After the Second World War, in countries under Soviet hegemony, Chekhov and the Art Theatre interpretation, now heavily adulterated by Socialist Realism, were thrust down the throats of Czech, Polish, East German, and Hungarian audiences. Little wonder if, left to their own devices, directors and critics found him indigestible and sought to supplant the Stanislavsky legacy.
The rehabilitation of Chekhov’s drama in Europe after World War II is due to a Czech and an Italian — Otomar Krejca and Giorgio Strehler, both leftists, but of quite different stripes. At his theater near Prague, Krejca worked in collaboration with his actors to realize what Gorky had once called the cold, cruel Chekhov, an impassive creator who flung his characters into an absurd world. There, in his interpretation, they beat their wings futilely against the meaninglessness of existence. Without being either a programmatic existentialist or a doctrinaire absurdist, Krejca distilled his own experiences as a victim of postwar Soviet domination into an interpretation of Chekhov that administered the shock of recognition to audiences throughout Europe. They could identify with the blighted hopes of his characters.
Strehler, for his part, employed elegance and metaphor in his 1956 Cherry Orchard, arguably the most influential Chekhov production of modern times. His white-on-white decor, with its overhead membrane of petals in a diaphanous veil, was copied from Bucharest to Indiana. Strehler sought to conflate all the levels of meaning in the play: the narrative, the socio-histori-cal, and the universally metaphoric. The toys in the nursery, for instance, went beyond realistic props to become emblems of the characters’ lost innocence and retarded emotions. Strehler universalized the nostalgia of Komisarjevsky and Pitoëff by enlarging it beyond the private sphere, while Krejca’s productions grew ever more schematic, insisting on the collective grotesque of the Chekhovian world.
In Soviet Russia during the 1960s, Chekhov was co-opted by a generation of idealists opposed to one of cynics. Ivanov became the play for the times, repeatedly revived. Antidomesticity was proclaimed by scenery that lacked walls and doors; manor houses were made to look like skeletal prisons and the branches of the cherry orchard became sterile and gnarled.
The English-speaking world has been the most resistant to extreme reforms in the performance of Chekhov. Psychological realism remains the preferred format, and the Chekhovian estate has become as familiar as the old homestead or the derelict country house. “Chekhov has been ennobled by age,” says Spencer Golub. “. . . He is as soothing and reassuring as the useless valerian drops dispensed by the doctors in all his plays . . . an article of faith, like all stereotypes . . . the Santa Claus of dramatic literature.”12 This may account for the large number of plays about Chekhov’s life, in which he turns into Drs. Dorn, Astrov, or Chebutykin, depending on the playwright’s bent. It is also the case that the English-speaking theater has, until very recently, been dominated by playwrights rather than directors. A Chekhovian resonance can be found more in the plays of leading dramatists from Rodney Ackland to Tennessee Williams than in extraordinary stagings.
Anywhere else in the world, the reinterpretation of Chekhov, defying the conventional homilies and exploding the traditional conventions, was the work of directors. At least until the end of the nineteenth century, one could trace the stage history of Shakespeare or Molière through the actors and their treatment of individual roles. Chekhov’s career as a dramatist, however, coincides with the rise of the director as prime mover in the modern theater; and the nature of his last plays derives in part from his awareness—if not his full approval — of what a director’s theater was capable of. Following the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, it required the integration of every component: the actors had to become an ensemble led by a virtuoso conductor. We can compare the Hamlets of great actors to some advantage and insight; but to compare the Ranevskayas of individual actresses makes no sense outside the context of the directorial visions for the productions in which they appeared.
Writing in 1960, Harry Levin pointed out that the opening of a New York apartment building called The Picasso signaled the domestication, and hence the end, of modernism.13 When the enfant terrible becomes the elder statesman and new coinages turn into commonplaces, efforts have to be made to recapture the original effect. The acceptance of Chekhov as a readily recognizable cultural totem makes him available for all kinds of co-optation. In the 1970s, the process of dismantling the Soviet icon of Chekhov continued: Anatoly Éfros converted The Cherry Orchard to a graveyard and Yury Lyubimov flung open the wall of the Taganka Theatre during his Three Sisters to reveal the Moscow streets outside: “You yearn for Moscow?” he seemed to be saying, “Well, there it is, in all its noise, grubbiness, and squalor.” Fifty years of false aspiration were debunked in a moment.
Later, Yury Pogrebnichko re-created Three Sisters behind a velvet rope as a museum exhibit, cluttered with the detritus of the past, forcing the post-Soviet spectator to come to terms with a regime that left him washed up on the shoals of the present. Henrietta Yanovskaya put her Ivanov on roller-skates to show him attempting to evade the responsibilities of his sordid situation. In the United States, the experimental Wooster Group dismantled Three Sisters by means of video screens and improvisation to evoke the modern world of mass media and create a hybrid theatrical language. The seamless web of the Stanislavskian simulacrum is fragmented into jagged shreds of interrupted meaning and faulty recollection. Dramatists remote from Chekhov’s sensibility, language, and concerns, such as Pam Gems, Edward Bond, David Mamet, Trevor Griffiths, Lanford Wilson, David Hare, Brian Friel, and Richard Nelson, transmogrify him in new versions, refracting their own preoccupations. This need of the English-speaking playwright to wrestle Chekhov to the mat has become a rite of passage. There is something compulsively Oedipal in this recurrent grappling with the one universally admitted patriarch of the modern stage.
Chekhov as patriarch may be a jarring image. Let us return to Chekhov’s replacement of Tolstoy as the Russian man of letters par excellence. Even as late as the 1940s, the Communist critic György Lukács could point to Tolstoy as the paradigm of universal genius who transcended his otherwise crippling bourgeois milieu through the power of his demiurgic creativity. In our less heroic age, however, Tolstoy seems unsympathetic; like Blake’s old Nobo-daddy, he glowers at us dispprovingly from beneath his beetling brows. Tolstoy’s creative achievements and his moral demands on us seem the titanic labors of some mythic era, impossible to us puny mortals. They also exude a kind of confidence and self-righteousness that are luxuries too costly for the spiritually impecunious survivors of the twentieth century. Even his death was exemplary: Tolstoy’s solitary demise in the railway station at Astapovo is the stuff of tragedy, Lear succumbing on the heath, this time unreconciled with Cordelia.
Chekhov’s death, which has been so often retold and reworked as fiction, is, in contrast, a comedy of errors. It too is exemplary, but as farce, from his alleged last words, “It’s been a long time since I’ve drunk champagne” (which echoes Uncle Vanya’s nanny: “It’s a long time since I’ve had noodles” ) to the transport of his corpse in a freight car marked “Oysters,” to the military band straying from a general’s funeral to double in brass at his graveside. Chekhov is the more accessible and more familiar figure. His irony has greater appeal than does Tolstoy’s moral absolutism. His vaunted objectivity, not all that objective under scrutiny, is more welcome because less judgmental. His inability to write a novel and his preference for small forms, open endings, and ethical ambiguities appeal to our postmodern fondness for the marginal, our wary distrust of the grand gesture. Tolstoy the schoolmaster stands over his text, ferule in hand, to make sure we have learned the lesson; Chekhov endears himself by modestly bowing out, protesting that it’s all in the words.