The home in Yalta (today a Soviet museum) became a Mecca for young writers, importunate fans, touring acting companies, and plain free-loaders. Such pilgrimages, though well meant, did not conduce to Chekhov's peace of mind or body, and his health continued to deteriorate. In December 1903, he came to Moscow to attend rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard; the opening night, 17 January 1904, coincided with his nameday and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the commencement of his literary activity. Emaciated, hunched over, gravely ill, he did not show up until the second act and was made to stay through Act Three when the ceremony to honour him took place, greatly to his surprise.
Despite his rapid decline in health and the disappointment of Olga's miscarriage in 1902, a deeply lyrical tone enters his last writings. His final stories, Lady with Lapdog (Dama s sobachkoy ), The Archbishop (Arkhierey ), and The Darling (Dushenka) present a more accepting view of the cyclical nature of life. They also reveal an almost musical attention to the structure and sounds of words, to be remarked as well in that last 'comedy' The Cherry Orchard.
In June 1904 his doctors ordered Chekhov to Baden- weiler, a small health resort in the Black Forest. There the forty-four-year old writer died on July 2. Shortly before his death, the doctor recommended putting an ice pack on his heart. 'You don't put ice on an empty heart,' Chekhov protested. When they insisted that he drink champagne, his last words came, 'It's been a long time sinced I've drunk champagne'. He was unconsciously echoing the line of the old nurse Marina in Uncle Vanya, 'It's a long time since I've tasted noodles'. Chekhov's obsequies were a comedy of errors he might have appreciated: the railway carriage that bore his body to St Petersburg was stencilled with the label 'Fresh Oysters,' and at the Moscow cemetery, the bystanders spent more time ogling Maksim Gorky and the basso Chaliapin than in mourning.6 Inadvertently, the procession became entangled with that of General Keller, a military hero who had been shipped home from the Far East, and Chekhov's friends were startled to hear an army band accompanying the remains of a man who had always been chary of grand gestures.
2
At the Play
'It is easy to convince the sentimental and credulous populace that the theatre, such as it is, is a school. But anyone who knows what a school is will not fall for this bait. I don't know what will happen fifty or a hundred years from now, but in its present state the theatre can only serve as an amusement.' The first-person narrator of A Boring Story, 1889
After his family moved to Moscow, Chekhov the schoolboy became an inveterate spectator at the Taganrog Civic Theatre, in company with his enthusiastic uncle Mitrofan. At this very time, the Taganrog management had completely refurbished the repertory to suit a new building constructed in 1865. Formerly, the local company had played an outworn stock of Kotzebue and Pixerecourt, Lensky's vaudevilles and the grandiloquent patriotic dramas of Polevoy. The new management endeavoured to introduce the Taganrog public to more ambitious fare, enabling them to see Italian opera, along with Gogol's Inspector General and Getting Married, and the 'new drama' of Ostrovsky, Potekhin, Dyachenko, and Shpazhinsky. The newness now seems tenuous as Dyachenko's society dramas are one step away from Lady Audley's Secret, but as an impressionable adolescent, Chekhov observed what was taken to be the latest thing - problem plays, peasant dramas, and comedies of byt or everyday life, full of brutish merchants, virtuous muzhiks and improvident nobles. He also cherished a fondness for the older varieties of romantic melodrama, such as Dumas' Kean, and The Mail Robbery (the Russian Lyons Mail), which turns up in The Seagull as a memory of Shamraev the anecdotal overseer.
In 1873, when Chekhov was thirteen, the Taganrog management featured comic operas by Lecocq and Offenbach: the latter's La Belle Helene, the first play Chekhov ever saw, was probably the most popular stage work in Tsarist Russia, and crops up repeatedly in Chekhov's writing. If we examine the repertory lists for 1876-79, when we know that Chekhov resorted regularly to the theatre to solace his loneliness, we find that he could have seen, among other presentations, four plays of Ostrovsky, a play apiece by Sardou and Dennery, one by Dyachenko, Offenbach's Perichole and Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka, a reference to which also surfaces in The Seagull .1 The actors who played in these pieces belonged to a generation of flamboyant personalities who held an audience rapt by the virtuosity of their playing, little subordinated to the script.
For all its deficiencies, Chekhov could comprehend the appeal of the 'new drama', though he never put much stock in its attempts at social relevance and verisimilitude. At the same time, he mocked the conservatives who decried stage realism and hearkened back to the romantic past. In On Drama (1884), he showed a callous provincial magistrate pontificating on art:
Present-day dramatists and actors strive, uh, how can I put this more clearly . . . they strive to be life-like, realistic . . . On stage you see what you see in life . . . But is that what we need? We need expression, impact! [. . .] An actor used to talk with an unnatural gruff voice, beat his breast with his fists, howl, drop to the ground, and yet how expressive he was! And he was expressive in his speeches too! He would talk about duty, humanity, freedom. . .2
The impresario in the story The Jubilee (1886) declares that art is dead, because Today it's the thing to say the stage needs truth to life! . . . You can see that anywhere: at the inn, at home, in the market, but at the theatre give me expressiveness!'3 In fact, the new problem plays did retain enough of the romantic melodrama's emotionalism and rant to satisfy ordinary audiences.
Chekhov's years as a medical student in Moscow coincided with a period of transition in the drama. Increasing pressure from Ostrovsky and amateur groups for 'people's' theatres had led to the cancellation in 1882 of the monopoly held by the Imperial theatres. Many private theatricals went professional, appealing to new audiences and creating showcases for new playwrights, homegrown and imported. The young theatres Chekhov regularly attended were those of the 'Muscovite wizards and warlocks', Mikhail Lentovsky and Fyodor Korsh, who, in their separate ways, promulgated 'new forms'.
Chekhov's brother Nikolay worked for Lentovsky as a scene-painter, so they had free entry to the Hermitage Pleasure Garden, which he managed, and its 'Fantasy Theatre', a derelict mansion overgrown with weeds, but rendered romantic by moonbeams and electric fairy lights, chimes, a hidden orchestra, and a small stage where
Lentovsky could present the latest music hall attractions from Paris and Vienna. In 1886, with money from the merchant class that supported him, Lentovsky founded the Skomorokh or Mountebank Theatre, hoping to present a prestigious repertory. He even negotiated with Tolstoy, a supporter of 'people's' theatre, to mount The Power of Darkness, but the censor forbade it. Plays of Gogol and Ostrovsky and even Hamlet could be found there, but gradually the bulk of the repertory was translated farces, melodramas and feeries, including the Offenbach-Verne Trip to the Moon with illuminated panoramas. Lentovsky's productions abounded in pyrotechnical displays, explosions, fires, collapsing bridges, and the whole impedimenta of sensationalism. Of The Forest Tramp (1883), Chekhov wrote, 'Thanks to this new, bitter-sweet, German Lieber- gottic rubbish all Moscow smells of gunpowder'.4