I myself remembered Ivanov as livelier than any of the other long plays. I remembered that I understood how Chekhov might have been amused by it and why it also could have been confusing to everyone in the audience. The translation I have read three times is by Marina Brodskaya, and she used the version Chekhov revised at the end of 1888 and was performed in 1889. The differences between the version of 1887 and Chekhov’s revision do not seem of consequence to me.
Following Ezhov, I sit down to read Ivanov from beginning to end. Envying Ezhov, I decide to imagine that Chekhov is my friend and mentor, too. I, however, will be rereading it while pretending I have never read it before.
Scene: I walk into Chekhov’s study, we shake hands, he asks about my sister, whose cough he treated last week, and he asks me to sit down. He nods to the chair at his desk. I sit and glance at the bookshelves. Am I sitting in his chair? I start to get up, I tell him he should sit in his own chair. He shakes his head and says he wants me to be comfortable. He’ll sit across from me. I notice the lamp that he has been mentioning in his September letters. It shines onto a stack of manuscripts. Start? He nods. I make a humble smile. He doesn’t smile. I try now to keep my expression blank and avoid his eyes as I read.
As a teacher, as a friend, as a writer, I know what it is to sit with someone while they read my work or I read theirs. And even though I am in Chekhov’s presence, I am a reader first of all; I zone in, fully focused on the pages, but within a few minutes, I am wondering why Ivanov seems so dull. Without opening my mouth, I start to criticize and summarize: The play reflects Ivanov’s and Chekhov’s disenchantment with women, who represent life, yet the “comedy” is that a bunch of difficult, unpleasant men know they’re bums and that they’re unworthy of the women. Anna/Sarra, the rich Jewish wife who converted to Christianity to marry Ivanov, but consequently lost her inheritance, is sympathetic but not interesting, and neither is Sasha, the young rich neighbor who is sadly in love with Ivanov. Does Chekhov not understand that his characters, untied from and unenlivened by his narration, are as dull as they think themselves to be? Should I say something?… Oh, and combined with the men’s misogyny is the anti-Semitism again! Ivanov declares: “My dear friend, you left college last year, and you are still young and brave. Being thirty-five years old I have the right to advise you. Don’t marry a Jewess or a bluestocking or a woman who is queer in any way. Choose some nice, commonplace girl without any strange and startling points in her character.”4
By the end of Act 1, the questions the unsympathetic Dr. Lvov asks Anna/Sarra are, unfortunately, the ones I am asking myself. Why am I here, wasting my time with these people?
LVOV: […] Why are you here? What have you in common with such a cold and heartless—but enough of your husband! What have you in common with these wicked and vulgar surroundings? With that eternal grumbler, the crazy and decrepit Count? With that swindler, that prince of rascals, Misha, with his fool’s face? Tell me, I say, how did you get here?
In Act 2, it seems to me that the characters are sometimes only Chekhov talking to himself. For example:
1) MARTHA [Martha is properly known as Babakina in Brodskaya’s translation]. [Aside] Heavens! This is deadly! I shall die of ennui.
2) SASHA: Oh, dear! There is something wrong with you all! You are a lot of sleepy stickin-the-muds! I have told you so a thousand times and shall always go on repeating it; there is something wrong with every one of you; something wrong, wrong, wrong!
3) SASHA: [To Ivanov] What makes you so depressed today?
IVANOV: My head aches, little Sasha, and then I feel bored.
My imagination about reading this in front of Chekhov while he observes me begins to fail me. In real life, I realize it’s evening, and I’m tired. What if I stop reading halfway through? I manage to rouse my imagination enough to picture Chekhov sighing, not saying anything though, as I clear my throat and apologize for my weariness. I ask him if he wouldn’t mind if I came back tomorrow to finish. He looks glum but nods.
When I return in my imagination the next morning, I arrive at Chekhov’s and knock and learn from a servant, a plump-faced young woman, that Anton Pavlovich is seeing a patient in his study, but that he has left instructions to lead me to his bedroom desk. I overhear the patient. She is a middle-aged woman by the sound of her voice; she goes on about a pain in her heel. She can’t put pressure on it; pain shoots from the foot into her calf. Chekhov says, “Your shoe.”
She says, “Lovely, aren’t they?”
“Would you please take off that shoe?”
I sit down at his desk in front of the manuscript and take a glance around Chekhov’s bedroom, sniffing the scent of books, tobacco, musty warmth. I sit up straight as the servant enters, bringing me a cup of tea. I thank her and resume reading.
I have been prepared for the worst, but Act 3 isn’t so bad! I occasionally smile. I wonder if it has become better because the situation now has enough context and if my expectations have been properly diminished. Still, no character is sympathetic, and the humor is dry.
In the middle of Act 3 I think: Okay, here is the play. That is, here is the internal monologue, beyond which there is no need for any of the rest of the play:
IVANOV: I am a worthless, miserable, useless man. Only a man equally miserable and suffering, as Pavel is, could love or esteem me now. Good God! How I loathe myself! How bitterly I hate my voice, my hands, my thoughts, these clothes, each step I take! How ridiculous it is, how disgusting! Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, full of pride and energy and enthusiasm. I worked with these hands here, and my words could move the dullest man to tears. I could weep with sorrow, and grow indignant at the sight of wrong. I could feel the glow of inspiration, and understand the beauty and romance of the silent nights which I used to watch through from evening until dawn, sitting at my worktable, and giving up my soul to dreams. I believed in a bright future then, and looked into it as trustfully as a child looks into its mother’s eyes. And now, oh, it is terrible! I am tired and without hope; I spend my days and nights in idleness; I have no control over my feet or brain. My estate is ruined, my woods are falling under the blows of the axe. [He weeps]
The speech, soliloquy, whatever you want to call it, goes on another… what, 300 words! It further describes Ivanov’s shame, concluding with what is lately an all too typical refrain: “I can’t, I can’t understand it; the easiest way out would be a bullet through the head!” (Yes, a bullet would be the easiest way, and in Chekhov’s revision next year, instead of Ivanov bringing down the curtain with a fatal heart attack, he does it with a shot to the head.)
As I sit at the desk, frowning over his manuscript, I wonder what my imaginary friend and mentor Chekhov is working out of his system. I go on:
IVANOV: Sarah, stop at once and go away, or else I shall say something terrible. I long to say a dreadful, cruel thing. [He shrieks] Hold your tongue, Jewess! [Brodskaya’s translation: “I’m itching to say something dreadfully insulting… (He yells) Stop it, you Yid!…”]
Why does Chekhov have Ivanov throw the anti-Semitism in her face?5
The air is still. I look over my left shoulder, and Chekhov is standing there, leaning on the door-frame. Did he see me shake my head in disappointment?
I’m to Act 4, and feel as unhappy as the critic in “Drama.” All that character did when the woman wouldn’t stop reading her boring play was smash her in the head with a paperweight!… It’s my own head I want to smash. I feign a smile at Chekhov, but inwardly wince as I read on through another of Ivanov’s speeches. This time he is addressing his fiancée, as between Acts 3 and 4 his wife has died of tuberculosis. Chekhov, smoking a cigar, sits down across from me. Everyone says he’s inscrutable, but he’s not. He knows my feelings by my expressions and my quiet sighings; I read him while he reads me. He knows I’m hating his play!