Yet, when he gave advice to would-be playwrights, he limited himself to matters of technique. For instance, in 1889, he offered these adages to a young novice:
“If you have hung a pistol on the wall in the first act, then it has to be shot in the last act. Otherwise, don’t hang it up.”
“It is unconscionable of authors to bring on stage messengers, bystanders, policemen. Why force the poor actor to get into costume, make himself up, while away hours on end in a nasty draft backstage?”
“In drama you mustn’t be afraid of farce, but philosophizing in it is disgusting. Everything goes dead.”
“Nothing is more difficult than writing a good vaudeville. And how pleasant it is to write one.”2
Essentially, there were two prevalent traditions of nineteenth-century play-writing upon which Chekhov could draw. One was the mode of the “well-made play,” which dominated European and American stages. Based on strict rules of construction, the well-made play involved a central intrigue, intricate manipulation of the hero’s fortunes, contrived episodes of eavesdropping, revealing soliloquys, and misdelivered letters, and a denouement in which good would triumph and evil receive its just deserts. Its leading exponent, the French playwright Eugène Scribe, declared that the function of such a play was solely to entertain, not by mirroring real life, but by providing an improved surrogate for life. Many of the greatest “box-office hits” of all time have been enacted within the constraints of the well-made play.
Later on, the well-made play attempted to encompass social problems, setting forth in its neat five-act structure a “burning question of the day,” such as women’s rights, divorce, or unemployment, and just as neatly resolving it by the fall of the curtain. As the Russian critic Vasily Sleptsov pointed out, the social question and the mechanical plot seldom bore an organic relationship to one another. The question was usually embodied in the raisonneur, a character like a doctor or lawyer who, in Sleptsov’s image, is a bottle brought on, uncorked, its message poured out, and then packed away until needed again.
The other dramatic tradition available to Chekhov was a purely Russian one. From Gogol onward, Russian playwrights had composed open-ended dramas, loose in structure and combining elements of comedy and pathos. The most prolific dramatist of Chekhov’s youth, Aleksandr Ostrovsky, used such plays to depict byt, the everyday life of merchants and civil servants, and to capture the rhythms and idioms of vernacular speech. Many of Ostrovsky’s types recur in a modified shape in Chekhov: the dispossessed and victimized young girl seeking to make a life for herself reappears as The Seagull’s Nina; the boorish peasant who buys the estate in The Forest is refined into The Cherry Orchard’s Lopakhin. However, Ostrovsky and his imitators took a definite moral stance. The apportionment of good and evil in their plays is as strict as in melodrama. Chekhov’s view of life was too complex to allow such a simplistic viewpoint and his sense of form too sophisticated for him to adopt Ostrovsky’s lax principles of construction.
In practice, Chekhov repudiates his predecessors in radical ways. Che-khovian drama has been defined as imitation of stasis, with action so gradual and non-progressive as sometimes to be imperceptible. Nevertheless, even though central actions, such as Treplyov’s attempted suicide or the sale of the cherry orchard, take place off stage, a sense of development is produced by the sequential placement of characters and their concerns. Chekhov creates an illusion of life in motion by juxtaposing apparently static elements, implying relationships in objects by aligning them in a kind of “montage.” The authorial point of view is not invested in any one character, but a spectrum of attitudes is provided, which reflect on each another and offer ironic counterpoint. The dialogue eludes the characters themselves to be transmitted along an underground railway of subtext and hidden motivation. Often, the conversation breaks off just when the characters are about to declare themselves. As Patrice Pavis puts it, the peculiar power of Chekhov’s text originates in a sort of teasing, never explaining, never providing the key to the quotations or to the characters.3
Given the uniqueness of Chekhov’s plays, the rise of his reputation is something of an anomaly. Shortly before his death in 1904, if you asked anyone who was the greatest living Russian writer, the answer would no doubt have been Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s imposing position as a moralist and reformer, his eminence at the panoramic novel, the genre most honored by the nineteenth century, which preferred monumentality, his political stance as the unassailable opponent of autocracy—these and other features made the sage of Yas-naya Polyana the voice of humanitarian culture to the world at large.
Chekhov, on the other hand, was regarded as a purely local phenomenon. Within the Russian Empire, his reputation was fragmented among various publics. The common reader remembered him chiefly as the author of a number of funny stories. The intelligentsia saw him as a chronicler of its own malaise, particularly in the plays staged by the Moscow Art Theatre. Political factions on the right and left dismissed him as a fence-sitter, too cowardly to take sides in ideological battles. The literary avant-garde deplored his lack of religious uplift and “sublimity.”
Outside Russia, Chekhov was viewed at best as an exotic petit maitre, trading in doom and gloom. The Poles patriotically neglected him, the Germans interpreted him as another exponent of the tragedy of fate, and the Georgians noted sarcastically that only ethnic Russians would fritter away their time as trivially as his characters do. In France, the standard works on Russian literature around 1900 shrugged off Chekhov: Kazimierz Waliszewski described his drama as “completely devoid of action and psychological differentiation of characters,” while the critic and novelist Melchior de Vogüé declared the full-length plays too pessimistic for the French, full of impotent heroes with “enigmatic Slavic souls.”4 In the first two English-language reference books to include Chekhov, both published the year before his death, those same dramatic characters were cited as “fit subjects for the psychiatrist” and “a strange assemblage of neurotics, lunatic and semi-lunatic,” obsessed with solving the riddle of life.5
In Russia, too, the respect and affection Chekhov’s memory had accrued began to evaporate. At the jubilee celebrations in 1910, some dissenting voices could be heard above the chorus of praise. At a meeting of the St. Petersburg Literary Society, the prominent feminist author Olga Shapir renewed the charge that he was a poet of gray, humdrum depressives, and added the complaint that his women especially lacked clear outlines or strong emotion, despite the fact that since the 1880s he had been in the vanguard of political reform movements.6 In a period of activism and engagement, Chekhov’s deliberately peripheral stance grew increasingly distateful. It would culminate in the Bolshevik rejection of Chekhov after the October Revolution.
That rejection was due in part to Chekhov’s inextricable association with the Moscow Art Theatre, a symbiosis rich in ironies. It was ironical that Chekhov, who deeply admired skilled acting technique, should have been imposed on the cultural consciousness of his times by a troupe of amateurs and semi-professionals. It was ironical that Stanislavsky, who had cut his teeth as an actor and director on Shakespeare, Schiller, and operetta, and whose dearest ambition was to stage historically accurate productions of the classics, should find his most important challenge and success in re-creating the dreary world of his contemporaries and, along the way, inevitably ennoble Chekhov’s characters. It was ironical that a theater whose founders intended it to be a school for a mass public should find itself explicating the intelligentsia to the intelligentsia. It is perhaps the irony of ironies that the Art Theatre, having discovered its most successful modus operandi in its staging of Chekhov, tried to apply this technique to all sorts of unlikely authors with the to-be-expected failure; while Chekhov himself chafed at what he felt were wilful departures from his meaning and intention.