Osip the horse-thief does not play Leporello to Platonov's Giovanni; rather, he is a kind of double on the plebeian plane. Chekhov is not very indulgent to the lower classes in this play; Anna's servants are lazy and insolent, preliminary sketches for Yasha in The Cherry Orchard. Marko the messenger from the district court is dense, if honest. But Osip, like Platonov, tries to set himself above his fellows, keenly appreciative of his own intelligence. 'Let's say ever'body knows, let's say, that I'm a thief and a robber too,' Osip laughs, 'but not ever'body can prove it . . . Hm . . . These plain folks don't dare nowadays, they're fools, no brains I mean . . . Scared of ever'thing . . 'A nasty underhanded, puny bunch . . . Ignoramuses . . . Don't feel sorry if folks like that git hurt.' Osip prides himself, as does Platonov, on being superior to his fellows, but his superiority is expressed in a sub-Nietzschean amorality. He hires himself out as an assassin and sets on nocturnal pedestrians, the criminal equivalent of
Platonov's egoistic manipulation of others' feelings. At the end, both are destroyed by the people they contemned: Osip is lynched by the peasants, and Platonov is shot by a cast-off mistress. The similarities are so great that when Platonov and Osip grapple in the schoolroom, it is like a man fighting his shadow or mystic double. Perhaps Osip reneges on the murder contract because he recognizes their symbiosis.
For all its overstatement, what makes Platonov a real portent of Chekhov's mature work is the unsteady listing from the comic side to the serious. It bespeaks a view of the cohesiveness of life, in which important issues and meaningless trivia co-exist. Chekhov's career as a professional humourist made him alert to the grotesque detail, the absurd facet of any situation; but more important is his ingrained awareness that the current of life, awash with the banal flotsam of everyday, sweeps away heroic poses and epic aspirations. A comic effect is natural when grandiose philosophical questions and emotional crises have to share space with the inexorable demands of the humdrum.
'Ivanov'
Ivanov, Chekhov's first work to be staged, was written at the prompting of Korsh and in the wake of the creative gust that had produced the important transitional story 'The Steppe'. Chekhov dashed off the play in a couple of weeks in October 1887, pleased with its 'unhackneyed subject' and its lack of longueurs. He defined his own originality this way: 'Modern dramatists start their plays exclusively with angels, cads and buffoons - try and find those elements anywhere in Russia! Sure, you'll find them, but not in such extreme guises as dramatists need. I wanted to do something original; I didn't hatch out a single villain, a single angel (although I couldn't refrain from buffoons), I didn't accuse anyone, I didn't acquit anyone' (to Aleksandr, 24 October 1887). He intended to 'sum up everything that's been written so far about whining and languishing people, and in my Ivanov to put an end to this writing' (to Suvorin, 7 January 1889). This determination shows Ivanov to be not a reconstruction of Without Patrimony, but a counterblast to it and its ilk.
Ivanov was first played at Korsh's Theatre in Moscow on 19 November 1887, for the benefit of Nikolay Svetlov who created Borkin; it enjoyed a great success. The actors' praise and the audiences' plaudits made Chekhov euphoric, and he wrote to Aleksandr, 'You can't imagine what's happened! From that insignificant turd that is my playlet. . . the devil knows what has occurred ... in his 32 years in the theatre the prompter had never seen anything like it'. He triumphantly signed himself, 'Schiller Shakes- pearovich Goethe' (to Aleksandr, 24 November 1887). But his younger brother Mikhail recalled the event differently. 'The success of the performance was spotty: some hissed, others, the majority, noisily applauded and called for the author, but in general Ivanov was not understood, and for a long time afterwards the newspapers were explicating the personality and character of its main hero.' The impressionable playwright gradually came to the conclusion that the audience had welcomed Ivanov himself as a distillation of the Zeitgeist. His mooning and moaning, his fits of self-castigation summed up for the generation of the 1880s its own pusillanimous torpor during the 'darkling decade,' a period of political repression and social inaction. His death provided a kind of vicarious expiation.
That was not what Chekhov had in mind. Superficially, Ivanov, his name the Russian equivalent of 'Jones', seemed another common- or garden-variety 'superfluous man,': 'a university graduate, in no way remarkable; a somewhat excitable, ardent nature, strongly inclined to honourable and straightforward enthusiasm, like most educated gentry,' was how Chekhov described him. Like Platonov, his past is nobler than his present; his projects for serving the people, rational farming, higher education have evaporated. But Chekhov wanted to get away from the apotheosis of this disillusionment, by then a stale treatment, to an examination by the character himself of the reasons for his empty life and contemptible behaviour. Ivanov was to suffer through his own awareness of wasted potential and vestigial honour. A basic dramatic problem was to keep the audience from idealising Ivanov's pessimism and, at the same time, to keep Ivanov from looking like the immoralist that Doctor Lvov makes him out to be.
The stage portrayal of this complex inner turmoil was tricky for an inexperienced playwright, trying to employ age-old strategies of dramatic carpentry to contain a richly psychological subject. Basically, the 'plot' might have come from a society melodrama by Dyachenko. A scoundrel abandons his exploited wife in hopes of repairing his fortunes by wedding a young heiress: this sensational story-line is how Ivanov's actions look to outsiders such as Lvov. Ibsen had already managed to sublimate such a triangle into the internalised conflicts of Rosmersholm, with the bedevilled intellectual Rosmer torn between coequal calls to duty. Chekhov, however, was constrained to write long expository speeches, endless explanations, confessions, acts of contrition, to counter his audience's preconceptions of heroism and villainy.
The earliest revision was for the Alexandra Theatre in St. Petersburg. Chekhov wrote, 'Now my Mr. Ivanov will be much better understood. The finale doesn't satisfy me exactly (except for the shooting, everything is weak) but I am comforted that its form is still not finished' (19 December 1888). Originally, Ivanov had died on stage of a heart attack and Chekhov realized that this posed a problem for an actor while it undermined the real causes of Ivanov's destruction.
The play's life-blood is gossip. In the first act, we hear of slanderous rumours about Ivanov, but no one takes them too seriously. In the second act, the school for scandal is in session at Lebedev's home, but the gossipmongers are so caricatured that again .their power to harm is discounted. Ivanov is now associated with Borkin's shady machinations, however. In Act Three, Lebedev still refuses to believe the tattle, but warns Ivanov, 'There're so many rumours about you running through the county, watch out, our friend the District Attorney may turn up . . . You're a murderer, and a vampire, and a grave-robber . . .'Aided by Lvov, the rumours reach Anna's ears, provoking her confrontation with Ivanov and her collapse. In the play's first version, this theme continued into Act Four, with even Lebedev succumbing to doubts about Anna's death. Ivanov, definitively charged with villainy by the Doctor, dies of a heart attack 'because,' said Chekhov, 'he can't endure the outrageous insult' (letter to Aleksandr, 20 November 1887).
This was to turn the play into a tract about provincial narrowmindedness, and, indeed, many of the critics described Ivanov as the honourable but vacillating victim of scandalmongers. So Chekhov added Sasha to the attackers in Act Four, and had Ivanov taking active measures in his own defence. He gave him a long monologue about dreams of becoming the young Ivanov once more. 'If Ivanov turns out looking like a cad or a superfluous man, and the doctor a great man . . . then, obviously, my play won't come off, and there can be no talk of a production' (to Suvorin, 30 December 1888).