71 A Mongolian living on the Caspian sea. Ethnic Russians held them in contempt for their flat faces.
72 A river in northern Italy, once the border between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy. By crossing the Rubicon in 49 B.C., Julius Caesar began a civil war; so the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” has come to mean “taking a decisive step.”
73 Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804–1857), Russian composer, who wrote the first national Rus sian operas, A Life for the Tsar (1836) and Ruslan and Lyudmila (1841).
74 Voinitsev is quoting from a Russian translation that corresponds only roughly to Shakespeare’s “Could you on this mountain leave to feed, / And batten on this moor?” (Act III, scene 4). Or else “O shame! where is thy blush! Rebellious hell, / If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones, / To flaming youth let virtue be as wax, / And melt in her own fire.”
75 Possibly a paraphrase of “Give me that man that is not passion’s slave. . . .” The “nymph” line is misquoted by Lopakhin in Act Two of The Cherry Orchard.
76 Nicholas I (1796–1855), an absolutist monarch, militarized all Russia and instituted the reactionary “Holy Alliance”; he waged wars against Persia, Turkey, Polish insurgents, and, finally, in the Crimean War, against England and France as well.
77 Sebastopol, a port city on the Black Sea, played a major role in the Crimean War (1853–1856); after a siege of one year, later described by Lev Tolstoy, it fell to the enemy.
78 The Russian for tip is na chay, literally, for tea, but it is assumed that the recipient will spend it on something stronger.
79 Latin: I love, thou lovest, he loves . . . One of the first declensions learned in a Latin class; see Three Sisters, note 57.
80 The ten plagues visited on the Egyptians by God to persuade them to let the Hebrews go. See Exodus 7–10.
81 Quotations from Macbeth and Hamlet. Platonov still doesn’t take Osip seriously.
82 A constellation of Russian literary geniuses: besides the poet Pushkin, Ivan Krylov (1768–1844), the great fabulist, and Nikolay Gogol (1809–1852), the great comic prose writer and dramatist.
83 German: Send for him, my dear.
84 To call her solely by her first name implies intimacy. To use both first name and patronymic is more formal.
85 The method was to steep the matches in water to release the sulphur in their tips, and then drink the water.
86 Greek physician (480–377 B.C.), whose oath is still administered to doctors of medicine.
87 Correctly, chininum sulphuricum, sulphate of quinine, an alkaloid found in cinchona bark, used in treating malaria. Later in life, Chekhov named his dachshund Quinine.
88 The Greek philosopher Socrates (470–399 B.C.) remained impassive in the face of his death at the hands of the Athenian state.
89 French: flying blister-flies.
90 Italian: the comedy is over! Chekhov also puts it in Astrov’s mouth in Uncle Vanya.
91 A square in central Moscow, bounded by the Bolshoy and Maly theaters.
92 In Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus blinds himself when he becomes aware that he has murdered his father and wed his mother.
NOTES for Variants
1 Latin: in a healthy body.
2 Demosthenes (383–322 B.C.), Greek orator, was famous for his political speeches against Philip of Macedon.
3 Yiddish: So must one live in this world, my dear sir!
4 French: And I rub, rub, / And look there / Some company’s come / To the house.
5 See Untitled Play, note 42.
6 Latin: in full, Suum cuique pulcrum, Everyone thinks his own is most beautiful.
7 In Greek mythology, a Gorgon whose hideous face and glaring eyes could turn men to stone.
8 In the Old Testament, the wife of Potiphar, the Pharaoh’s butler, tried to seduce his slave Joseph and, when he resisted, accused him of rape. See Genesis 39.
9 A comic juxtaposition of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher and a contemporary Russian news commentator.
10 Bad pronunciation of the French, Je vous salue!, So long!
ALONG THE HIGHWAY
Chekhov wrote this “dramatic étude” — which he privately referred to as a “little nonsense for the stage” — in autumn 1884. The piece was based on his short story, “Autumn,” which had appeared the previous year. Story and play share the same locale, Uncle Tikhon’s tavern, and the same basic premise: To pay for another shot of vodka, a nobleman on the skids gives the tavernkeeper a locket with the portrait of his unfaithful but still beloved wife. A peasant who used to be in his service recognizes the gentleman and relates his tale of woe.
Adapting this for the stage, Chekhov conscientiously enlarged his canvas. The anonymous “company of cabmen and pilgrims” is differentiated into the pilgrims Nazarovna and Yefimovna, the religious itinerant Savva, and the factory worker Fedya. The important new astringent in the dramatic blend is the ruffian Yegor Merik, who had also suffered an unhappy love affair in the past. Unfortunately, Chekhov felt that his prose sketch was too static as it stood, and so he had recourse to a violent climax. The gentleman’s wife, by the unlike-liest of coincidences, takes shelter in the pothouse and is almost killed by the delirious Merik. The story had ended with the author’s rhetorical question, “Spring, where art thou?” The play concludes with Merik’s overwrought exclamation, “My heart is breaking! My wretched heart is breaking! Take pity on me, Christian folk!”
The mitigating factor are speeches of the transients, especially the workman Fedya, dreaming of perfect cities and free arable land in the East. These, along with the religious quotations of the pilgrims, function like the lyrical metaphors in Gogol, providing a contrast, albeit a Utopian one, to the squalor depicted on the stage.
The play was submitted to the censor, an unavoidable step if it was to be performed on a public stage. This particular censor, a Baltic German named E. I. Kaiser von Nilckheim, indignantly underlined the word “lord” (barin) every time it appeared in the manuscript, and, in his unfavorable report, commented that “among all the vagrants and transients come to the pothouse to get warm and spend the night, there appears a decayed gentleman (dvoryanin) who begs the barman to give him a drink on credit. . . . This gloomy and squalid play, in my opinion, cannot be passed for production.” Kaiser von Nilckheim thus has the dubious distinction of being the first of a long string of critics to complain that Chekhov’s plays are gloomy.
The play was not published until 1914, ten years after Chekhov’s death, when a production was mounted at the Malakhov Theatre in Moscow. Reviewers varied in their assessments from ecstatic — one of them saw Fedya as an archetype of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard—to, mostly, hostile. Used to the lyrical qualities of Chekhov’s mature works, they were taken aback by the raw melodrama of Along the Highway.
ALONG THE HIGHWAY
Нa ·oльшoй ‰oрoҐe
A Dramatic Sketch in One Act
CHARACTERS
TIKHON YEVSTIGNEEV, keeper of a wayside tavern
SEMYON SERGEEVICH BORTSOV, a ruined landowner