DRAMA OF CHEKHOV

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22985, 14 September 1936, Page 12

DRAMA OF CHEKHOV

ADDRESS TO W.E.A. “ The Drama of Chekhov ” was the title of a very interesting address delivered to the W.E.A. on Saturday evening by Professor J. N. Findlay. The drama of Chekhov, Professor Findlay said, presented very great difficulties for appreciation and analysis. It was, in the’first place, doubtful whether anyone could thoroughly understand a work belonging to a remote literature unless he took the trouble to steep himself in the geographical, historical, and sociological circumstances in which that work had been produced. For this reason it was highly probable that no one now living understood Greek tragedy. The impression produced on us by such writings would have seemed a shocking distortion to the ancients. In the case of the literatures of England. France, and Germany, where the social and cultural situations were more or less similar, and there was a great deal of mutual influence and interchange, it was possible for works belonging to one literature to be appreciated by members of the other cultures. Even here, however, there were astonishing anomalies. There were English writers of the highest merit for whom Continental readers had no use, whereas some quite inferior writers such as Byron or Wilde or Kipling were regarded as the fine flower of English genius. In the case of Russia, these difficulties of interpretation were considerably greater. Russia had been and was a thoroughly crazy country, in which imperfectly assimilated Western literatures, sciences, philosophies, and social practices had been superimposed oil mystical, mediaeval opinions and feudal ways. We who had not lived in sue'' situations found it very hard to think ourselves into ,them; we were, therefore, liable to attribute to the individual style of an author the peculiarities of the material he was working on and to think him queer and revoffing, or original and beautiful, when he was merely presenting to us the lue and circumstances among which ha had moved. These difficulties applied particularly to the plays of Chekhov. The gloom and despair of many of the characters, their vague and unsatisfactory ideas and ideals, their absorption in themselves and lack of external interests and responsibilities, the irrelevant flight of their thoughts and irrational sequence of their feelings were all characteristics of a certain large and influential class of people who had been the products of a certain historical and social situation which, it was to be hoped, would never return Chekhov had stressed these qualities in the characters of his dramas, and made them the material of his art; it was natural for a foreign reader to think that these were qualhies of Chekhov’s art as well, and to see in the latter monotony, dismalness, and disconnection. It was only when one became adapted to the peculiarities of Chekhov’s material that one could see how superbly planned, how devoid of all superfluities and disconnections his dramas were; every detail was carefully designed to show up or enrich the central theme. Modern Russian critics did not appear to think as highly of Chekhov as had formerly been the case, and were astonished at the vogue, now waning, which his plays had enjoyed in England. The vogue of Chekhov had probably been exaggerated, as all vogues were, and the speaker thought that it had primarily been due to a certain harmony between the mood of England in the ’twenties and of Chekhov in the ’eighties and ’nineties. But Dr Findlay also imagined that the decline of Chekhov’s reputation in modern Russia was due to the fact that he had been essentially detached and objective, a pure artist without a “ message,” of the same type as Flaubert or Proust, and pure art was not in favour under a Marxist regime, though it had continued to exist there as elsewhere. The dramas of Chekhov were quite unlike other dramas in the fineness of their texture. The first impression they produced was one of bizarrerie and confusion. They did not read at all well. The dialogue seemed incredibly dippy and disconnected, and was passing continually from one character to another. People were constantly coming on to the stage and vanishing, and incidents were constantly occurring which seemed to have no connection with the main theme, if there was a main theme. One could easily have imagined that Chekhov had constructed his plays in a thoroughly random and irresponsible way. If one added to this the fact that practically nothing happened in his plays, the initial bewilderment of English audiences accustomed to the slick obviousness of Pinero or Galsworthy or Somerset Maugham wks easy to understand. The play of Chekhov required to be seen at least twice and preferably three times in order to be followed at all. They were like some very complicated symphonic poem, in which a vast number of instruments played their part, which had all to be separately attended to and followed in order that the whole might be apprehended*. No character occupied the footlights for any length of time, no remark was underlined, there were always distracting influences and crosscurrents, and it was exhaustingly difficult to see the wood for the trees. But there was a wood in Chekhov as well as trees, and one only learnt to see that wood when, after having grown acquainted with the trees, one withdrew to a distance. Then all the strange and brilliant fragments of which his work seemed at first to consist, composed themselves into an extremely simple and perspicuous design. The imposition of unity on so rich a diversity could probably only be paraded in Shakespeare. On the first impression Cnekhov’s plays were not dramas because there seemed to be no continuous or sustained action in them. Lots of minor things happened, but there was no central happening, no conflict of pitched interests, which engaged attention. There was certainly a profound difference between the aspects of life selected by the ordinary'dramatist and those selected by Chekhov. The ordinary dramatist selected a certain rather unusual and critical situation in which certain characters were engaged, and showed how this situation worked itself out. Only such aspects of the characters and their environment as were relevant to the developing situation were brought into the play. This mode of abstractive treatment was legitimate, but it was quite as legitimate to express in art another perception: that life did not consist of neat, isolated situations which worked themselves to; final conclusions, that it resembled in the main a vast and sluggish stream traversing a tundra and breaking up into hundreds of disconnected streams and tendencies which wei’e characterised by nothing in common but difficulty and complexity and a general direction towards something which could not be really determined. Chekhov attempted to picture the continuous life of certain places and times: the life in provincial towns or on country estates, where all crises and personal repercussions were relatively unimportant disturbances of an unchanging or very slowly changing situation. All of us had lived for periods in certain relatively stable situations, meeting certain people fairly regularly and repeatedly, doing certain familiar things, and had been either happy, unhappy or merely bored in such situations. If we had attempted, after a laQ.se of years, to recover the quality of such a life, we should not have laid much stress on incidents which had seemed important at the time, nor should we have laid stress on any person or event at the expense of any other. All would have been passed over in a rapid, detached way as different things which had had nothing to do with each other and at the time would be brought together as parts of the same mass of associated material. We should have selected fairly typical moments for presentation rather than extraordinary bnes. walks in the woods, social gatherings in the evenings, conversations in familiar places, the beginnings Snd ends of journeys, depressed meditations in the middle of the night with the wind howling, and so on. If we had attempted to express the quality of such a period of our life in a drama we should have been writing in the way Chekhov had written. There might not have been so much boredom and

depression in our general picture as there was in his dramas, but that was a consequence of his temperament and material, not of his method. The principal characters in Chekhov’s plays were members of the Russian landed gentry and the intelligentsia, a peculiar historical class. These people had relied for all the material provisions for their existence on the labours of serfs and peasants; they had had, for the most part, no understanding of the processes by which wealth had been produced and distributed. They had also been nourished by ideas and ideals which bore no relation to their mode of life or traditions; they had imbibed scientific materialism, liberal and socialistic ideas, western fashions in art and literature. They had spoken a foreign language to a large extent, and had been quite out of touch with the life and thought of the uneducated, and had in general had no immediate relation to any kind of reality. If we added to these facts the further fact that at the beginning of the ’eighties the Czar Alexander 111 had initiated a vicious reaction from all forms of liberalism, and that every person of intelligence or enlightenment had been more or less suspect and debarred from public activity or expression of his opinions, we could understand why all the activities of the Russian upper classes had lost themselves in rather useless and dismal channels. If we considered all these factors we could understand why Chehkov’s plays were so full of ineffectual people, certainly entirely free from vulgarity or the grosser vices, touchingly unable to adjust themselves to changing conditions, and wasting their energies in vague intellectual or romantic aspirations, occasionally filled with visionary satisfaction but more often a prey to futility and frustration.