January 17, 1904 – On his 44th birthday, a terminally ill Anton Chekhov was brought to the premiere of his final play, The Cherry Orchard. Six months later he died at a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany, where he had gone for treatment of the tuberculosis that killed him.
“Dead six months after the premiere, huh?” my work colleague David said. He paused, his lips curling in amusement. “Guess it must have been a really bad production, huh?”
Not quite. Even as the roar of the Moscow audience descended on Chekhov, he could barely stand to acknowledge their applause, for his body was shaken with coughing induced by T.B.
In a way, it was fitting that the dying writer’s last play should be a comedy-drama about death – not only the end of a way of life, but the end of nature.
The last sound heard in the play is “the thud of an ax striking a tree far away in the orchard.” It might just as well be the death knell for the aristocrats that had ruled Russia for centuries, for a decade later they would be overcome by their nation's part in a calamitous world war and a revolution that would produce the 20th century's first and longest-lasting totalitarian regime. Yet modern audiences might feel that this class’s inadequate stewardship of the land will have even more devastating consequences than its profligate use of wealth.
A century before Al Gore and his Powerpoint-presentation-as-celluloid-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Chekhov understood perfectly the damage caused by exploitation of the land. Without strutting ego or hope of gain, but with an eloquent passion that rose to the level of poetry at times, he warned audiences of the hazards of abusing their ancestral lands for short-term profit. I’m surprised that current critics haven’t made more of his farsighted understanding on this score.
It may be because unlike all too many today, Chekhov doesn’t use theater as a political soapbox. His characters have a distinct vision of a brighter future in mind, but their all-too-human imperfections constantly undermine their best efforts to bring it to fruition.
Perhaps even more so than The Cherry Orchard, the play that best displays Chekhov’s understanding of the effect of the environment on character is Uncle Vanya. I have seen three versions of this 1902 tragicomedy, each fine in its way: Louis Malle’s 1992 film Vanya on 42nd Street, performed by actors in a theater in contemporary clothes, starring Wallace Shawn and Julieanne Moore; the 2000 production at New York’s Roundabout Theatre, starring Derek Jacobi, Roger Rees, and Laura Linney; and my personal favorite, the 1963 film starring Michael Redgrave, Rosemary Harris, and Laurence Olivier.
Perhaps recognizing that Dr. Astrov acts as something of a mouthpiece for the playwright, Olivier (who not only directed the movie but the original play in its legendary Chichester Festival production the year before) strongly resembles Chekhov with his pince-nez, dark hair, and goatee (as can be seen in the photo I’ve attached). I write “something of a mouthpiece” because, for all his wit, brilliance, and idealism, Astrov may be the character found most wanting by the playwright.
Consider Act 3, when the doctor opens up a map to show Yelena, the beautiful but indolent wife of one of his patients, how their district has changed ecologically over the years: Compared with 50 and even 25 years before, he notes, “there’s not a trace of those settlements, farms, monasteries or mills. What we have here is basically a picture of gradual but unmistakable decay, and the way things are going it won’t take another ten or fifteen years to complete….The decay we see here is the result of a struggle for existence man is losing. It’s the result of inertia, ignorance, and an utter lack of awareness.”
Astrov’s speech is brisk, specific, and uncomplicated – but, as the doctor notes in frustration, the object of his lecture is “not interested.” Yelena wants to gauge his feelings for her stepdaughter Sonia. The doctor’s eye, which misses few of the signs of nature’s degradation or his patient’s maladies, has utterly failed to observe Sonia’s obvious love for him (“You’re so distinguished. You have such a gentle voice…More than anyone I know, you are beautiful.”)
More than anyone else in the play, Sonia glimpses the doctor’s possibilities for greatness – his “astral” qualities. “Just listen to what he has to say,” she urges Yelena:
“He says that forests make the earth beautiful, that they teach man to appreciate beauty and instill a sense of majesty in him. Forests make a harsh climate milder. In countries with a mild climate people use less energy in their struggle with nature, so man himself is milder, gentler. People are soft and beautiful, yet full of passion.”
One person who benefits the most from nature is the doctor himself. There he can rejuvenate himself, forget the petty quarrels of the intellectuals he’s come to despise or the peasants who don’t really appreciate his services – and his inevitable, at least occasional failures in treating patients. (He winces at the memory of a patient who died while under chloroform.)
