The Russian Connection

Ryan McKittrick: How have twentieth-century Russian directors treated Chekhov’s vaudevilles such as those in Three Farces and a Funeral?

Anatoly Smelyansky: Leading twentieth-century directors have linked Chekhov’s vaudevilles with the whole of his art. Meyerhold was the first to do this in a 1933 production called Thirty-Three Swoons, which combined the leitmotifs from many of the vaudevilles. He also split the male and female characters into two separate parties, turning the gender struggle into a choral Greek conflict. More recently, Pyotr Fomenko directed a gloomy, mystical production of The Weddingthat enlarged the scope of the vaudeville by turning it into a play about human nature. The vaudevilles by themselves have historical significance. But, for me, the most interesting thing in them is Chekhov himself. Not the characters, but the writer who wrote them. The A.R.T. production, which combines the vaudevilles with scenes from Chekhov’s own life and death, shows this positive tendency to make connections.

RM: How would you contrast the vaudevilles with Chekhov’s major plays?

AS: The later dramas are parodies of the vaudevilles. Look at Chekhov’s famous devices from the serious dramas: the muffling of events, silences, pauses, idleness, the desire to do nothing, the inability to solve questions, complaining. In the vaudevilles, it’s the opposite. Those heroes have goals; every second they are doing something to get what they want. In the serious dramas, there is an unresolved central tension. In the vaudevilles, everything is possible, and often the characters get what they want. Chekhov reconstructed his vision of life when he began to write the serious dramas.

RM: What happens to Chekhov’s farcical sensibilities in his later plays?

AS: Chekhov’s later plays all have farcical elements in them. Comedy is always very close to Chekhov. It’s the most important part of his vision of life. Without that ingredient, Chekhov doesn’t exist. The Cherry Orchard, for example, has elements of farce in its structure and characters. In 1904, The Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) couldn’t bear to stage The Cherry Orchardas farce. Stanislavsky declared it a tragedy; Chekhov insisted it was a comedy. But in 1931, Nemirovich-Danchenko restaged The Cherry Orchardas a comedy while he was in Italy. We’re about to publish the letters in which he states that the Moscow Art Theatre misunderstood the play in 1904. Until the last day of his life, Chekhov felt the farcical aspects of life. Look at the letters from his last month in Germany. If he were able, he probably would have written a vaudeville about German life in a spa.

RM: What provoked the change from farce to tragicomedy in Chekhov’s plays?

AS: Chekhov wrote the vaudevilles and comic short stories to make a living. He once joked, “My Bear gave me more money than the gypsies’ real bears.” But he never considered the vaudevilles his ultimate goal. And something happened to him in the middle of the 1880s. He had become a fairly well-established writer and doctor. And this comfortable position forced him to ask, like Ivanov: what now? And there was another impetus to move onto something bigger. In 1884 he began coughing up blood, which he undoubtedly recognized as the onset of tuberculosis. In 1887, Chekhov published his first novel, The Steppe, and the important writers of the age immediately recognized Chekhov as a new voice. And Chekhov now realized he could be a serious writer. With The Steppe, Chekhov found his own distinctive style. And with The Seagulland Uncle Vanya, he tried to bring that voice to his drama.

RM: What do Chekhov’s letters to Olga Knipper reveal about his attitude towards love and marriage?

AS: Chekhov once joked in his journal: “In my grave I will be as alone as I am in my life … I cannot be married because I cannot be happy all day long.” Later, he wrote, “I would like to have a wife who appears every night like a moon in the sky.” In the end, he married a woman who didn’t appear every night. Olga doesn’t express incredible passion for her dying husband in the letters. Incredible respect, yes. But not great love. There was a lot of gossip surrounding Anton and Olga: why did they spend so much time apart, Olga in Moscow, Anton always somewhere else? For thirty years Chekhov had kept women at a distance. He visited brothels quite often; the brothel and the cemetery were the first places he visited in any town because he thought those two places revealed how people lived. Chekhov was actually quite a cynic, and he was afraid of love. That’s why his story with Olga was so painful. It was probably the first time he really fell in love. So he distanced himself. And their separation was an agreement between the two of them.

RM: How does Chekhov treat love in his plays?

AS: In his major dramas and later prose, Chekhov didn’t focus on the beginning, on courtship. The pain of keeping and saving love, this is a Chekhovian theme. Love is a great passion, it elevates you. But Chekhov looks at what happens after this elevation, the next morning or the next month. In the vaudevilles, real love does not exist. The characters use the word, but they don’t know what it means. Or they confuse love with sexual desire.

RM: Having seen Yuri Yeremin’s famous adaptation of Chekhov’s Ward 6 and Institute productions of the vaudevilles and dramas, how would you characterize his treatment of Chekhov?

AS:Ward 6 was one of Yuri’s best works. He brought an extremely sharp sense of pain to it. And he elevates Chekhov’s vaudevilles with this same sensitivity for pain. Yuri doesn’t understand farce in a purely farcical way. He can’t do Chekhov without a funeral.

Ryan McKittrick is a recent graduate of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute dramaturgy program.