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Contents 1 Lead 2 Childhood 3 Early Maturity 4 Sakhalin 5 Social conscience 6 Melikhovo 7 Late Plays 8 Longer stories 9 Yalta 10 possible article: The Stories of Anton Chekhov 11 possible article: The Seagull 12 possible article: The First Night of the Seagull 12.1 Earlier plays 12.2 Melikhovo/the writing/ the sources (Levitan's lake etc.) 12.3 Rehearsals/ casting/ build up 12.4 Disastrous premiere, with Chekhov's reaction 12.5 Nemirovich's interest/his background 12.6 Art Theatre/Stanislavski/rehearsals 12.7 Success and aftermath of other plays 12.8 Performance History/Stage History 13 Material unused so far 14 Quotes/background on Chekhov, to choose lead from, plus influence section 15 Books to get hold of 16 Refs

[edit] Lead

Chekhov habitually removed the opening and ending of a finished story, the places where he believed writers are least honest, and he preferred inconclusive endings.^[1]

Maxim Gorky interpreted Chekhov's viewpoint as, "You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that".^[2]

Chekhov was famously enigmatic about the meaning of his stories, explaining no further than: "There's no making out anything in this world".^[3]

in the words of actor Ian McKellen, "Actors climb up Chekhov like a mountain, roped together, sharing the glory if they ever make it to the summit".

calmly, and with a "strange, sourceless maturity",

[edit] Childhood

For all his faults, Pavel Chekhov fostered a sense of culture and creativity in his children which had a lasting influence on their lives.^[4] Chekhov, for example, played the part of Gorodnitchy in a performance of Gogol's The Government Inspector put on by the children, in which he reviewed an imaginary squad of Cossacks.^[5] He also edited a family magazine called The Stammerer. Stories written when he was twelve reveal the same simple, direct style as in his maturity.^[6]

After attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's operetta La Belle Hélène at Taganrog City Theatre on 4 October 1873, Chekhov began spending most of his savings at the theatre, where, among other plays, he saw Hamlet, The Government Inspector, and Griboyedov's Woe from Wit. At the age of fifteen, he was invited to take part in amateur theatricals for charity and scored a hit as an old crone in Grigoriev's piece The Coachman, or the Prank of a Hussar.^[7]

Some of Chekhov's mature stories depict children separated from their families: The Steppe, for example, concerns a boy, Yegorushka, sent away from home to live with strangers;^[8] Sleepy tells of the thirteen-year-old nursemaid Varka, left in charge of a baby;^[9] while in Vanka a nine-year-old orphan, apprenticed far away from his village to a cruel shoemaker, writes to his grandfather begging to be taken home "…and when I grow up to be a man I will look after you and I will not let anyone hurt you…" ^[10]

[edit] Early Maturity

Chekhov published more than four hundred short stories and sketches by the age of twenty-six, but much of his early work remains uncollected, owing to his many pseudonyms and contributions to obscure newspapers.

Reviewing the early stories translated in The Undiscovered Chekhov, George Steiner observed:

There is in these miniatures an arresting potion of cruelty. This can take the form of physical assault, of lacerating accidents. More subtly, there is the unctuous sadism of money and of social rank. Young women are simply sold off to rheumy, ageing bidders. Alcoholics are mocked and tormented when they cannot scrounge the kopek needed for their next drink. The wonderfully compassionate Chekhov was yet to mature. ^[11]

In 1880, Chekhov wrote his first full-length play, variously called the "untitled play", That Worthless Fellow Platonov, or simply Platonov, and tried without success to have it staged. That year he also wrote The Little Apples, which may be considered his first fully realised story, in which cruel beatings intrude on the earthly paradise of two young lovers.^[12] Chekhov's early stories have until recently been omitted from collections as juvenilia; but from The Little Apples on, a steady power is evident in Chekhov's best work, and a fully formed sensibility.^[13]

