Plays
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
GLOSSARY
Ivanov - A Drama in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
The Seagull - A Comedy in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
Uncle Vanya - Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
Three Sisters - A Drama in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
The Cherry Orchard - A Comedy in Four Acts
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
NOTES
PENGUIN
PENGUIN
READ MORE IN PENGUIN
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
PLAYS
ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1887 his first full-length play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, practising medicine and writing many of his best stories, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote his best-known plays in the last years of his life; in 1898 Stanislavsky produced The Seagull at his newly founded Moscow Art Theatre, and it was for him that Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya (1900), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903). In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, one of the Art Theatre’s leading actresses. He died of consumption in 1904.
PETER CARSON learned Russian during National Service in the Navy at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Crail and London, and at home — his mother’s family left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. His working life has been spent on the editorial side of London publishing.
RICHARD GILMAN is Professor Emeritus of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at Yale University’s School of Drama. He has been drama critic for Newsweek, Commonweal and the Nation and was a contributing editor of Partisan Review for many years. His latest book is Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity.
BookishMall.com
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi — 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
On the World Wide Web at: www.penguin.com
First published 2002
13
Translation and Notes copyright © Peter Carson, 2002 Introduction copyright © Richard Gilman, 2002 Chronology copyright © Ronald Wilks, 2001 All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Set in 11/12.5 pt Monotype Fournier
Typeset by Rowland Photorypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
eISBN : 978-1-101-16052-7
www.greenpenguin.co.uk
Penguin Books is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. The book in your hands is made from paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
http://us.penguingroup.com
INTRODUCTION
‘Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the fundamental qualities of every true talent.’
— CHEKHOV
In September of 1900 Anton Chekhov wrote from Yalta, a fading but still rather fashionable Black Sea health resort, to his sister Maria in Moscow that ‘I find it very difficult to write ... Three Sisters, much more difficult than any other of my plays.’ A little later he wrote to his actress-wife Olga Knipper, for whom he had intended the important role of Masha, the middle sister, that ‘it looks at me gloomily ... and I think about it gloomily’, and in another letter told her ‘there are a great many characters, it’s crowded, I’m afraid it will turn out obscure or pale.’ Even after he’d finished he continued to fret, telling a friend it was ‘dull, verbose and awkward’.
Three Sisters is none of those things; quite the contrary. One of the greatest dramas in any language since Shakespeare, the play is animated, often exhilarating, funny and deeply sad by turns, but never dull; far from being verbose and awkward, it’s a masterpiece of verbal economy and dramaturgical grace. (If you need any more testimony to Chekhov’s courage and mental strength remember that he wrote this play and another almost equally splendid work — The Cherry Orchard - while suffering through the last agonizing stages of the tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’, as it was called then) which would soon kill him; besides his lungs, the disease had attacked his spinal cord and intestines. A doctor himself, he strangely refused for years to acknowledge the severity, or even at first the existence, of his illness, at times using his literary gifts to disguise, or moderate, the truth; for example, he once described the sight of blood pouring from his mouth during a haemorrhage as resembling ‘the glow of a distant fire’.)
Olga Knipper, the daughter of a cultivated German-Russian family, had met Chekhov in 1899, when he was already a celebrated writer — of short fiction mostly; his first full-length plays were still making their way into public consciousness — and she was a promising young actress at the theatre with which he would soon become indelibly associated, the recently established Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). They fell in love and quietly married in 1901, but were mostly kept apart by Chekhov’s doctors’ insistence that, for his health, he must live in Yalta, which he bitterly called his ‘warm Siberia’. He wanted Olga to continue her career, though she was more than prepared to abandon it, to help nurse him or simply be with him. They built their relationship through occasional meetings, but even more, perhaps, through their many letters, filled with vivid expressions of love, longing, sorrow, frustration, a saving humour, and some equally saving, not wholly serious, quarrels.
Chekhov died in 1904in a German spa where Olga had taken him, looking for a cure. He was forty-four. She, eight years younger, would outlive him by an astounding fifty-five years, her career launched and sustained by central roles in his plays, but not confined to them. She died in 1959, having never remarried. (It’s worth noting that Maria, Chekhov’s sister, who for years ran the Yalta house, first as their residence and then, after his death, as a Chekhov museum, also lived to a grand old age, dying at ninety-three in 1957.)
‘When someone spends the fewest number of motions on a given action, that is grace.’
— CHEKHOV
The difficulty Chekhov experienced with Three Sisters was unusual: although he had occasionally proclaimed his unfitness for playwriting, even vowing once or twice to abandon it, this doubtless came largely from anger at what he called the ‘conventions’ of the theatre, as well as from a modesty which Nathalie Sarraute, the brilliant Russian-French novelist, would later describe as ‘fierce’. He was ordinarily a sure-handed, confident dramatist; it was his fiction that sometimes bedevilled him, he once said.
Whatever the truth of this, nothing seems to have given him as much trouble as Three Sisters, for a good reason: it was inherently the most difficult artistic enterprise he had attempted, something whose full radical nature he would discover — to his surprise, I think — as the writing progressed.
His artistic task, as he saw it, or at least as we see it now, was to create drama and fiction out of seemingly unpromising materials. A generation or so later Samuel Beckett (with whose work Chekhov’s has many affinities) would confront much the same aesthetic task, and assert that he dealt with ‘a whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as unusable’, conditions like ‘ignorance and impotence’, to which it makes sense to add failure, weakness, apathy, and boredom, previously ‘unusable’ conditions which Chekhov put to remarkable dramatic use.
’It’s only fools and charlatans who know everything and understand everything.’
— CHEKHOV
Almost certainly beyond his full, conscious awareness, Chekhov had for years been creating a new sort of drama. His way of working was painterly: make a starting stroke here, a counterstroke, a thematic strain, perhaps through a relationship between angles and curves, a countertheme, a little blurring, a revelation through juxtapositions, an enigma through loppings-off: the literary equivalents of visual puzzles, bits of emptiness, colours interrogating each other, shapes vying for room.
Chekhov’s most daring departure from the conventions of dramaturgical creation was to abandon, as much as possible, the usual linear movement of a play — from a starting-point to exposition and ‘development’ (which usually meant the ’thickening’ of a plot) to a denouement (a climax, the resolution of the play’s struggle or dilemma); instead he worked toward the filling in of a dramatic field, an artistic space. This new dramaturgical construction, which began with Ivanov and culminated in Three Sisters, necessarily affected some of the most solidly rooted traditional elements and procedures of drama: all that had been accepted as its very constituents, and sanctified by centuries of theatrical pieties.
Chekhov as a subversive playwright? A revolutionary? Yes, we have to think of him in that way, in the face of popular and scholarly opinion having fixed him as the charming, conventionally realistic poet of the normal, the domestic and small; the dramatist of ‘real’, and unusually melancholy, life.
No contemporary playwright has been more widely misinterpreted; none has been more often wrongly directed and performed.
1 comment