A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  2. There shall be no limitations, either for voters or delegates.

  3. The canvass and the elections shall be absolutely unrestricted, and therefore the Government, pending the organization of the National Assembly, shall authorize, in the form of temporary measures; (a) Complete freedom of the press; (b) Complete freedom of speech; (c) Complete freedom of public meeting; (d) Complete freedom of election program. This is the only way in which Russia can return to the path of normal and peaceful development.

  We declare solemnly, before the people of our native land and before the whole world, that our party will submit unconditionally to the decisions of a National Assembly elected in the manner above indicated, and that we will not allow ourselves, in future, to offer violent resistance to any Government that the National Assembly may sanction.

  And now, your Majesty, decide! Before you are two courses, and you are to make your choice between them. We can only trust that your intelligence and conscience may suggest to you the only decision that is compatible with the welfare of Russia, with your own dignity, and with your duty to your native land.

  The Executive Committee

  5.1.4 Father George Gapon, Petition to Nicholas II: 22 January 1905

  Translated by Basil Dmytrshn

  Sovereign!

  We, the workers and the inhabitants of various social strata of the city of St. Petersburg, our wives, children, and helpless old parents, have come to you, Sovereign, to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; our employers oppress us, overburden us with work, insult us, consider us inhuman, and treat us as slaves who must suffer a bitter fate in silence. Though we have suffered, they push us deeper and deeper into a gulf of misery, disfranchisement, and ignorance. Despotism and arbitrariness strangle us and we are gasping for breath. Sovereign, we have no strength left. We have reached the limit of endurance. We have reached that terrible moment when death is preferable to the continuance of unbearable sufferings.

  And so we left our work and informed our employers that we shall not resume work until they meet our demands. We do not demand much; we only want what is indispensable to life and without which life is nothing but hard labor and eternal suffering. Our first request was that our employers discuss our needs jointly with us. But they refused to do this; they even denied us the right to speak about our needs, saying that the law does not give us such a right. Also unlawful were our requests to reduce the working day to eight hours; to set wages joindy with us; to examine our disputes with lower echelons of factory administration; to increase the wages of unskilled workers and women to one ruble per day; to abolish overtime work; to provide medical care without insult; to build shops in such a way that one could work there and not die because of awful drafts, rains, and snow.

  Our employers and factory administrators considered all this to be unlawful; they regarded every one of our requests as a crime and interpreted our desire to improve our condition as audacity.

  Sovereign, there are thousands of us here; outwardly we resemble human beings, but in reality neither we nor the Russian people as a whole enjoy any human right, have any right to speak, to think, to assemble, to discuss our needs, or to take measures to improve our conditions. They have enslaved us and they did it under the protection of your officials, with their aid and with their cooperation. They imprison and [even] send into exile any one of us who has the courage to speak on behalf of the interests of the working class and of the people. They punish us for our good heartedness and sympathy as if for a crime. […]

  Sovereign! Is all this compatible with God’s laws, by the grace of which you reign? And is it possible to live under such laws? Wouldn’t it be better for all of us if we, the toiling people of all Russia, died? Let the capitalist-exploiters of the working class, the bureaucratic embezzlers of public funds, and the pillagers of the Russian people live and enjoy themselves. Sovereign, these are the problems that we face and these are the reasons that we have gathered before the walls of your palace. Here we seek our last salvation. […] It is not arrogance that forces us to speak but the realization of the need to escape from a situation unbearable for all of us. Russia is too great, her needs too diverse and numerous to be administered by bureaucrats only. It is essential to have a popular representation; it is essential that the people help themselves and that they govern themselves. Only they know their real needs. Do not spurn their help; accept it; decree immediately to summon at once representatives of the Russian land from all classes, from all strata, including workers’ representatives. Let there be present a capitalist, a worker, a bureaucrat, a priest, a doctor, and a teacher – let everyone regardless of who they are elect their own representatives. Let everyone be equal and free to elect or be elected, and toward that end decree that the elections to the Constituent Assembly be carried out on the basis of universal, secret, and equal suffrage.

  *

  Perhaps because the political subtext of Chekhov’s plays is so ambiguous, his drama is generally seen as associated with pre-revolutionary society. Indeed, all his full-length plays deal with the leisured classes, and are set outside the centres of power and political struggle, on Russian country estates (with the exception of The Three Sisters, which takes place in a provincial town). At first sight there is little sign of the growing revolutionary ferment, and Chekhov’s characters appear to be insulated from political events by their geographical distance from Moscow – though the three sisters who sigh so heavily for Moscow are in fact living only just outside the capital. This apolitical association of Chekhov with the values of the pre-revolutionary elite stems partly from Stanislavsky’s description of a performance of The Cherry Orchard on the eve of the October Revolution.