In 1888 and 1889, Chekhov spent the summers with his family at Luka, in the province of Harkov, where he delighted in the garden, the woods, the pond full of carp, and a river full of fish and crayfish.^[5] But the second of those summers was darkened by

[edit] Sakhalin

Mania Sachalinosa, as he called it, now held him in its grip.^[14]

In 1892, Chekhov depicted the horrors of internment in one of his grimmest stories, Ward no. 6, in which Ragin, a doctor who quotes Marcus Aurelius to his patients, ends up confined with his former charges in a psychiatric ward, tyrannised by a brutal gaoler.^[15] Where The Island of Sakhalin prods and pokes, Janet Malcom has written, Ward No. 6 stabs.^[16]

Yakov Ivanitch had been sentenced to penal servitude for life and given forty lashes. Then he was punished by flogging twice again for losing his prison clothes, though on each occasion they were stolen from him. The longing for home had begun from the very time he had been brought to Odessa, and the convict train had stopped in the night at Progonnaya; and Yakov, pressing to the window, had tried to see his own home, and could see nothing in the darkness. He had no one with whom to talk of home.

[edit] Social conscience

Chekhov always claimed he was apolitical and once said, "I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist."^[17] But the catharsis of his experiences on Sakhalin left a mark on his social outlook.^[18] The philosopher Lev Shestov suggested that Chekhov's work murmers a quiet "I don't know" to every problem.^[19]In the same vein, Vladimir Nabokov observed the typical Chekhov anti-hero to be:

…a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets…[who] combine[s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action…Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good.^[20]

After 1890, the middle-class characters in Chekhov's stories increasingly wring their hands about what is to be done with Russia, whether they are revolutionaries like Sasha in Betrothed,^[21] or liberal activists from the landowning classes like Natalya Gavrilovna in The Wife. In A Doctor's Visit, a factory owner's daughter suffers a psychosomatic illness as a symptom of the injustice of her position;^[22] in A Woman's Kingdom,^[23] a wealthy factory owner performs a random and counter-productive act of charity towards a poor family. In An Anonymous Story,^[24] a nobleman-turned-revolutionary gradually loses his sense of purpose.

Chekhov believed there would never be a revolution in Russia.^[25] But the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had left Russian society in a state of social and political vulnerability which he constantly lay bare in his work.^[26] Without a cheap labour-force of serfs, most landlords struggled to survive economically, while the peasants, cut adrift from their traditional role, often found themselves abandoned to market forces. At the end of The Cherry Orchard, when the family leaves the house after selling up, their old retainer, Firs, an ex-serf who calls the emancipation "the disaster", is left behind, locked in the nursery, the family assuming he had been taken to hospital.^[27]

[edit] Melikhovo

Some of his stories grew directly from his experiences as a doctor; for example, the idea for A Dead Body^[28]came from an autopsy he had conducted in a field near Voskresensk.^[29] And his story The Party^[30] describes a problematic pregnancy from a female character's point of view. "It really isn't bad to be a doctor and to understand what one is writing about," he told Suvorin. "The ladies say the description of the confinement is true.”^[31]

Chekhov often chose doctors as protagonists, usually, like Ragin from Ward no. Six, depicted in a state of impotent despair. In Ionitch, an idealistic young doctor misses his opportunities in life, and in middle-age turns disillusioned and greedy.^[32] In The Grasshopper, a specialist in diphtheria deliberately infects himself with the disease in response to his wife’s long-term infidelity.^[33]

Doctors appear in both the plays Chekhov finished at Melikhovo. In Uncle Vanya, Dr Astrov casually seduces the woman the title character has set his heart on; while in The Seagull, Eugene Dorn, another doctor, observes the tragi-comic events in the role of a detached outsider. Chekhov had written to Suvorin that he did not fear death. ^[34] In The Seagull, Dorn says, "The fear of death is an animal passion which must be overcome. Only those who believe in a future life and tremble for sins committed, can logically fear death."^[35]

[edit] Late Plays

The first night of The Seagull on 17 October 1896 at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg was a disaster, booed by the audience. Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who some considered the best actor in Russia, and who, according to Chekhov, had moved people to tears as Nina in rehearsal, was intimidated by the hostile audience and lost her voice.^[36] The next day, Chekhov, who had taken refuge backstage for the last two acts, announced to Suvorin that he was finished with writing plays.^[37] When supporters assured him that later performances were more successful, Chekhov assumed they were just being kind.

