'The Jubilee'
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 gift from grateful shareholders. While he prepares a speech of thanks and his clerk Khirin is, with an ill will, drawing up statistics, their work is interrupted by Shipuchin's giddy and garrulous wife and 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 testimonial scroll and silver tankard 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 Jubilee lies halfway between the unsuccessful experiment of The Wood Demon and Chekhov's transitional play The Seagull. Once again founded on a published short story, A Defenceless Creature (1887), it was written in December 1891, but not performed until the Chekhov evening at the Moscow Hunt Club in 1900. By the time The Jubilee reached the stage, Chekhov was already known to the general 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 ended with 'the bank manager making an insulting gesture at his bookkeeper, while the latter tears books and files to pieces, tossing the ravaged pages in the manager's face.'5 Chekhov was later to transform this finale to the Gogolian tableau that greets the astonished delegation of stockholders.
The first St. Petersburg production on the stage of the Alexandra in May 1903 was even more questionably received. Although the audience was dying with laughter at the antics of Varlamov as Khirin and the hilarious comedienne Levkeyeva as Merchutkina, certain critics wondered at the crude vulgarity of it all, and speculated whether such a piece had a place in a national theatre. They could not reconcile its extravagant humour with the Checkhov they had grown to expect.
There is a savagery to The Jubilee 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 Shipuchin an ineffectual ass. The setting enforces hypocrisy: as Shipuchin says, 'At home I can be a philistine and a parvenu and indulge my own little habits, but here everything has to be on a grand scale. This is a bank!' The impending ceremony creates a temporal pressure that propels the mounting hysteria. The result is Homeric laughter, not at all what the textbooks call 'Chekhovian.'
'The Night Before The Trial'
In 1886, Chekhov had published a story by that title, and he returned to it in the early 1890s to convert it into a play. In the process, he intensified the guilt of the main character Zaytsev, causing him to come to trial not simply for bigamy and a series of beatings, but for bigamy, forging his grandmother's will and attempted murder. The scene in which he plays mock doctor to 'examine' the woman in the room next door was considerably enlarged; so was his sleasy courtship of her, and her own character was darkened to make her seem an experienced coquette ready to cuckold her husband. But, because the play was left unfinished, Zaytsev's farewell the next morning and his payment for his 'honest labour' were never worked out, nor was the climax, the scene in court when Zaytsev is surprised to find that the Public Prosecutor is in fact the deceived husband.
Why Chekhov gave it up is a matter for speculation. Perhaps he realised that the seduction would be hard to get past the censorship or that the necessary division into two or three scenes would defeat the comedy's economy as a curtain-raiser. As it stands, Night Before the Trial is close to
French boulevard farce in its sexual emphasis. The tone is more insistently vulgar than in any of Chekhov's short plays other than The Wedding; bedbugs and fleas are omnipresent, a dramatic legacy from Gogol, no doubt, but emphasised here ad nauseam. The mock doctor's examination could easily coarsen into an American burlesque sketch. The Aesopic names Gusev and Zaystev (Goose and Hare) suggest a clown show, and the 'gags' are part of a long popular tradition. Zaytsev (who may in fact be guilty of the crimes he is charged with) contemplates suicide if the verdict goes against him.
In case the jury finds against me, I'll turn to my old friend ... A loyal, trusty friend! (Tales a large pistol from his suitcase.) here he is! How's the boy? I traded Cheprakov a couple of dogs for him. What a beauty! Just shooting yourself with him would be a kind of satisfaction . . . (Tenderly.) You loaded, boy? (In a piping voice, as if answering for the pistol.) I'm loaded ... (In his own voice.) I'll bet you'll go off with a bang, right? A real rip-roaring ear-splitter? (Piping.) A real rip-roaring ear-splitter ... (In his own voice.) Oh, you silly little thing, gun o'my heart. . . All right, now lie down and go to sleep . . . (Kisses the pistol and places it in the suitcase.) As soon as I hear 'Guilty as charged,' then right away - bang to the brain and the sweet bye-and-bye . . .
This ventriloqual exchange as he croons endearments to his suicide weapon is a comic device that goes back at least as far as the commedia delVarte and the folk comedies of Ruzzante. Zaytsev turns into an updated Harlequin, amoral and appetitive, whose ruminations on self- destruction reflect satirically on the suicides in Chekhov's serious works.
Did Chekhov, as he refined his full-length plays and purged them of the grossness of contemporary melodrama and farce, relegate his more exuberant and ironical spirits to the one-act form? The increasing grotesquerie of the series that begins with Tatyana Repina certainly suggests it.
5
'The Seagull9
I asked what was most requisite to make a piece fit for the theatre.
'It must by symbolical,' replied Goethe; 'that is to say, that each incident must be significant by itself, and yet lead naturally to something more important.' Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (26 July 1826)
Baldly put, the plot of The Seagull has the makings of a conventional romance. Arkadina, a flashy and egocentric actress, carrying on a liaison with a famous writer, has a neglected son, who wants to make a name for himself in literature. In his first effort, a play of symbolist tendency, he has featured a naive and beautiful girl, who longs for fame. But the young man meets with failure in every direction: his play is scoffed at by his mother; the girl, whom he claims to love, becomes infatuated with the famous writer and runs off with him to Moscow; the youth is unable to leave his uncle's estate because his mother will not give him any money and he attempts to take his life, without success. Two years later, all the characters return to the same place: her affair with the writer long over, the girl, Nina, has become a provincial actress, reduced to playing one-night stands in backward county towns. The young man, Treplyov, is now a published writer, his work appearing in the same journal as that of his mother's lover, Trigorin. Masha, the daughter of the estate's overseer, still carries a torch for the young writer, but he ignores her. While the other characters are at supper offstage, Nina and Treplyov have a final interview. Despite his pleas, Nina leaves to pursue her career; frustrated and confused, Treplyov destroys his manuscripts and shoots himself, this time successfully. Any actor, confronted with this scenario, might be excused for falling into standard patterns of characterisation.