  At the same time, writing his memoirs under Stalinism, Stanislavsky promoted a specific political meaning in Chekhov’s plays. The political sensitivity of Chekhov’s work is also indicated by the Russian editions of his correspondence (1944–51, and 1963–4). In these a letter which quoted a passage from Porfiry Uspensky, a nineteenth-century Bishop – “Standing armies … are the lawless defenders of unjust and unfair laws, of privilege and of tyranny” (6 February 1899) – had a note stating that Bishop Porfiry, who wrote in 1848, was commenting solely on the armies of capitalist countries. Another letter referring disparagingly to “Marxists with their self-important faces” [26 December 1900] was either omitted altogether, or had a note claiming that Chekhov was only referring to those Marxists “officially sanctioned” by the Czarist state – not to the Marxist-Leninists who had founded the Soviet state. So Stanislavsky’s pro to-revolutionary interpretation has to be seen as a way of justifying the close association of the Moscow Art Theatre with Chekhov’s work, by showing his characters as prefiguring the “heroes” of the 1917 Communist revolution:

  Astrov and Uncle Vanya are not simple and small men, but ideal fighters against the terrible realities of the Russia of Chekhov’s time … when the plot of the play drags him and his heroes into the sad dark life of the eighties of the last century, then the happy laughter of the men [of the post-revolutionary audience] serves but to make clearer the hardships that were borne in Russia by the great men who became heroes in the days of revolution. I cannot believe that a man like Astrov would remain unrecognized at a moment of national uplift in Russia.

  (Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art 1926)

  Despite the tone of special political pleading, Stanislavsky does point to a major motif that runs through all Chekhov’s plays in the longing for a better life expressed – in a very general and undefined way – by so many of his characters.

  5.1.5 Konstantin Stanislavsky, Chekhov and Russian Politics

  Translated by J. J. Robbins

  “[…] our art is not eternal, but it is the most inescapable of all arts so far as our contemporaries are concerned. What strength there is in it! Its action is created not by one man, but simultaneously by a group of actors, artists, stage directors, and musicians; not by one art, but simultaneously by many most d
iverse arts, music, drama, painting, declamation, dancing. This theatrical action is received not by one man, but simultaneously by a crowd of human beings which develops a mass emotion that sharpens the moments of receptivity. This collectivity, that is, the simultaneous creation of many different artists, this comprehensivity, that is, the action not of one, but of many arts at one time, this herd feeling of receptivity, show their full strength in the impression they make on this new, unspoiled, trusting, and unsophisticated spectator.”

  This force of the scenic power over the spectator was shown in strongest relief at one performance which I will always remember. This performance was given almost on the eve of the Third Revolution. On that night the soldiery was gathering around the Kremlin, mysterious preparations were being made, gray-clad mobs were walking somewhere, some of the streets were completely empty, the lanterns were out, the police patrols removed, and in the Solodovnikovsky Theatre there gathered a thousand-headed crowd of the common people to see Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard”, in which the life of that class against whom the common people were preparing for final revolt was painted in deep and sympathetic tones.

  The auditorium, filled almost exclusively by the common people, buzzed with excitement. The mood on both sides of the footlights was one of worry. We actors, in our make-ups, waiting for the performance to begin, stood near the curtain and listened to the buzzing of the audience in the thickened atmosphere of the auditorium.

  “We won’t be able to finish the performance,” we said to each other. “There will be a scandal. Either they will drive us from the stage or they will attack us.”

  When the curtains parted, our hearts beat in the expectation of a possible excess. But – the lyricism of Chekhov, the eternal beauty of Russian poetry, the life-mood of country gentility in old Russia, caused a reaction even under the existing conditions. It was one of our most successful performances from the viewpoint of the attention of the spectators. It seemed to us that all of them wanted to wrap themselves in the atmosphere of poetry and to rest there and bid peaceful farewell forever to the old and beautiful life that now demanded its purifying sacrifices. The performance was ended by a tremendous ovation, and the spectators left the theatre in silence, and who knows – perhaps many of them went straight to the barricades. Soon shooting began in the city. Hardly able to find cover, we made our way to our homes in the night. In the darkness I ran into a priest, and thought:

  “They are shooting there, and we are in duty bound to go, he to the church, I to the theatre. He to pray, I to create for those who seek respite.”

  2 CHEKHOV’S NATURALISTIC DRAMA

  While there is no direct evidence that he knew of Zola’s theories, when Chekhov came across J’Accuse! – Zola’s polemic pamphlet defending Dreyfus – in 1898, he characterized Zola as “a noble soul” and stressed that he was “delighted by his outburst” (Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 4 January 1898). Chekhov certainly knew, and admired Ibsen’s naturalistic plays, and his commitment to objectivity follows the basic principle of Naturalism:

  It is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc.; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness

  (Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 30 May 1888)

  However, just as Strindberg rejected “photographic realism”, he expressed his impatience with realistic writers who “describe life as it is and … have neither immediate nor remote goals”. In his definition all good writers

  have one highly important trait in common: they’re moving towards something definite and beckon you to follow … The best of them are realistic and describe life as it is, but because each line is saturated with the consciousness of its goal, you feel life as it should be in addition to life as it is …

  (Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 25 November 1892)

  Comments to other writers on their work, scattered through his correspondence, offer insights on his own methods of dramatic composition. These indicate that Chekhov based his writing on images – which he collected in his mind independent of any specific story or play – and began by creating a framework of character relationships, building up minor figures to create a context that delineated the nature of the protagonists.

