In without patrimony two scenes are worked out ingeniously, if you like, but on the whole it is an inexcusable, albeit innocent lie. Innocent because it derives from the virginal depths of your inner view of the world. You must feel yourself, though faintly and involuntarily, that your drama is a lie . . . The handling and the dramatic talent are worthy (on your own part) of greater activity and a wider frame.2
Chekhov must have taken this to heart, for he continued to work on the play; toning down the dialogue, dropping two characters (Shcherbuk's ugly daughters), and omitting a lurid scene in which Voynitsev pulled a dagger on Platonov, who disarmed him with the shout 'Stand back!' and a torrent of rhetoric. Even with cuts, it was twice the length of the average play of the period. But Chekhov took it to Mariya Yermolova, one of the stars of the Moscow Maly Theatre, as a possible offering for an upcoming benefit performance. The addressee was ill-considered: the only part suitable for Yermolova's status would have been that of Anna Petrovna, the frivolous widow, besieged on all sides by admirers. Yermolova was noted for her heroic impersonations of Joan of Arc and Lady Macbeth; her roles seldom admitted sexual laxity. In any case, she returned the play, and the chagrined young playwright tore up the manuscript.
But his brother Mikhail had copied out two scripts for submission to the censorship; and one of these survived to be published in 1923. Since then, actors and producers have tried to reconstitute it for the stage as a 'newly discovered play by Chekhov'. Cut to the bone, it has, since the 1930s, appeared as/l Country Scandal, A Provincial Don Juan, and, most frequently, as Platonov. Probably the most distinguished attempts were those of Jean Vilar in 1956, under the title CeFou Platonov, and Michael Frayn's wholly rewritten 1984 version Wild Honey. None of these versions has managed to secure a place for the protracted piece of juvenilia in the repertory. Its interest resides primarily in its being a dramatic storehouse for Chekhov's later themes and characters. Most intricately re-worked of all, the threat that the estate is to be auctioned in Platonov was to become the connecting thread and constitutive symbol of The Cherry Orchard.
A sign of Chekhov's youth at the time of writing is the obsession with parental relations, emblazoned in the original title Without Patrimony (Bezottsovshchina). Specifically, it refers to the economic dispossession of the main characters: Platonov, a member of the gentry, is forced by circumstances to descend in caste by becoming a village schoolmaster; Voynitsev loses the family estate through his stepmother's extravagance. But a bleak picture is drawn of fathers and children on a moral level as well. Platonov's recollections of his late father are contemptuous and angry. Glagolyev Junior heartlessly tricks his father and provokes him to a stroke; both Glagolyevs woo the same woman unsuccessfully and drown their defeat in mutual debauchery in Paris. The Triletskys are ashamed of their old father, the General, whom they treat as a kind of wayward child. Shcherbuk hates his two daughters. Platonov's infant son is a source of ill-concealed annoyance. Only the Vengerovichs father and son seem to preserve a mutually respectful alliance, and they are Jews, outsiders in this society.
Chekhov was unable to pursue all the hares he started in this play, or to find the proper angle of vision by which to regard his protagonist. Awkwardly, he puts his own opinion in the mouth of Glagolyev Senior shortly before Platonov makes his first entrance.
Platonov, to my mind, is the best representative of modern uncertainty . . . He is the hero of the best, still, regrettably, unwritten modern novel . . . (Laughs.) By uncertainty I mean the current state of our society: the Russian man of letters can sense this uncertainty. He's come to an impasse, he's gone astray, he doesn't know what to focus on, doesn't understand . . . It's hard to understand these gentlemen, indeed it is!
The uncertainty is Chekhov's as well.
The rural Don Juan irresistible to women is also a cracker-barrel Schopenhauer whose alleged idealism and scepticism appeal to the men. Shallow and wishy-washy, he has a silver tongue, not unlike Turgenev's Rudin, the classic example of the lishny chelovek or superfluous man in Russian literature. He bears all the earmarks of the type: alienated, hypersensitive and mired in inertia, in direct succession to Lermontov's Pechorin, the Byronic 'hero of our times', and Griboyedov's drawing-room misanthrope Chatsky, who were characterized at least by a definite moral stance towards their imperfect society.
The squalour of his provincial community is hardly enough to justify Platonov's sense of superiority; he appears to have no ideals outside his own creature comforts. Did Chekhov intend a send-up of the superfluous man? Characteristically, he would make his initial forays into a new genre by parodying it. His first experiments with a iong short story' were The Futile Victory (1882), a spoof of the popular Hungarian romancer Mor Jokai, and A
Hunting Drama (1884), a detective story in the style of Gaboriau. If Platonov is meant as parody, that would save it from being a failed attempt at a society melodrama in the style of Shpazhinsky or Dyachenko. Then again, it may not be a case of either/or: the immature dramatist was unsure of the direction to take. He may have seriously intended to explore certain social issues, but was ineluctably drawn to the comic side of things. He himself was aware of the ambivalence: 'However much I try to be serious, I don't succeed, in me the serious is constantly mixed up with the vulgar. I suppose it's my fatality' (to Yakov Polonsky, 22 February 1888).
Even if Platonov were a serious try at a 'superfluous man,' the type could not hold up when juxtaposed with closely-observed real life. Irony swamps Platonov's claims to heroic stature; under the microscope, he looks shoddy and despicable. Platonov himself is prone to making high-flown comparisons, fancying himself Hamlet, 'a second Byron' and 'a prospective Cabinet minister and a Christopher Columbus'; but he is somewhat shamefaced to reveal his paunchy schoolmaster presence to a former girlfriend who had put him on a pedesal. He has not even graduated from the university, although this does not prevent him from lecturing others on their spiritual and moral failings. Since most of the men in the community are grotesque buffoons or flaccid weaklings, he seems in contrast a paragon, and hence a lodestone to women.
Four of themille e tre this village Don Giovanni numbers in his catalogue of conquests are drawn in detail. His wife Sasha is a long-suffering homebody, whom he forces to read Sacher-Masoch's Ideals of Our Times.3 Sasha waits long hours for Platonov to return from parties, and when her nose is rubbed in his unfaithfulness, she twice attempts suicide. Chekhov is unable to withhold a smile from repeated suicide attempts, so that Sasha's laying herself on the railway tracks and then drinking an infusion of sulphur matches are more farcical than pathetic. Twenty-year-old Mariya Grekova is first offended by Platonov's brutal behaviour, then secretly smitten; and when he writes her an irresistibly abject letter of apology, she melts at once and abandons her lawsuit against him. The sophisticated widow Anna Petrovna openly puts herself on offer, and when she finds that he has made her daughter-in-law Sofiya his mistress, deals with the facts coolly, refusing to break off their liaison. Sofiya, the most deeply committed, having jeopardized her marriage and compelled Platonov to elope with her, finally, in a fit of jealousy on seeing him and Mariya together, takes up a handy pistol and shoots the philanderer. If Mariya is the Donna Elvira, then Sofiya is the Donna Anna of this prose opera.