6 A joke name suggesting “mommy’s cheek.”
7 In Motley Tales this is replaced by “Of course, I dare not offer you reproof, but . . . I always say to my wife’s daughters, ‘Children, do not laugh at that which transcends laughter!’”
8 In Motley Tales this is replaced by “Forgive me for this agitation and this quaver in my voice; you see before you the happiest of fathers!”
9 In Motley Tales this is followed by “Awfully difficult! It’s easier to borrow money on a third mortgage than to find a husband for even one of your daughters!”
10 In Motley Tales this is replaced by “My wife’s daughters are taking so long getting married because they’re shy and because no men ever get to see them.”
11 In Motley Tales this is followed by “Zavertyukhina, the one who suffers from rheumatism and collects old coins.” (A joke name meaning “all wrapped up.”)
12 Motley Tales this is followed by “And when my wife isn’t around, you might get a bit of . . .”
IVANOV, FIRST VERSION
Chekhov wrote Ivanhov, his first work to be staged, at the prompting of the theatrical impresario Korsh and in the wake of the creative gust that had produced the important transitional story “The Steppe.” He dashed off the play in under two 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 forms as dramatists require. I wanted to do something original; I didn’t hatch out a single villain, a single angel (though I couldn’t refrain from buffoons). I didn’t accuse anyone. I didn’t acquit anyone” (to his brother Aleksandr, October 24, 1887).
Ivanov was first played at Korsh’s Theatre in Moscow on November 19, 1887, for the benefit of Nikolay Svetlov, who created the role of Borkin; it enjoyed a mixed success. The actors’ praise and the audience’s plaudits made Chekhov euphoric, and he wrote to Aleksandr, “You can’t imagine what’s happened! From that meaningless little turd that is my playlet . . . there’s been a hell of a development . . . in his 32 years in the theater the prompter had never seen anything like it.” He triumphantly signed himself, “Schiller Shakespearovich Goethe” (November 24, 1887). But his younger brother Mikhail recalled the event differently: “The success of the performance was uneven; some hissed, others, the majority, applauded and called for the author, but in general Ivanov was misunderstood, and for a long time afterward the newspapers were explicating the personality of the character of its leading 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 “dark decade,” a period of political repression and social inaction. Ivanov’s 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 honorable and straightforward enthusiasm, like most educated gentry” was how Chekhov described him. His past was nobler than his present: his projects for serving the people — rational farming, higher education — have evaporated. Chekhov, however, wanted to avoid idealizing this disillusionment, by then a stale treatment, to an examination by the character himself of the reasons for his empty life and contemptible behavior. Ivanov was to suffer through his own awareness of wasted potential and vestigial honor. A basic dramatic problem was to keep the audience from romanticizing 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 rich psychological subject. Basically, the “plot” might have come from a typical society melodrama: 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.
The play’s lifeblood is gossip. In the first act, we hear of slanderous rumors about Ivanov, but no one takes them 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, though he warns Ivanov about it. Aided by Lvov, the rumors reach Anna’s ears, provoking her confrontation with her husband and her collapse. In the play’s first version, this theme continued into Act Four, with even Lebedev harboring doubts about Anna’s death. Ivanov, publicly charged with villainy by the Doctor, dies of a heart attack “because,” said Chekhov, “he can’t endure the outrageous insult” (to Aleksandr, November 20, 1887). This was to turn the play into a tract about provincial narrow-mindedness, and, indeed, many of the critics described Ivanov as the honorable but vacillating victim of scandalmongers.
After friends in St. Petersburg assured him that the character drawing was solid, and that, contrary to what some critics said, the play was not immoral, Chekhov decided on minor revisions. He realized that the final heart attack posed a problem for an actor while it undermined the real causes of Ivanov’s destruction. With a new ending, a monologue to clarify Ivanov’s state of mind, and some minimal rearrangement, it would be suitable for submission to the Imperial Alexandra Theatre in St. Petersburg. “Now my Mr. Ivanov will be much better understood. The ending doesn’t quite satisfy me (except for the gunshot, it’s all flabby), but I am comforted by the fact that it’s still in an unfinished form” (to Suvorin, December 19, 1888).
IVANOV
И‚aнo‚
Comedy in Four Acts and Five Tableaux
FIRST VERSION
CHARACTERS
IVANOV, NIKOLAY ALEKSEEVICH, Permanent member of the Council for Peasant Affairs1
ANNA PETROVNA, his wife, born Sarra Abramson2
SHABELSKY, MATVEY SEMYONOVICH, Count, his maternal uncle
LEBEDEV, PAVEL KIRILLYCH, Chairman of the Rural Board3
ZINAIDA SAVISHNA, his wife
SASHA, the Lebedevs daughter, 20
LVOV, YEVGENY KONSTANTINOVICH, a young country doctor4
BABAKINA, MARFA YEGOROVNA, a young widow, landowner, daughter of a rich merchant
KOSYKH, DMITRY NIKITICH, a tax collector
BORKIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH, a distant relative of Ivanov and manager of his estate
DUDKIN, the son of a rich factory owner
AVDOTYA NAZAROVNA, an old woman of no fixed profession
YEGORUSHKA, a poor relation of the Lebedevs
FIRST GUEST
SECOND GUEST
PYOTR, Ivanov’s manservant
GAVRILA, the Lebedevs’ manservant
GUESTS of both sexes, manservants
The action takes place in one of the districts5 of Central Russia.