29 “Talent” is one of Chekhov’s favorite words of praise, equivalent almost to “genius.” His characters name it as a positive quality when they are unable to specify someone’s virtues. The opposite, “untalented,” is extremely negative.
30 Zhuchka, from zhuk, beetle, a common name for a black dog.
31 The young poet Lensky sings this aria in Chaikovsky’s opera Yevgeny Onegin (based on Pushkin’s verse novel), just before he is killed in a duel.
32 The title character of Goncharov’s novel, synonymous with sloth, indolence, lack of energy, negligence, and apathy.
33 A water nymph or rusalka is not a mermaid; although she is dangerous and sexy, she is also undead, usually the spirit of a drowned girl. A water sprite or vodovoy is more benign, the aquatic equivalent of a wood sprite or leshy.
34 From Nikolay Nekrasov’s nature poem “The Green Sound” (1862). In the earlier version of the play, Zheltukhin quotes it at length in the last act. See Variants.
35 The Chechens are fiercely independent, Islamic natives of the eastern Caucasus, occupying west Daghestan. They fought desperately against Russian aggression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until their chieftain, Shamyl, surrendered in 1859, when many of them fled to the mountains or to Armenia.
36 In the original, Voinitsky uses the formal “you,” vy, whereas the Professor addresses him with the informal ty.
37 The famous opening line of the Mayor in Gogol’s classic comedy The Inspector General, Act I, scene 1, to the officials who have gathered in his house. A cliché joke of pedagogues.
38 Latin: “The same night awaits us all,” from Horace’s Odes, Book 1, ode 28.
39 Since Finland was part of the Russian Empire, its rural areas within easy reach of St. Petersburg were dotted with summer cottages and villas. The Professor is trying to find a cheap way of returning to the scene of his celebrity.
40 Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788–1860), apostle of pessimism, and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Russian novelist (1821–1881), apostle of salvation through Slavic Christianity.
41 Literally, “why break chairs?,” a quotation from the first act of Gogol’s Inspector General, when the Mayor is complaining about an overzealous schoolteacher.
42 A joke. Most Russians would consider Pushkin, rather than the neoclassic and derivative Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–17 65), to be the greatest Russian poet.
43 In the original, “worthy of the brush of Aivazovsky.” Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817–1900), Russian painter famous for his seascapes, particularly storms and naval battles, whom Chekhov had met in Feodosiya on the Black Sea in 1888.
44 The Prince’s cavatina from Dargomyzhsky’s opera The Rusalka (Act I, scene 2); in its source, Pushkin’s dramatic fragment, the Prince’s words open the last scene. Chekhov is suggesting that, by hiding at the mill, Yelena had become a kind of water nymph.
45 Part of Yulya’s economy: refined sugar, which has to be bought, is more expensive than fruit jam, which can be made on the estate.
46 A joke name, meaning “Recent Settler.”
47 From Nekrasov’s poem “To the Sowers” (1876).
48 Different brands of revolver. Fyodor, as a military man, would prefer the Smith & Wesson, which was standard issue for the Russian army, to a French make.
49 Dyadin is alluding to two of Chekhov’s favorite works, Offenbach’s comic opera La Belle Hélène (1864) and Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. The mixture is characteristic.
50 At the end of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the statue of Dona Anna’s father, the Commendatore whom Don Juan had slain, comes to life and drags the Don to hell.
51 Misquoted from Pushkin’s verse fable Ruslan and Lyudmila.
NOTES to Variants
1 A leading character in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), a cynical “Nihilist,” taken to be a caricature of the radicals of the time, until the critic Pisaryov cited Bazarov as the prototype of the progressive democrat.
2 Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889), a writer influenced by French socialism and Russian populism; his novels were satirical indictments of Russian life.
3 A roundabout way of saying “asleep”; Morpheus was the Greek god of dreams.
4 The Greek sun god, an avatar of Apollo, whose drive across the heavens accounted for the daylight hours.
5 Nekrasov’s “The Green Sound” had become a rallying cry for progressive Russian youth in the 1870s, thanks to its platform recitation by the acress Mariya Yermolova.
THE CELEBRATION
In 1891, private commercial banks were a relatively new feature in Russian life. The State bank itself dated back only to the reforms of 1866. The financial institution in Chekhov’s farce is about to celebrate its fifteenth birthday, on which occasion the bank manager Shipuchin will receive a testimonial from grateful shareholders. While he prepares a speech of thanks and his clerk Khirin is, with an ill will, crunching numbers for the thank-you speech, they are interrupted, first by Shipuchin’s giddy and garrulous wife, and then by old Mrs. Merchutkina, nagging on behalf of her civil-servant husband. The more the women talk, the more the men are driven to distraction. The deputation arrives with its scroll and silver loving-cup to behold a vision of chaos: the manager’s wife fainting on the sofa, the old lady collapsing in the arms of a babbling Shipuchin, and Khirin threatening the females with murder.
The peculiar position of The Celebration lies halfway between the failed experiment of The Wood Goblin and Chekhov’s transitional play The Seagull. Founded on a published short story, “A Defenseless Creature” (1887), it was written in December 1891 but not performed until a Chekhov evening at the Moscow Hunt Club in 1900. By the time The Celebration reached the stage, Chekhov was already known to the public as the author of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Many were upset by what seemed a throwback to comic anarchy. The Moscow News referred to it as a “strange play” that ends with “the bank manager making an insulting gesture at his bookkeeper, while the latter tears books and files to pieces, tossing the ravaged pieces in the manager’s face.” Chekhov later rewrote this finale into the Gogolian tableau that greets the astonished delegation of shareholders.
The first St. Petersburg production, on the stage of the Alexandra Theatre in May 1903, was even more questionably received. Although the audience was dying with laughter at the antics of the elephantine Varlamov as Khirin and the hilarious comedienne Levkeeva as Merchutkina, certain critics wondered at the crude vulgarity of it all, and speculated about whether such a piece had a place in a national theater. They could not reconcile its extravagant comedy with the Chekhov they had come to expect.
There is a savagery to The Celebration that exceeds even the contumely of The Wedding. Each member of the comic quartet is despicable: both women are portrayed as idiotic chatterboxes, the clerk is a crabbed misogynist, and the bank manager is an ineffectual fussbudget. The setting enforces hypocrisy. As Shipuchin says, “at home I can be a slob, a low brow, and indulge my bad habits, but here everything has to be on a grand scale. This is a bank!” The impending ceremony imposes a temporal pressure that propels the mounting hysteria. The result is a hilarious clash of monomanias, not at all what the textbooks call a “Chekhovian mood.”