M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova (Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1980), p. 44.
Ernest Simmons, Chekhov. A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 6.
Peter the Great had established a table of ranks which stratified society status into civil, military, naval and ecclesiastical hierarchies. In the civil hierarchy, meshchanin (townsman) came just above peasant. Treplyov, in The Seagull, complains that his father had been classified asameshchanin of Kiev, even though he was a famous actor, and that the same rank appears on his own passport. He finds it particularly galling since the term had come to suggest petty bourgeois philistinism.
Letter to Dmitry Savlyev, Jan. (?) 1884. All quotations from Chekhov's creative writings and letters are based on the texts in A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochineny i pisem (30 vols.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1974-1974), henceforth referred to as PSS. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
6. Maksim Gorky, Literary Portraits, tr. Ivy Litvinov (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 158-59.
At The Play
V. F. Tretyakov, Ocherki istori i Taganrogskogo teatra s 1827 do 1927 god (Taganrog: Izd. Khud. Sektsii Taganrogskogo Okrolitrosveta, 1928), pp. 36-38.
PSS, III, 95.
PSS, V, 455.
PSS, XVI, 65.
M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova (Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1964), p. 212. All mention of Yavorskaya is dropped from the most recent edition.
PSS, XVI, 60.
M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova (Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1980), p. 142.
Dmitry Merezhkovsky, 'Neoromantizm v drame,' Vestnik inostrannoy literatury 11 (1894), p. 101.
Anton Krayny (pseud, of Zinaida Gippius), 'O poshlosti,' Literaturny dnevnik (1899-1907) (St. Petersburg: M. V. Pirozh- kov, 1908), pp. 221-22.
Olga Knipper-Chekhova, 'Ob A. P. Chekhove,' Vos- pominaniya i stati (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), I, 57.
Quoted by Arseny Gurlyand, 'Vospominaniya ob A. P. Chekhove,' Teatr i iskusstvo 28 (1904).
A. I. Urusov, Stati yego o teatre, literature i iskusstve (Moscow; Tip. I. N. Kholchev i ko., 1907), II, 34.
Journeyman Efforts
M. P. Chekhov, 'Ob A. P. Chekhove,' Novoe slovo 1 (1907), p. 198.
Pisma A. P. Chekhovu yego brata Aleksandra Chekhova, ed. I. S. Yezhov (Moscow: Gos. sotsialno-ekonomicheskoe izd., 1939), pp. 50-51.
Chekhov did not know the German's 'masochistic' works, but did see one of his plays.
A. R. Kugel, Russkie dramaturgi (Moscow: Mir, 1934), p. 33.
Letter to Chekhov from Pavel Svobodin (25 Oct. 1889), in Chekhov i teatr, ed. E. D. Surkov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961), p. 211.
M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova (Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1980), p. 152.
Khrushchyov's nickname 'Leshy' gives too diabolic an impression when translated as 'Wood-Demon'; there is nothing Mephistophelian about the mischievous sprite which the ancient Slavs thought inhabited the forests. Russians use ieshy voz'mi' the way an Englishman might say 'Deuce take it.' 'Wood-goblin' might be more appropriate.
A. P. Chudakov, Chekhov's Poetics, tr. F. J. Cruise and D. Dragt (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983), p. 210.
Quoted in D. Gorodetsky, 'Mezdu "Medvedem" i "Leshim",' Birzhevye vedomosti 364 (1904).
4. The One-Act Plays
Quoted in PSS, XI, 403.
Quoted in PSS, XI, 427.
A. S. Suvorin, Tatyana Repina, komediya v chetyrakh deystvyakh (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1889), Act IV,scene 3.
Ibid., Act III, scene 6.
Quoted in PSS, XII, 397.
5. The Seagull
K. S. Stanislavsky, My Life in Art, tr. J. J. Robbins (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), p. 355.
A. I. Urusov, Stati yego o teatre, literature i iskusstve (Moscow: Tip. I. N. Kolchev i ko., 1907), II, 35-38. First appeared in Kuryer (3 Jan. 1889).
A. G. Gladkov, 'Meyerhold govorit,' Novy Mir 8 (1961), p. 221.
Leonid Andreyev, 'Letters on the Theatre,' in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, ed. and tr. L. Senelick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),pp. 238-242.
A. N. Ostrovsky, Artistes and Admirers, tr. E. Hanson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), p. 64.
A. P. Chudakov, Chekhov's Poetics, tr. F. J. Cruise and D. Dragt (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983), p. 193.
D. S. Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature 1881-1925 (London: George Routledge and sons, 1926), p. 88.
Nina's last name 'Zarechnaya' literally means 'on the other side of the river,' both suggestive of her alien status on the estate and reminiscent oizamorskaya, 'on the other side of the water,' a term frequently synonymous in Russian folklore with 'wondrous strange.'
W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems (London and New York: Macmillan, 1964).
6. Uncle Vanya
27 January 1899, quoted in S. S. Koteliansky, 'A note on "The Wood Demon", in The Wood Demon (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 14.
M. Gorky and A. Chekhov, Stati, vyskazyvaniya, perepiska (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1951), pp. 63-65.
Osip Mandelshtam, 'O pyese A. Chekhova "Dyadya Vanya," ' [1936] Sobranie sochineny 4 (Paris: YMCA Press), pp. 107-109.
Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), p. 8.
Also the sub-title of Turgenev's.4 Month in the Country.
Chekhov may have had in mind the Russian fairy-tale of 'Yelena the Fair,' a Cinderella story in which the snivelling booby Vanya woos and wins the beautiful princess with the aid of his dead father. An English version can be found in Russian Fairy Tales by W. R. B. Ralston (London, 1887).
Robert Mazzocco, 'In Chekhov's spell,' New York Review of Books (22 Jan. 1976), p. 35.
Vsevolod Meyerhold, 'Teatre (k istorii tekhnike),' in Teatr: kniga o novom teatre (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908), pp. 143-45. A partial English translation of this essay appears in Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and tr. Edward Braun (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 25-39.
Vladimir Ladyzhensky, 'Dalyokie gody,'Rossiya i slavyan- stvo (13 July 1929), p. 5.
Olga Knipper-Chekhova, 'Ob A. P. Chekhove,' Vos- pominaniya i stati (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), I, 56.
Maksim Gorky, Sobranie sochineniya (Moscow: Akademiya Nauk SSR, 1958), XXVIII, 159.
Leonid Andreyev, 'Tri sestry,' Polnoe sobranie sochineny (St. Petersburg: A. F. Marks, 1913), VI, 321-25.
Randall Jarrell, 'About The Three Sisters: Notes,' in The Three Sisters (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 105-106. There had been an impressionist show in Moscow in 1896, and Tolstoy had characterised Chekhov's technique as a story-waiter as impressionism. As early as 1912 George Calderon was comparing The Cherry Orchard to a French 'vibrationist' picture.
Jovan Hristic, Le theatre de Tchekhov, tr. H. and F. Wybrands (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1982), p. 166.
The Cherry Orchard
Varya is another variant of the driven housekeeper-type Chekhov had described in his plans for a collaborative play with Suvorin. Earlier avatars include Yuliya in The Wood Demon, Sonya in Uncle Vanya and Natasha in Three Sisters.