Yet, for all this modesty, over the course of a mere century Chekhov has reached the rank of Shakespeare. They are bracketed together as the greatest playwrights of all time. The Polish director Andrzej Wajda has remarked, “Theatre in our European tradition derives from the word, from literature, the Greeks, Shakespeare, Chekhov.”14 Note the absence of Ibsen, who might deserve better, with his endeavors to raise everyday experience to an epic level. Ibsen’s grandiosity takes risks: when he succeeds, the effect is breathtaking; when he fails, it is involuntarily ludicrous. Chekhov regularly avoided the grandiose, the overtly poetic, the tragic pose; or else he undercut them when they arose inadvertantly.
Despite what Wajda says about the word, part of Chekhov’s special appeal comes from what he leaves out, another legacy from the Symbolists, the pregnant pause. Often what is left unsaid—the awkward gaps in conversation, the sentences that trail off in the air, the interstices of pauses—matters most in Chekhov’s plays. Of course, Stanislavsky, who distrusted understatement, amplified and multiplied the Chekhovian pause, turning it into a pretext for veristic stage effects. An actor who worked at the Art Theatre in 1908–1909 recalled that the pauses “were held precisely by the numbers and the actors were recommended to count the seconds mentally during the duration of the pauses.”15 This mechanical rendition loses touch with the essence of the Chekhovian pause, itself a precursor of what Beckett referred to as the transitional zone in which being makes itself heard.
What then justifies this coupling of Shakespeare and Chekhov? I would suggest that John Keats, in a famous letter of 1818, put his finger on it. Reacting to a performance of Edmund Kean as Richard III, Keats mused on Shakespeare’s protean brilliance:
at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainities, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.16
Walter J. Bate paraphrases this: “in our life of uncertainties, where no one system or formula can explain everything . . . what is needed is an imaginative openness of mind and heightened receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness.”17 Shakespearean mastery requires a negation of the writer’s own ego, a sympathetic absorption into the essential significance of the writer’s object. Chekhov seems to have attained that state of authorial absence.
For Keats, as for the other English Romantics, Shakespeare’s brilliance at negative capability was shown in his extensive gallery of characters, all equally vivid, multi-faceted, and imbued with idiosyncratic opinions, idioms, behavior. Chekhov can hardly exhibit the Bard’s variety or plenitude in his plays; the narrow, seemingly repetitive nature of his dramatic world was a ready target for satire even in his lifetime. But another, earlier letter of Keats comes to our aid; in it he divided ethereal things into three categories: “Things real— things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare—Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist— and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit.”18
Chekhov admits the existence of real things in his writings and endows them with a significance beyond their material status; however, the existence of semireal things such as love remains problematic and nebulous for his characters. Yet, the confines of the Chekhovian world teem with Keats’s “Nothings” to be made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit. As Stanislavsky intuited, a samovar in Chekhov was not the same as a samovar in Ostrovsky; it, along with the pauses and sound effects and changeable weather, bespoke the overall tone, reflected the inner life of the characters. Leonid Andreev named this interrelationship of everything in Chekhov “panpsychism.” The same soul animates whatever appears on stage:
On the stage Chekhov must be performed not only by human beings, but by drinking glasses and chairs and crickets and military overcoats and engagement rings. . . . it all comes across not as items from reality or true-to-life sound and its utterances, but as the protagonists’ thoughts and sensations disseminated throughout space.19
This goes beyond the sympathetic fallacy; it creates a distinctive microcosm, instantly recognizable whatever the vagaries of directors. It is the unifying factor that ties together even the most seemingly non-communicative dialogue and solipsistic yearnings.
When Mariya Knebel, Stanislavsky’s last pupil, came to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1968 to direct The Cherry Orchard, the actors were surprised that she did not require a samovar on stage.20 The samovar had always been the indispensable token of Chekhov’s foreignness. In the last decades, however, in production after production, the samovar has been supplanted as emblematic prop by an old Victrola with a morning-glory horn. Chekhov is still associated with the past, but not a specificially Russian or historic past. His “pastness,” like that of any great dramatist, is part of a continuum with the present. The suggestion is that somehow the screechy recorded voices played back on a turntable return the past to us in distorted, nostalgic form, which we interpret as our needs require.21
In his book The Theatrical Event, David Cole refers to illud tempus, an archetypal realm that the theater must depict, “not so much when it first occurred as where it is always happening.”22 Beyond the reality the estates and garrison towns of Chekhov’s plays held for their original audiences, they have now taken on a polysemic existence. They transcend a specific society to become archetypal realms. The spellbinding lake of The Seagull has more in common with the island of The Tempest than with a landscape in Turgenev. The rooms in the Prozorov home can expand to the dimensions of Agamemnon’s palace or dwindle to the claustrophobic cells of Beckett. The early critics of Chekhov could not have been more wrong when they condemned him as the poet of an obsolescent set, circumscribed by its own eccentricity. Just as the Shakespearean illud tempus shines through modern dress and radical transpositions, the Chekhovian illud tempus gains in eloquent meaning from its disguises, even when Thomas Kilroy transfers The Seagull to the Ireland of the Celtic Twilight or Tadashi Suzuki plungs the officers of Three Sisters into absurdist baskets or the Irondale Ensemble Project turns Uncle Vanya into a 1940s radio announcer in Charlevoix, Michigan. Without shedding its specificity, the world of the Chekhovian intellectual has become as remote as Camelot and as familiar as Grover’s Corners, as exotic as Shangri-La and as homely as Kasrilevka. It instantly conjures up a long-vanished way of life that nevertheless compels us to adduce current counterparts. The persistence of the identifiable and idiosyncratic world suggests that he never stopped being Chekhov our contemporary.