Plays Read Online

It was soon published as A Play Without a Title in Four Acts, but wasn’t produced until 1954, when a truncated version in Swedish appeared in Stockholm under the title Poor Don Juan. Chekhov probably wrote it in 1881 or 1882, which would make it his first full-length play (although rumours persist of earlier high-school epics). Chekhov had shown the manuscript to the prestigious Maly Theatre, which rightly rejected it, for it was an amateurish, if ambitious, piece of work, which was so long that, as far as I know, no complete production has ever been done. Badly or incompletely rendered into English in a number of versions, the play did receive one full workmanlike translation by David Magarshack, who called it Platonov, after its central character, a good-looking, womanizing, self-important, quarrelsome yet charming former landowner. Still, nobody has rushed to stage this prehistoric monster.

‘A writer must be humane to his fingertips.’

— CHEKHOV

Chekhov left behind him many stories, most of them extremely short; a dozen or so one-act plays, or vaudevilles; one non-fiction book — an account of his 1890 journey to the half-Russian, half-Japanese island of Sakhalin off Siberia; the Russian sector was mostly a penal colony, and Chekhov’s account of his visit helped bring about some reforms of the atrocious conditions. He also left behind seven full-length plays, five of which, in new translations by Peter Carson, make up the present volume.

Chekhov had begun to write sketches while still a student in Taganrog, a Black Sea port, where his father ran a small grocery store; when his hard-pressed large family — Anton had three brothers and a sister — moved to Moscow in 1876 he stayed behind to go through high school, then joined them after his graduation in 1879. At sixteen he quickly became the chief — sometimes only — economic support of his beloved but improvident family (whose numbers were regularly swelled by relatives paying ‘visits’ that could last for months) by contributing sketches or stories to the popular journals of the day. At the same time he was earning a medical degree at Moscow University.

The little house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street in which he first practised medicine is now a museum where among other affecting objects one can see copies of some of the Punch-like magazines he first wrote for, often under a pseudonym — Antosha Chekhonte, for instance — his long, narrow bed with its plump comforters, a cane, a pair of pince-nez, and some early medical paraphernalia, including his worn black leather doctor’s bag. By all accounts he was a most generous physician, available at all hours to those in need, sometimes treating poor patients without charge and never dunning those who were late in paying him, throwing himself tirelessly, too, into the cause of public health and hygiene.

As good a man as we know him to have been, Chekhov wasn’t a saint, the way some of his contemporaries regarded him. After his death a well-meaning friend described him as having looked ‘Christ-like’, an epithet Chekhov could well have done without. But the chief figure in his near-canonization was most likely Maxim Gorky, who in his Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev wrote this encomium: ‘I think that in Anton Chekhov’s presence everyone involuntarily felt in himself or herself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one’s self.’

Gorky, a notorious flatterer (of Josef Stalin among others), compounded the myth-making by extending his sycophancy to Chekhov’s writing (some of which he didn’t quite get), thereby establishing a view of the stories and plays that has been extremely influential — and almost wholly wrong. Treating Chekhov’s work as though it were chiefly a sociological critique, Gorky wrote: ‘in front of that dreary grey crowd of helpless people there passed a great, wise and observant man; he looked at all those dreary inhabitants of his country and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them: “You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.”’ This burst of sombre invention is surely one of the origins of the widely held idea that Chekhov combined the roles of priest and judge, and that his main characters, especially in his great last plays, are, in his eyes and so necessarily in ours, weak, ineffectual, defeated and culpable.

The relation between the main activities of Chekhov’s life, doctoring and writing, was sometimes stressful, but he mostly handled it with characteristic humour: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife,’ he once wrote, ‘and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I go to the other.’ A variant of this concerning his writing is rather more effervescent: ‘narrative [fiction] is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impudent, exhausting mistress.’

Yet in a letter of that period he spoke of the theatre in far less lively terms. ‘The atmosphere of the theatre in Russia,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he himself began to help resuscitate it, ‘is leaden and oppressive. It is covered inches thick in dust and enveloped in fog and tedium.’

No better source exists for an understanding of Chekhov’s thought and character than his large correspondence. Two letters written within a three-month period in the autumn of 1888 and winter of ‘89, a time when his renown was growing, call particular attention to themselves. The first, to the poet-critic Aleksey Pleshcheyev, is so revelatory of Chekhov’s governing values and attitudes that it deserves extensive quotation: ‘The people I fear,’ Chekhov wrote, ‘are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines [alongside widespread admiration and esteem, throughout his career Chekhov underwent savage attacks on the political and ideological ‘neutrality’ of his writing, especially his plays, and on their artistic ‘inconclusiveness‘] and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk ... I would like to be a free artist and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all their forms. Pharisaism, dull-wittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations ... [but] in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no predilection for policemen ... scientists, writers, or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom from violence and lies.’

The second letter was to Aleksey Suvorin, his publisher and friend. After writing about the newly finished Ivanov Chekhov told Suvorin that he had recently gained ‘a sense of personal freedom’; then, out of nowhere, came a tiny, scarcely disguised autobiography. ‘Write a story ... ,’ he told Suvorin, ‘about a young man, the son of a serf, a former grocery clerk, a choirsinger, a high school pupil and university student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss the hands of priests, to truckle to the ideas of others — a young man who expressed thanks for every piece of bread, who was whipped many times, who went without galoshes to do his tutoring, who used his fists, tortured animals [probably the one untrue statement of the lot], was fond of dining with rich relatives [Anton had one wealthy, generous relative, his father’s brother Mitrofan], was a hypocrite in his dealings with God and men, needlessly, solely out of a realization of his own insignificance — write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how, on awaking one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a slave, but that of a real human being.’ (Chekhov was actually the grandson of a slave, or serf, his paternal grandfather having bought the family’s freedom in 1840, a generation before the serfs’ formal emancipation.)

‘The plot is unprecedented,’ Chekhov wrote to his brother Aleksandr in October 1887, soon after finishing an early draft of Ivanov. The assertion was doubly uncharacteristic of Chekhov: first, it was contrary to his innate modesty; and second, it went against his lifelong aversion to aesthetic discussions. The letter went on again in an uncharacteristic way.

‘I wanted to be original,’ he told his brother.