Chekhov Chekhov on Theatre

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78850-010-4
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Reihe: ... On Theatre

A unique collection of everything that Chekhov wrote about the theatre. Chekhov started writing about theatre in newspaper articles and in his own letters even before he began writing plays. Later, he wrote in detail about his own plays to his lifelong friend and mentor Alexei Suvorin, his wife and leading actress, Olga Knipper, and to the two directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. Collected for this volume, these writings reveal Chekhov's instinctive curiosity about the way theatre works - and his concerns about how best to realise his own intentions as a playwright. Often peppery, passionate, even distraught, as he feels his plays misinterpreted or undermined, Chekhov comes over in these pages as a true man of the theatre.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a physician by training, is now considered the most notable 20th-century Russian dramatist. His major plays, all staged by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre, helped establish psychological realism in European theatre.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chekhov, Anton

Weitere Mitwirkende

Mulrine, Stephen

Leseproben

2

On Writing, 1883–1904

Chekhov’s published letters to date run to over five thousand items, still very far from complete, and his casual remarks on other European writers are of interest not only as evidence of the breadth of his reading, but also for the insights they afford on his own work. Particularly notable is his enthusiasm for Maeterlinck and the new symbolist drama, although Chekhov’s own essay in the form – Treplev’s overheated little play in The Seagull – can scarcely be regarded as flattery.

Elsewhere in Chekhov’s correspondence one finds a consistent position on the responsibility of the author towards both his art and his public. To M.V. Kiselyova, who had taken him to task over an admittedly rather salacious story ‘The Mire’, published in Suvorin’s New Time, Chekhov responds with a lengthy and spirited defence of the writer’s duty to depict life as it is, not as one might like it to be. The writer, Chekhov asserts, must work with the objectivity of a chemist, and he revisits that theme on several occasions, among them a letter to a former classmate in the medical faculty of Moscow University, in which he places his scientific training at the very core of his art. Chekhov is equally forthright on the issue of artistic neutrality, the duty incumbent on the writer to leave the judgement of moral questions, as far as they concern the actions of created characters, to the audience.

Chekhov also has much to say on the professional aspects of writing, of earning a living by his pen. From his earliest paid literary work, in 1880 at five kopecks a line, talent and industry had brought him, by 1888, for his short story The Steppe, published in the prestige Northern Herald, a single payment of 1000 roubles, and the Russian Academy’s Prize for Literature that year. Writing for the theatre, however, was far more profitable, especially if the play was a success, since the playwright received a percentage of the box-office takings. Against this, there were a great many bureaucratic obstacles to success in the State theatres, and private theatres such as that owned by the Moscow impresario F.A. Korsh, were almost non-existent. The near-monopoly enjoyed by the officially licensed theatres, with their hidebound repertoire committees and rigorous censorship, inevitably tended to stifle creativity, and acting standards, skewed by the widespread practice of ‘benefit’ performances for star actors, were a sore test of Chekhov’s long-standing love for the medium, as evidenced in one letter after another. Above all, Chekhov despised actors’ ‘tricks’, mannered substitutes for the genuine expression of feeling, and his disapproval of the diva phenomenon, from Bernhardt to his own later creations Arkadina and Ranevskaya, appears to have been reinforced by experience.

Throughout his penetrating critiques of work by fellow writers, such as Suvorin, Shcheglov, Gorky, his elder brother Alexander and many others, Chekhov’s advice constantly recalls us to his own practice: understatement, economy of means, even-handedness, and above all, unforced naturalness. What is remarkable is the extent of detailed analysis he is willing to apply to even the most unpromising material. In part, that is a reflection of his well-attested generosity and tact, and it is a feature of Chekhov’s advice to his correspondents that he often passes off a damaging criticism as a minor reservation in the context of a generally encouraging response. At other times, he may claim to know very little about theatre anyway, to blunt the edge of his expressed opinion. The truth is that Chekhov’s correspondence in this vein is not only a fount of theatrical wisdom, innate and acquired, but also further proof of his lifelong fascination with the process of making a play. As he observes in a letter to Suvorin in May 1889: ‘Everybody judges plays as if they were easy to write. They don’t know that while writing a good play is difficult, writing a bad one is twice as hard, and terrifying.’

Authors

Goethe

March 1886 to N.P. Chekhov

Well-educated people behave as follows: in order to rise up, and not stagnate at the bottom level of the milieu in which you find yourself, it won’t do simply to content yourself with reading The Pickwick Papers, or learning Faust’s monologue by heart. Nor will it do to climb into a cab and drive to Yakimanka,1 emerging a week later.

