A Modern Everyman

Chekhov was worn out by Ivanov. He wrote the play quickly–the first draft was completed in only ten days–but continued to rewrite it laboriously for several years. Two versions of the text survive, one written in 1887 for the Korsh Theatre in Moscow, the other for a production two years later at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. The two editions are, for several reasons, very different from each other.

To start with, Ivanov was Chekhov’s first attempt at writing a full-length play. Hitherto known only as the author of one-act farces, “vaudevilles” as he referred to them, Chekhov was determined to establish himself as a serious dramatist–a playwright for the new Russian theater. Unusually self-critical, he continuously rewrote the script until it met his own exacting standards.

Circumstances surrounding the play’s first production prompted Chekhov to revise Ivanov further. Shortly after the Moscow premiere, Chekhov’s literary and theatrical friends insisted that he should clarify the play’s central idea, adding weight to Ivanov’s inner conflict. Chekhov, an introvert by nature, rarely agreed to discuss his own work, but since these suggestions were made by trusted colleagues, whose authority in matters of theatre was beyond dispute, he soon found himself trapped in a series of discussions.

Chekhov reworked the role of Ivanov, emphasizing the spiritual sickness of his hero, who in the bloom of youth loses his appetite for life. Physician as well as writer, Chekhov interpreted Ivanov’s psychic frailty as a characteristically Russian ailment, even drawing charts and diagrams to illustrate this “national disease.” He wrote until his fingers could hardly move, spelling out time and again what he believed an average audience member should understand from the play. He began referring to the piece as “Dumbanov” and resented having to supply a philosophical treatise for the text to be understood. Exasperated, he rewrote the ending and added material that the later Chekhov, the author of Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, would have considered redundant.

The play enjoyed considerable success in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite extensive alterations to the script, Chekhov retained many comic and melodramatic elements, and his audience found much to laugh at. But the profound new idea that Chekhov frequently refers to in his letters defending the play was not understood. Only the surface details of the plot were staged: the story of an affable freethinker, Nikolai Ivanov, who acts in flagrant defiance of social norms by marrying a Jewish woman, then surrenders to the force of circumstances. He withdraws, loses his self-esteem, becomes entangled with a young girl, and drives his wretched, consumptive wife to death. Finally, unable to find any other means of escape, he kills himself–not offstage, but in front of the audience, just when he’s supposed to leave for church and his wedding.

This stagy ending, borrowed by Chekhov from the junkyard of theatrical convention, illustrates the dual nature of Ivanov. Conceptually innovative and thematically unique, the play lacks the artistic maturity that Chekhov would attain fully eight years later in another work of dazzling heresy, The Seagull. But much in Ivanov really is revolutionary. The “Russian disease” that Chekhov identifies, an equal blend of conscience and apathy, was unheard of in the theater of his day. The play dramatizes a metaphysical crisis, a condition we know well from Hamlet but which seems hilarious and strange in a provincial Russian setting. Ivanov suffers such an acute attack of the existential malaise that he wins the audience’s sympathy, despite his anti-Semitic brutality to his dying wife. The people around Ivanov fall back on the clichés of the Russian classics to explain his illness. Turgenev invented the phrase “superfluous man” to describe the ineffectual, idealistic hero of his novel of the same name. But Chekhov’s Ivanov refuses to adhere to literary typecasting: he doesn’t want to be either the Russian Hamlet or “the superfluous man.” He wants to be himself–and fails to do so.

A play like Ivanov could only be written by an author who drew on his own romantic history for material. Incidents from Chekhov’s personal life–in several cases only recently discovered–permeate the play. It was Anton Chekhov who, just before writing Ivanov, intended to marry Dunya Efros, an emancipated Jewish girl. It was Anton Chekhov who asked Dunya to change her religion. And it was Anton Chekhov who retold his own Jewish story in “Mire,” now rightly consigned to the literary subculture of Russian anti-Semitism. In Ivanov, Chekhov transcended that subculture, together with the other prejudices of his time.

For a hundred years, Ivanov has been an infrequent visitor to the Russian stage. In 1905, shortly after Chekhov’s death, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko directed the play’s first production at the Moscow Art Theatre. As a man of the 1880s and a contemporary of Chekhov, he staged Ivanov without revisionist interpretation. By 1905, the play already required a historical context to be understood, and Nemirovich needed to explain the social mind-set of the characters to the younger actors in the Moscow Art company. Two decades later in 1924, responding to Stanislavsky’s proposed repertory for the Moscow Art in Soviet Russia, Nemirovich strongly opposed any production of the play: “Ivanov is so out of sympathy with an optimistic age as to be incomprehensible.”

For decades, Ivanov disappeared from the stage. But each time the play returns to the repertory, it forces us to revise our understanding of Chekhov, and of our own age as seen through Chekhovian eyes. In the 1950s, Ivanov enjoyed a renaissance, first in Russia, then elsewhere. The post-Stalinist era discovered in Chekhov’s play a dramatization of the decline and fall of the Russian intelligentsia in a repressive social order. Soon it had become conventional to stage Ivanov as a tragicomedy. The play was especially popular under Brezhnev during the so-called “period of stagnation.” There could be no more resonant a text for those days of social decline and spiritual oppression than Ivanov, which was frequently produced in Moscow and the provinces in a variety of dramatic styles. In the most recent Moscow Art Theatre production (1977), Ivanov lived on a barren estate where interior and exterior were strangely intertwined.

Dead branches of trees were visible through the transparent walls of the house, like growths from some malignant disease. There was no furniture on stage, nor even a wall against which Ivanov could lean. At Moscow’s Lenkom Theatre, in contrast, the play became a farce and Ivanov a ridiculous idiot, his laments and groans incapable of provoking more than a smile.

Chekhov was convinced that Ivanov’s disease and suicide were quintessentially Russian, “unknown to Europe.” In his diary he once meditated on suicide among young Russian men. This striking passage draws emotional parallels between the vast Russian landscape, even the Russian climate, and the intimate details of human psychology:

On this side we find physical weakness, nervousness, premature puberty, a tremendous passion for life and truth, dreams of activity wide as the steppe, troubling analysis, ignorance alongside the loftiest thoughts; on the other side the endless plains, severe climate, a gray and severe nation with its sober, bitter history, the Tartar yoke, bureaucracy, illiteracy, damp capital cities, etc. “While in Western Europe people die because it is too cramped and suffocating to live, here they die because it is too wide to live.” There is too much space here, and insignificant man has not the strength to find his way around.

Though Chekhov did not have Ivanov in mind when he wrote this passage, it could serve as an epigraph to the play–if it were not for the fact that Chekhov never liked epigraphs.

Dr. Anatoly Smeliansky is Associate Artistic Director of The Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre and Associate Dean of the Moscow Art Theatre School.