Adapting Chekhov

The Text and its Mutations

J. Douglas Clayton, Yana Meerzon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136252914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book considers the hundred years of re-writes of Anton Chekhov's work, presenting a wide geographical landscape of Chekhovian influences in drama. The volume examines the elusive quality of Chekhov's dramatic universe as an intricate mechanism, an engine in which his enigmatic characters exist as the dramatic and psychological ciphers we have been de-coding for a century, and continue to do so. Examining the practice and the theory of dramatic adaptation both as intermedial transformation (from page to stage) and as intramedial mutation, from page to page, the book presents adaptation as the emerging genre of drama, theatre, and film. This trend marks the performative and social practices of the new millennium, highlighting our epoch's need to engage with the history of dramatic forms and their evolution. The collection demonstrates that adaptation as the practice of transformation and as a re-thinking of habitual dramatic norms and genre definitions leads to the rejuvenation of existing dramatic and performative standards, pioneering the creation of new traditions and expectations. As the major mode of the storytelling imagination, adaptation can build upon and drive the audience's horizons of expectations in theatre aesthetics. Hence, this volume investigates the original and transformative knowledge that the story of Chekhov's drama in mutations offers to scholars of drama and performance, to students of modern literatures and cultures, and to theatre practitioners worldwide.

Part I

On Categories, Techniques, and Methodologies of Mutation

1 Diagnosis and Balagan

The Poetics of Chekhov’s Drama¹

J. Douglas Clayton

A reading of the numerous studies of Chekhov’s plays reveals how much is left to be said about their poetics; indeed, one has the impression that an analysis of their poetics on the level on which Aleksandr Chudakov analyzed the poetics of the prose fiction has yet to be started.² Discussion of the plays has tended to be deeply influenced by classical productions of the works and to offer impressionistic discussions of the different characters’ motivations or various motifs, such as the famous breaking string.³ Even careful reading of the texts of the plays is hard to find, so that the implications of, for example, the ending of The Cherry Orchard remain unexamined. Moreover, less consideration is generally given to the vaudevilles and monologues, which are considered to be less important and substantial than the four final plays. Further, writing on Chekhov’s dramaturgy has historically tended to separate it from the larger context of his work. The organic relationship between the short stories and the plays has tended to be neglected. This is surprising, since the dramatic principle is deeply engrained in the prose works, so that it would be appropriate to say that in Chekhov the writer the dramatic principle has precedence over the prosaic. If some works, such as the early story “On the Road,” could be easily translated into a short play with a description of the decorations, stage directions, and dialogue, then others, like “Lady with Little Dog,” are film scenarios waiting for a director, as Iosif Kheifits demonstrated in his 1960 film version. Chekhov’s search for new dramatic forms thus has its origins in his prose fiction. This quest begins as early as his first short stories, many of which read as miniature scenarios that evoke either a comic scene or a parodistic monologue, e.g., “An Unsuccessful Visit” (1882); in it a visitor to a genteel house pats the rump of the hostess’s daughter, thinking she is the maid. These brief mises en scène grew into the vaudevilles that Chekhov subsequently began to write and that constituted an important part of his dramatic output.

The following does not pretend to be an exhaustive examination of the question, but is intended to “reset” the discussion and offer a new perspective. What then are the questions that one should ask when attempting to define the poetics of Chekhov’s plays? First, it should be asked how they are structured and how this structure relates to the traditional structure of the genres of comedy and tragedy. By structure we cannot mean simply the division into acts, although this is important in defining the shape of the spectacle, nor is it the way dialogue and episodes are constructed and coordinated with each other in the play, although that is important and also needs attention. A related, extremely important question is the nature of the ending of the play, a question that by all accounts Chekhov pondered at great length. We need to begin by asking the nature of the material that Chekhov chose to fashion into his plays. Where does it come from? As is generally known, playwrights up to the time of Chekhov tended to choose mythical or historical subjects. These are almost totally absent in Chekhov, except perhaps in vestigial, parodic form (Voynitsky as a Don Juan manqué in Uncle Vanya).

The general term that has typically been used to characterize Chekhov’s plays is “psychological realism.” It has its roots in the Stanislavskian interpretation of Chekhov’s plays that has dominated their presentation in production after production. There are a number of reasons to reject this term as either inadequate or misleading. “Realism” in the general sense is a quality of convincing verisimilitude that can apply to works of art in different genres and of different eras. The case of Chekhov is, however, quite specific: he was writing in the shadow of the great realist writers of the mid-nineteenth century whose preferred genre was the prose novel and whose work is characterized in Russian as “Critical Realism.” The work of the great critical realist novelists, especially Tolstoy, who left a huge impression on Chekhov, was grounded in the philosophical current known as Positivism. It assumed an all-encompassing worldview and an unambiguous relationship to the word. It also expressed an abiding belief in the perfectibility of the world—generally through scientific progress. In (Critical) Realism there is an unambiguous interpretation of existential problems with a prescriptive intent: what is to be done. By the time Chekhov began to write the philosophical underpinnings and the corresponding aesthetic and literary environment of the mid-nineteenth century had broken down. His inability to write a novel, for example, should therefore not be seen as a lack of talent, but rather a signal that the poetics of literature had changed along with the philosophical dominants. Chekhov’s age was characterized by two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, there was a commitment to technological change for its own sake and a concern with social issues without the optimism that characterized an earlier age; its literary and artistic equivalent was Naturalism. There was, at the same time, a realization that the older assumptions of Positivism about the nature of the world were excessively simplistic: the world is, in a word, more complex, and the need to capture that complexity presents undreamed-of challenges. The end of the nineteenth century therefore also saw a rejection of unambiguous prose and a new attention towards the ambiguity of the literary sign that we now call Symbolism, with its renewed interest in poetry and a growing hermeticism of the text. In their attention to the existential world, artists began to focus on the ever-changing flux of reality, which could not be perceived as a constant, but only captured at a given, unrepeatable moment in time: in a word, Impressionism. It is against the background of these philosophical and aesthetic tendencies that we need to situate Chekhov in order to begin to analyze the poetics of his plays.