The Seagull impressed the playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, however, who said Chekhov should have won the Griboyedev prize that year instead of himself.^[38] And it was Nemirovich-Danchenko who convinced Konstantin Stanislavski to direct the play for the innovative Moscow Art Theatre in 1898.^[39]Chekhov's collaboration with Stanislavski proved crucial to the creative development of both men: Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the play and revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage; while Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the script forced Stanislavski to dig beneath the surface of the text in ways that were new in theatre.^[40]

In My Life in Art, Stanislavski recorded that after his own performance as Trigorin, Chekhov had said, "It was wonderful. Only you need torn shoes and check trousers." Stanislavski grasped that Trigorin was glamorous solely in Nina's imagination; in reality, he was seedy and second rate.^[39]

In 1899, Stanislavski directed Uncle Vanya, to such acclaim that Chekhov was bombarded with phone calls in the night, "the first time that my own fame has kept me awake".^[41] When he had rewritten The Wood Demon as Uncle Vanya is not clear, but in December 1898 he had told Gorky: "Uncle Vanya was written long, long ago; I have never seen it on the stage. Of late years it has often been produced at provincial theatres."^[42]

Chekhov disliked Yalta: his letters reveal a longing for Moscow, echoed by the three sisters of his play, who also felt trapped in a small provincial town. Mihail Chekhov suggested that The Three Sisters was informed by the summers the Chekhov family had spent at Voskresensk, a military town like the one in the play.^[5] Chekhov found himself well enough to assist in the rehearsals of his last play The Cherry Orchard, which was rapturously received at its premiere on 17 January 1904. Two days later he wrote to F.D.Batyushkov, "they gave me an ovation, so lavish, warm, and really so unexpected, that I can't get over it even now."^[43]

[edit] Longer stories

Chekhov wrote most of his best stories in the 1890s. He largely moved away from very short fiction and allowed his stories whatever length they needed, though his attempts to write a full-length novel appear to have come to nothing.^[5] His story The Duel,^[44] for example, was serialised in eleven issues of Suvorin's Novoye Vremya in 1891 and afterwards published by Suvorin as a book in twenty-one chapters.^[45] Several of the longer stories were, in effect, short novels, which attempted a more varied portrait of Russian society at all its social levels. The longest was My Life,^[46] the story of a young man who, in revolt against his harsh father, deserts his middle-class lifestyle and prospects to work as a housepainter. Another long story, Three Years,^[47]follows the industrial heir Laptev, who at first rejects the factory he inherits and marries a woman who does not return his love but later resigns himself to the factory and becomes emotionally numbed. In 1900 Chekhov wrote the long story In the Ravine,^[48] which depicts an entire rural community, with its social, economic, and religious dynamics, centred on the troubled Tsybukin family that runs the village store. "There's everything in it," Chekhov told Olga Knipper.^[49] In the Ravine includes perhaps Chekhov's most evil character, ^[50]the ruthless Aksinya, "who looked at the horses' teeth like a peasant", who in a fit of jealous rage scalds her sister-in-law’s baby to death with a ladle of boiling water. Another of Chekhov's ambitious long stories was An Anonymous Story, in which a revolutionary nobleman spies on a government minister's son by working as his valet.

