distant past, our life here, with the same feeling. Who knows?” In the morning he is roughly woken by Sisoy. From church to convent in his district the bishop travels throughout Holy Week, seeing supplicants, and on his return has to meet visitors. It irks him to hear his mother, who does not know how to talk to him, chattering away easily to Sisoy and others about goodness knows what, except that in every story she always begins with the words “Having had tea,” or “Having drunk tea,” as if she had done nothing but drink tea all her life.
Now the bishop is very ill. He has got typhoid, Sisoy tells him brutally, and the monk insists on rubbing his body with tallow. Doctors are called and the bishop knows for certain that he is dying.
“How good,” he thought. He has attained what he has longed for: “Insignificance.”
His simple mother sits with him and she has forgotten he is a bishop and now calls him “my darling son” and says, “Why are you like this? Answer.”
The night before Easter Sunday he is dead.
What happens in a little town like this one when a famous man dies? Nothing. On the morning of Easter Sunday, as always, the joyful bells clang, the birds sing, the spring air quivers; in the market square barrel organs play, the accordions are squeaking, the drunks are shouting. After midday people began driving in carriages up and down.
Notice the precision of that return to the normal habits of the town. Notice also that at the end of the story Chekhov returns to his inner theme. Like an ordinary person, the bishop is forgotten. Except by his mother,
who is living today with her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, [and] when she goes out at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the pasture, [she] begins talking of her children, her grandchildren, and says that she had a son a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed. And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.
Chapter Eighteen
As we have seen, Chekhov draws on his short stories for the important characters and themes of his plays. In the stories his people live under the directing authority of his prose and are not at the mercy of producer or actors—a matter which plagued him; he had his own strict interpretation of the difference between the tragic and the dramatic. He was always angered when he was defined as a master of “twilight moods.”
If we turn to Donald Rayfield’s excellent work Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, we find he says something decisive on Chekhov’s last plays and especially on The Three Sisters, the longest and greatest of them. Rayfield notes that the total effect is symphonic; the play moves as a symphony does from movement to movement as it gathers power. The theme of changing time is set at once by the striking of a clock that interrupts the chatter of the three sisters on a happy May morning. Olga, the eldest, who is twenty-eight, remembers:
It is exactly a year ago today since Father died—on the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina. It was very cold then and snowing … but now a year has gone by and we don’t mind talking about it. You are wearing your white dress again and you look radiant…. The clock struck twelve then too. I remember the band playing when they took Father to the cemetery and they fired a salute. He was a general and commanded a Brigade. All the same, not many people came.
That last flat sentence tells us something of importance about the isolation of the family. The girls are trapped in a dull provincial town, alien to their cultivated upbringing. They long to get back to the wonderful earlier life they had in Moscow. Their longing is revived by the arrival of a new artillery brigade in the town. Two or three of the officers have known the girls and their family in Moscow when the girls were young; the soldiers seem to be messengers of release.
Chekhov had turned to an early story, The Kiss, written when he was at Babkino and studied an artillery brigade stationed there, a story that has something of Tolstoy’s understanding of the ethos of military life. Chekhov understood that a regiment is a disciplined and migrant culture passing through a stationary society. He also understood that since the officers were under orders, they became uprooted and solitary daydreamers on their monotonous journeys, and that this gave them a bond with the daydreaming sisters. In their isolation the simple officers become amateur philosophers. They brood on large insoluble questions, their private longings and sentimentalities. Disciplined, they see undisciplined Russia: they speculate about the “good life.” Vershinin, the decent middle-aged commanding officer, has his private miseries: he is the victim of an unlucky marriage to a wife who is a suicidal neurotic, and who joins him at his postings. Messages come that his wife has once more taken poison and he has to drop everything to go and protect his children. (He could very well have been the young officer in The Kiss who was stamped for life by his failure to trace the girl who kissed him in the dark, and who became obsessed by his failure.) Tuzenbakh is a stolid baron who believes, in his simplicity, that manual labor is the solution to Russian evils! He dreams of leaving the army and establishing brickfields—a life that will appeal to the idealism of the youngest sister, Irina. His enemy is a pestering Captain Solyony, a querulous and jealous adolescent who has failed to grow up and has dreams of becoming a romantic Byronic figure like the duelist in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. He is looking for someone to fight. There is the old idle army doctor Chebutykin, a cynic who likes to fancy he had been the lover of the sisters’ mother in Moscow. Life is meaningless, he believes; he drinks too much, reads out stupid items from the papers and occasionally sings out lines from a silly song—“Tararaboomdeay.” There are parties, dances, flirtations; love affairs begin. Even Masha, who reads Pushkin aloud and who is married to a boring foolish schoolmaster from the town, will have a secret love affair with the worried Vershinin before the play is done.