Work without cease, read constantly, study, have the will, that’s what’s needed. Every hour counts.

4 May 1889 to A.S. Suvorin

At long last you’ve taken notice of Solomon. Every time I’ve mentioned it to you, you’ve casually dismissed it. In my view, it’s Ecclesiastes that gave Goethe the idea of writing Faust.

30 January 1902 to N.D. Teleshov

Incidentally, there’s a prose version by Veinberg of Goethe’s Faust just published in the New Review of Foreign Literature, a wonderful translation! You ought to commission some literal translations too — in prose, but magnificent, of Hamlet, Othello, etc. And publish them at twenty kopecks a copy. Have a word with Veinberg about it.

Byron

22 November 1892 to A.S. Suvorin

Don Juan in prose is quite magical. This monumental work has everything: Pushkin, Tolstoy and even Burenin,2 who appears to have pilfered his bad jokes from Byron. Manfred has an impressive set, but compared to Goethe’s Faust, it’s pretty feeble. I saw Manfred on stage at the Bolshoi when Possart was in Moscow, and at that time it didn’t make a great impression on me.

Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Grigorovich

12 January 1888 to D.V. Grigorovich

Today I shall be obliged to drink the health of all those who taught me to dissect cadavers and write out prescriptions. Most likely I shall also have to drink your health, in so far as never does an anniversary go by here, without the drinkers speaking well of Turgenev, Tolstoy and you. The men of letters drink to Chernishevsky, Saltykov and G. Uspensky, but the general public (the studiosi, physicians, mathematicians, etc.) among whom I belong, thanks to Aesculapius, keep up tradition and won’t betray their beloved names. I am profoundly convinced that as long as Russia has forests, ravines and white nights; as long as the curlews cry and willows weep, neither you, nor Turgenev, nor Tolstoy, nor Gogol will ever be forgotten. The people you have represented will die and be forgotten, but you will remain safe and sound. Such is your power and such, therefore, your happiness.

9 February 1892 to M.P. Chekhova

Our famine relief effort is coming along splendidly: at Voronezh we had lunch with the Governor, and went to the theatre every evening; yesterday we spent the whole day at the Khrenovo stud farm, as guests of the manager Ilovaisky; we found carpenters in his drawing room, in the process of constructing a stage and some flats, also some amateurs rehearsing Gogol’s Marriage for a charity performance in aid of the famine victims. After that there were blinis, conversations, charming smiles, and Mlle Ilovaiskaya, a girl of eighteen, who quite enchanted us with her originality and scene-painting talent. Finally, there was tea, preserves, conversation again, and last of all, a troika with little bells. In brief, everything’s going rather well for the famine victims.

Gogol, Griboyedov, Turgenev

11 February 1903 to M.P. Lilina

No matter how we often we’ve turned over The Government Inspector, Woe from Wit,3 A Month in the Country, etc., in the long run we’ve got to stage these plays too. And I think The Government Inspector would go very well for you. And Marriage equally so. In any event, having plays like these in the repertoire is scarcely a handicap. I’m beginning to think that in three or four years, people will get fed up with new plays, and audiences won’t be clamouring any longer for a new repertoire, but a literary repertoire. Perhaps I’m wrong.

5 September 1898 to A.S. Suvorin

In Woe from Wit, Sofia resembles Tatyana about as much as a hen does an eagle.4 Sofia is poorly delineated, she isn’t even a character, but a personification in the style of Krylov. Pardon me for this heresy.

Hauptmann

29 November 1898 to A.S. Suvorin

Korsh’s son-in-law, Vladimir Mikhailovich Sablin (c/o Avtomov, Afanasiev Lane, Moscow) writes to say that he has translated Hauptmann’s new play Henschel the Drayman, and begs me to recommend his translation to you, should you desire to stage this play.

19 August 1899 to A.S. Suvorin

Have you read The Gospel as the Foundation of Life by the priest Petrov? After that, I’ve read nothing else of interest apart, incidentally, from Hauptmann’s The Lonely Ones, an old play, but one which struck me by its modernity. Why haven’t you ever staged it? It’s very clever and very scenic.

21 May 1901 to V.A. Possé

Your article on the Moscow Art Theatre was very much to my liking. But why was Hauptmann’s The Lonely Ones so poorly received in St Petersburg? Why did it go down well in Moscow?

Hugo

15 November 1889 to L.N....