Chekhov to Olga Knipper-Chekhova,18 October 1903:
For the longest time now, I’ve been wanting to write the silliest possible vaudeville.
Untitled Dramas, 1903–1904
Mikhail P. Chekhov, “On A. P. Chekhov,” Everybody’s Journal (Zhurnal dlya vsekh) 7 (1906):
My brother always had plenty of themes for plays. I remember, he told me the subject of a play he had thought up, in which there was supposed to be an enormous printing office on stage. My brother loved printing offices, even advised me to get a job at some big printing office, even loved the book trade, but believed most, I think, in selling books at railroad stations. While staying in Venice with Suvorin and the author Dmitry Merezhkovsky in March 1891, Chekhov considered writing a play about the tragic fate of the Doge Marino Faliero, who stood up for the honor of his young wife, insulted by a patrician slanderer, but was not supported by the senate, and, after an unsuccessful attempt at an uprising against the oligarchy, was executed in 1355.
Olga Knipper-Chekhova, memoirs in Izvestiya, July 14, 1934:
In the last years of his life Anton Pavlovich had the idea of writing a play. It was still rather vague, but he told me that the hero of the play, a scholar, is in love with a woman who either doesn’t love him or betrays him, and so this scholar goes to the Far North. This is how he imagined the third act: there is a steamship, lost in the ice, Northern lights, the scholar is standing alone on the deck, silence, serenity and long nights, and then against the background of the Northern lights he sees the shadow of the beloved woman skim by.
Konstantin Stanislavsky,19 “A. P. Chekhov and the Art Theatre (Recollections),” Yearbook of the Moscow Art Theatre 1943 (Moscow, 1945):
The Spring of 1904 passed. Anton Pavlovich’s health kept getting worse. . . . However, despite his illness, he did not abandon his love of life. He was very interested in the Maeterlinck production which we were enthusiastically rehearsing at the time. He had to be kept abreast of the course of the work, shown the models for the sets, have the staging explained.
He himself dreamed of a play entirely new to his tendencies. Actually, the plot he concocted for the play was far from Chekhovian. Judge for yourself: two friends, both young, are in love with the same woman. This mutual love and jealousy creates complicated interrelationships. It ends up with them going on an expedition to the North Pole. The set for the last act depicts an enormous ship, lost in the ice. At the end of the play the two friends see a white ghost, gliding across the snow. Obviously, this is the phantom or soul of the beloved woman who has died far away in their homeland.
That was all that one could learn from Anton Pavlovich about his newly conceived play.
Aleksandr Kuprin,20 memoirs in Znanie (Knowledge) 3 (St. Petersburg, 1905):
At the same time, he required of writers the most ordinary, true-to-life plots, simplicity of exposition and absence of tricky effects. “Why write,” he wondered, “that somone got into a submarine and traveled to the North Pole to effect some reconciliation with people, while his beloved with a dramatic yelp throws herself off a bell-tower? All this is untrue, and doesn’t happen in reality. One must write simply: about how Pyotr Semyonovich married Mariya Ivanovna. And that’s all . . .”
NOTES
1 The actual author was A. M. Krasovsky. Solovyev had translated a comedy called Too Few Suitors and Too Many Brides.
2 French: who knows?
3 Nikolay Aleksandrovich Leikin (1841–1906), humorist and editor of the comic journal Splinters (Oskolki), to which Chekhov contributed from 1882 to 1887.
4 Instead of a parody, Chekhov wrote a damning review of the novel’s dramatization (Splinters of Moscow Life, 7, February 18, 1884), and later refers to it in The Seagull.
5 Aleksandr Semyonovich Lazarev (1861–1927), a journalist and writer under the pseudonym A. Gruzinsky, was befriended by Chekhov, who tried to improve his style.
6 Members of Korsh’s acting company in Moscow, many of whom appeared in the first production of Ivanov: Leonid Ivanovich Gradov-Sokolov (1840–1890) as Kosykh, Nikolay Vladimirovich Svetlov (d. 1909) as Borkin, and Bronislava Eduardovna Kosheva as Babakina. Chekhov’s boyhood friend Nikolay Nikolaevich Solovtsov (1856–1902) created Smirnov in The Bear.
7 “Chekhov could do a very funny takeoff of L. L. Belyankin, far from the most vicious of the vicious Moscow journalists. By the words ‘Belyankin type’ he sketched for me a completely clear and finished type” (Lazarev-Gruzinsky’s note)
8 For the final version of this play, see Collaboration, pp. 253–262.
9 See Collaboration, note 1.
10 Letter to Leontyev-Shcheglov, November 2, 1888.
11 Aleksey Sergeevich Suvorin (1834–1912), journalist and publisher, had risen from peasant origins to become a millionaire and influence monger in the conservative camp; he and Chekhov were good friends until they took opposite sides in the Dreyfus Affair.
12 Mariya Gavrilovna Savina (1850–1915), leading lady at the Alexandra Theatre in St. Petersburg, who created the role of Sarra there. Vladimir Nikolaevich Davydov (pseudonym of Ivan Nikolaevich Gorelov, 1849–1925), leading actor at the Maly Theatre, for whom Chekhov had written Swan Song and who created the role of Ivanov in both Moscow and Petersburg.
13 Vladimir Alekseevich Tikhonov (1857–1914), a fellow playwright, who wrote a review of Ivanov.
14 Tatyana Lvovich Shchepkina-Kupernik (1874–1934), writer and good friend of Chekhov’s who introduced him to the actress Lidiya Yavorskaya, one of the models for Arkadina.
15 Pavel Nikolaeich Orlenev (Orlov, 1869–1932), an impassioned actor of neurotic roles such as Raskolnikov, who had begun his career at Suvorin’s theater and corresponded with Chekhov in 1902–1904.
16 Pyotr Petrovich Gnedich (1855–1927), playwright; when he became manager of the Russian troupe of the Petersburg imperial theaters he tried to get Chekhov’s plays onto the Alexandra stage.
17 Aleksandr Leonidovich Vishnevsky (Vishnevetsky, 1861–1943), former schoolmate of Chekhov and founding member of the Moscow Art Theatre, where he created the roles of Dorn, Voinitsky, and Kulygin.
18 Olga Leonardovna Knipper (1870–1959), actress at the Moscow Art Theatre, who played Arkadina, Yelena, Masha, Ranevskaya, and Sarra there; she met Chekhov in 1898 and married him in 1901.
19 Konstantin Sergeevich Alekseev, known as Stanislavsky (1863–1938), a wealthy industrialist and amateur actor-director, who, with Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898 the Moscow Art Theatre, where he directed the first Moscow revivals of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, and the premieres of Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.
20 Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin (1870–1938), novelist and short story writer, became friendly with Chekhov in the 1890s, when Kuprin dabbled in playwriting.
ALSO BY LAURENCE SENELICK
Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists
Anton Chekhov
The Chekhov Theatre:
A Century of the Plays in Performance
Russian Satiric Comedy (translator)
Russian Comedy of the Nikolaian Era (translator)
Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet
Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin