with: (sobbing). Then they raise the jib-halyards, brace the main topsail and others, at the afore-mentioned, close-haul the sail, and then they dash to the location of fore and main tack, haul the sheets and haul in the bowline . . . I’m cry . . . I’m crying . . . So happy . . .
NOTES
1 Most of the names are puns or plays on Russian words. Zhigalov recalls zhigalo, ringleader, bellwether; zhigalka, horse-fly, tallow candle; and zhiga, invective. Aplombov seems to come from the French aplomb, self-confidence; Nyunin, from nyuni, slavering lips; nyunit, to moan and groan; nyunya, whining child, cry-baby; Zmeyukina from zmey, dragon, zmeya, snake. Yat, the name of a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, sounded like є but written otherwise, thus providing a trap for schoolchildren and clerks (it was abolished in the spelling reforms of 1917). Mozgovoy, from mozg, brain; spinal cord, bone marrow. Revunov-Karaulov, one who cries for help (karaul).
2 Founded during the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878); its three ships were later ordered to the Pacific to transport prisoners to Vladivostok and the island of Sakhalin.
3 In Russian Orthodox wedding ceremonies, both the bride and the groom have attendants, who hold the crowns over their heads and accompany them in the procession.
4 Mispronounced French, Grand rond, s’il vous plaît. A “grand rond” is a round dance, a figure in a quadrille.
5 The Dutch philosopher Benedictus Spinoza (1632–1677) is confused here with the dancer Leone Espinosa (1825–1903), who worked at the Moscow Bolshoy Theatre from 1869 to 1872.
6 Mispronunciation of Haut Sauternes, a sweet white dessert wine. Drinking it before the meal is another sign of gaucherie.
7 The 1829 poem by Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837)—“I loved you once, perhaps I love still . . . / Love has not fully died out in my heart . . .”—was set to music by many composers, including Alyabiev, Bulakhov, Varlamov, and Gurilev, etc.
8 In Russian, Dymba not only makes mistakes in grammar but cannot pronounce the sound ch.
9 Quotation from the poem “The Sail” (“Parus,” 1832) by Mikhail Lermontov, which Chekhov also quotes in the last act of Three Sisters.
10 The idea is that the young couple must kiss to “sweeten things up.”
11 Ma chère, French, my dear.
12 In the original, Boulanger. Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger (1837–1891), French Minister of War from 1886 to 1887, an ambitious and reactionary troublemaker, who preached revenge against the Prussians.
13 In his memoirs, Chekhov’s brother Mikhail reported that in 1883 Chekhov had inherited a book from the late F. F. Popudolgo, Commands for the Most Important Naval Maneuvers, which “provided him material for the role of Revunov-Karaulov.”
14 In Russian, chelovek can mean both “human being, person” and “waiter.” The Captain can be heard to appeal to his fellow men to deliver him from this inhuman herd.
THE WOOD GOBLIN
In 1888, even before he had finished work on Ivanov, Chekhov suggested to Aleksey Suvorin that they collaborate on a comedy. He drew up a list of characters, episodes, and a distribution of assignments. Suvorin soon dropped out, and Chekhov reworked the play into The Wood Goblin in spring 1889. On May 14, 1889, Chekhov wrote Suvorin:
The play turned out boring, pieced together like a mosaic . . . nowhere in the whole play is there a single lackey or peripheral comic character or little widow. There are eight characters in all and only three of them are episodic. As a rule I tried to avoid superfluity, and I think I have succeeded.
What Chekhov saw as a structural flaw, the play’s mosaic-like quality, would become a characteristic element of his playwriting in the future.
The Wood Goblin was read by the committee that passed on plays for the Petersburg state theaters. Its devastating and unanimous decision was to reject it as a “beautiful dramatized novella,” as Chekhov confided to the actor Nikolay Pavel Svobodin (October 25, 1889). However, the play was solicited by Chekhov’s boyhood friend Solovtsov, who had left Korsh’s theater to start a new one in Moscow with the heiress Mariya Abramova. So The Wood Goblin, with a hastily rewritten fourth act, was first presented at Abramova’s private theater on December 27, 1889, in a very weak production. The role of the beautiful Yelena was taken by the corpulent Mariya Glebova, and, as Chekhov’s younger brother remembered, “to the romantic lead, the actor Roschin-Insarov, making a declaration of love to her was positively incongruous: he called her beautiful, yet he could not get his arms around her to embrace her. Then the glow of the forest fire was such that it aroused laugh-ter.”1 Dissatisfied, Chekhov withdrew the play, which had been received with indifference.
His dissatisfaction related, however, more to the play’s internal imperfections than to its faulty staging. The problem with The Wood Goblin is that it tries very hard to make a positive statement. It had been preceded by the novella “A Dismal Story,” whose central characters, a played-out scientist and his ward, a despairing actress, have reached an impasse in life. No way out of the sterility that confronts them seems possible. Critics had been dwelling on Chekhov’s pessimism and it was beginning to get under his skin. He was drawn to the popular teachings of Tolstoy, centered around the passive resistance to evil and ascetic way of life, but he was unable to give himself wholly to any doctrine. Still, he experimented with these fashionable beliefs in his new play.
In The Wood Goblin, Chekhov subscribes to the Tolstoyan notion of universal love as a means of unraveling the Gordian knot of social problems. The cast of characters he had drawn up for Suvorin had included two Tolstoyan characters: Anuchin, an old man whose public repentance made him the happiest person in the district, and the pilgrim Fedosy, a plain-speaking and optimistic lay brother of the Mount Athos monastery. All that survives of these characters in The Wood Goblin is a last-act speech of Orlovsky Sr., who relates his midlife crisis and regeneration.
Baldly put, the speech in which Dr. Khrushchov, the “Wood Goblin,” complains that people must treat one another as human beings, without preconceptions and labels, formulates the play’s ideology. The happy ending Chekhov boasted of comes about as the characters discover this idea for themselves. The couples who had been divided by mutual distrust now link up, and stand on the brink of a new life full of truth.
In the first version of The Wood Goblin, this was not entirely clear, and Chekhov worked hard to remove similarities to Ivanov. He radically changed the character of Zheltukhin, originally portrayed as a slogan-spouting liberal, prone to quoting the protest poetry of Nikolay Nekrasov. In the produced version, the characters are evenly divided between the self-centered rationalists (Uncle Georges, his mother, Zheltukhin, the Professor, and Sofiya before her reformation) and the pure in heart, who avoid self-analysis and are spontaneous in their reactions (the Orlovskys, Yulya, Dyadin). Chekhov changed the denouement to point this up. Originally, the Professor was to undergo a change of heart, see the error of his ways, and forgive Yelena, while Fyodor, who had abducted her, would be chastened by news of his father’s death. Instead, the absurd Dyadin is made to make off with Yelena, and Orlovsky Sr. does not die of shock. Now it is Fyodor who undergoes a sudden and unconvincing conversion to simplicity, while the Professor remains obtuse to the end.