Sonia even successfully curbs Astrov’s heavy drinking, at least temporarily. But the doctor has not the slightest feeling for her. Instead, he indulges in an infatuation with Yelena, who is not only married but who embodies his belief that “an idle life can never be pure.”
At the end of the play, he is reduced to using nature to wheedle Yelena into an affair (“At least it’s romantic and has its own beauty: the woods, tumbledown manors out of Turgenev…”). When that doesn’t work he turns on her with rough but exacting justice that doesn’t leave himself unscathed, either: “You infected us all with your idleness – yours and his [her elderly husband, Serebryakov -- "Herr Professor," in Vanya's scornful nickname]. I was infatuated with you and didn’t do a thing all month. And meanwhile people have been falling ill, the peasants have let their cattle graze in the woods I was planting.”
It is all too easy for the doctor to stop at the end of the play for one last vodka. You can’t help suspect that, once the curtain comes down, his disciplined efforts on behalf of his patients and the landscape will come undone, as his cynicism feeds a growing thirst for alcohol.
Fortunately, idleness was not an issue for Chekhov. He not only found time to write four of the greatest plays ever written, but hundreds of innovative short stories – and kept up a busy medical practice. It was in the course of the latter – fighting a cholera epidemic, serving as doctor to the local peasant stock from which his parents sprang, and helping to build schools – that he was stricken with a massive pulmonary hemorrhage that forced his long-concealed tuberculosis out into the open. He lived the “strenuous life” preached by Teddy Roosevelt and, only forty-four, died even sooner from it than the American President.
The great theme underlying the melancholy music of Chekhov’s dialogue is waste – the fear that one’s life has been lived for nothing, an anxiety with a counterpart in man’s headlong destruction of the environment. Nobody has ever conveyed this inner turmoil with as much sympathy matched by gentle humor – just one of the many reasons why he is my favorite playwright.
“Dead six months after the premiere, huh?” my work colleague David said. He paused, his lips curling in amusement. “Guess it must have been a really bad production, huh?”
Not quite. Even as the roar of the Moscow audience descended on Chekhov, he could barely stand to acknowledge their applause, for his body was shaken with coughing induced by T.B.
In a way, it was fitting that the dying writer’s last play should be a comedy-drama about death – not only the end of a way of life, but the end of nature.
The last sound heard in the play is “the thud of an ax striking a tree far away in the orchard.” It might just as well be the death knell for the aristocrats that had ruled Russia for centuries, for a decade later they would be overcome by their nation's part in a calamitous world war and a revolution that would produce the 20th century's first and longest-lasting totalitarian regime. Yet modern audiences might feel that this class’s inadequate stewardship of the land will have even more devastating consequences than its profligate use of wealth.
A century before Al Gore and his Powerpoint-presentation-as-celluloid-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Chekhov understood perfectly the damage caused by exploitation of the land. Without strutting ego or hope of gain, but with an eloquent passion that rose to the level of poetry at times, he warned audiences of the hazards of abusing their ancestral lands for short-term profit. I’m surprised that current critics haven’t made more of his farsighted understanding on this score.
It may be because unlike all too many today, Chekhov doesn’t use theater as a political soapbox. His characters have a distinct vision of a brighter future in mind, but their all-too-human imperfections constantly undermine their best efforts to bring it to fruition.
Perhaps even more so than The Cherry Orchard, the play that best displays Chekhov’s understanding of the effect of the environment on character is Uncle Vanya. I have seen three versions of this 1902 tragicomedy, each fine in its way: Louis Malle’s 1992 film Vanya on 42nd Street, performed by actors in a theater in contemporary clothes, starring Wallace Shawn and Julieanne Moore; the 2000 production at New York’s Roundabout Theatre, starring Derek Jacobi, Roger Rees, and Laura Linney; and my personal favorite, the 1963 film starring Michael Redgrave, Rosemary Harris, and Laurence Olivier.