According to accounts of his life, Chekhov’s acquaintance with the theatrical world began early in the provincial theatre in his place of birth and home until eighteen years of age: Taganrog. This provincial southern town was quite prosperous and able to support a lively cultural program. The theatre in Taganrog (which was built in 1865 and is still standing today) alternated between opera and drama and also was a stopping point for many of the foreign theatrical celebrities that visited Russia. Chekhov began to visit the theatre regularly from a relatively early age, and there he was exposed to the principal theatrical genres as they then existed: tragedy, comedy, and vaudeville, both in theatre and in their operatic form (Rayfield, Anton Chekhov 27). The first performance he saw there was of Jacques Offenbach’s La belle Hélène. Later Chekhov made the backstage of a production of this comic operetta the setting for his metatheatrical playlet The Swansong (written long before Stoppard thought of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). This prolonged exposure to the classical repertoire of the nineteenth-century theatre was formative, but in a negative sense: here was an object lesson in how not to write for his age, however moving he found Hamlet or Othello. By and large, drama until Chekhov had tended to imitate other drama, recycling subjects, themes, and dramatic forms. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a widespread belief that theatre was ripe for renewal; this led to the experiments of Gordon Craig, Georg Fuchs, and others. It also meant a renewal of dramaturgy. Chekhov was to radically disrupt traditional patterns by modeling his plays after clinically observed life, the touchstone being the play’s faithful representation of chaotic, observed reality.

The importance of Chekhov’s field of study when he moved to Moscow cannot be overemphasized: he chose medicine. In addition to lectures, his training consisted of the dissection of cadavers and writing diagnoses of sick patients, and his early practice comprised autopsies and social surveys of prostitutes (Rayfield, Anton Chekhov 108–9). In short, Chekhov was trained to examine and analyze: not only the physiology, but also the psychological makeup of the patient. The diagnoses he wrote (which have apparently survived, although they have not yet been published) comprise an important factor in his work, both as a doctor, a profession he was to exercise for most of his adult life, and also as a writer. Rayfield writes: “His bent—for diagnosis and forensics—was apt for a writer [... ]. All his life his eye for a fatal disease and a victim’s life expectancy was feared, and his autopsies admired. In psychiatry, then in its infancy, Anton also showed prowess” (74). Moreover, Chekhov was a keen student of natural history, the names of birds, trees, and animals figuring largely in his work. In a word, Chekhov was an observer: of nature and of human kind. It is precisely in Chekhov’s powers of observation of humankind that we should seek the secret of the literary and intellectual content of Chekhov’s writing, both prose and drama: in it he was constantly trying to reconcile his diagnostic presentation with the demands of art. There is a telling passage in a brief autobiographical note he wrote:

The conventions of artistic creation do not always permit a complete agreement with scientific data: it is impossible to depict a death from poisoning on the stage as it happens in real life. But within this conventionality you have to feel an agreement with scientific data, i.e. the reader or audience must see that this is all convention and that one has to do with a knowledgeable writer. (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [ PSS ] 16: 271–72)

Here, then, lies the fundamental explanation for Chekhov’s innovative art: in it he seeks not to imitate inherited forms and subject matter, but to create a new art that is consonant with his dispassionate, one might say clinical, observation of humanity.

One of the features of Chekhov’s mature plays that has generated a great deal of controversy or even bewilderment is his designation of two of them— The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard —as comedies. Uncle Vanya is designated not as a comedy (perhaps because it grew out of The Wood Demon, which was a comedy with the traditional happy end and united couples) but as “Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts,” while Three Sisters is called a “drama.” In fact, all four plays resemble each other in tone and outcome. Clearly, Chekhov was at a loss to describe the genre of the plays, hence the bewilderment that his various designations have evoked. The designation of two of them as “comedies” is particularly paradoxical, since the term evokes specific generic expectations. Northrop Frye summed up these expectations in his Anatomy of Criticism. He writes:

Dramatic comedy [... ] has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles and character types. [... ] The plot structure [... ] in itself less a form than a formula, has become the basis for most comedy [... ] What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will. In this simple pattern there are several complex elements. In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play, the obstructing characters are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs i...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowlegments
• Introduction: The Text and its Mutations— On the Objectives of the Volume
• Part I On Categories, Techniques, and Methodologies of Mutation
• Part II Chekhov in the Post[ist] Context
• Part III Performing Chekhov in Radical Mutations
• Afterword: On Chekhov, Adaptation, and Wonders of Writing Plays: Dialogue with Patrice Pavis, J. Douglas Clayton, and Yana Meerzon
• Contributors
• Index