I helped him to dress, and he let me do it with an air of reluctance without speaking or noticing my presence; then with his head wet with washing, smelling of fresh scent, he used to go into the dining-room to drink his coffee. He used to sit at the table, sipping his coffee and glancing through the newspapers, while the maid Polya and I stood respectfully at the door gazing at him. Two grown-up persons had to stand watching with the gravest attention a third drinking coffee and munching rusks.^[51]

[edit] Yalta

At Yalta Chekhov also wrote The Bishop,^[52] "one of the most autobiographical of his stories", ^[53] a long, elegiac portrait a dying bishop, whose family, even his mother, has come to respect rather than love him. Chekhov’s final story, Betrothed,^[54] depicts a decaying household, run by three women from different generations of the landowning class: the grandmother who retreats into religion, the mother who "was interested in spiritualism and homeopathy, read a great deal, was fond of talking of the doubts to which she was subject", and the daughter, Nadya, who comes under the influence of the revolutionary student Sasha, renounces her betrothal, and leaves the old order behind for a new life in the city.

Chekhov disliked Yalta: his letters reveal a longing for Moscow, echoed by the three sisters of his play, who also felt trapped in a small provincial town. Mihail Chekhov suggested that The Three Sisters was informed by the summers the Chekhov family had spent at Voskresensk, a military town like the one in the play.^[5] Chekhov found himself well enough to assist in the rehearsals of his last play The Cherry Orchard, which was rapturously received at its premiere on 17 January 1904. Two days later he wrote to F.D.Batyushkov, "they gave me an ovation, so lavish, warm, and really so unexpected, that I can't get over it even now."^[55]

[edit] possible article: The Stories of Anton Chekhov

The biographical background to The Grasshopper is very interesting (see Rayfield).

[edit] possible article: The Seagull

[edit] possible article: The First Night of the Seagull

Poss headings:

[edit] Earlier plays

[edit] Melikhovo/the writing/ the sources (Levitan's lake etc.)

[edit] Rehearsals/ casting/ build up

[edit] Disastrous premiere, with Chekhov's reaction

[edit] Nemirovich's interest/his background

[edit] Art Theatre/Stanislavski/rehearsals

[edit] Success and aftermath of other plays

[edit] Performance History/Stage History

[edit] Material unused so far

[edit] Quotes/background on Chekhov, to choose lead from, plus influence section

I think that in Anton Chekhov's presence every one involuntarily felt in himself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one's self;http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/gorky.htm

I witnessed a flogging, after which I dreamt of the executioner and the revolting flogging-horse for three or four nights. I chattered with men fettered to wheelbarrows. Once I was having tea in a mine and the former Petersburg merchant Borodavkin, sent here for arson, took from his pocket a teaspoon and gave it to me, and as a result my nerves were upset and I promised never to go to Sakhalin again.

Letter to Suvorin from Sakhalin.[56]

D.S.Mirsky Modern Russian Literature (London 1925) p 91, q Bartlett about love pXIX said the works of Chekhov marked "the crest of a second wave in the history of Russian realism"

Mirsky "He had no feeling for words. No Russian writer of anything like his significance used a language so devoid of all raciness and nerve" A history of Russian Literature from its beginnings to 1900 New York 1958, q in Bartlett about love XXIII p382

Tolstoy of one story "It is like lace made by a chaste young girl" (check Simmons; also in Bentley) Bentley also deals with ecology in Uncle Vanya

It is true that many of his shortest short stories seem at first sight to be the work of a man who has delicately fastidiously, and ironically picked up with the extreme tips of his fingers a little piece of real life, and then with minute care and skill pinned it by means of words into a book. — Leonard Woolf, "Miscellany: Tchehov," New Statesman, IX, 227, August 11, 191

Our first impressions of Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the point of it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we read story after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and they part and meet, and in the end are left talking about their position and by what means they can be free from "this intolerable bondage." Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: No.1, p 222,

Now, of Tchehov I would say that his stories have apparently neither head nor tail, they seem to be all middle like a tortoise. Many who have tried to imitate him however have failed to realise that the heads and tails are only tucked in. ... From here on in Emeljanow (ed): p 375. I should say that Tchehov has been the most potent magnet to young writers in several countries for the last twenty years. He was a very great writer, but his influence has been almost wholly dissolvent. For he worked naturally in a method which seems easy, but which is very hard for Westerners, and his works became accessible to Western Europe at a time when writers were restless, and eager to make good without hard labour ... — John Galsworthy, Selected Essays and Addresses (Heinemann, 1932) Good one for ending section) qu in Emeljanow, Victor (ed), Anton Chekhov, Routledge(UK), (1981)1997, ISBN 0415159512. p 375.

