Dominic Dromgoole discusses the plays of Anton Chekhov and the nature of Chekhovian tragedy.

Dominic Dromgoole is the Artistic Director of the Oxford Stage Company. He has directed many plays, is  the author of The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting and has written for the New Statesman.

‘We’ve had enough of Shakespearean tragedy: we’d like a century or two of Chekhovian tragedy’ says a droll Israeli, surveying his country’s present political situation, in David Hare’s Via Dolorosa. He is summoning up an image we can easily draw down from our stock of cultural archetypes. Cultured and frustrated people, sitting in wicker chairs, bothered by flies, under an autumn sun, being slowly crushed by life’s inanity, love’s missed glances and the slow steamroller of time. The Israeli was stating a preference for such civilised anomie over tanks and occupation and exploding martyrs on school buses. It’s an understandable point of view. But does that etiolated archetype do justice to what Chekhov was attempting? And what is the nature of Chekhovian tragedy itself?

Chekhov himself defied analysis, both implicitly and explicitly. It’s hard when faced with work of such magnitude to do anything bar a tired wave of the arm, as if placed in front of Mount Everest and asked to describe it. As he himself said, “When people ask what is the meaning of my plays, I reply, what is the meaning of a carrot? A carrot is a carrot. A play is a play”. There’s a refreshing blend of modesty and mystery about Chekhov’s refusal to be known. These days a new writer need only have a modest hit in Edinburgh and they’re pouring out their souls about their themes and their process. Chekhov, who has a gift as large as a reservoir beside many writer’s watertanks, is more circumspect. He leaves clues scattered in letters, in journals and in the work itself. But his respect for his unsteady muse is too great to sully its name by gabbing it all over town.

His own reticence makes writing about him all the more difficult. His silence commands respect. It seems inane when someone is minding their own business to charge up to them and start excitedly telling them about themselves. Once when I was in rehearsal for Three Sisters, I met Chekhov in a dream. I walked across a ploughed field to a substantial house on a hill. I was admitted through a small door by a short dumpy businesslike woman. She led me down a series of corridors and up two flights of stairs, then opened a door and gestured at a man sitting by a window in a spartan room. It was only at this point that I realised it was Chekhov, who was looking a trim 150. Our chat was short and full of gentle, embarrassed silences. He asked about my cast, and was quietly happy about what I told him. I asked him about two small problems I had with the play, to which he gave terse and cryptic responses. Then as silence fell again, and the light failed, I made my excuses, and walked back across the ploughed field. World shattering it wasn’t, but appropriate it was. It was a tenderly truthful moment, and I found it impossible to tell anyone for weeks afterwards. His presence was so decent and reserved, that it seemed indecent to squawk about it. The encounter was as private as any of the small revelations he uncovers in his plays.

Chekhov’s natural reserve and understatement is one of the clues to the delicacy of his tragic vision. Yet it is also the by-product of its historical moment. He wrote at the end of what was essentially a pacific century. Bar escapades in the Crimea, no shortage of revolutionary ferment and a fair amount of colonial savagery, the century from Waterloo through to the beginning of the First World War was remarkably calm by comparison with what preceded it. And one long tea party by comparison with what followed. The end of that century often seems an astonishing high water mark in human civility. There is a desperate irony in the way we cling to a belief in some form of incremental moral progress. The cultural evidence is against us. Where our era expresses its tragic capacity in torture and falling buildings, Chekhov’s age manifested it in adulterous fumbles and an inability to catch a train to Moscow. I certainly know where I’d prefer to live.

Certainly in terms of drama it was an extraordinarily rich moment. I have recently worked on a tranche of plays from that time by Shaw, Chekhov, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Hauptmann and Strindberg. In all these plays, small moral lapses are agonised over with huge intellectual fervour, and trivial incidents lead to endless spiritual angst. It is a terrifying contrast with our own age where the dung encrusted moral dungeon of Abu Ghraib is argued out with tabloid brutality. Where, why and how it all went wrong is a question for another place, but the contrast is remarkable. Was 1904, the year of the Cherry Orchard, the moment when the human reached his apogee of civility and moral dignity? Is that play’s tragedy the sound of humanism hitting a glass ceiling?

So historically Chekhov occupied a unique moment, and formally too. His plays often seem to live, precariously balanced, on the tipping point between traditional structures and modernism. Tolstoy criticised The Seagull as an ‘inept impersonation of Ibsen’, thus managing to miss the point entirely. Ibsen belonged to the world of the Victorian play, sturdy, well upholstered, artificially manufactured, and built on a strong narrative and a regular rhythm of crisis and resolution. Chekhov knew that world – he respected it – but it wasn’t sufficient for expressing the miasma of little moments that he had heard and seen. He took the four act form and filled it with the lazy chaos of life. Or he took the mess of the world and poured it into the four act form. People still complain of his plays, as they do of Beckett, that nothing happens, when in fact there is a tidal wave of incident. It is just that it is arranged as if accidentally, rather than with the swingeing broad brush strokes of intention that marked out the works of his contemporaries.

After Chekhov came the mad experiments of expressionism and Brechtian alienation and absurdism, and whatever other –ism tried to dam up the flow of life. Before him was melodrama, the epic and the self-serving naturalism of Zola and his school. Chekhov, sitting in his unique position in the middle of all these historical and cultural forces, draws on all of them and somehow supersedes them with his perfect plays. This act of floating above history and culture is often ascribed to a sort of Olympian detachment. Chekhov the cool doctor, the shy lover, the political disaffiliate, the aesthetic stand-alone. There is a whole stock of archetypes of uninvolvement that are drawn on to separate Chekhov from his own moment and his own life. The dispassionate scientist who observes human behaviour clinically, making no judgments, is the ready cliché. But how could someone so disaffiliate break your heart so completely. And is his tragic vision one of studied neutrality?