The sisters do not realize that the wrecker of their future is their brother, Andrey. He has easily given up the ambitions of his Moscow days—he had intended to be a professor—and has sunk to a minor job on the town council and to gambling at cards in this provincial backwater. He has fallen in love with Natasha, a shrewd local girl, one of Chekhov’s predatory women, and has married her. She becomes, by this marriage, the ruler of the house, and her provincial manners are mocked by the sisters. She is an ambitious secretive schemer. She has become the mistress of the powerful chairman of the town council, who does not appear in the play. Her only weakness is her ridiculous, if cunning, fuss about her baby. We soon hear whispers that the brother has gambled away his sisters’ inheritance.
It was Chekhov’s rule that a play must come to a decisive head in the third act. There is a sudden fire in the town—two streets of wooden houses are burned to the ground—and the soldiers help to fight it. We know of the fire by the sound of the galloping horses of the fire brigade, also by the reflected red glow on the walls of the room in which the sisters, overwrought by taking in refugees, are exchanging confidences. They are interrupted in their confessions and are scared by the sight of Natasha, asserting her power by crossing the room where they are huddled, carrying a lighted candle and ignoring them. It is the most arresting moment in the play. She is Lady Macbeth reborn. Masha says: “She goes about looking as if she started the fire.” Yes, Natasha is the spirit of destruction. We have already seen her cruelty when she sacks the eighty-year-old servant who has worked for the family all her life. Andrey, too, has seen his wife’s imperious “walk.” Confused by his guilt about what he has done to his sisters, he protests that he loves his wife and that they are wrong to hate her. She is splendid, he says, and they must stop hating her. Suddenly he shouts: “Don’t believe a word of what I’ve said.” He confesses he has mortgaged the property to pay his debts.
In the last act the play is haunted not simply by the goodbyes of the soldiers and the girls as the army prepares to move off. The partings begin. We shall see Masha’s guilt as she says good-bye to Vershinin. Her decent ridiculous husband, the schoolmaster, puts on a false beard and mustache he has taken from a boy in his class and clowns to prevent Masha from confessing her guilt. The fool loves her and she is grateful. But laughter and tears are not enough. Theater requires horror. Everyone half knows that the baron and the jealous Solyony are absent for no good reason. There is the sound of a shout from across the fields. It is not a shout but a shot: Solyony has had his duel and killed the baron. Chebutykin, the believer in meaninglessness, reacts to this tragedy with a typical display of indifference. He takes a newspaper out of his pocket and sings his familiar silly song: “Tararaboomdeay.” The collector of faits divers from the newspapers is enjoying being adjacent to catastrophe. Why? No reason at all except that it supports his doctrine: “Nothing matters.” God has become the Absurd, or, rather, the Indifferent.
At the house Natasha, the vulgar interloper, says that she intends to have their lovely avenue of firs cut down “because it looks awful in the evenings.” She is going to have a proper little suburban avenue of garden flowers. She sees a maid has left a table fork on a chair and screams at the maid: “Don’t answer me back”—the voice of power and pettiness made absolute.
Farewells are over. We see the sisters listening to the distant, stirring, mocking sound of the army band as the soldiers march away. The symphony is over. Olga comforts Masha. As she weeps Irina cries, “Why do we have to suffer so much?” but clings to Chekhov’s remedy: we must work and work and think of nothing else. The most searing line comes from Olga: “In time we shall pass on for ever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices, and [most piercingly of all] no one will even know how many of us there were.”
What has moved us so much? As in real life the feeling lies not in the words that are said, but in what lies unspoken between the words. Even the abused things of this household play their part.
Before turning to his last play, Chekhov turned to what would be his last story. It exists in five versions and is The Bride. Many Russian and English critics have seen it as being “more affirmative” or “positive” than the rest of his later writing because the heroine, Nadya, breaks with her provincial family and leaves her home to go to Petersburg to be reeducated. She is stirred by the wild talk of Sasha, a young painter, who talks about “the glorious future.” He is obviously dying of consumption and she has been captivated by what she supposes is his genius. In fact he has failed as a painter and is no more than a lithographer in a modest printing works. His stirring speeches are those of a man recklessly deceiving himself but she has learned something from him: one must rebel. Sasha has at least made her break with the pompous conventional son of a priest to whom she was engaged. There is a remarkable scene in which her fiancé takes her to inspect the house and conventional pictures and furnishings which would be her future home. No elation there! What a prison! Her future husband’s only gift is the absurd squeaking and grunting preoccupation with playing the violin. There is a wonderful moment when Chekhov uses his old trick with sounds: one day a string snaps.
In a letter to Olga Chekhov said he was writing this story in the “style of the seventies,” which suggests his study of self-satisfied bourgeois life in Three Years. He said he was writing slowly, a spoonful at a time— “possibly because there are a lot of characters or because I’ve lost the knack.” Not quite, for in a few lines he establishes the dead town. One quiet evening Nadya stands listening to the distant croaking of the frogs, which makes the place seem “much larger than it really is.” Chekhov evokes the finicking house-proud mother and her pride in her jewelry. We hear Sasha’s denunciation of the beetle- and bug-infested kitchens where the servants sleep on the floor. Much of Sasha’s talk will recall Trofimov’s outburst in The Cherry Orchard. There is a savage moment when the prim garden of the house is slashed by the autumn winds. News comes that Sasha, who has been taking the koumiss cure, has died, and Nadya leaves home for good. The last words of this story are enigmatic:
In a lively, cheerful mood she left the town, forever, as she thought.