What happens in the course of the Chekhov play is that the characters are shown responding and reacting to one another on the emotional level: Chekhov creates among them what may be called an emotional network, in which it is not the interplay of character but the interplay of emotion that holds the attention of the audience. ... A kind of electric field exists among all the persons in a Chekhovian group. ... Emotional preoccupations in the Chekhov play do not remain private and submerged, but are brought to the surface as the characters intermingle and become emotionally involved with one another. This as it were activates the emotional network, and emotions may come to vibrate between particular individuals. ... It is on occasions such as these, when the emotional network is vibrating with an unusually high degree of harmony or disharmony, that the characters' emotional preoccupations are likely to be most clearly revealed. — Harvey Pitcher, The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (Chatto & Windus, 1973)

"His achievement was of such a stature as called for a redefinition of naturalism, and made Ibsen's look old-fashioned." Styan p 81

"In performance, these plays reinforce a persistent belief that the stage can hold a mirror up to life, and clarify the very forms and pressures of present-day existence" John Russell Brown in Chekhov on the British Stage Ed Miles, Patrick, Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ISBN 0521384672, p 6.

I witnessed a flogging, after which I dreamt of the executioner and the revolting flogging-horse for three or four nights. I chattered with men fettered to wheelbarrows. Once I was having tea in a mine and the former Petersburg merchant Borodavkin, sent here for arson, took from his pocket a teaspoon and gave it to me, and as a result my nerves were upset and I promised never to go to Sakhalin again.

Letter to Suvorin, Rayfield, 232.

Ian McKellen quoted in "We recognize of Chekhov, what we don't yet, in our hearts, accept of Shakespeare, that only when every part—each lazy valet, each stoical nanny, each gypsy violinist—has been perfectly cast, costumed and acted, can the whole play be fully realized. Actors climb up Chekhov like a mountain, roped together, sharing the glory if they ever make it to the summit." p 9

"When I hear a play of Tchekoff's I want to tear my own up," Shaw exclaimed after seeing the Stage Society's Uncle Vanya in 1914,

[edit] Books to get hold of

Pitcher's biog of Knipper Books by and about Stanislavski and the Art Theatre Books on Nemirovich and Meyerhold

