page 448 / After: has his good points . . . — NATALIYA STEPANOVNA. Absolutely none!
CHUBUKOV. He’s pedigreed . . . (C, L)
page 448 / After: That’s not true, sir! . . . — The master of hounds is a drunken ignoramus, and that’s why he hit him. (C, L)
page 449 / After: Puppy! — A walking medicine chest!
page 449 / After: Hypocritical fraud! — I know you through and through!
page 449 / After: You pipsqueak! —
NATALIYA STEPANOVNA. Splasher is a million times better than Dasher! Bullock Fields are ours! So there!
CHUBUKOV. Bullock Fields are ours! (C, L)
page 450 / After: NATALIYA STEPANOVNA. Worse! —
LOMOV. Better!
NATALIYA STEPANOVNA. Worse! (C, L, NT, P)
NOTES
1 From chubuk, a long-stemmed pipe of Turkish origin.
2 From lom, a shard, scrap, bit of waste.
3 Lomov uses the euphemistic term polozhenie, or situation, referring to the Imperial decree of 1861, emancipating the serfs but not endowing them with land.
4 A direct quotation from A. S. Griboedov’s satiric comedy Woe from Wit (Act I, scene 10).
5 A well-known breeder.
IVANOV, FINAL VERSION
The acceptance of Ivanov at the Alexandra Theatre made revisions all the more urgent. Chekhov’s friend, the millionaire publisher Aleksey Suvorin, kept advising him to beef up the character of Sasha, especially now that the star actress Mariya Savina was to play her. So Chekhov added Sasha to the attackers in Act Four, and had Ivanov taking active measures in his own defense. Moreover, Suvorin insisted on misreading the central protagonist, which constrained Chekhov to write long expository speeches, explanations, confessions, and acts of contrition to counter preconceptions of heroism and villainy. He gave his hero 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 is a great man . . . then, obviously, my play won’t come off, and there can be no talk of a production” (to Suvorin, December 30, 1888). (See Variants to First Version.)
Doctor Lvov also needed revising. In traditional drama, doctors were raisonneurs, whose sagacious moralizing clued the audience into the way to think about the characters. Lvov, however, does not heal breaches; he creates them through his purblind and self-righteous assumptions. In this respect, he much resembles Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, who, in his quixotic attempt to strip away illusions, destroys the lives of those around him. Chekhov’s task was to make sure that Lvov did not come across either as an objective spokesman or a fatuous prig. As he wrote to Suvorin, “Such persons are necessary, and for the most part sympathetic. To draw them as caricatures, even in the interests of the stage, is dishonorable and serves no purpose” (December 30, 1888).
Rehearsals for the Petersburg production went badly, despite a strong cast, and Chekhov was dissatisfied with the comic actor Vladimir Davydov, who played the lead in a monotonous style to indicate seriousness. Even though the opening night was a huge success, Chekhov sneaked away, regarding the ovation as a binge that would later give him a severe hangover. He continued to revise Ivanov, dropping one comic character, Dudkin, and, in general, toning down the farcical elements. Chekhov intended to “sum up everything that’s been written so far about whining and languishing people, and in my Ivanov put an end to such writing” (to Suvorin, January 7, 1889). A third version appeared in 1889, with more explanations between Lvov and Anna, and the removal of Ivanov’s monologue in the last act. Even then, Chekhov was not content and kept tinkering with it until 1901.
Chekhov never managed to eliminate the mannerisms of boulevard drama that vitiated the subtlety of his concept. The Act Two curtain, with a consumptive wife intruding on her husband in the arms of another woman, is effective claptrap; at least we are spared the fainting that is described in the next act. Scenes of vituperation rise, in the best melodrama manner, to one consummate insult. “Kike bitch,” Ivanov screams at Anna in his ugliest moment; “Bastard” (or “Cad,” “Bounder”—podiets is too dated to be translated easily) is the summation of Lvov’s contempt for Ivanov. Chekhov was to handle the slanging-match between Arkadina and Treplyov in The Seagull more dexterously. Even the final suicide is, as the critic Aleksandr Kugel opined, “a sacrifice made by Chekhov’s soul to the god of theatrical gimmickry,” literally ending the play with a bang. It may have been copied directly from Luka Antropov’s popular comedy-melodrama Will-o’-the-Wisps (1873).
For a modern audience, the anti-Semitic slurs are a problem. The Jews were the largest and most persecuted minority in the Russian Empire, officially segregated into an area of Western and Southern Russia known as the Pale of Settlement. Seen as aliens, they were severely limited as to education and profession, as well as residence, heavily taxed, and often subjected to the periodic massacres known as pogroms. Although Chekhov privately used the slighting term zhid (“Yid,” “kike”) without thinking twice about it, at a time when anti-Semitism was public policy, his tolerance and lack of prejudice were exceptional. His fiction is filled with admirable or sympathetic Jewish characters. Two years before he wrote Ivanov, he may have proposed marriage to Yevdokiya Éfros, a Jew who refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. Later on, her husband, the lawyer Yefim Konovitser, became one of many Jews on friendly terms with Chekhov, among them the painter Isaak Levitan. In 1898, Chekhov broke with his close friend and associate Suvorin because the publisher’s newspapers supported the anti-Semitic faction in the Dreyfus affair.
Anna is a familiar literary type, the noble, self-sacrificing Jewess descended from Ivanhoe’s Rebecca of York, who, in nineteenth-century fiction, drama, and opera, is nobler than her “race” and usually dies or converts for love of a Christian. Ivanov is shown married to a Jew as a token of his quixotic social idealism. It is akin to a white South African marrying a Zulu woman in protest against apartheid. The revulsion Ivanov feels for Anna is part and parcel of his general loss of ideals. The comedown from his once noble if unrealistic stance to his present moral torpor is revealed at the end of Act Three when he insults her.
Within the conventional framework, a Chekhovian sense of atmospherics is beginning to emerge. He knew well the resonance that derived from a properly chosen setting, and structured the play to alternate between private and public life. We first see Ivanov alone, seated in a natural surrounding against the background of his house. He is outside it, because it represents to him a suffocating prison to be escaped. The primal image of an isolated Ivanov is almost immediately shattered by Borkin with his gun. The unused firearm of the opening will be recalled in the gunshot that ends the play.
As if to exacerbate the incursions into his privacy, Ivanov flees to a more peopled spot, the party at the Lebedevs’. But there the guests are already yawning at the very boredom he hoped to avoid. Act Two begins in a crowd of people, some so anonymous as to be designated merely as First Guest, Second Guest, etc. Even before Ivanov and Shabelsky appear, their lives are trotted out as slander and conjecture; Ivanov’s innermost motives are distorted, and his most intimate action here, the embrace of Sasha, is intruded upon by the worst possible witness, his wife.