page 523 / After: I should have done what I intended . . . — This is all I wanted . . . (Shows a revolver and hides it again.) It’s easier to kill myself than to ruin your life. But I thought that you would listen to common sense and . . .
SASHA. Hand over the revolver!
IVANOV. I won’t.
SASHA. Hand it over, I tell you!
IVANOV. Sasha, I have too much love for you and too much anger for small talk. I’m asking you to call it off! It’s a final demand in the name of fairness, humane feeling! (Censor 1889)
page 525 / Replace: I was young . . . fury chokes me!
with: I’ll ask you only about one thing. If once in your life you encountered a young man, ardent, sincere, no fool, and you see that he loves, hates and believes not as everyone else does, works and hopes for ten, makes an unusual marriage, tilts at windmills, bangs his head against the wall, if you see how he has hoisted a load which snaps his spine and strains his sinews, then say to him: don’t hasten to squander your strength on youth alone, preserve it for your whole life; get drunk, get excited, work, but be temperate, otherwise fate will punish you cruelly! At thirty you will already have a hangover and you will be old. With a heavy head, with an indolent soul, worn out, broken down, without faith, without love, without a goal, like a shadow, you will loiter amidst people and not know: who are you? why are you alive? what do you want? And it will seem to you that love is rubbish, affection cloying, that there’s no sense in hard work, that songs and passionate speeches are vulgar and stale. And wherever you go, everywhere you will bring with you longing, cold boredom, dissatisfaction, revulsion to life, and there will be no salvation for you. Ruined irrevocably! You’ll say, how before you there stood a man of thirty-five already impotent, disappointed, crushed by his insignificant accomplishment, how he burned with shame in your eyes, was mocked for his weakness, how pride was aroused in him, and how stupidly he ended up! How this raving choked him! (Censor 1889; Northern Herald)
page 526 / After: Positively a comedian! —
SASHA. It doesn’t matter, we’ll all go together right now. (Takes Ivanov by the arm.) Let’s go!
IVANOV. An energetic individual! (Laughs.) I’m marrying a drill sergeant . . . (Censor 1889)
NOTES
1 “What my Ivanov says to Doctor Lvov is said by a worn-out, haggard man; on the contrary, a man must constantly if not crawl out, then peep out of his shell, and he must grapple with ideas all his life, otherwise it’s not a life, but an existence” (Chekhov to his brother Mikhail, March 5, 1901).
2 Italian: a guide who shows antiquities. The pretentious Third Guest is misusing foreign words.
3 Dudkin (Mr. Bagpipe), “son of a rich factory-owner,” was a character in the first version of Ivanov. Chekhov cut Dudkin from the script in the interests of a more serious play, and divided his lines between First and Third Guests.
4 Nikolay Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov (1836–1861), liberal critic and journalist, who had a great influence over Russian youth in the 1860s. His article (“The Kingdom of Darkness”) on Ostrovsky’s plays suggested that Russia was in thrall to conservative, domestic tyranny; the term crops up in Borkin’s compliments in the next scene.
5 Kulak, literally, fist, applied to sharp-dealing, tight-fisted tradesmen and rich peasants.
6 Since the serfs were not emancipated until 1861, Shabelsky probably had owned serfs in his youth.
7 Chatsky is the leading character in Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit (1821–1823), a young gentleman returned from abroad who is disgusted by the hypocrisy of Moscow society. The society, in turn, decides, on the basis of his anti-social behavior, that he is mad.
8 A follower of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), whose systematic dialectics rejected irrationality.
9 Francis Bacon (1561–1626), empirical philosopher and natural scientist, who insisted on facts. Bacon’s experiential approach is at the farthest pole from Hegel’s abstractions.
10 Manfred, the hero of Lord Byron’s eponymous poem, a romantic outlaw who, with the help of magic, controls the spirits of nature. The poem greatly influenced Pushkin and Lermontov.
11 The English scientist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) argued that in natural selection the female of a species chooses for reproduction the strongest or most capable male.
12 A reference to Oblomov, the protagonist of Goncharov’s eponymous novel of 1859, an indolent landowner who spends his days in a dressing gown, lolling on a sofa, incapable of making a decision.
TATYANA REPINA
Tatyana Repina is an anomaly among Chekhov’s one-acts. It can be understood only in relationship to another play by someone else. In 1889, Aleksey Suvorin wrote a “comedy,” founded on an actual occurrence: the suicide, eight years earlier, of the young actress and operetta singer Yevlaliya Kadmina. Jilted by her lover, she poisoned herself and came on stage to die in the last act of Ostrovsky’s Vasilisa Melentyeva, whose heroine also succumbs to poisoning. Kadmina perished in gruesome torments before the eyes of a Kharkov audience, and so won posthumous notoriety. Chekhov considered her an “extraordinary celebrity” and even collected her photograph.
Suvorin’s Tatyana Repina follows the facts fairly closely. Repina, a high-spirited and talented provincial actress, is thrown over by her lover, who hopes to repair his ruined fortunes by marrying an heiress. Deeply hurt, publicly insulted by a gross Jewish banker, seeing nothing to live for, Tatyana takes poison before going on stage and dies performing the last act of Ostrovsky’s play as her friends look on aghast. From a modern standpoint, Chekhov’s enthusiasm for Suvorin’s sensation drama is hard to comprehend; yet he was lavish in his praise and offered copious advice in his letters. He predicted a success that came to pass in both capitals, and got embroiled in the Moscow rehearsals as an intercessor between actors and author, while Suvorin was busy helping to stage Chekhov’s Ivanov in Petersburg.
Chekhov’s one-act is therefore a kind of private joke, the “what happens after the curtain goes down” that St. John Hankin perfected in his Dramatic Sequels. Chekhov hypothesizes an epidemic of suicides following in the wake of Repina’s desperate act, and depicts the marriage taking place between the dead actress’s lover and his rich fiancée. The hieratic formality of the Orthodox wedding ceremony authentically reproduced, with interpolations of trivial remarks by the bystanders, provides the structure. The counterpoint between the sonorous Church Slavonic with its portentous vows and the mundane chitchat of the wedding party produces a sour and sardonic effect. Eventually, the church choirs have to compete with a worldly chorus of “Voices,” which begins to spread the news of the suicide epidemic, passing along fragments of gossip. In this antiphony, female neurotics are reproved for being copycats while the choristers intone “Lord, have mercy” and “Amen.”
Suvorin’s Tatyana Repina is interesting in foreshadowing The Seagull. Chekhov’s favorite character in Suvorin’s play was the journalist Adashev, who denigrates his profession as a man of letters in a manner that Chekhov replicated in the Trigorin-Nina interview in Seagull.1 It is Adashev, a raisonneur, who tells Tatyana, after she has, unbeknownst to him, taken the poison, his opinion that suicide is cowardice.