FR. IVAN. Well, you know best.
LADY IN BLACK (comes out from behind a pillar, staggering). Who’s there? Take me away . . . take me away . . .
FR. IVAN. What’s that? Who’s there? (Frightened.) What are you after, good woman?
FR. ALEKSEY. Lord, forgive us sinners . . .
LADY IN BLACK. Take me away . . . take me away . . . (Groans.) I’m the sister of Officer Ivanov . . . his sister.
FR. IVAN. Why are you here?
LADY IN BLACK. I’ve poisoned myself . . . out of hate . . . He abused me . . . Why is he happy? My God . . . (Shouts.) Save me, save me! (Sinks to the floor.) Everyone should take poison . . . everyone! There’s no justice . . .
FR. ALEKSEY (horrified). What blasphemy! God, what blasphemy!
LADY IN BLACK. Out of hatred . . . Everyone should take poison . . . (Groans and rolls on the floor.) She’s in her grave, while he . . . he . . . Insult a woman and you insult God . . . A woman is destroyed . . .
FR. ALEKSEY. What blasphemy to religion! (Clasps his hands.) What blasphemy to life!
LADY IN BLACK (tears at what she is wearing and shouts). Save me! Save me! Save me! . . .
Curtain
and all the rest I leave to A. S. Suvorin’s imagination.
NOTES
1 In Russian Orthodox churches, the raised chancel on the eastern side is reserved for clergy and choristers. The iconostasis, a screen of painted icons, richly carved frames, and eternal lamps, separates the choir from the sanctuary. The central doors in the iconostasis are called the tsarskie vrata, or royal gates, and may be used only by priests.
2 The high hat of violet velvet, characteristic of Greek Orthodox clergy.
3 Church Slavonic, the lectern in Greek Orthodox churches.
4 A verse from the Psalms, sung before the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are read. In the Western Bible, this is from Psalm 21.
5 Epistles to the Ephesians 5:20–33.
6 John 2:1–11.
7 Mispronunciation of Qu’est-ce que c’est, French, what is it?
8 Paraphrase of a line in Griboedov’s satiric comedy Woe from Wit; Famusov says, “If for philosophizing you go in, right away your brain starts to spin” (Act II, scene 1).
9 Chekhov seems to have forgot that he earlier distinguished Fr. Nikolay as the shaggy one.
AN INVOLUNTARY TRAGEDIANC
Chekhov had promised the comic actor Konstantin Varlamov an acting vehicle and turned to his story One of Many (1887) about a paterfamilias who must spend his time shunting back and forth between the dacha where his loved ones are summering and the town, where he carries out their innumerable commissions. For the sake of the stage, Chekhov altered the list of errands, deleting from the items to be purchased “a child’s coffin” and expunging racy remarks that could pass in print but would never get past the dramatic censor. Varlamov did not in fact appear in the play, so the first actor to create the harried family man was the far less famous M. I. Bibikov, at an amateur perfomance at the Petersburg German Club on October 1, 1889. Basically, Tragedian is a straightforward comic monologue, with the officious friend acting as “feed” or straight man.
The allusion to Molière in the original title—A Tragedian in Spite of Himself—alerts one to the extreme contradictions of the protagonist. Molière dealt in paradoxical natures: the imaginary invalid, the learned ladies, the bourgeois aristocrat, or the misanthrope, originally subtitled “the grouch in love” (l’atrabilaire amoureux). Described as “the father of a family,” Tolkachov is a characteristic hero of a Chekhov farce, being a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He begins the play by calling for a pistol to commit suicide and ends it by quoting Othello, demanding the blood of his interlocutor. Between these two extremes, the banal situation he describes comes less from the world of tragedy than from that of existential absurdity His multifarious errands compel him to live in a muddle of inanimate objects. “For instance, do you put the heavy brass mortar and pestle in with the glass lampshade or the carbolic acid with the tea? How do you pack the bottles of beer with the bicycle?” This surrealistic mélange, followed by a hyperbolic comparison of married life to the Israelites’ labor in the Egyptian brickyards or the Spanish Inquisition, creates an impression of an ordinary middle-class existence as Bosch’s hell. Although firmly in the Gogol tradition, Chekhov is here halfway to Jarry and Ionesco.
AN INVOLUNTARY TRAGEDIAN (FROM THE LIFE OF VACATIONERS)
Tрa„иk пoнe‚oлe
(Иэ ‰aчнoй жизни)
A Joke in One Act
CHARACTERS1
IVAN IVANOVICH TOLKACHOV, the father of a family
ALEKSEY ALEKSEEVICH MURASHKIN, his friend
The action takes place in Petersburg, in Murashkins apartment.
Murashkins study. Well-upholstered furniture—MURASHKIN is sitting at a writing desk. Enter TOLKACHOV, holding a glass globe for a lamp, a toy bicycle, three hatboxes, a large bundle of clothing, a shopping bag filled with bottled beer, and lots of little parcels. He has a dazed look in his eyes and drops on to the sofa in exhaustion.
MURASHKIN. Good afternoon, Ivan Ivanych! Delighted to see you! What have you been up to?
TOLKACHOV (breathing hard). My good friend, dear heart . . . I’ve come to you with a request . . . Please . . . lend me a revolver until tomorrow. Be a friend!
MURASHKIN. What’ll you do with a revolver?
TOLKACHOV. I need it . . . Ugh, good grief! . . . Let me have some water . . . Quick, water! . . . I need it . . . Tonight I have to drive through a dark forest, so you see, I . . . in case of emergency. Lend it to me, do me a favor!
MURASHKIN. Uh-oh, you’re lying, Ivan Ivanych! What the deuce do you mean dark forest? More likely, you’re up to something? I can see by your face that you’re up to no good! What’s the matter with you? Do you feel ill?
TOLKACHOV. Hold on, let me catch my breath . . . Oof, good grief! I’m dog tired. There’s this feeling running all through my body and my brain-pan that I’ve been made into shish kebab. I can’t stand another minute of it. Be a friend, don’t ask questions, don’t go into details . . . lend me a revolver! For pity’s sake!
MURASHKIN. That’s enough of that! Ivan Ivanych, why so down in the mouth? You’re the father of a family, a senior civil servant! You should be ashamed!
TOLKACHOV. What kind of father of a family? I’m a martyr! I’m a beast of burden, a peon, a slave, a contemptible worm, who goes on hoping against hope and puts off taking his own life! I’m a doormat, a numbskull, an idiot! Why do I go on living? What’s it for? (Leaps up.) Go on, tell me, what am I living for? What’s the point of this neverending series of moral and physical torments? I can understand being a martyr to an idea, sure! but to be a martyr to who the hell knows what, lady’s petticoats and lampshades, no! — thank you kindly! No, no, no! I’ve had enough! Enough!