CLASSICS REVISITED
Continuing charisma
BY RAVI VYAS
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In Collected Plays, Anton Chekhov, Penguin Classics, first translated by Elisaveta Fen, 1954. Other editions are also available.
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Chekhov is inexhaustible because, despite the everyday life he appears to depict in his plays, he is really talking all the time not of the accidental and specific, but of the Human, with the capital `h'. This is his basic spiritual leitmotif.
Konstantin Stanislavsky, Director of Moscow Art Theatre, in My Life in Art.
THE ability to turn ideas into behaviour was Antov Chekhov's great gift to 20th Century theatre. What makes Chekhov's psychological interpretations so modern is his perception that people are motivated more by what is outside them than what is within. Words come before meanings, and people take their identities first of all from others, falling prey to their own suggestibility. That is why faithlessness and compromises are not such moral failings in Chekhov as the inevitable consequences of sheer human vacuity. Chekhov often said that he wanted to depict "real life", both in his plays and short stories, as it is lived by ordinary people: "A play should be written in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather, and play cards. Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are — not on stilts... Let everything on the stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple as it is in life".
Chekhov always put life before art in his plays but the distinction is made nowhere more insistently than in "The Seagull". But given Chekhov's exacting demands, the problem was how to enact it. Anything affected was anathema. Not even Stanislavsky (they had endless problems with each other) could produce the requisite lightness of touch, for, his "method acting" infused his characters with an inner motivation and psychological rationale which were, all too often, precisely what they lacked. Chekhov's characters are not driven by some great cause like the heroes of a Greek tragedy, but by their irrational selves.
"The Seagull" tackles a theme that was central to Chekhov's ways of feeling: humbug in the world of art, which is divorced from life as it is. No other play features so many creative artists. With two actresses and two writers, "The Seagull" teems with them. Whether it is happening in front of us or elsewhere, art is happening all over the place.
Plays are being written, rehearsed and performed; past performances are constantly being reviewed, some fondly relived; famous authors are being read, compared, approved or disapproved; artistic careers are projected, celebrated or mourned; lines are being jotted in notebooks, plots concocted. The whole art world is an intellectual hothouse. Everyone wants art to touch their lives. But everywhere art is stagey, brittle and false. Art is removed from life, no more than a poor translation, like the stylised Ballet Russe of Konstantin's atrocious amateur play in the beginning.
Life and art
Everyone calls upon art to give some meaning to their lives. If only life could be lived as art! But they are patently doing things the wrong way round. Trigorin is a successful author whose borrowed sheen not only inspires Konstantin, but his actress mother and would-be girlfriend as well. Trigorin is praised for bringing characters so marvellously to life, but it is at some cost. Because Trigorin cannibalises the present; no sooner is a moment lived or a kiss kissed than it is put down in a notebook, to be recycled in the next novella. This is humbug, not life as it happens day after day.
Trigorin jots down in his notebook the plot of the story that he's in: a man comes along and destroys a young girl's life, simply for lack of anything better to do. ("We are all bored" is one of the central themes of Chekhov's short stories.) The destructiveness is self-fulfilling. Konstantin yearns to do the same, to fuse art with experience and to breathe life into his otherwise wooden characterisations. But ends up neither writing nor living; he realises he is "inauthentic to the marrow of my bones". He tears up his papers in despair and shoots himself in the last scene. His one grand gesture — the killing of the seagull — is as meaningless as the farce of his school play and for the same reason: it is done purely for effect. The symbolism doesn't mean a thing. The seagull isn't his girlfriend, Nina, the loved creature of the lake. Nor is it a symbol of lost love, lost hope. A dead bird is a dead bird: Period. Chekhov was just that: a realist, first and last. Chekhov had famously said elsewhere that "there are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of those are professed by people who have never been in trouble". "The Seagull" is merely an extension of this experience of life lived as received wisdom rather than seen through, warts and all.
Dramatic ruse
With its profound suspicion of artists and of art, "The Seagull" would appear to back the unmediated life, spontaneous and lived to the full. This is a ruse for deflecting our attention from the work we are watching, differentiating it from the painted stage in order to make it seem all the more natural and "real". But in Chekhov's case, the disillusionment with art is so intense that what we get is not so much art which conceals art as an art which disavows it. "The Seagull" tries very hard not to be a play; it wants to show life as it is with all its pretences. That is why all Chekhov's plays and the majority of his short stories, despite their flashes of humour, impresses one as infinitely sad, full as they are of frustration, disappointed hopes, and unfulfilled longings — all because we are busy aping others, not being true to ourselves.
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