Whether or not this play is identical to Without Patrimony, the obsession with paternal relations and dispossession runs through it. Platonov has descended in status from gentleman to village schoolmaster. Voinitsev loses his estate through his own and his stepmother’s extravagances; a deceased general looms over their lives as one will in Three Sisters. A bleak picture is drawn of fathers and sons on a moral leveclass="underline" Platonov’s recollections of his late father are contemptuous; Glagolyev Jr. heartlessly tricks his father and goads him into a stroke; both Glagolyevs woo the same woman and drown their disappointment in Parisian debauchery. The Triletskys are ashamed of their drunken father, whom they treat as a kind of wayward child. Shcherbuk hates his two daughters. Only the Vengerovichs seem to preserve a mutually respectful alliance, and they are Jews, outsiders in this society.
Chekhov was unable to pursue all the hares he started in this play, or to find the proper angle from which to view his protagonist. Awkwardly, he puts his own opinion in the mouth of Glagolyev Sr. shortly before Platonov’s first appearance, setting him up as “the finest exponent of modern infirmity of purpose.” This rural Don Juan is irresistible to women, but he is also a cracker-barrel Schopenhauer whose alleged idealism and skepticism appeal to the men. Shallow and vacillating, he has a silver tongue, not unlike Tur-genev’s Rudin, the exemplar of superfluous man. He bears all the earmarks of the type: alienated, hypersensitive, and mired in inertia.
Irony swamps Platonov’s claims to heroic stature; with ambitions to be Hamlet, “a second Byron,” “a prospective cabinet minister and a Christopher Columbus,” he is shamefaced to reveal his paunchy schoolmaster status to a former girlfriend. He has not even graduated from the university, which does not prevent him from lecturing others on their spiritual and moral failings. Since most of the men in the community are grotesque clowns or flaccid weaklings, he seems in contrast a paragon, and hence a lodestone to women.
Four of the mille e tre this village Don Giovanni numbers in his catalogue of conquests contradict Glagolyev’s notion that a woman is a paragon. Platonov’s wife, Sasha, is a long-suffering homebody whom he forces to read Sacher-Masoch’s Ideals of Our Times; her two attempts at suicide, both thwarted, are not to be taken seriously. Twenty-year-old Mariya Grekova is shown to be a hypocritical bluestocking, whose highminded scorn melts into infatuation when Platonov writes her a love letter. The sophisticated widow Anna Petrovna manipulates the men in her circle for financial security, and sees Platonov as a better quality of plaything, although her feelings may run deeper than she is willing to admit. Sofiya, her daughter-in-law, commits adultery with Platonov in hopes of a “new life” but shoots him when he shrugs off the affair. If Mariya is the Donna Elvira, then Sofiya is the Donna Anna of this opera.
Osip the thief does not play Leporello to Platonov, however; rather, he is a kind of double. He tries to set himself above his fellows by being a “bad man.” He is a Nietzschean superman on a plebeian plane. Platonov harms others by manipulating their emotions; Osip harms them physically and materially. And they are both destroyed by their victims. When the two men grapple in the schoolroom, it is like a man fighting his shadow or Doppelgänger.
For all its overstatement, what makes this play a real portent of Chekhov’s mature work is the unsteady listing from the comic side to the serious. It bespeaks a view of the cohesiveness of life, in which critical issues and meaningless trivia coexist. Chekhov’s career as a professional humorist made him alert to the grotesque detail, the absurd facet of any situation; but more important is his ingrained awareness that the current of life, awash with the banal flotsam of everyday, carries away heroic poses and epic aspirations. A comic effect is natural when grandiose philosophical questions and emotional crises have to share space with the inexorable demands of the humdrum.
NOTE
1 M. P. Chekhov, “Ob A. P. Chekhove,” Novoe slovo 1 (1907): 198.
UNTITLED PLAY
ПЬeca ·eз нaз‚aния
sometimes known as
WITHOUT PATRIMONY (DISINHERITED) or PLATONOV
Бeэoтцo‚щинa or Плaтoнo‚
Play in Four Acts
CHARACTERS
ANNA PETROVNA VOINITSEVA, the young widow of a general
SERGEY PAVLOVICH VOINITSEV, General Voinitsev’s son by his first marriage
SOFYA YEGOROVNA, his wife
PORFIRY SEMYONOVICH GLAGOLYEV SR.
landowners, neighbors of the Voinitsevs
KIRILL PORFIRYEVICH GLAGOLYEV JR.
GERASIM KUZMICH PETRIN
PAVEL PETROVICH SHCHERBUK
MARIYA YEFIMOVNA GREKOVA,
a girl of 20
IVAN IVANOVICH TRILETSKY,
a retired colonel
NIKOLAY IVANOVICH,
his son, a young physician
ABRAM ABRAMOVICH VENGEROVICH SR,
a rich Jew
ISAK ABRAMOVICH, his son, a university student
TIMOFEY GORDEEVICH BUGROV, a merchant
MIKHAIL VASILYEVICH PLATONOV, a village schoolmaster
ALEKSANDRA IVANOVNA (SASHA), his wife, daughter of 1.1. Triletsky
OSIP, a fellow about 30, a horse thief
MARKO, messenger for the Justice of the Peace, a little old geezer
VASILY
servants of the Voinitsevs
YAKOV
KATYA
GUESTS, SERVANTS
The action takes place on the Voinitsevs’ estate in
one of the southern provinces.
ACT ONE
A drawing-room in the Voinitsevs’ home. A French window to the garden and two doors to the inner rooms. A mixture of both old-and new-fashioned furniture. A grand piano, beside it a music-stand with a violin and sheet music. A harmonium. Pictures (oleographs) in gilt frames.
SCENE I
ANNA PETROVNA is sitting at the piano, her head bowed over the keys. NIKOLAY IVANOVICH TRILETSKY enters.
TRILETSKY (walks over to Anna Petrovna). What’s the matter?
ANNA PETROVNA (raises her head). Nothing . . . Just a little bored . . .
TRILETSKY. Let’s have a smoke, mon ange!1 My flesh is itching for a smoke. For some reason I haven’t had a smoke since this morning.
ANNA PETROVNA (hands him hand-rolled cigarettes). Take a lot so you won’t be pestering me later.
They light up.
It’s so boring, Nikolya! It’s tedious, there’s nothing to do, I’m depressed . . . I don’t even know what there is to do . . .