  These elements control the meaning in Chekhov’s plays, most obviously the images, which he singled out as “best, that I love and jealously hold on to so as not to waste” on more minor work (Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 27 October 1888). These infuse his drama on several levels. There are the explicit, global images of the seagull or the cherry orchard: similar to Ibsen’s doll’s house or wild duck, but even more pervasive. They give the titles to the plays, are present on the stage, identified with by one of the characters, referred to in the dialogue (and intensified in their effect by being destroyed – shot like the bird, or chopped down like the trees). There is the transposition or expansion of the dramatic situation into musical terms, as with the street musicians in Act IV of The Three Sisters, whose nostalgic interplay of harp and violin speak for the silent listening characters, or the retreating sound of the military band – and the openly symbolic breaking harp-string in The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov also had clear visual images in mind for the specific moments in the stage action, as in his directive to Stanislavsky during the rehearsals for The Three Sisters’:

  You write that when Natasha is making the rounds of the house at night in Act Three she puts out the lights and looks under the furniture for burglars. It seems to me, though, that it would be better to have her walk across the stage in a straight line without a glance at anyone or anything à la Lady Macbeth with a candle – that way it would be much briefer and more frightening.

  (Letter, 2 January 1901)

  As with this analogy to Lady Macbeth, these images contradict what is usually assumed to be a fundamental principle of Naturalism, in substituting interpretive symbolism for the observed behavior of ordinary people in daily life.

  In the way he used images, Chekhov can be seen as borrowing techniques from the Symbolist movement; and indeed there are references to the symbolists in his plays. Gayev talks of “the Decadents” (the common term for symbolist writers) in The Cherry Orchard, while the play that Nina performs in Act I of The Seagull – “the talented work of Treplev” which Stanislavsky refers to as “real art” (My Life in Art) – corresponds to the quintessential qualities of Symbolism. These were defined by Arthur Symons, who took Axël by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam as his prime example of symbolist drama:

  The religious ideal, the occult ideal, the passionate ideal, all are presented one after the other, in these dazzling and profound pages; Axël is the disdainful choice from among them, the disdainful rejection of life itself, of the whole illusion of life, “since infinity alone is not a deception” … And the play is written, throughout in a particular kind of eloquence, which makes no attempt to imitate the level of speech of every day, but which is a sort of ideal language in which beauty is aimed at exclusively as if it were written in verse …

  The ideal, to Villiers, being the real, spiritual beauty being the essential beauty, and material beauty its reflection or its revelation, it is with a sort of fury that he attacks the materialising forces of the world: science, progress, the worldly emphasis on “facts,” on what is “positive,” “serious,” “respectable.”

  (Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement, 1899)

  Just as the extreme theory of Naturalism traced passions to physiology, which substituted for the soul, Symbolism denied the validity of physical existence. Chekhov combines elements of both, to create what has been called “poetic naturalism” – and indeed it was this quality that Stanislavsky singled out as the basis of his naturalistic “System” of acting:

  Chekhov discovered to us the life of things and sounds, thanks to which all that was lifeless, dead and unjustified in the details of production, all that in sp
ite of our desires created an outward naturalism, turned of itself into living and artistic realism, and the properties on the stage took on an inner relationship with the soul of the actor. Chekhov, like no one else, was able to create inward and outward artistic truth.

  (My Life in Art, 1926)

  This balance was difficult for even the Moscow Art Theatre to achieve. As Stanislavsky admits in his memoirs, the over-emphasis on external Naturalism in his productions (even in The Cherry Orchard after extensive experience with Chekhov’s plays) caused Chekhov to propose adding a speech – “How wonderful! We hear no birds, no dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no clocks, no sleigh-bells, no crickets” – in protest against all the contextual background being introduced in the staging.

  There is also another major element in Chekhov’s naturalistic plays that transgresses generally accepted boundaries – his combination of comedy, sometimes verging on farce, with intrinsically serious themes, even tragedy. (Death is a consistent theme in his mature plays, ranging from the suicide of a major character, shooting in a duel – albeit off stage – or the final image of an abandoned servant dying of old age, to a failed – and therefore farcical – attempted murder; and none has a “happy” outcome.) This caused repeated misunderstandings, even with Stanislavsky. Despite the themes of unrequited love, the tragic fate of Nina, the young actress, sexually exploited and discarded, and the final suicide of Treplev together with his unsuccessful attempt to kill himself earlier in the play, The Seagull was conceived as a “comedy” – as Chekhov wrote to his publisher, “flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage” (Letter to Alexei Suvorin, 21 October 1895).The Cherry Orchard too is explicitly labeled a comedy, and Chekhov complained “Why is the play so persistently called a drama [as distinct from a comedy] in posters and newspaper advertisements? Nemirovich and Stanislavsky definitely see … something absolutely different from what I have written” (Letter to Olga Knipper, 10 April 1904).