[edit] Refs

1. ^ "When one has written a story I believe that one ought to strike out both the beginning and the end. That is where we novelists are most inclined to lie." Reported by I.A.Bunin in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov.; "He is aware that modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-ludicrous and yet painful, and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses is much more usual than anything extreme." Virginia Woolf (1918), quoted by Bartlett in From Russia, with Love.
2. ^ Maxim Gorky in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov; Chekhov: "I only wished to tell people honestly: 'Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live'." Quoted by Simmons, p 581.
3. ^ That statement comprises the penultimate line of the story Lights, in Love and Other Stories; also: "We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world." Letter to Shcheglov, 9 June 1888, quoted in Malcom, p 20.
4. ^ Alexander was to become a journalist and writer, Nikolai an artist, Ivan a teacher, Mihail a jurist and writer, and Mariya (Masha) a teacher and artist. Simmons, p 18.
5. ^ ^{a b c d e} Biographical Sketch.
6. ^ Payne, introduction to Forty Stories, p XIX.
7. ^ Simmons, p 21.
8. ^ The Steppe.
9. ^ Sleepy.
10. ^ Vanka.
11. ^ George Steiner, Vodka miniatures, belching and angry cats, 2001. Retrieved 31 October 2006.
12. ^ Payne, p XXIII.
13. ^ Payne, p XXIV.
14. ^ "I have nothing in my head or on paper except Sahalin. Mental obsession. Mania Sachalinosa." Letter to A.N.Pleshtcheyev, 15 February 1890. Letters of Anton Chekhov; Simmons, 204, 213.
15. ^ Ward no.6; This story terrified Vladimir Lenin so much that he felt as if he himself were locked up with the inmates. Emma Polotskaya, Chekhov and his Russia, in The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, p 20.
16. ^ Malcom, p 183.
17. ^ Letter to A.N Pleshtcheyev, 4 October 1889. Letters of Anton Chekhov.; " 'A conscious life without a definite philosophy is no life, rather a burden and a nightmare'. A writer who has not spent his life trying to find and articulate 'answers' could not have written this." Arthur Miller on Chekhov in Conversations with Arthur Miller, ed. Matthew Charles Roudané, University Press of Mississippi, 1987, ISBN 0878053239, p 59.
18. ^ Simmons, p 232.
19. ^ Quoted by Wood, p 86.
20. ^ Quoted by Malcom, p 104.
21. ^ Betrothed (in The Schoolmaster and Other Stories).
22. ^ A Doctor's Visit.
23. ^ A Woman's Kingdom (in The Party and Other Stories).
24. ^ An Anonymous Story.
25. ^ "Life creates such characters as the dare-devil Dymov [The Steppe] not to be dissenters nor tramps, but downright revolutionaries…There never will be a revolution in Russia, and Dymov will end by taking to drink or getting into prison. He is a superfluous man." Letter to A.N.Pleshtcheyev, 9 February 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
26. ^ "The spectre of serfdom, abolished in 1861, haunts Chekhov's plays." The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, ed Martin Banham, Cambridge University, 1995, ISBN 0521434378, p 949.
27. ^ In The Cherry Orchard. "there is no villain, no hero, no moral, just a calm and amused treatment of a potentially enormous and explosive situation, that of the breaking up of the old order and the disintegration of a whole class of society". Styan, p 84.
28. ^ A Dead Body.
29. ^ Payne, p XXVII.
30. ^ The Party.
31. ^ Letter to Suvorin, 15 November 1888. Letters of Anton Chekhov; "The Name-Day Party, a story about a pregnant woman, is full of observations about pregnancy which I had thought were secrets." Francine Prose, Learning from Chekhov, p 230.
32. ^ Ionitch.
33. ^ The Grasshopper.
34. ^ Letter to Suvorin, 25 November, 1892. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
35. ^ The Seagull.
36. ^ Letter to A.F. Koni, 11 November 1896. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
37. ^ Letter to Suvorin, 18 October 1896.Letters of Anton Chekhov.
38. ^ Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction, p 16.
39. ^ ^{a b} Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction, p 25.
40. ^ Chekhov and the Art Theatre, in Stanislavski's words, were united in a common desire "to achieve artistic simplicity and truth on the stage". Allen, p 11.
41. ^ Letter to Olga Knipper, 30 October 1899, Letters of Anton Chekhov.
42. ^ Letter to Gorky, 3 December 1898, Letters of Anton Chekhov.
43. ^ Letter to F.D.Batyushkov, 19 January 1904. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
44. ^ The Duel.
45. ^ Seven Short Novels, tr. Makanowitzky, p 10.
46. ^ My Life.
47. ^ Three Years.
48. ^ In the Ravine.
49. ^ Letter to Olga Knipper, 2 January 1900. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
50. ^ Malcom, p 124.
51. ^ An Anonymous Story.
52. ^ The Bishop.
53. ^ Payne, p XXXV; Rayfield, p 551.
54. ^ Betrothed (in The Schoolmaster and Other Stories).
55. ^ Letter to F.D.Batyushkov, 19 January 1904. Letters of Anton Chekhov.
56. ^ Quoted by Rayfield, p 232.