All posts tagged Chekhov

Stanisław Wyspiański: Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery

Drawing to the end of its display is a lovely room at the National Portrait Gallery devoted to the first ever UK exhibition of portraits by the late-Victorian Polish artist Stanisław Wyspiański (1869 to 1907).

Wyspiański was an impressive polymath. He was an interior and furniture designer and conceived monumental schemes for churches and public buildings. He was also a playwright who is often credited with inaugurating modern Polish theatre, during the same period as Ibsen in Norway and Chekhov in Russia.

In his day Poland didn’t actually exist as an independent state and was still partitioned between Prussia, Austria and Russia. The city he grew up in, Krakow, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So Wyspiański was among the artists and writers seeking to create a new national art based on folk traditions, the Polish language and its distinctive heritage. The Young Poland movement which he belonged to contributed to helping bring about Polish independence in 1918.

Based in Kraków, Wyspiański did much to innovate not only theatre, stage design and architecture, but wrote poems and – the reason we’re here – drew and painted. He worked mainly in pastels, using a characteristically bold black outline to make clear but stylised images which are clearly influenced by a number of late nineteenth century trends, including Art Nouveau, Japanese woodcuts, and the strong stylised moulding of Paul Gauguin.

This stylised and idealised image of his wife, Teodora Pytko, suckling their baby son Staś, watched by his daughters, is one of the most famous portraits in Polish art. In fact the two girls on the left is a doubling of his one daughter, Helenka. The more you look at the face facing us the more she looks like a spooky Symbolist head, hovering amid the stylised foliage.

Maternity by Stanisław Wyspiański (1905) pastel on paper, National Museum in Kraków

The 16 paintings and drawings in this exhibition have been selected to focus on portraits of writers, artists and politicians who Wyspiański knew or worked with. Rather shamefully, they have never been exhibited in the UK before. They all radiate a wonderful charm, sympathetic and intimacy. Here’s a portrait of the actress Władysława Ordon-Sosnowska in theatrical costume.

Portrait of Władysława Ordon-Sosnowska in the role of Krasawica in the drama ‘Bolesław the Bold’ by Stanisław Wyspiański (1093)

There is some overlap with the big exhibition of Edvard Munch portraits recently staged here at the NPG. Munch and Wyspiański were connected through the writer Stanisław Przybyszewski who was a close friend of Munch, a critic of his work, and introduced Wyspiański to Munch’s art in Berlin.

A portrait of Przybyszewski is included in the show, but I’m choosing to share this portrait, of physician, social activist, politician and professor, Julian Nowak, because it highlights Wyspiański’s technique. It’s done with pastel and note the different types of shading he creates. The different hues of the face – the deft combination of brown, orange, red, yellow, grey – are interesting and tangy. But the obviously striking thing is the deliberately rough treatment of Nowak’s black coat which creates a magically vivid and dynamic effect.

Julian Nowak by Stanisław Wyspiański (1904) private collection, on loan to the National Museum in Krakow

Vivid and at the same time precise, isn’t it? In my opinion Wyspiański has a claim to be a more consistently attractive and accurate portrait painter than Munch.

I mentioned his children. Here’s one of the most attractive and charming ones, a portrait of his daughter, Helenka. Note the contrast between the fine detail of the girl’s dress and the rough shading of the background wallpaper. And also the unusual tilted nature of the image, demonstrating the same kind of casual attitude to classical perspective you see in Gauguin or Van Gogh. There’s more table surface in the image than child, and yet this somehow brings out her delicacy and detail all the more.

Little Helen with a Vase by Stanisław Wyspiański (1902)

Summary

I’m afraid I’ve come to reviewing this lovely little exhibition very late and it closes this Saturday. It’s completely FREE so if you’re in central London this week and have half an hour to spare, it’s worth dropping in and savouring these lovely, beautifully drawn and often charming images.

Related reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on July 7, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Art, drawing, Exhibition, Painting

Posted by Simon on July 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/07/07/stanislaw-wyspianski-portraits-the-national-portrait-gallery/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (1)

You may well complain of the vagueness of my language.
(Woolf acknowledging that she doesn’t always have clear ideas or express them very clearly, in ‘Character in Fiction’, page 48)

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s non-fiction prose pieces and groups them under four headings:

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

I’ve published introductory notes on the themes and style of the essays. This blog post summarises the first four essays of the ten in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section (many but not all of which are available online).

The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
Modern Fiction (1919)
The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]

1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905: 3 pages)

Summary: good essays are always personal and autobiographical.

Woolf was just 23 and exploring her talents in this early essay. She affects a world-weary omniscience of the literary scene and laments the overproduction of writing of all types:

Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger—come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them.

Like many conservative-minded people she laments all the newfangled tricks and innovations of ‘modern’ writers (this was written before the genuine wave of modernist innovations, so reads like the standard conservative lament about everything going to the dogs; and is also deeply ironic seeing as she was to go on to become one of the most notable pioneers of modernist techniques in English fiction).

She claims that one of the most prominent innovations of the age (end of the Victorian era, start of the Edwardian decade) has been the advent of the personal essay which gives the opinions of the author, in which every sentence starts with ‘I’:

Its popularity with us is so immense and so peculiar that we are justified in looking upon it as something of our own—typical, characteristic, a sign of the times which will strike the eye of our great-great-grandchildren

Rather ludicrously she attributes this tidal wave of personal essays to the simple fact that so many people have been taught to write, presumably as a result of the late-Victorian education acts which expanded the scope of state schooling. But it’s the personal, egotistical element of essay writing which interests her:

The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays.