Perhaps recognizing that Dr. Astrov acts as something of a mouthpiece for the playwright, Olivier (who not only directed the movie but the original play in its legendary Chichester Festival production the year before) strongly resembles Chekhov with his pince-nez, dark hair, and goatee (as can be seen in the photo I’ve attached). I write “something of a mouthpiece” because, for all his wit, brilliance, and idealism, Astrov may be the character found most wanting by the playwright.
Consider Act 3, when the doctor opens up a map to show Yelena, the beautiful but indolent wife of one of his patients, how their district has changed ecologically over the years: Compared with 50 and even 25 years before, he notes, “there’s not a trace of those settlements, farms, monasteries or mills. What we have here is basically a picture of gradual but unmistakable decay, and the way things are going it won’t take another ten or fifteen years to complete….The decay we see here is the result of a struggle for existence man is losing. It’s the result of inertia, ignorance, and an utter lack of awareness.”
Astrov’s speech is brisk, specific, and uncomplicated – but, as the doctor notes in frustration, the object of his lecture is “not interested.” Yelena wants to gauge his feelings for her stepdaughter Sonia. The doctor’s eye, which misses few of the signs of nature’s degradation or his patient’s maladies, has utterly failed to observe Sonia’s obvious love for him (“You’re so distinguished. You have such a gentle voice…More than anyone I know, you are beautiful.”)
More than anyone else in the play, Sonia glimpses the doctor’s possibilities for greatness – his “astral” qualities. “Just listen to what he has to say,” she urges Yelena:
“He says that forests make the earth beautiful, that they teach man to appreciate beauty and instill a sense of majesty in him. Forests make a harsh climate milder. In countries with a mild climate people use less energy in their struggle with nature, so man himself is milder, gentler. People are soft and beautiful, yet full of passion.”
One person who benefits the most from nature is the doctor himself. There he can rejuvenate himself, forget the petty quarrels of the intellectuals he’s come to despise or the peasants who don’t really appreciate his services – and his inevitable, at least occasional failures in treating patients. (He winces at the memory of a patient who died while under chloroform.)
Sonia even successfully curbs Astrov’s heavy drinking, at least temporarily. But the doctor has not the slightest feeling for her. Instead, he indulges in an infatuation with Yelena, who is not only married but who embodies his belief that “an idle life can never be pure.”
At the end of the play, he is reduced to using nature to wheedle Yelena into an affair (“At least it’s romantic and has its own beauty: the woods, tumbledown manors out of Turgenev…”). When that doesn’t work he turns on her with rough but exacting justice that doesn’t leave himself unscathed, either: “You infected us all with your idleness – yours and his [her elderly husband, Serebryakov -- "Herr Professor," in Vanya's scornful nickname]. I was infatuated with you and didn’t do a thing all month. And meanwhile people have been falling ill, the peasants have let their cattle graze in the woods I was planting.”
It is all too easy for the doctor to stop at the end of the play for one last vodka. You can’t help suspect that, once the curtain comes down, his disciplined efforts on behalf of his patients and the landscape will come undone, as his cynicism feeds a growing thirst for alcohol.
Fortunately, idleness was not an issue for Chekhov. He not only found time to write four of the greatest plays ever written, but hundreds of innovative short stories – and kept up a busy medical practice. It was in the course of the latter – fighting a cholera epidemic, serving as doctor to the local peasant stock from which his parents sprang, and helping to build schools – that he was stricken with a massive pulmonary hemorrhage that forced his long-concealed tuberculosis out into the open. He lived the “strenuous life” preached by Teddy Roosevelt and, only forty-four, died even sooner from it than the American President.
The great theme underlying the melancholy music of Chekhov’s dialogue is waste – the fear that one’s life has been lived for nothing, an anxiety with a counterpart in man’s headlong destruction of the environment. Nobody has ever conveyed this inner turmoil with as much sympathy matched by gentle humor – just one of the many reasons why he is my favorite playwright.
Tonight at the library I shall immerse myself in Chekhov instead of providing reference service to the good folks of Monmouth County! I blame you Mr.Tubridy ;) Your writing is truly inspirational - thanks for giving a weary soccer mom an intellectual lift.
ReplyDeleteBridget
Dear Bridget,
ReplyDeleteYou lift my heart, weary soccer mom! Many thanks. I hope I'll always have faithful readers such as you.
Your fellow weary librarian,
Mike T.