NOTES
1 Ivan Bunin, O Chekhove [About Chekhov] (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1955). Translations are mine unless otherwise stated.
2 Ars. G., in Teatr i Iskusstvo [Theater and Art] 28 (1904). The author’s real name was Ilya Yakovle-vich Gurlyand (b. 1863?), a student at the time he met Chekhov in Yalta in 1889, later a journalist and professor.
3 Patrice Pavis, “Commentaires et notes” to Antoine Tchékhov, La Mouette. Traduction d’Antoine Vitez (Paris: Actes Sud, 1985), pp. 99–103.
4 K. Waliszewski, Littérature russe (Paris, 1900), p. 426; de Vogüé, quoted in Yu. Felichkin, “Rol teatra v vospriyati tvorchestva Chekhova vo Frantsii,” in Literaturny Muzey A. P. Chekhova: sbornik statey i materialov [The Chekhov Literary Museum: a collection of articles and documents], vyp. V (Rostov, 1969), p. 155.
5 Leo Wiener, Anthology of Russian Literature (New York, 1903), II; A. Bates, The Drama (London, 1903), p. 73.
6 “V Peterburge,” Chekhovsky yubileiny sbornik [Chekhov Jubilee Anthology] (Moscow, 1910), p. 530.
7 Yevtikhy Karpov, “Dve poslednie vstrechi s A. P. Chekhovym” [My last two encounters with Chekhov], Ezhegodnik imperatorskikh teatrov [Yearbook of the Imperial Theaters], vyp. V. (1909). It should be noted that Bunin considered Karpov’s reminiscences to be a tissue of lies.
8 V. E. Meyerhold, “Naturalistichesky teatr i teatr nastroenii” [“The Naturalistic Theater and the Theater of Mood”], in Teatr. Kniga o novom teatre: sbornik statey [Theater: A Book About the New Theater. A Collection of Articles] (St Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908): 136–150.
9 J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life, trans. S. M. Fuller (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1839), p. 168 (July 26, 1826).
10 Osip Mandelshtam, in Teatr i muzyka [Theater and Music] 36 (November 6, 1923).
11 Moskovsky Khudozhestvenny teatr v sovetskuyu épokhu. Materialy, dokumenty [The Moscow Art Theatre in the Soviet Era. Materials, Documents], 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1974), p. 124; V. A. Nelidov, Teatralnaya Moskva (sorok let moskovskikh teatrov) [Theatrical Moscow (Forty Years of Moscow Theaters)] (Berlin-Riga, 1931), p. 436.
12 In Newsnotes on Soviet and East European Drama and Theatre, III, 3 (November 1983): 2–3.
13 Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?” (1960), in Varieties of Literary Experience, ed. S. Burn-shaw (New York: New York University Press, 1962), p. 307.
14 Quoted in Maciej Karpinski, The Theatre of Andrej Wajda, trans. C. Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 124.
15 A. A. Mgebrov, Zhizn v teatre [A Life in the Theater], ed. E. Kuznetsov (Leningrad, 1920), I, pp. 224–225.
16 The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 184.
17 W. J. Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 249.
18 Letter to Benjamin Bailey (March 13, 1818).
19 Leonid Andreev, Pisma o teatre (1912), trans. as “Letters on Theatre,” in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, ed. and trans. L. Senelick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 240–241.
20 Mariya Knebel, “ ‘Vishnyovy sad’ v Irlandii,” Teatr 5 (1969): 158–166.
21 Even the first production of Three Sisters in 1901 gave the critic Innokenty Annensky the sense of a phonograph reproducing his own world: “the phonograph presents me with my voice, my words, which, however, I had been quick to forget, and as I listen, I naively ask: ‘who is that talking through his nose and lisping?’ ” I. F. Annensky, “Drama nastroeniya. Tri sestry,” in Knigi otrazhenii [A Book of Reflections] I (St. Petersburg: Trud, 1906), p. 147.
22 David Cole, The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective (Middletown, Conn., 1975), p. 8.
UNTITLED PLAY
While still in high school Chekhov wrote a four-act play so full of incident, “with horse-stealing, a gunshot, a woman who throws herself under a train,”1 that a family friend described it as a “drrama,” the two rs bespeaking its sensational quality. The critical consensus today sees it as the early stage of a work that may or may not be identical to a play called Without Patrimony or Disinherited (Bezottsovshchina). The hopeful neophyte sent it to his literary brother Aleksandr in Moscow. He got back a very negative critique, and may either have shelved it or else launched into the work now usually known as Platonov. This play also underwent intense rewriting, probably between 1878 and 1879. Chekhov toned down the dialogue, dropped two characters (Shcherbuk’s ugly daughters), and omitted a lurid scene in which Voinitsev pulls a dagger on Platonov, who disarms him with the shout, “Stand back!” and a torrent of rhetoric. Even with cuts, it was over twice the length of an ordinary play of the period.
Chekhov took it to Mariya Yermolova, one of the stars of Moscow’s Maly Theatre, an ill-considered move since the part suitable for her would have been the merry widow Anna Petrovna. Yermolova, noted for her heroic Joan of Arc, never played roles of sexual laxity. She returned the play, and the chagrined young playwright tore up the manuscript. However, his younger brother Mikhail had made two copies for submission to the censorship; and one of these survived in a safety-deposit box, 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 and drastically rewritten, it was first staged in German as Der unnützige Mensch Platonoff (The Superfluous Man Platonov) in 1928, and since then has appeared as A Country Scandal, A Provincial Don Juan, Ce Fou Platonov, Fireworks on the James, Untitled Play, Comédie russe, Wild Honey (Michael Frayn’s version), Player Piano (Trevor Griffith’s version), and Platonov (David Hare’s version). None of these adaptations has managed to secure a place for the protracted piece of juvenilia in the repertory. Its interest lies primarily in its being a storehouse of Chekhov’s later themes and characters: the cynical doctor, the cynosure attractive woman, the parasitic buffoons, the practical housewife, and the failed idealist. Most intricately reworked of all, the threat of losing the estate to debts was to become the connecting thread and constitutive symbol of The Cherry Orchard.
The characters are neatly divided into debtors and creditors. The older generation corrupts and suborns the younger generation through mortgages, loans, bribes, and gifts. Many of them are shown as nouveaux-riches, upstarts whose incomes derive from such suspect sources as leasing out dramshops and ruining old, established families. Yet their juniors are easy prey, depicted as wastrels and profligates. In Act Two, the clownish young doctor Triletsky puts the touch on an enriched grocer “just because,” and then hands out the cash he has received, ruble by ruble, to anyone who comes along. The passing of the banknotes from hand to hand graphically illustrates the mindless prodigality of Chekhov’s nobly born contemporaries.