Even in those simple forms, Chekhov was relying on a context that he would exploit more authoritatively in The Wedding, The Jubilee, and Tatyana Repina: a familiar social ritual to set off the satirical point. A period of mourning, a marriage proposal, a wedding ceremony, a nuptial banquet, an anniversary presentation are all relatively formal occasions, whose basic outlines are familiar to every member of a society. Each person knows how he is expected to behave at such times. But in Chekhov's one-acts, under the duress of monomania and personal stress these rituals collapse, revealing the frailty of their shared assumptions. The putative relationships prove to be faulty, the bonds of affection or sympathy wanting. In these shorter works, Chekhov's vaunted objectivity resembles impassivity, and he seems almost cruel to his creatures.
The finales of the farces are, in the earliest works, conventional enough: a wedding in the offing or an invitation to a drink, the standard New Comedy termination. Endings gave Chekhov a hard time:
I've got an interesting plot (syuzhet) for a comedy, but I haven't yet come up with an ending. Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. Trite endings don't work! The hero either gets married or shoots himself, there's no other way out. . . Each act I finish like a story: I carry on the whole act peacefully and quietly, and at the end give the spectator a sock in the jaw (to Suvorin, 4 June 1892).
The development to be traced in his dramatic finales, from the suicides in Ivanov and The Seagull, the engagements in The Wood Demon, to the open-ended continuum of his final masterpieces, is conspicuous in the one-acts as well. Life goes squalidly on in The Wedding, life is startled into a frozen tableau in The Jubilee. A neat disposition of the characters' fates is no longer possible.
4On The Highway'
Chekhov wrote this 'dramatic etude' - which he privately referred to as a 'little nonsense for the stage' in autumn 1884. The piece was based on a short story 'Autumn' that had appeared the previous year. Story and play share the same locale, Uncle Tikhon's pothouse, and the same basic premise: a nobleman on the skids gives the tavernkeeper a medallion with the portrait of his unfaithful but still loved wife, to pay for another tot of vodka. A peasant who used to be in his service recognizes the gentleman and relates his unhappy history.
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. But the valuable new astringent in the dramatic blend is the tramp 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 most unlikely 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 anguish! My vicious anguish! Pity me, orthodox folk!'
The play was submitted to the censor, an unavoidable step if it was to be performed on a public stage. This particular censor, who bore the burlesque name of E. I. Kaiser-von-Nilckheim, indignantly underlined the word 'gentleman' (barin) every time it appeared in the manuscript, and in his unfavourable report, commented that 'among all the vagrants and transients come to the pothouse to get warm and spend the night, there appears a decayed aristocrat (dyoryanin) who prays the tapster to give him a drink on credit . . . This gloomy and squalid play, in my opinion, cannot be allowed for production.'1 Kaiser- von-Nilckheim has thus 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 appalled by the raw melodrama of On the Highway.
'On The Harmfulness of Tobacco'
Originally, Chekhov intended this as a monologue for the talented though alcoholic comedian Gradov-Sokolov, and dashed it off in two and a half hours in February, 1886. He spent the rest of his career returning to it, revising and emending it, until it reached the shape in which it is ordinarily reprinted today. Six distinct variants exist, the more serious changes concomitant with the greater depth of psychology of Chekhov's works throughout the 1890s. Over the course of this recension, Chekhov heightened the emotional tone of the monologue, refined the comedy and increased the pathos. The speaker's pseudo-scientific jargon became more attenuated, with a concurrent introduction of cliches.
Nyukhin (the name suggests sniffing snuff, the perfect comic tag for a lecturer on the evils of tobacco) has been forced by his wife to deliver a lecture. During this half-hearted address, he reveals his henpecked existence and his insignificance in the life of his family. As draft followed draft, Nyukhin began to cast more aspersions on his unseen wife and to reveal more hatred for his enforced nullity. What Chekhov had earlier left the audience to deduce was now spelled out in tones of complaint. The pure ridicule that had been showered on his hero was turned to pity, and Nyukhin became the latest in the Russian tradition of the put-upon 'little man'.
'Swan Song' (Calchas)
Chekhov based Calchas (late 1886 or early 1887) on a short story of the same name; like the previous play, it was meant as a 'dramatic etude' for a popular comic actor, Davydov. 'It should play 15 to 20 minutes,' Chekhov suggested. 'As a rule little things are much better to write than big ones: they're less pretentious, but still successful . . . what more does anyone need?' (to M. V. Kiseleva, 14 January 1887). Davydov performed it at Korsh's Theatre on 19 February 1888, but put in so many ad-libs about great actors of the past that Chekhov could barely recognize his script. Later he made some slight emendations which he submitted to the censorship in hopes of a performance in a State theatre, and changed the title to Swan Song. 'A long title, bitter-sweet, but I can't think up another, although I thought a long time' (to Lensky, 26 October 1888). (It's six syllables in Russian: Lebedinaya pesna.)
Svetlovidov - which means 'of bright aspect', probably a nom de theatre - has, like one of Tolstoy's heroes, begun life as an army officer but lost caste by going on the stage. Even there, his career has been one of decline, from tragedian to buffo. He has been playing Calchas, the wily old oracle- monger in Offenbach's comic opera La Belle Helene, a secondary part chosen for his benefit, no doubt because the popular operetta would fill the house. Its standard costume consisted of a short Attic tunic and tights on his 68-year old legs. So, throughout this play, Svetlovidov's declamation from King Lear, Othello and Hamlet is continually contradicted by his ludicrous appearance.
Although the play draws heavily on Dumas' Kean to allow a skilled character actor a field-day, it still encompasses a serious Chekhovian theme - coming to terms with life. Svetlovidov, in the course of fifteen minutes, passes from self-aggrandisement as a ruined tragedian to self-contempt as a hammy clown to self-acceptance as an attendant lord, like T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, who can 'swell a progress, start a scene or two'. At the height of his delusion, he spouts Lear's storm speech; but by the end, he exits with a pettish repudiation of society from Griboyedov's classic comedy Woe From Wit. This diminuendo hints at a pocket enlightenment, a compressed version of the awareness that tragic heroes take five acts to achieve.