It is not she, the seagull [who] commits suicide (which a run-of-the-mill playwright, out for his audience’s tears, would be sure to have done) but the young man who lives in an abstract future and has no idea of ... what goes on around him.’

In the ‘puds of love’ letter to Suvorin Chekhov wrote: ‘I can’t say I’m not enjoying writing [the play], though [it would have been more accurate if he’d said ‘because’] I’m flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage ...’

In his important book Chekhov the Dramatist David Magarshack argues that the turning-point in Chekhov’s dramaturgy came with The Seagull, when he moved from writing plays of ‘direct’ action — one of the stage’s basic tenets — to ones of ‘indirect’. Magarshack’s theory is too complex and detailed to deal with thoroughly here, but his main point is central to our grasp of Chekhov. Action, especially physical action to the point of violence, had always been at the centre of dramatic practice; language, dialogue primarily, must defer to a play’s physical events, or what makes up most of what we call ‘plot’. Magarshack implied that plot, bound to or embedded in physical action, was a source of melodrama, which may be defined as drama without ‘consciousness’. In turn consciousness can be described as both the recording instrument of our sentient life and the substance of what has been recorded.

The Chekhov scholar Ronald Hingley once made a most astute observation about Chekhov’s fiction, which I think it permissible to apply to the plays too: ‘The more complex the plot of a Chekhov story, the less artistically successful it’s likely to be.’

Why this should be so is a complicated matter. Plot — the twists and turns of the drama’s tale, its suspensefulness and surprises, its outcome, its very body or physicality — tends to crowd out consciousness, leaving less room for awareness, insight, perception, contemplation — the basic instruments of our experience of art. Had Chekhov not moved offstage the key elements of Nina’s story — her disastrous affair with Trigorin, his abuse of her and desertion, the child she bears who dies young, and her life’s effect on her art — Chekhov’s play, bursting with intellectual vitality, full of fascinating moral and spiritual dilemmas, would almost certainly have turned into a cautionary tale (talented young girls oughtn’t to trust lecherous older writers), or else a spicy love story with twists, but in any case, a melodrama.

WORK

Many, if not most, of the major characters in Chekhov’s plays look for salvation, rescue, through love, and learn, to their sorrow, that love isn’t the answer; neither is work, to which they most often turn next. The supreme portrayer of what life is really like, the incorruptible artist of the way things are - Beckett’s non-contingent Comment c’est — Chekhov never allows wishfulness to block out actuality and cannot be tempted away (by audiences’ or readers’ or critics’ shallow or naive yearnings) from what he sees as a writer. Love, sex and marriage are most often grave, painful and difficult in life, and so, too, they are in his writings.

Chekhov, the realist, knows, too, that work is more often dull or painful than fulfilling; something to notice is that women work hardest in the plays (Sonya in Uncle Vanya, Olga in Three Sisters, Varya in The Cherry Orchard) and men talk about it most often, most abstractly and most romantically: Vershinin and Tuzenbakh, and belatedly Andrey Prozorov, in Three Sisters, and Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard.

‘White, wan, slender, and very beautiful in the moonlight, she was expecting tenderness; her constant dreams of happiness and love had exhausted her.’

— CHEKHOV, ‘A Visit’

Irina, the youngest Prozorov sister, is doubly afflicted: she dreams constantly of love, and of work too — until her romantic desire runs up against the hardness of fact, and, after having had at least two jobs, she bitterly deplores their lack of ‘poetry’. Meanwhile Olga works hard at her school, and is worn out by her diligence.

The cry ‘Work! for we must work!’ is heard throughout the last plays. In almost every case the character is speaking out of desperation, not conviction; to claim that the orchard is being lost because the family’s ancestors scorned work is both silly and false.

In a masterstroke of Chekhov’s artistry in Three Sisters, he has Irina accept Tuzenbakh, whom she doesn’t love but admires; she then suffers his loss when he is killed in a duel. Chekhov’s genius lies in his avoiding the temptations the situation throws out, and which a lesser playwright would have snatched. Such a dramatist would doubtless have portrayed Irina and Tuzenbakh as passionately in love, so that Irina’s loss would appear more wrenching. That Chekhov conceived Irina as having matured enough to accept a loveless marriage, after giving up her idle dreams of a lover-to-come in Moscow, the site of potential happiness for Olga and Masha, also makes Tuzenbakh’s death all the more poignant.

One of the most heartrending moments in drama is Tuzenbakh and Irina’s farewell. In less gifted hands it surely would have been sentimental, even maudlin; in Chekhov it’s stringent with the truest feeling. The baron is going off to the duel, which we and all the characters sense will be fatal. As he makes ready to go, they stand irresolute, struggling for words. Finally, he speaks lyrically about the vagaries of life, and notices a dead tree that still sways with the others. So, too, he would still be ‘taking part in life’, even after his death. She suddenly says, ‘I’ll come with you’, alarming Tuzenbakh into flight.

Then in one of the most piteous speeches in all drama, he turns round and says, ‘I didn’t have any coffee this morning. Will you ask them to make me some . . .’

The simplicity and matter-of-factness of this utterance, in the face of all the horror we know will come, is exactly what gives the words their extraordinary power to move us. Chekhov takes one more step to ensure that nothing banal or bathetic will occur: he moves the duel so far offstage that the fatal shot can barely be heard.

The play’s other affecting — and necessarily ill-fated — love story is Masha and Vershinin’s. Chekhov lets their romance develop slowly and rather quietly, with only a few amorous declarations on each side. Their leave-taking is even quieter, with Vershinin simply slipping away after Olga assures him she’ll look after Masha and, a lovely note, Vershinin’s family too.

Uncle Vanya, the play that followed The Seagull, has received the widest range of critical interpretations of all Chekhov’s plays. But among the multiplicity of readings, many containing bits of truth, but none entirely satisfying, we can be certain of one thing: the play is NOT a drama about weak, helpless people, ‘losers’ in our current jargon. David Magarshack’s assertion in his pioneering study that Uncle Vanya’s principal theme ’is not frustration, but courage and hope’ may have overstated the case, but was closer to the truth than all those views of the play as a study of failure, wasted or ruined lives, a picture of disappointment and despair.

Vanya Voynitsky and Dr Astrov are usually considered the heroes of this play, Prof. Serebryakov the villain.