Theatrical Activity in Paris — 2 — "Ivanov," by the Russian Writer Chekhov

Paris's connection with Chekhov's theater is of long standing, going back to 1919, when Georges and Ludmilla Pitoëff performed the play "Uncle Vanya" at the Vieux Colombier theater (Vieux Colombier). Since then Paris has returned from time to time to present some of his splendid plays on its various stages — even the Comédie-Française itself. In the program of the current season are two plays by Chekhov: the first, "That Madman Platonov," at the Théâtre National Populaire (Théâtre National Populaire), and "Ivanov" at the theater of the Alliance Française.

The readers of The Woman's Voice must have a brief glimpse of Chekhov's life and the milieu in which he grew up before we can understand any one of his plays on its own. Chekhov was born in 1860 in the city of Taganrog (Tagonrog) on the coast of the Sea of Azov. He was a skilled physician and a bold dramatist, who portrayed in his plays the life of his troubled age and that violent, decisive period in Russia's social and political life. He mingled with the great men of letters, the likes of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, and with the great stage director Stanislavski; and he created for himself a special method of dramatic composition and a personal Chekhovian art — indeed, he wrought a revolution in the style of Russian literature akin to the revolution of the Impressionists (Impressionistes) in the world of painting.

His writing is distinguished by simplicity and concision, for the speech uttered by the characters of his plays is very brief, merely hinting at what stirs within their souls; and the listener or spectator must deduce the content and feel it from the various expressions of the face, from the many intervals of silence, from those broken snatches of conversation, and from the total atmosphere created by the scene as a whole — through the actors' capacity for silent expression and through stage decoration in harmony with those states of soul whose deep, hidden depths Chekhov wishes to sound. Hence his affinity with poetic symbolism, even if he did at times mock it, and some of the extremist Symbolists of his age.

As for the music that rises from the folds of his words — how eloquently the Russian composer Rachmaninoff expressed it when he set Sonya's speech at the end of the play "Uncle Vanya" to music, saying: "I try to discover the music latent in Chekhov's writing, not to impose my own music upon it."

And when Chekhov cuts down speech and multiplies the moments of silence in his plays, he is portraying the Russian life of his age impressionistically, as does the brush of Gauguin (Gauguin) or Cézanne (Cézanne). His subjects are drawn from the very heart of the Russian life he knew so well — from the company of the leaders of thought to which he himself belonged, from the milieu of the actors whom he knew at close quarters, and from the community of physicians whose profession he knew and practiced. In nearly all his plays a single set of characters recurs: a dramatic author, a well-known actress, a young girl looking toward life with longing and hope, a country doctor working devotedly at his arduous profession, and a despairing person attempting suicide..

Yet these characters, however different their kinds and their milieux, all share one trait: they are Russians living in that anxious period at the end of the nineteenth century, as if standing at a crossroads, bidding farewell to a worn-out old life that must inevitably pass away, and groping their way to find a new goal, or a meaning for their lives, or a picture of the distant horizon. They are pained, rebellious, despairing, repressed; their emotions sometimes explode with the eruption of a destructive volcano. In a word, they are psychologically sick people who, had they lived in our age, would have sought out a psychiatrist to treat their emotional disturbances and their ailments of the soul. Despair sometimes takes hold of them and drives them to complaint, to moaning, and to confession. Each of them knows that his life is on the wrong track, and each knows that he must rid himself of his present condition. But how to find the way?

The answer sometimes comes like a gleam of hope on the face of a young girl yearning for the new life, like the face of "Sashenka" in the play Ivanov, or on the tongue of a young student dreaming of a new upheaval, like the student "Trofimov" in "The Cherry Orchard" (La cerisaie) — states of soul shifting between crushing despair and radiant hope, which Chekhov draws with the graceful skill of the artists, and colors with biting irony and a droll wit that provokes the laughter that eases souls, together with the burning tears of pain.

From the foregoing it is clear that the actor in a Chekhov play faces an arduous task, for he must sound the depths of the psychology of his author and his characters, and must personally steep himself in the profound Russian atmosphere that the author wished to express. And so when the actor "Jacques Mauclair" undertakes to render the play Ivanov into French, to direct it, and to play the leading role in it, and wins, by the unanimous verdict of the critics, success in his task, he has inscribed a glorious page in the history of the Russian theater in Paris. His whole company joined together in expressing this excellent play; special mention goes to the actress Lolleh Bellon (Lolleh Bellon), who played the role of the quiet, sick, suffering wife, aided in this by her beautiful face, the enchanting tone of her voice, and the calm of her measured movements. Irène Sergine (Irène Sergine) played the role of Sashenka, the beautiful young girl; she was a flash of lightning in a dark night, casting a gleam over the pitch darkness of the souls hovering around her. "Harry Max" played the role of the Count, and was the one who makes us laugh and weep at once, expressing thereby the essence of Chekhovian art in the theater.

As for the story of Ivanov, it is the story of a man of thirty-five, a modernizing landowner with progressive, up-to-date ideas, who once wished to help the peasants and raise them up, and to that end carried out several experiments whose lot was failure; so that now he has become despairing and weary, looking at life through black spectacles, and seeing that his own life has gone for nothing, without meaning. He is, moreover, in a barren emotional desert: he married a woman whom he loved and who loved him against her family's wishes, and here he is, a few years after his marriage, emptied of this love, filled with a cold void, weary of his home, seized at dusk by an oppression of spirit and a melancholy he cannot explain. "Anna Petrovna" tries to cheer the soul of her beloved husband and searches for that magic chord that once bound them with love's luminous flame; but she tries in vain — that ember has died out and she will never be able to rekindle it, though she is the complete woman in her beauty, her sweetness, the refinement of her feeling, and her understanding of her husband's morbid state of mind. Ivanov flees the atmosphere of his house, taking refuge in the evenings at the house of his friend Lebedev; but before long he feels the weariness mastering him with its black, crushing nightmare. Young Sashenka, Lebedev's daughter, feels a tenderness toward this despairing man and tries to deliver him from his crisis of soul; and Ivanov imagines that he has awakened to life anew, and that the love of the merry, hopeful Sashenka will pull him out of the fathomless pit of despair.

Ivanov's wife dies wretched, wretched; and Ivanov decides to marry Sashenka — at Sashenka's own insistence. But he feels in the depths of his soul that he is inescapably lost, that his life has ended while his fiancée is at the break of her first dawn. He tries to free himself from the pledge he gave her, but she refuses to release him from it. Ivanov feels that he is leading her into the abyss with him, and so he fires a bullet into himself — the final word in his violent dispute with her..

Perhaps we may ask: what does the author intend by all this, and what are the play's important events? To the first question Chekhov himself gave the answer when he once said: "The writer's task is to bear witness and to record, not to judge." He portrays the life of despair that had seized the Russian people in his time with precise and truthful strokes. His feeling toward these wretched ones is one of human compassion, not of unjust judgment. It is as if he wished to say to his people: "Here is the model of your failed life — take heed, and look toward the ideal life, for you have it in your power to wake from your morbid nightmare."

As for the second question, the answer is that Chekhov's plays are distinguished by the unimportance of their events, for nothing important happens in them. They are pictures of life, slow and silent; but the volcano of the soul boiling beneath this surface crust is what concerns us, and in it lies the essence of his theatrical art...