5) Your ending for Act I is stilted. It mustn’t end like that . . . In the interests of Act II you have to end with the reconciliation of the parties. After all, in Act II Tigrov plays Hamlet’s ghost!
6) By the way: the role of Trigrov is for Gradov.
7) Judging by your synopsis, you will be far from concise. Don’t forget that half the time will be spent on the actors’ business.
8) I’m afraid you’re getting fed up with me and will start cursing me out for being an arrogant swine . . . But I am comforted by the thought that fussing over a vaudeville is good for you: you’ll get the knack of it.
9) After the play [ivanov] I was so worn out that I lost the ability to think straight and speak right. Don’t be hard on me!
The Power of Hypnotism [Cилa „ипнoтизмa], 18878
Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov,9 “Literary Supplement,” Niva (Cornfields) 6–7 (1906):
In those days Chekhov had not yet written plays, and the one-act joke The Power of Hypnotism which he thoroughly reminds me of in one of his letters also remained unrealized . . . This was almost the only one of Chekhov’s improvisations of the time in dramatic form, from which, however, my memory has preserved only the “scenario” part. . . .
A certain dark-eyed little widow has turned the heads of two of her admirers, a fat major with a superb majorial moustache and a youth with no moustache at all, a pharmacist’s assistant. Both rivals, military and civilian, are crazy about her and ready to commit any folly for the sake of her flashing eyes, which possess, they are convinced, a certain special, demonic power. A funny love scene takes place between the seductive little widow and the fat major who, wheezing, gets down on his knees before the widow, offers her his hand and heart and swears that for love of her he will undergo the most awful sacrifices. The cruel little widow explains to the amorous major that she has nothing against his proposal and that the only obstacle to their march up the aisle . . . is the major’s bushy moustache. And wishing to test the demonic power of her eyes, the little widow hypnotizes the major, and hypnotizes so successfully that the major silently heads for the door and hurries straight out of the parlor to the nearest available barber. Then there occurs a certain farcical mix-up, whose details have escaped my memory, but whose upshot is the complete triumph of the moustacheless pharmacist. (It would seem the enterprising suitor, taking advantage of his rival’s absence, pours into the widow’s cup of coffee a love potion of his own devising.) And at the very moment when the little widow falls into the pharmacist’s embrace, the hypnotized major appears in the doorway in the most comic and silly plight: he has just got rid of his splendid moustache. . . . Of course, at the sight of the little widow’s perfidy, “the power of hypnotism” ends in a moment and the vaudeville ends with it.
I recall that the last scene, that is the major’s appearance without his moustache, made us both laugh a lot. Evidently, The Power of Hypnotism had the potential to become one of the most hilarious and popular of Russian farces, and I immediately made Chekhov promise that he would keep at it and not hide it away in a drawer.
“How’s it going, Antoine, with The Power of Hypnotism?” I asked him in one of my next letters.
“I shall write The Power of Hypnotism next summer—I don’t feel like it now!” Antoine negligently replied from his Moscow torpor.10
But summer went, winter came, then a number of years rolled by, and other, more melancholic themes eclipsed the brazenly funny joke of youth.
Leontiev-Shcheglov to Chekhov, September 30, 1888:
How is your Power of Hypnotism? Who knows — maybe, in defiance of all opinions, you are fated to become the more popular writer of vaudevilles.
Chekhov to Leontyev-Shcheglov, November 2, 1888:
Am I turning into a popular writer of vaudevilles? Goodness gracious, the way they clamor for them! If in my lifetime I just manage to scribble a dozen airy trifles for the stage, I’ll be thankful for it. I have no love for the stage. I’ll write The Power of Hypnotism during the summer—I don’t feel like it right now. This season I’ll write one little vaudeville and then rest until summer. Can you call this labor? Can you call this passion?
Thunder and Lightning [Гpoм и мoлиня],1888
Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin,11 Moscow, December 23, 1888:
I’ve dreamed up for Savina, Davydov12 and the ministers a vaudeville entitled Thunder and Lightning. During a thunderstorm at night I will have the country doctor Davydov drop in on the old maid Savina. Davydov’s teeth will ache, and Savina will have an insufferable personality. Interesting dialogue, interrupted by thunder. At the end—I marry them. When I’m all written out, I’ll start to write vaudevilles and live off them. I think I could write a hundred a year. Vaudeville plots gush up in me like oil in the wells of Baku. Why can’t I give my oil fields to Shcheglov?
Untitled Comedies and Vaudevilles
Chekhov to his younger brother Ivan, late October 1883:
I don’t walk anywhere, I don’t work. I keep busy with medicine and concocting a bad vaudeville.
Chekhov to Vladimir Tikhonov,13 May 31, 1889:
. . . I was starting a comedy, but wrote two acts and gave it up. It came out boring. There’s nothing more boring than a boring play, but now, it would seem, I am capable of writing only boring stuff, so it’s better to give it up.
Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik,14 Days of My Life:
I remember how once we were coming back to the estate [at Melikhovo] after a long walk. We were caught in the rain, and waited it out in an empty barn. Chekhov, holding a wet umbrella, said:
“You know, somebody ought to write a vaudeville: two people are waiting out a rainstorm in an empty barn, they joke, they laugh, they dry out their umbrellas and make declarations of love — then the rain ends, the sun comes out—and suddenly the man dies of a heart attack!”
“God save you!” I said in amazement. “How can you call that a vaudeville?”
“Still, it’s like life. You think things like that don’t happen? Here we are joking, laughing—and suddenly—bang! The end!”
Of course, he never wrote that “vaudeville.”
Pavel Orlenev,15 Memories of Chekhov in Rabis 29 (1929):
I had just performed one of my vaudevilles — From a Job to a Career—at Korsh’s Theatre. . . . After the intermission A. P. Chekhov came backstage. He walked into the dressing room and introduced himself.
“You know,” he said, smiling blandly at me, “as I watched you act, I wanted to write a vaudeville which would end in a suicide.”
Pyotr Gnedich,16 in Istorichesky Vestnik (Historical Messenger), 1911:
“Why do I write comedies!” Anton Pavlovich grieved. “Nobody needs them. The thing I should be writing is trivial vaudevilles! Ah, what can be better than a funny little, trivial little vaudeville, so funny that the spectators will burst their buttons roaring with laughter. And how healthy that would be for our hemorrhoidal organism!”
Aleksandr Vishnevsky,17 Scraps of Memory (Leningrad, 1928):
During a walk in [. . .] Tarasovka, Chekhov shared with me the plan for a play without a hero. The play was to be in four acts. During the first three acts people are waiting for the hero, they talk about him. He’s on his way, he isn’t on his way. And in Act Four, when everyone is fully prepared to meet him, a telegram arrives that he has died. This plan was very characteristic of Chekhov.