Her rebellion is positive. There are no tears. She will, as Sasha has urged her, “educate herself.” Many critics have thought that in the portrait of the dying Sasha Chekhov is in some degree mocking himself.
The importance of the story really lies in details that connect it with the writing of The Cherry Orchard.
Chapter Nineteen
Chekhov started writing The Cherry Orchard in Yalta in February 1903. He wrote to Olga, who was in Moscow and whom he called his “little pony,” that a crowd of characters was gathering in his mind but he could only manage to write four lines a day and “even that gives me intolerable pain.” His disease was possessing his whole body, moving to his intestines and his bowels. Olga came to Yalta in July, hoping the play would be finished in time for her to take a fair copy back to Moscow in September when the theater season opened. It was not ready because he was continuously revising what he had written, but also because, in his anxiety about money, he had agreed to become the literary editor of a new magazine which had been started by his liberal admirer Lavrov, and he was reading dozens of manuscripts for him. At last the play was finished, “except for difficulties with the second act.” Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko sent him long and enthusiastic telegrams. There was only one jarring note: Stanislavsky had called the play “a truly great tragedy.” Tartly, and fearing Stanislavsky’s possessiveness, Chekhov replied that it was not even a drama— “It is a farce.”
The central subject of The Cherry Orchard seems to have been taken from Chekhov’s story A Visit to Friends, written in 1898, which deals with the bankruptcy of the Kiselev family, with whom he had stayed many times at Babkino. Chekhov did not include the story in the complete edition of his work and it has been suggested that he did not want to offend the family: but the story may very well have been rejected because it is too labored in a novelizing way. In the story, the family have turned cynically to a shrewd and successful young lawyer, hoping against hope that he will find some way of saving them from ruin: he knows so many rich people. The wife thinks the solution lies in getting him to marry their daughter. He is sentimentally attracted to her, but self-interest is stronger than sentiment: he simply sneaks away in the night. The young man is ashamed of his behavior.
In The Cherry Orchard, Lopakhin, the property speculator, evades all appeals to marry Ranevskaya’s ward. He seems to be a new version of the shrewd plain practical railway engineer who appears in Lights and more fully in the excellent My Life, a man with a businesslike eye for taking over the properties of the feckless landowning families. Chekhov admired this self-made man and he warned Stanislavsky that Lopakhin must not be played as a greedy vulgarian; he saw that Lopakhin’s weakness was that he would be too cautious and inhibited in love. Ranevskaya must not be played as an entirely frivolous and irresponsible spendthrift: she is all heart; her sensuality is natural to her and not vicious. In her reckless life in Paris she has nursed a lover who has deceived and robbed her, and she will return to him at the end of the play when he is ill again and appeals to her once more. She is shrewd when she mocks Trofimov, the high-minded and self-absorbed “eternal student” who has been the family tutor, because, at his age, he has never had a mistress. He is, she says, a prig. She may be a victim of what Chekhov called morbus fraudulentus when she gazes at her cherry orchard and sees in the white blossoms the symbol of the lost innocence of her girlhood, but the incurable lavishness of her heart is genuine. Lopakhin will not forget the moment she tenderly washed his face when his nose was bleeding when he was a little boy, and called him “little peasant.” In Lopakhin, the tongue-tied money-maker, that childhood memory is a genuine grace. What Chekhov brings out, as he makes his people tell their own story without listening to one another, is their absurd pride in their own history and their indifference to everyone else’s. Ranevskaya may long for the tongue-tied Lopakhin to propose to her ward, but the girl’s real dream is for a life of pious journeys from convent to convent.
The truly desperate character is the bizarre half-German outsider, Sharlotta, who breaks the tension of the play by her mystifying tricks with cards and her ventriloquism. Chekhov had seen such a girl at a fair on one of his trips. She is the daughter of anarchy and is truly frightening. Everyone else knows who they are. She does not know who she is. “I have no proper identity papers and I don’t know how old I am. I keep imagining I am young…. Where I come from and who I am I do not know.” All she knows is that she has traveled, when she was a child, from fair to fair and that her gypsy parents taught her to do card tricks. A German lady rescued her and turned her into a governess. She pulls a cucumber out of her pocket and eats it. “I am so lonely, always so lonely … and who I am, what I exist for, nobody knows.” Pathos? Not at all—a wild independent native homelessness. In the final scene of the play, in the general good-byes when the house is sold, she picks up a bundle, pretends it is a baby, produces the illusion of a baby crying as she sings “Hush, little baby, my heart goes out to you,” and then throws the bundle on the floor and says to them all: “And please find me another job. I can’t go on like this.”
