He complained that, “at the Art Theatre, all those prop-room details distract the spectator, keep him from listening. [. . .] Let’s take Cherry Orchard . . . Is this really my Cherry Orchard? Are these really my types? . . . With the exception of a couple of performers, none of it’s mine. . . . I write life. . . . This gray, everyday life. . . . But that does not mean annoying moaning and groaning. . . . They make me lachrymose, a really boring writer. [. . .] It’s starting to get on my nerves. . . .”7
Whatever the discrepancy between Chekhov’s vision and that of the Art Theatre, what struck the spectators of the original productions most forcefully was that company and author seemed to be totally and intimately amalgamated; the plays seemed to be written and staged by the same person. When the actors at provincial theaters simple-mindedly played Chekhov in a dismal monotone, the result was boredom; whereas the Art Theatre revealed the covert, repressed feelings underlying the bad jokes and banal conversation. What distinguished Chekhov’s drama from all other plays at the time was what Stanislavsky called the “submarine” course of the through action, which renders the dialogue nearly allegorical. Every individual scenic moment was carefully worked out in terms of the integrity of the entire production, to create an effect of seamlessness. Everyday or material reality went beyond mere naturalism to achieve the famous nastroenie (mood). Stanislavsky’s layering of “mood” or “atmosphere” is essentially a symbolist technique. Just as the words “Balzac was married in Berdichev” overlay another, more profound emotion significance, so the tableaux of ordinary life, abetted by sound and lighting effects, opened into a “beyond” of more intense reality.
Those who saw Chekhov as a realist were deceived by Stanislavsky’s atmospheric and detail-crammed productions and the seeming looseness of the plays’s dialogue and structure. Like all great artists, however, Chekhov was highly selective in what he chose to take from reality. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold recalled an occasion in 1898 when The Seagull was in rehearsal at the Moscow Art Theatre, and an actor boasted to Chekhov of how backstage “frogs were to croak, dragon-flies were to buzz, dogs to bark.”
“What for?” Anton Pavlovich asks in a surly voice.
“Realism,” replies the actor.
“Realism,” repeats A. P., with a grin, and, after a brief pause, says: “The stage is art. There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy, with the faces magnificently painted. What if the nose were to be cut out of one of the faces and a real one stuck in? The nose is ‘realistic,’ but the painting is spoiled.”
One of the actors tells him proudly that at the end of the third act of Seagull, the director wants to bring on stage the whole domestic staff, some woman with a crying child.
Anton Pavlovich says:
“It isn’t necessary. It’s the same as if you’re playing a piano pianissimo, and meanwhile the lid of the piano collapses.”
“In life it often happens that a forte breaks into a pianissimo quite unexpectedly,” one of the acting company tries to object.
“Yes, but the stage,” says A. P., “demands a certain conventional quality. We have no fourth wall. Nevertheless, the stage is art, the stage reflects the quintessence of life, you don’t have to put anything extraneous on stage.”8
This succinctly expresses Chekhov’s belief in the selective detail and the need to edit reality to make an artistic point. Perhaps the symbolist writer Andrey Bely put it best when he described The Cherry Orchard as “loops from the lace of life,” realistic details scrutinized so closely that the dimension beyond them is revealed. He suggested that Chekhov became an unwitting Symbolist as his surface layer of reality turned transparent and disclosed the hidden profundities beneath. A similar analogy might be made with pointillist painting. Up close, the individual specks of color make no sense, create no discernible pattern; but at the proper distance, the shapes reveal themselves in new and often striking ways; their relationships fall into place. In this respect, Chekhov’s plays fit Goethe’s prescription for a stageworthy drama: “each incident must be significant by itself, and yet lead naturally to something more important.”9
This scenic extension of the Russian tradition of literary realism enabled the intelligentsia to behold its hopes and fears on stage in terms it readily adopted. As the poet Osip Mandelshtam wrote in 1923:
For the intelligentsia to go to the Moscow Art Theatre was almost equal to taking communion or going to church. . . .
Literature, not theater, characterized that entire generation. . . . They understood theater exclusively as an interpretation of literature . . . into another, more comprehensible and completely natural language.
. . . The emotional zeal of that generation and of the Moscow Art Theatre was the emotional zeal of Doubting Thomas. They had Chekhov, but Thomas the intellectual did not trust him. He wanted to touch Chekhov, to feel him, to be convinced of his reality.10
The illusion of life created by Stanislavsky, his emphasis on subtext and context, provided that reality, and gave Chekhov a novel-like amplitude that satisified the intelligentsia’s need for theme and tendentiousness.
The Bolsheviks had extra-literary uses for the theater. No less tendentious, they fomented performance that was stark, immediate, and viscerally compelling. The new demands made on art in the aftermath of the October Revolution had a Medusa-like effect on the Art Theatre: it froze in place. Locked into its aging repertory, it found itself and Chekhov both repudiated as irrelevant excrescences of an obsolete bourgeois culture. Sailors at special matinees for workers shouted, “You bore me, Uncle Vanya,” while ideologues and journalists called for Chekhov’s suppression in favor of a vital, swashbuckling, romantic drama. “Is it really necessary to stir up such feelings?” émigrés reported Lenin complaining about Uncle Vanya. “One needs to appeal to cheerfulness, work, and joy.”11 Such vital creators of Bolshevik theater as Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Meyerhold turned to the one-act farces when they sought to stage Chekhov, and the only full-length play of his to be performed regularly in this period was The Cherry Orchard, treated as a satiric farce mocking the estate owners and their parasites.
While Chekhov languished at home, abroad he was promulgated by a diaspora. The 1920s and 1930s are the decades of the émigrés’ Chekhov; fugitives from the Revolution saw themselves as Ranevskayas and Gaevs, expelled from a tsarist Eden. Outside Russia, the tours of the Moscow Art Theatre and its offshoot, the self-exiled Prague Group, disseminated the style and look of the original, but aging, productions, while resident actors and directors who left the Soviet Union perpetuated a Stanislavskian approach in Europe and America. Even those refugees who had never practiced the Art Theatre approach, such as Theodore Komisarjevsky in England and George Pitoëff in France, carried on under its banner. Their Chekhov was lyrical, enigmatic, moonstruck, and, above all, steeped in romantic nostalgia. European and American audiences accepted this without demur. After all, if Chekhov was a particularly Russian author, then who better to interpret him than a Russian, any Russian? Chekhov, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, came to be seen as elegiac and wistful.