The locus classicus of this was the MAT’s production of The Cherry Orchard, which Stanislavsky directed as a heavy, lugubrious near-tragedy, when Chekhov had taken pains to call it a ‘comedy’. Chekhov’s categorizing of his own plays is important to keep in mind as we read them. He called Ivanov and Three Sisters dramas, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard comedies, and Uncle Vanya, with extreme flatness, ‘Scenes from Country Life’. Obviously that last subtitle, together with the designations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as comedies — when we have been used to regarding them as basically sorrowful works — will engage our attention in the coming pages.

The intention with which Chekhov used subtitles went far beyond conventional practice. In calling The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard ‘comedies’ he intended something radically different from our usual meanings; the plays are comedies in the sense of Dante’s La Divina Commedia and Balzac’s ironic secular alternative, La Comédie humaine. Neither of these great works is ‘funny’, full of laughs; in their different ways they are deeply serious, providing us with comedy’s truest actions: to liberate, to relieve, to heal. Treplyov’s suicide in The Seagull, and the loss of the family estate in The Cherry Orchard, we might reflexively think, are endings which forbid the use of ‘comedy’ as ascriptions. But keep in mind that, as we’ll see, Chekhov counterbalances Treplyov’s death with Nina’s exemplary new understanding of the key to productive life. With this in mind we can grasp the play as a comedy in Dante’s sense: hope is kept alive, salvation is possible. In The Cherry Orchard something similar happens: Anya’s maturing wisdom leads the play to an unexpected, potentially ‘happy’ ending. We shall consider both plays at greater length later on.

Chekhov used his subtitles partly as warnings to readers or audiences or performers or directors not to be trapped by misleading labels, or accurate ones, for that matter. The point he made in Ivanov was that labels and tags could be instruments of tyranny; someone expecting a ‘serious’ drama, upon opening his or her playbill, or programme, for The Seagull, or the text itself, and seeing the subtitle ‘A Comedy’ would have to make some mental adjustments as the play went on to its surely unfunny climax. These adjustments were just what Chekhov wanted from his hypothetical reader or spectator: becoming open to new theatrical experiences, stepping past frozen categories, accepting newness.

‘Scenes from Country Life’ suggests a pastoral idyll; but of course Uncle Vanya is anything but. Why Chekhov decided on that subtitle has, I think, much to do with his sense of the play’s being so delicately poised between laughter and tears that the subtitle needed an especially exquisite neutrality to keep the work from toppling over for its audiences or readers into either of Chekhov’s main characterizations: drama or comedy. The term ‘tragicomic’ wasn’t in existence in Russia yet, nor would it have been entirely accurate.

‘Drama should present not new stories, but new relationships.’

— FRIEDRICH HEBBEL

The European theatre and the Russian stage in particular were at low ebbs in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Chekhov began writing plays. The stock fare in almost every cultural centre (including Moscow in the 1880s when Chekhov was studying and then practising medicine) were bedroom farces; formulaic, often violent melodramas; light romantic comedies (the whole repertoire mostly translations from the French or based on French models); vaudevilles; and, very occasionally, productions of classics — the Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Racine and Corneille. Here and there in Europe new genius (or at least major talent) had shown itself: Ibsen and Strindberg in Scandinavia, both of whom Chekhov read in translation and admired; Hauptmann in Germany; Zola — primarily a novelist, however — in France; Wilde and Shaw in Britain; Maurice Maeterlinck (with whose aesthetic ideas Chekhov largely agreed) in Belgium; but none gave rise to any movements of consequence or any significant successors. Acting was everywhere florid, declamatory; directing as an art was in its crude infancy; ensemble playing was barely known; costume and stage design were at worst flamboyant, at best uninspired.

‘We must get the theatre out of the hands of the grocers and into literary hands . . .’

— CHEKHOV

With its roots in religious and folk ritual the theatre in Russia had developed much later than in Western Europe. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anything appear that could be called a truly Russian theatre, with native actors, directors, designers and dramatists, instead of French, Italian or German practitioners, as in earlier days. Even so, of the two truly gifted Russian dramatists before Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, the former wrote only one full-length play — Boris Godunov — and was far more influential as a poet and patriot who incarnated the ‘national spirit’, while Gogol, who also wrote only one full-length play, The Government Inspector, was probably most influential as a satiric fantasist in fiction. Moreover, from its beginnings the Russian theatre was closely associated with the state and thus the court, one consequence being a heavy-handed censorship, something Chekhov continually railed against.

Gogol exerted a strong influence on him, perhaps by his ideas and judgements as much as his formal dramas. Chekhov surely must have read Gogol’s famous 1836 denunciation of theatre in Russia during the early nineteenth century and beyond. After deploring the stage’s corruption by ‘the monster ... melodrama’, Gogol went on to ask ‘where is our life, ourselves with our own idiosyncrasies and traits?’ (These are almost the same words with which Shaw would praise Ibsen a half century later: ‘He gave us ourselves in our own situations.’) ‘The melodrama is lying most impudently,’ Gogol went on. ‘Only a great, rare, deep genius can catch what surrounds us daily, what always accompanies us, what is ordinary — while mediocrity grabs with both hands all that is out of rule, what happens only seldom and catches the eye by its ugliness and disharmony ... The strange has become the subject-matter of our drama. The whole point is to tell a new, strange, unheard-of incident: murder, fire, wild passions ... poisons. Effects, eternal effects!’

Chekhov would prove to be Gogol’s rare, deep genius, although it took a while.

In the summer of 1923 the manuscript of an untitled, previously unknown Chekhov play was found in an old desk in Moscow.