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Classics Revisited

Chekhov’s sad comedies

Plays, Anton Chekhov, Penguin Classics, translated by Elisaveta Fen, 1954.

Chekhov wrote sad books for humorous people…Things were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see the sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.

Vladmir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, 1981

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was one of the great chroniclers of social circumstances. Unlike Dostoevsky (too complex) or Tolstoy (too big a scale), he saw Russia with a miniaturist’s humility; he would not make more of society than it revealed it self, or as a Russian proverb wouldput it, he would not expect more from truth than what it actually contains. He was a man of sense, of common sense, in a place where only the bourgeoisie were proud of having common sense, and, of course, for all the wrong reasons. To them life meant the sense to conform, to concur, the sense to reject all other ways of thinking as inferior or comic or dangerous. This wasn’t Chekhov’s kind of common sense: he tried to see things as they were and to deal with them as he saw them. He hated theorising, had no time for metaphysical or religious generalisations or high-sounding emptiness even when it came from Tolstoy. He was determined to see life as it was, both funny and sad, the axis on which all his stories and plays were based, especially his 1896 play, “The Seagull”, that he described as “a comedy in four acts”.

Unless Chekhov meant “comedy” tongue-in-cheek because “nothing in life ever happens as we’d like it to”, the play could hardly be considered as light-hearted. It is a play riddled with absurdity but grief is its explicit subject. In the opening scene, the young Masha walks on to the stage with lovelorn Medvedenko, hand in hand; he asks her: “Why do you always wear black?” and she replies, “Because I am mourning for my life.” Chekhov point is that we spend far more time killing life than living it. And in various ways, we murder our happiness — through self-centredness or by rejecting genuine offers of love because we are seduced by glamour. “The Seagull” is an expense of “spirit in a waste of shame”.

The setting is pastoral in late 19th century Russia. The characters have been called to watch a play on a small stage erected in a glade. The land belongs to Sorin, an elderly lawyer who is entertaining his sister, Madame Arkadina and her lover, Trigorin, a famous man of letters. Arkadina’s 25-year-old son, Konstantin Treplyov, is the author of the play. It is a monologue about a lifeless future, starring his beloved Nina, the daughter of a nearby landowner, and it’s nothing like the work that his mother, a rich and successful actress, has made her name in. This the son has made sure of. As Konstantin sets up the chairs for the performance, he tells his uncle:

“My mother loves The Theatre, she thinks she is serving humanity, she thinks she’s a high priestess of art, but what I think is, that kind of theatre is tired, it’s all worn out. It’s so restrictive! The curtain goes up, the lights come on, and you’re in a room with three walls, and there they are, those servants of art, and all they do is show us how people eat, drink, make love, walk, and wear clothes…It makes me sick!”

Minutes after the audience assembles for Konstantin’s play, it bombs: Arkadina heckles Konstantin and Nina in bringing down the curtain. Arkadina is perhaps a little unfair but some of the lines are heavily symbolic: “And the weary moon in heaven lights her lamp in vain.” It has its appeal though, which Dr. Dorn acknowledges at the end of the first act when he tells Konstantin: “You tackled a difficult subject, an abstract one. And you were right to. Every work of art has to express some great idea. True beauty is always a serious matter.”

But Konstantin’s raging against traditional theatre (this could be Chekhov speaking) reveals something about him: rooted in his speech is the soul of a critic which could be because of having Arkadina as a mother. Konstantin is unsuccessful because he writes in order to compete with his mother, not because he has something to say of his own; his mother always overshadows him. As he tells Sorin: “She’s a psychological textbook, my mother…You’re supposed to talk about her, write about her, applaud her, tell her she was divine in Camille.”

Arkadina is a woman who has never stopped yearning. She can’t mask her fear and hatred of the young and beautiful Nina, with whom she finds she must share Trigorin’s attentions, nor can she hide her inability to love or care for her son. Konstantin knows this streak in her character: “When I’m not around she’s only thirty-two; when I’m around, she’s forty-three.” Arkadina knows that her son will outlive her but will his legacy? The question consumes her all the time.

Nina and Konstantin are two very complex characters; both are torn up by their association with Arkadina and Trigorin. Nina, who dreams of becoming an actress, follows Trigorin to Moscow where they have an affair, and a child who dies. In a final conversation, Nina describes to Konstantin the effect Trigorin has had on her life:

“He never believed in theatre, he laughed at all my dreams…I started getting petty, depressed, my acting was emptier and emptier…I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I didn’t know how to hold myself on stage, I couldn’t control my voice.”

Her confession to Konstantin is as much a lamentation for her lost youth as an admission that, despite all this, she could not love anyone except Trigorin. When Nina leaves Konstantin because she couldn’t bear to be near the visiting Trigorin, Konstantin leaves. Minutes later, a shot rings out; Konstantin has killed himself.

As a final act, this is terrible but it is logical. Konstantin never grew up, may be because his mother never allowed him to; Nina dashes her soul against the rocks, not like a seagull but like a sad, obsessive young woman who sublimates her dream of becoming a great actress to being merely a mistress. Where was there any hope for the two of them? And how did Chekhov find comedy in all this?

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