 | |
Drama
Anton Chekhov
 Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was one of seven children born to a failed, brutal businessman,
Pavel Chekhov, and his wife Evgenia. He grew up in Taganrog, Russia, described
by Donald Rayfield as a "decrepit military harbour and a thriving civil port."
Rayfield explains, "Chekhov's life was short, but neither sweet nor simple."
It was marred early by poverty and his father's abuse, and later by tuberculosis
to which he eventually succumbed. Yet in between a difficult childhood and his
ongoing battle with a terminal disease, Chekhov became not only one of the world's
most prolific authors of short stories, but one of the principal architects of
the evolving modern drama.
Life in Taganrog held both misery
and bliss for the young Chekhov. Writing about his youth, he put the matter
of his abuse about as directly as it can be stated: "My father began to .teach'
me, or, to put it simply, to beat me when I was less than five years old.
He thrashed me with a cane, he boxed my ears, he punched my head and every
morning, as I woke up, I wondered, first of all, would I be beaten today?"
These beatings, plus his father's public faith and failed business ventures,
made Chekhov write later in his life that he was repulsed by his childhood.
Nonetheless, there was one glimmer of light: the local theater and its productions
of opera, French farce, Romantic drama, and—young Chekhov's favorites—Shakespeare
and Aleksánder Ostróvsky. Rayfield believes that translations of Hamlet
and Macbeth may be among the first books that Chekhov ever acquired,
and by the later 1870s he began to experiment with playwriting himself.
His father's poverty made Anton
a central provider for the family, leaving him as a teenager to try and settle
with his father's many debtors, as most of the family moved to Moscow leaving
him behind. Finally, Anton would join them and he later earned a medical
degree. By the time he was twenty-one, however, both Chekhov and his brother
became regular contributors to several literary magazines. He contributed
journalistic pieces, reviews, and fiction; and by 1882 he was earning money
for his work, funds his family badly needed. He was also publishing pieces
that ran afoul of the state censor, one reason why he began to employ a number
of pseudonyms.
He also wrote plays, but by the
1890s his experiences of the theater had been so negative that he had vowed
to avoid drama altogether. But in 1898 Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko, and a small company of actors formed the private Moscow
Arts Theatre (MAT); they were ready to embark upon bold experiments in theater,
and all they needed were modern plays to produce. The first drama they took
a great interest in was Chekhov's The Seagull, which had been staged
two years earlier in St. Petersburg with mixed results. The opening night
audience behaved in an unruly fashion, and numerous critics lacerated the
play, turning Chekhov away from the theater. He wrote to a friend after watching
the first performance of the 1896 production: "I was ashamed, dejected, and
I left St. Petersburg with doubts of every sort."
Subsequent performances went better,
however, and Chekhov received significant praise for the play. But nothing
could have prepared him for the great success the play would have in Moscow
two years later, although he disagreed with Stanislavski's acting technique
and direction. Still, the combination of the Moscow Arts Theatre, Chekhov's
plays, and Stanislavski's direction proved a potent combination. The MAT
production of Uncle Vanya the following year secured Chekhov's triumph
as a playwright, and twenty years later the same combination of forces would
take America by storm when the MAT played in New York.
Note on The Cherry Orchard
The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov's
last play composed as he battled the devastating effects of tuberculosis,
has always been something of an enigma. For example, as David Magarshack
observes in The Real Chekhov, "The most extraordinary thing in the
whole history of European drama is the contemptuous dismissal by directors
of Chekhov's own description of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard
as comedies." "Do they really believe," Magarshack asks, "that Chekhov did
not know the difference between a comedy and a tragedy?" Admittedly, the
fates of some characters are not especially happy ones at the end of both
plays. And Stanislavski, perhaps too concerned with the famous concept of
the subtext—an attempt to extrapolate from the text the complete life
of a character or characters—famously argued that The Cherry Orchard
conveyed a "great tragedy."
Adaptations and productions of
the play have differed on this point—and on the extent to which the play is
a realistic representation or a more symbolist one. Chekhov,
Magarshack explains, abhorred the term "realism," contending that the tension
in the play exists between things as they are and things as his characters
believe them to be.
It is, perhaps, at least in part
because of such disagreements that The Cherry Orchard has proved to
be such an enduring play in the contemporary repertory. For only an appreciable
work of art could motivate such divergent readings.
|
Selected Bibliography of Chekhov's Work
Plays
Ivanov (rev. version, 1889)
The Wood Demon (1889)
The Seagull (1896)
Uncle Vanya (1897)
Three Sisters (1901)
The Cherry Orchard (1903; first production, January, 1904)
|
Further Reading About Chekhov's Life
Carlile, Cynthia, and Sharon McKee, trans. Anton Chekhov and His Times. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1995.
Hingley, Ronald. A New Life of Anton Chekhov. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1976.
Magarshack, David. Chekhov: A Life. 1953; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970.
Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. London: HarperCollins, 1997.
|
Further Reading About Chekhov's Work
Bloom, Harold, ed. Anton Chekhov. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999.
Clayton, J. Douglas, ed. Chekhov Then and Now: The Reception of Chekhov in World Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.
Eekman, Thomas, ed. Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989.
Gottleib, Vera. Chekhov in Performance in Russia and Soviet Russia. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck Healey, 1984.
Hahn, Beverly. Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays. London: Cambridge UP, 1988.
Jackson, Robert L., ed. Reading Chekhov's Texts. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993.
Peace, Richard. Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
Senelick, Laurence. Anton Chekhov. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.
_______________. The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of Plays in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Styan, J.L. Chekhov in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971.
Valency, Maurice. The Breaking String: The Plays of Anton Chekhov. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.
Worrall, Nick, ed. File on Chekhov. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
|
| |
|
