But this is not true of plays. People do read plays, but not very much, and most of us judge them by what we see on the stage. If the literary world has a handful of interpreters who mistake themselves for the author, the theatrical world has only a handful who do not mistake themselves for the playwright. '\Ve all need to see ourselves as a little more important than we are, but people in the theatre need to see themselves as a lot more important than anybody else.
Stanislavski, a great director, is probably most responsible for the frequent misinterpretations of the Chekhov plays. '\Ve have taken his prompt scripts for the Moscow Art Theatre produc- tions and used them as our bible, adding our own misinter- pretations, of course, until now we seldom see a Chekhov play that is pure Chekhov. Most of us, therefore, do not know the plays. We know only something that we call "Chekhovian," and by that we mean a stage filled with sweet, soupy, frustrated people, created by a man who wept for their fate. This inter- pretation holds very little of the truth: it is based on the com- mon assumption that the writer shares the viewpoint of those he writes about. One forgives the dinner-party ladies and gen- tlemen who say, "You must think people terribly evil or you wouldn't write about villains," or, "I am sure you are an aw- fully nice person because you write about such nice people," but it is hard to forgive the serious critic or reader, or the teacher, or Stanislavski, or the followers of Stanislavski, for this kind of foolishness.
Chekhov fought long and hard against this interpretation of his plays. He lost the battle and he knew it, but, fortunately, he could not have known that it would still be lost fifty years later. Stanislavski was a theatre king by divine right, his actors chil- dren of the line, and it is always hard to convince royalty. Chekhov did argue over the plays, but he was a sick man and he was living in Yalta, far away from the theatre world of Moscow and St. Petersburg. He admired the Moscow Art Theatre and felt close to it, though he was critical of it, and sometimes sharp and bitter. He was tied to Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko by affection and gratitude but Chekhov acted like a father who is forced to sit in impotent disapproval of his child's adopted home lest if he take the child away a new set of foster parents might prove worse than the old.
Stanislavski was a man of intelligence and great ability, and one can wonder why he did not present the plays as Chekhov wished them to be presented. The answer is simple: Stanislav- ski's interpretation had made the plays popular. What Stanis- lavski put upon the stage was what the public wanted, or at least what the avant-garde section of the public wanted. It was their mood, the state of their disillusioned lives, their lack of hope, their tragic reading of life that was responsible for the popular conception of Chekhov as a playwright. Chekhovian came to mean something drear and wintry, a world filled with puff-ball people lying on a dusty table waiting for a wind to roll them off.
It has been forgotten that Chekhov said The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard were comedies. Trigorin, in The Seagull, has been interpreted in many ways, but he has almost never been played as he was intended: a third-rate writer, a man who was neither good nor bad, an aging and disappointed fellow who floundered around hoping that the next small selfish act would bring him pleasure. Nina is usually played with a certain high- minded foolishness, a virgin with her head in the air, too simple to understand the worldliness of the man who seduces her. Certainly Chekhov meant her to be a sweet and charming young woman, but the head that was in the air was not meant to be too bright, and it was filled with nonsense. She is a sad, lost, hopeless girl whose punishment springs from her owra second- rate standards of life. She could never have been intended as the tragic figure that actresses and directors prefer.
And it is so with The Cherry Orchard. One of Chekhov's favorite themes is the need that shallow people have for emo- tional fancy dress, their desire to deck out ordinary trouble in gaudy colors, and to teeter around life like children in their mother's high-heeled shoes. Chekhov makes it very clear that the lovable fools in The Cherry Orchard are not even worth the trees that are the symbol of their end. But the play is usually presented as a drama of delicate, charming, improvident aris- tocrats pushed around by a vulgar, new-risen bourgeoisie. (Chekhov took great pains to point out that Lophakin was not a vulgar man and should not be played like a lout.) Mme. Ranevskaya is a woman who has dribbled away her life on trifles. Chekhov pitied her and liked her—it still seems to be news to most people that writers end up liking all their charac- ters—but he was making fun of her. In real life it is possible to like a foolish woman, but this viewpoint is frowned upon in the theatre: it allows for no bravura, gets no sympathy for the actress, and is complex because foolishness is complex. It is thus easier, in such cases, to ignore the author's aim, or to change it. The Cherry Orchard is sharp comedy. Nowhere else does Chekhov say so clearly that the world these people made for themselves would have to end in a whimper.
He foresaw the end of their world, but he had the artist- scientist hope for a better world. He says so over and over again. It is doubtful, however, that he would have liked or would have fitted into the social revolution that was so shortly to follow him. It is one thing to know what is wrong with the old order, it is another to be comfortable in the new. But hu- man personality is extraordinarily complex and is dependent upon so many factors and grows from so many different roots that one such guess is as worthless as the next. And the roots from which Chekhov grew were very speciaclass="underline" his place of birth, his education, his family, his religion, his sexual nature, the whole niveau of his life was very different from ours.
Then, too, Chekhov was not a simple man and much of his life is still not known to us and much of what is known is not understood. He was a nineteenth century man and he shared with the intellectuals of his time and his country a kind of Christian ideal of life, although he divorced the ideal from the church he was born into. Human life was of very great impor- tance to these men: they were, in the deepest sense, reformers, and they wished to reform not from busybody zeal, but from their anguish that the individual human being cease to suffer hunger and disease. It was easy for such men to become senti- mentalists, and many of them did. Chekhov was a sweet man, a generous man, a tolerant man, and he gave pity where it was due, but he was a tough, unsentimental man with a tough mind, and thus he had tough tools to write with.
His friend Tolstoy, comparing him to Shakespeare, said: "Chekhov doesn't have the real nerve of a dramatist." In the end, Tolstoy is probably right, although the comparison is harsh and hasn't much point.
But then I am not a critic of writers, nor do I wish to be. Chekhov said: "When people talk to me of what is artistic or inartistic . . . I am at my wit's end. I divide all productions into two categories: those I like and those I don't like." I like Chekhov, I like these letters, and I hope you will, too.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
SHOLOM ALEICHEM (1859-1916) was the pseudonym of Solomon Rabinowitz, a humorous writer who emigrated to the United States in 1906.
MARIA ANDREYEVA ( ? -1953) was an actress in the Moscow Art Theatre. She played Irina in the first performances of "The Three Sisters."