BARONESS (marrying the General). Ah!
GENERAL EHRENSWERD. I’ll make it hot for ‘em! (Is appointed warden of the prison, where Delagardi and Tarnovsky are incarcerated.)
CHARLES. Well, now I’m free right up to the fifth act. I’ll go to my dressing room!
ACTS THREE AND FOUR
STELLA (plays all right, as usual). Count, I love you!
YOUNG COUNT. And I love you, Stella, but I implore you in the name of love, tell me, why the hell did Tarnovsky get me mixed up in this godawful mess? What does he want from me? What’s my relationship to this plot?
BURL. Why, it was all Sprut’s doing! Thanks to him I wound up in the army. He beat me, dogged me, bit me . . . and my name’s not Burl if he wasn’t the one who wrote this play! He’s capable of anything just to make things hot for me!
STELLA (having found out her parentage). I’m going to father to set him free! (On the way to the prison she meets Hansen. HANSEN performs an entrechat.)
BURL. Thanks to Sprut I wound up in the army and am taking part in this play. Probably, it’s Sprut, just to make it hot for me, who made this Hansen trip the light fantastic! Well, just you wait! (The boards collapse. The stage caves in. HANSEN performs a leap that causes all the old maids present to feel faint.)
ACTS FIVE AND SIX
STELLA (meets her dear papa in prison and with him comes up with a plan of escape). I’ll save you, father! But how can it done so that Tarnovsky won’t escape with us? If he escapes from prison, he’ll write a new melodrama!
GENERAL EHRENSWERD (tortures the Baroness and the incarcerated). Because I’m the villain, I’m not supposed to resemble a human being at all! (Eats raw meat.)
DELAGARDI and STELLA (escape from prison).
EVERYONE. Hold ‘em! Catch ‘em!
DELAGARDI. Be that as it may, we’ll escape all the same and stay in one piece! (Gunshot.) Spit on it! (Falls dead.) And spit on this too! The author kills, but also resurrects! (CHARLES comes out of the dressing room and orders the virtuous to triumph over vice. General rejoicing. The moon smiles, and so do the stars.)
AUDIENCE (pointing out TARNOVSKY to Burl). There he is, there’s Sprut! Catch him!
BURL (strangles Tarnovsky. TARNOVSKY falls dead, but immediately leaps up again. Thunder, lightning, hoarfrost, the murder of Coverley,14 a great migration of peoples, shipwreck and the tying up of all the loose ends.)
LENTOVSKY. And yet I am not satisfied! (Is swallowed up.)
*I wanted to put down “Prologue,” but the editor says that the more improbable the better. Whatever he wants! (Typesetter’s note.)
NOTES
1 A parody of K. Tarnovsky’s adaptation from a German melodrama, The Clean and the Leprous, which opened at Lentovsky’s New Dramatic Theatre in Moscow on January 15, 1884. First published in The Alarm-clock (Budilnik) 4 (1884), pp. 50–51.
2 Mikhail Valentinovich Lentovsky (1843–1906), actor and manager, important in promoting Russian music-hall and operetta. Chekhov liked him personally but regularly made fun of his crowd-pleasing productions.
3 The action takes place in Sweden; the role of the king was played by V. L. Forkatti.
4 Lentovsky’s sister, A. V. Lentovskaya-Ryuban, was an actress in his company.
5 Pavel Mikhailovich Svobodin (Koznenko, 1850–1892) was an actor in the company in the 1883– 1884 season and played the simpleton Burl. His performance as Count Shabelsky in Ivanov in 1889 so pleased Chekhov that they became good friends.
6 I. Hansen (b.1841), the theater’s balletmaster, played the mute role of Axel.
7 Aleksey Sergeevich Suvorin (1834–1912), journalist and publisher, had risen from peasant origins to become a millionaire and influence monger in the conservative camp; he and Chekhov were good friends until they took different sides in the Dreyfus Affair. His publishing house issued calendars and almanacs, among other things.
8 Lentovsky had presented successful productions of the Offenbach operetta (based on Jules Verne) A Trip to the Moon (1878), and a melodrama called The Forest Vagabond (based on the French melodrama Les Pirates de la Savane) in 1884.
9 Frants Osipovich Shekhtel (1859–1926), an architect, who later designed the Moscow Art Theatre building and the Chekhov library in Taganrog.
10 Modest Ivanovich Pisaryov (1844–1905), an excellent realistic actor, who later created the role of Dorn in The Seagull in 1896.
11 Rocambole is a romantic burglar in adventure novels by Ponson de Terrail; the Count of Monte Cristo is the protagonist of Dumas père’s novel of the same name. Chekhov later made an abridgment of it for Suvorin.
12 After recovering from an illness, Lentovsky had been hauled into court and sentenced to a month’s house arrest for disturbing the peace through his production of Frol Skobeev.
13 Konstantin Fyodorovich Valts (1846–1929), scene designer and chief stagehand of the Moscow Imperial Theatres, a specialist in spectacular stage effects. He was blamed by the newspapers for the collapse of the stage at the Bolshoy Theatre during a ballet in 1883.
14 The Murder of Coverley was a sensational melodrama in which a train runs across the stage; Lentovsky had produced it in 1883.
AN IDEAL EXAMINATION1
И‰eaльньiй эkзaмeн
(A Short Answer to All Long Questions)
Conditio sine qua non:2 a very learned teacher and a very clever pupil. The former is malicious and persistent, the latter is invulnerable. Just as an ideal fire brigade should arrive half an hour before the fire, so an ideal student has answers ready half an hour before the question. For brevity’s sake and to avoid a large fee,* I’ve put the gist in dramatic form.
TEACHER. You have just said that earth can be represented as a ball. But you forget that it contains high mountains, deep valleys, Moscow carriage ways, which prevent it from being round!
PUPIL. They no more prevent it from being round than do little indentations on an orange or pimples on a face.
TEACHER. And what does face mean?
PUPIL. The face is the mirror of the soul, and can get smashed as easily as any other mirror.
TEACHER. And what does mirror mean?
PUPIL. A mirror is a piece of furniture on which a woman hangs her weapons ten times a day. A mirror is a woman’s experimental laboratory.
TEACHER (sarcastically). Goodness me, aren’t you clever! (After a moment’s thought.) Now I’m going to ask you a certain question . . . (Quickly.) What is life?
PUPIL. Life is a fee paid not to authors but to their works.
TEACHER. And how large is that fee?
PUPIL. It is equal to the fee which bad editors pay for very bad translations.