These translations are dedicated to the directors, designers, casts, and crews of all the productions of their earlier versions, who, from 1967 to the present, have demonstrated that fidelity to an author and stageworthiness are not incompatible qualities.
CONTENTS
Preface
Anton Chekhov’s Brief Life
Chronology of Chekhov’s Life
A Note on the Translation
Guide to Transliteration and Pronunciation
Introduction
EARLY EXPERIMENTS
Untitled Play (Without Patrimony [Disinherited] or Platonov)
Variants
Along the Highway
COLLABORATION
The Power of Hypnotism by Anton Chekhov and Ivan Shcheglov
HUMOROUS DIALOGUES AND PARODIES
The Fool, or The Retired Captain
A Young Man
Unclean Tragedians and Leprous Playwrights
An Ideal Examination
“Chaos-Vile in Rome”
A Mouth as Big as All Outdoors
Honorable Townsfolk
At the Sickbed
The Case of the Year 1884
A Drama
Before the Eclipse
The Sudden Death of a Steed, or The Magnanimity of the Russian People!
PLAYS
Swan Song (Calchas)
Variants
The Evils of Tobacco, First Version
Ivanov, First Version
Variants
The Bear
Variants
The Proposal
Variants
Ivanov, Final Version
Variants
Tatyana Repina
An Involuntary Tragedian (From the Life of Vacationers)
Variant
The Wedding
Variants
The Wood Goblin
Variants
The Celebration
Variants
The Eve of the Trial
Variants
The Seagull
Variants
Uncle Vanya
Variant
Three Sisters
Variants
The Evils of Tobacco, Final Version
The Cherry Orchard
Variants
APPENDIX: Lost and Unwritten Plays
PREFACE
Complete is a weasel word. No sooner does a complete edition of anything appear than it is trumped by new discoveries. However, if one may modify an absolute, this edition is the most “complete” collection of Anton Chekhov’s plays in English. It contains all the plays performed during his lifetime and posthumous works, performed or not. The former include the first version of Ivanov, never before translated into English, and the latter the farce by Ivan Shcheglov cobbled together from his collaboration with Chekhov, which has never been published in any language since 1911.
I have also included a number of dialogue pieces that Chekhov wrote for comic journals in the 1880s. Throughout that decade, Chekhov published stories which are virtually one-act plays or monologues and which he often called “scenelets” (stsenki). They were frequently adapted for the stage. The Moscow Art Theatre, for instance, played “Surgery,” a dialogue between a country doctor and a sexton, as one of its recital pieces; and other stories, such as “The Witch” and “Robbers,” were produced by the Art Theatre studios and amateur groups. I have chosen not to list these stories among his plays, because they were not typographically distinguishable as such, and because they are readily available in collections of Chekhov’s prose. Similarly, I have not included the dialogue captions he wrote to cartoons, since these make little sense without their drawings. On the other hand, I have included every journalistic squib that he did write in the form of a play, including his parodies of popular drama.
This edition contains a number of features intended to improve the readers’ understanding of Chekhov and his writing. First, the plays are heavily annotated, not merely to provide explanations of obscure names and terms, but also to point out jokes and subtleties in the original and to explain why I made the translation choices I did.
Next, I have included a choice of variants. Plays in pre-Revolutionary Russia had to undergo two censorships, one for publication and one for performance. Occasionally, the censorship required deletions or rewrites of lines that, in the case of speeches about Arkadina’s liaison with Trigorin in The Seagull or Trofimov’s remarks about social conditions in The Cherry Orchard, were never restored in Chekhov’s lifetime. In other cases, such as in Ivanov, Chekhov kept tinkering with the play for years, the final published version being quite distinct from the two different stage versions of 1887 and 1888. Often a Chekhov play will have been published in a magazine before it was produced, or, in rehearsal, the director required or suggested changes. For example, it was Konstantin Stanislavsky who insisted that Act Two of The Cherry Orchard end with a love scene between Anya and Trofimov. Here the variants may coincide more exactly with Chekhov’s ideas than the final versions do. The fewest variants appear in Uncle Vanya, since it was a thoroughgoing revision of a pre-existing play, The Wood Goblin.
I have seen no reason to include variant inversions of words or minor changes that do not involve the sense and would be of interest chiefly to Slavic specialists who have access to the Russian originals. Those interested in the minutiae can consult the notes to Ronald Hingley’s Oxford Chekhov. However, I have left in anything that can provide more information about a character or an insight into Chekhov’s working methods. Except when the changes were made at the instigation of third parties, I do not recommend spatchcocking these remnants from Chekhov’s waste-paper basket back into the plays. He was a shrewd editor of his own work, regularly deleting lines that were too explicit or repetitive or caricatural. In his case, less is definitely more.
Over the years, my translations of Chekhov have benefited greatly from the directors and companies who have staged them. My thanks go to all of them for enhancing my understanding. Of the many individuals, scholars, and theater people who deserve my gratitude, I shall name only Martin Andrucki, John Emigh, Donald Fanger, Spencer Golub, André Gregory, Michael Henry Heim, John Hellweg, Simon Karlinsky, Nils Åke Nilsson, Emma Polotskaya, Sasha Popov, Herta Schmid, Virginia Scott, Julie de Sherbinin, Anatoly Smeliansky, Jurij Striedter, Richard Trousdell, and the late Irene Worth.
ANTON CHEKHOV’S BRIEF LIFE
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the town of Taganrog on the sea of Azov in southern Russia on January 17, 1860,1 the third of six children, five boys and a girl. He might have been born a serf, as his father, Pavel Yegorovich, had, for the Emancipation came only in 1861; but his grandfather, a capable and energetic estate manager named Yegor Chekh, had prospered so well that in 1841 he had purchased his freedom along with his family’s. Anton’s mother, Yevgeniya Morozova, was the orphaned daughter of a cloth merchant and a subservient spouse to her despotic husband. To their children, she imparted a sensibility he lacked: Chekhov would later say, somewhat unfairly, that they inherited their talent from their father and their soul from their mother.2