It’s hard to imagine that a man who went to Sakhalin Island and spent six months interviewing ten thousand malnourished and degenerate inmates for a census could have been all that neutral. If the same man opened two schools and a hospital for the peasants of Melikhovo, it becomes yet harder. If he did all this and tended to the sick, while simultaneously coughing his own life away in tuberculoid eruptions, it starts to become daft. Cultural conservatism of all sorts, left and right, wants us to see Chekhov as an etiolated ninny wittering about art. It doesn’t wash. He was a bundle of fire, caring for family, community and country, and passionately involved in the welfare of each. Though he may construct a smokescreen to dim its presence, the passion of that life is reflected in the work.

The desire to nudge the world obliquely forward infuses all his plays. There is a smug lazy scepticism amongst many modern writers, an easy retreat behind the artists’ complacent mantra; ‘We don’t do answers: we’re just here to ask the difficult questions’. As if that was some act of towering courage. Now of course, Chekhov didn’t provide some sanitised programme for the future. There are no tidy solutions on display. But he did posit the necessity of hope and intention. He never gives up on that hope. He does dwell on characters best summed up by that dread modern word – losers – people buffeted, beaten up and left behind by history. But they are losers on a quest, losers in search of a better world, or in search of come sort of peace in themselves. Astrov, Vanya, Yelena, Vershinin, the Prozorov girls all fail and fail utterly. They are all lost. But they keep looking. If all they find is their final destination, death, as is the case with Tuzenbach, then at least they find some sort of peace before arriving there. It’s small, but sizable, comfort.

Nor is Chekhov as politically neutral as many would wish him to be. No figure in the canon of Western literature is more ecologically sound or bang up to date as Astrov in Uncle Vanya. No one articulates the need for a new aesthetic to match a new world as ferociously as Konstantin does in The Seagull. There has never been a fiercer wind of aimless utopianism than the bright-eyed optimism that pours out of Vershinin in Three Sisters. And no one has expressed the necessity of the communist ideal more powerfully than Trofimov does in Cherry Orchard. It is easy and glib to say that these are characters talking and not the author. It is harder to admit that he is expressing his own dreams here.

Chekhov does undercut all of this rhetoric. In each case there is something else going on, and in each case it is a man trying to impress a girl. Yet isn’t utopianism often the walking companion of sexual desire. It is vital to understanding Chekhov to understand that in these scenes he offers two forces, passionate idealism and a hunger for love, as complements, not as neutralisers. The one doesn’t destroy the other: it adds to it. Where there is more than one force operating through a Chekhovian moment (and there are always many), academics or theatre directors often try to dictate which is the most important, which undercuts the other, which has priority. That approach to Chekhov is all wrong, just as that approach to life is all wrong. All these factors co-exist. Just as it is perfectly possible for a human to be a socialist, and want champagne – so it is true of Chekhov’s plays. To pick out one as more important than the other spoils life just as it spoils the plays. Just as it is possible to want revolution, and respect peasant history, while wanting to strip the innocence away from the daughter of the lady of the house – so it is true of the plays. This is not the comedy of hypocrisy, although it is almost always played that way and hence reduced to something shallow and shrill: it is the comedy of humanity.

Although Chekhov does complement his political rhetoric with a panoply of ulterior motives, he very rarely places an alternative viewpoint. There is no equivalent or balancing weight given to the arguments of political conservatism. The enemy isn’t the converse of ecological or aesthetic or utopian or communist dreaming; it is the context.  It is time and apathy and waste and nothingness. The vision isn’t of firebrands fighting it out with reactionaries; it is of dreamers hurling their good into the great wastes of the Russian landscape and the great emptiness of the Russian soul. There is very little active evil in Chekhov; there’s Solyony with his creepy malevolence in Three Sisters; the Dostoyevskeian agitation of Yepikhodov in Cherry Orchard; the sexual disaffection of Trigorin in The Seagull; the blithe arrogance of Serebryakov in Uncle Vanya – they’re all creepy, they all abuse women, but they’re none of them Iago. No, the evil is of the passive variety, it lies in laziness, in ignoring a problem, in seeing despair and looking the other way.

But it is impossible to say definitively that Chekhovian tragedy is definitively this or that. It is not reducible to lost love or a carefully weighted ethical balance or an iteration of tragic literary tropes. It resides in small and tiny moments that we recognise as horribly in his plays as we do in life. Those sudden spasms of emptiness, the holes that open up in everyday life, the cracked egg which suddenly reveals despair, the moment when your girlfriend cracks a joke and you suddenly fall completely out of love with her, the moment when you look at a family in a park and suddenly feel utterly alone. The plays are studded with these moments. Looks, glances, breezes, falling fans, touched knees, small moments that calmly collect the pieces of a human life together and steer them off in some strange or terrifying new direction. The unknowability of those moments is at the heart of his tragedy.

Links for further reading

Plays (contains The Cherry Orchard/Three Sisters/Ivanov/Uncle Vanya/The Seagull)
Chekhov: A Life in Letters
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories
The Shooting Party
The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories 

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