56 From Act I of the operetta by Franz von Suppé (1879).
57 The diabolical tempter and naysayer in Goethe’s Faust and Gounod’s opera of it: “the Spirit which denies.”
58 In the original, “Tit Titych’s wedding.” Tit Titych Bruskin is a merchant in Ostrovsky’s comedy Your Binge, My Hangover (1856).
59 Latin: Customs are the result of laws.
60 The scientific term for “pinheads,” persons born with smaller than normal skulls.
61 Latin: I carry all I have on me.
62 Greek: I have found it! Attributed to Archimedes (ca. 287–212 B.C.), when he discovered the law of specific gravity.
63 The same unusual word that Medvedenko uses at the beginning of The Seagull.
64 A quotation from an ode by Lomonosov based on the Book of Job, which Khlestakov also quotes in Gogol’s Inspector General in a similar courting scene.
THE BEAR
As usual, Chekhov’s earliest reference to his work-in-progress was offhandedly negative: “Having nothing better to do, I wrote a vapid little French-style vaudevillette (vodevilchik) entitled The Bear (letter to I. L. Leontyev-Shcheglov, February 22, 1888). No sooner had it appeared in print than Chekhov’s friends insisted that he submit it to the dramatic censor and recommended the perfect actors to play it. The censor was not amused, disturbed by the “more than strange plot” and “the coarseness and indecency of the tone of the whole play,” and forbade its production. He was overruled, however, by a superior in the bureaucracy, who, by suppressing a few lines, rendered it suitable for the public. The play had its premiere at Korsh’s Theatre in Moscow on October 28, 1888, with the clever ingenue Nataliya Rybchin-skaya as Popova and Chekhov’s boyhood friend Nikolay Solovtsov as Smirnov. Solovtsov, a tall, ungainly fellow with a stentorian voice, had probably been in Chekhov’s mind for the role of the bear as he wrote it.
The Bear was, from the start, a runaway success: the audience roared with laughter and interrupted the dialogue with applause, and the newspaper praised it to the skies. Theaters all over Russia added it to their repertories and the best Russian actors clamored to play in it. In Chekhov’s lifetime it brought in regular royalties, and it has been constantly revived on both professional and amateur stages all over the world ever since.
The plot updates Petronius’s ancient Roman tale of the Widow of Ephesus, which Christopher Fry later turned into the one-act play A Phoenix Too Frequent. That ribald fable tells of a widow whose grief for a dead husband melts under the ardor of the soldier guarding the corpse of a crucified criminal. She eventually colludes with him to replace the body stolen during their lovemak-ing with her own deceased spouse. Chekhov substitutes for the corpse the carriage horse Toby, as a token of the widow’s transference of affection.
The Bear’s comedy derives from the characters’ lack of self-knowledge. The widow Popova fancies herself inconsolably bereaved, a fugitive from the world, while Smirnov takes himself to be a misogynist to the core. They both are alazons in the classic sense: figures made ludicrous by pretending to be more than they actually are. If the languishing Popova is based on the Petronian source, Smirnov is a descendant of Molière’s Alceste, professing a hatred of society’s hypocrisy but succumbing to a woman who exemplifies that society. The two poseurs come in conflict, and the roles reverse: the inconsolable relict snatches up a pistol and, like any case-hardened bully, insists on a duel, while the gruff woman-hater finds himself incapable of facing down his female opponent. (It was the improbable duel that most outraged the censors.) It is in the cards that the dimpled widow and the brute in muddy boots will fall into one another’s arms by the final curtain.
Nevertheless, the comedy is also grounded in the harsh facts of Russian rural life: lack of money. Like Ivanov, the play begins with a landowner having to pay the interest on a loan and not having the money to do so. Smirnov’s boorishness is prompted as much by his desperate fear at losing his estate by defaulting on his mortgage as Ivanov’s funk is by his inability to pay his workmen or his creditors. This financial stress will remain a constant in Chekhov’s plays, motivating the basic action of Uncle Vanya and culminating in the overriding themes of lending and loss in The Cherry Orchard.
THE BEAR
Me‰‚e‰ь
A Joke in One Act
(dedicated to N. N. Solovtsov)1
CHARACTERS
YELENA IVANOVNA POPOVA, a young widow with dimples in her cheeks, a landowner
GRIGORY STEPANOVICH SMIRNOV,2 a middle-aged landowner
LUKA, Popova’s man-servant, an old fellow
A drawing-room in Popova’s manor house.
I
POPOVA (in deep mourning, her eyes fixed on a portrait photograph) and LUKA.
LUKA. This won’t do, mistress . . . You’re running yourself down is all . . . The housemaid and the cook are out picking berries, every living thing rejoices, even the tabby cat, she knows how to have fun, running around outside, tracking dicky birds, while you sit inside the livelong day, like in a nunnery, and don’t have no fun. Honest to goodness! Just figure, a year’s gone by now, and you ain’t set foot outside the house!
POPOVA. And I never shall . . . What for? My life is already over. He lies in the grave, I’ve buried myself within these four walls . . . We’re both dead.
LUKA. There you go again! And I shouldn’t listen, honestly. Nikolay Mikhail-ovich is dead, that’s how it is with him, it’s God’s will, rest in peace . . . You done your bit of grieving—and that’s that, time to get on with your life. Can’t go on weeping and wearing black for the next hundred years. In my time my old woman died on me too . . . So what? I grieved a bit, I cried off and on for a month, and then I was over her, but if I was to weep and wail a whole lifetime, it’d be more than the old girl was worth. (Sighs.) You’ve neglected all the neighbors . . . You don’t go visiting yourself, and you don’t invite nobody here. We’re living, if you don’t mind my saying so, like spiders, — we never see the light of day. The footmen’s liveries have been et up by mice . . . It’d be a different matter if there wasn’t no decent people, but after all the county’s packed with ladies and gents . . . In Ryblovo there’s a regiment posted, officers like sugar plums, you can’t get your fill of looking at ‘em! And in camp not a Friday goes by without a ball and, just figure, every day the brass band plays music . . . Eh, mistress dearie! Young, beautiful, the picture of health—all you need is to live and enjoy yourself . . . Beauty’s not a gift that lasts forever, y’ know! Ten years from now or so, you’ll be in the mood for preening and dazzling the officer gents, but it’ll be too late.
POPOVA (resolutely). I beg you never to talk to me about that sort of thing! You know, from the day Nikolay Mikhailovich died, life has lost all meaning for me. It may look to you as if I’m alive, but looks are deceiving! I have taken an oath not to remove my mourning until I’m laid in my grave, nor to see the light of day . . . Do you hear me? Let his spirit see how much I love him . . . Yes, I know, you’re well aware that he was nothing but unjust to me, cruel and . . . and even unfaithful, but I shall be faithful to the day I die and show him that I know how to love. There, from the other side of the grave, he will see that I am just as I was before he died . . .