Then she arrives at a point, of sorts. When contemporaries write reviews about books (which we can all read for ourselves) or pictures (which we can all see for ourselves) what real value do they add? It’s only when critics write of what is really, distinctively theirs alone, ‘of that single book to which they alone have the key and of that solitary picture whose face is shrouded to all but one gaze’, that their essays have value. Too many essayists, like autobiographers, feel obliged to produce fine writing and orthodox views. For young Virginia Stephen, on the contrary, it is the personal element which is most valuable in criticism.

This call for the personal in criticism can be seen as a kind of manifesto for the deeply personal impressions and observations she would make a career out of.

2. Modern Fiction (1919: 7 pages)

Summary: Woolf rubbishes the novels of the popular writers of her day, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, for being obsessed with realistic detail and neglecting the spiritual aspect of human nature. Hence her calling them ‘materialists’. She goes on to define the kind of novel she desires, concerned with the internal psychology of its characters and registering the blizzard of sensory input and thoughts we all experience.

It is important to state that a good deal of Woolf’s essays consist of gaseous verbiage. She is prolix and verbose. She writes as if she’s being paid by the word, not the idea. Entire pages consist of filler. Particularly irksome is her adoption of the lofty, snobbish ‘we’ in her articles.

It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

The ‘we’ refers to ‘people like us’, privileged, educated, upper-middle-class who have the right stuff, an advanced sensibility and sophisticated tastes. Another reason for using it is that, very simply, it protects the writer from coming out into the open and admitting it’s just their own personal opinion. It makes it sound like she’s speaking on behalf of a group, a class. Safety in numbers.

It need scarcely be said that we make no claim…

This orotund phraseology is the tone of a conservative snob, the tone of an old buffer in clubland. The fact that it emanates from the consciously feminist Woolf makes it all the more ironic. If she’d been a man, she would have been unbearably snobbish and reactionary.

This is a notorious essay because it’s the first in a series in which Woolf criticises three of the most successful novelists of her time, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. Why? Because they lacked the refined and sensitive spirituality of a superior soul such as Woolf. They describe real people in an all-too-rackety and realistic way. Woolf struggles to find a word to describe what she dislikes and the best she can come up with is materialism.

These three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us.

Woolf was an atheist. Her novels rarely bother with traditional Christian belief or, if they do, do so only to mock it, as in the figure of the Reverend Streatfield in Between The Acts. As always, to get the full measure of her real opinions, you shouldn’t consult the novels but read her searing criticism of the Church of England as a perpetrator of misogynist patriarchy in Three Guineas.

But here, in this essay, in order to diss Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy, she is happy to invoke traditional religious metaphors, contrasting the heavy, materialist, clay of their writings with her ideal of writing which is, of course, pure, airy and spiritual.

Of Bennett she says that his books are solidly built and well crafted and present hosts of characters but ‘it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?’ Bennett depicts nothing but comfortable lives, first class railways carriages and fine hotels at Brighton i.e. all the externals of life. Similarly, Wells overstuffs his novels with issues and ideas:

In the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator?

‘The inferiority of their natures’ – there you have, in black and white, the clearest possible expression of Woolf’s snobbery.

All three novelists, in Woolf’s opinion, describe in immense detail the material facts of life and completely neglect the higher, spiritual aspects, the aspects, in other words, which Woolf intended to devote her novels to. They:

write of unimportant things… they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

‘The true and enduring’ being exemplified by the Classics of English Literature which Virginia found in her father’s well-stocked library and which he taught her to revere as the true repositories of Poetry and Truth – Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare – you know the list.

So, in Woolf’s view, All Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy’s novels fail to capture ‘life’ – but the obvious question is, Whose definition of ‘life’? Hers, of course, The higher, spiritual life, not the low, clay life of ‘inferior natures’.

For us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.

‘Vestments’, by the way, are ‘liturgical garments and articles associated primarily with the Christian religion’. See what I mean by how, in order to insist on the important of the spiritual in art, she has to temporarily resort to explicitly Christian metaphors, despite her contempt for the Church of England?

As so often in her polemical essays, it becomes more interesting when it opens up to describe Woolf’s own practice. She very vividly describes what she feels as the oppressiveness of having to create characters, think up a plot, come up with some comedy and generally conform to the existing pattern of The Novel. Does the novel always have to be like this? she asks.

It’s at this point, if it wasn’t obvious before, that you realise that Woolf is deploying her criticism of Wells et al in order to better define what she is aiming to do with the form.

Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

This is an interesting description of Woolf’s own dilemma as a novelist: she had written two traditional, conventional, heavy realistic novels but knew she wanted to break free and works out in the essay what that would mean and feel like:

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.

And then a ringing statement of intent:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

This is a very eloquent defence of the new aesthetic she was to embody in Jacob’s Room and even more so in Mrs Dalloway. It is a manifesto. You can see why these passages are routinely quoted in introductions and essays to her works.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Surprisingly, she goes on to praise James Joyce, whose ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ had been published just three years earlier, in 1916. Why? Because he, like she, and unlike the clayey materialists she deprecates, is spiritual.

In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.

Although she immediately goes on to qualify her praise, claiming that Joyce’s work ultimately fails:

because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind… centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?

This is her response to the early chapters of Ulysses which were circulated among potential publishers from 1918 onwards. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that her aversion to the later book is due to its inclusion of sex, always a queasy subject for Woolf.

Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated?

As far as I understand it, Woolf deprecated sex in fiction not so much because of the sex itself, per se, but because sex is vulgar. A properly brought-up person, a well-bred writer, simply doesn’t talk about such matters. It is a paradox that Woolf cheerfully criticised other writers for being narrow and shut in and yet, on the subject which went on to dominate the fiction of the century, sex, it is she who is fastidious, aloof and taciturn.

Back to her manifesto, Woolf says the modern novelist must overthrow, ignore and reject all the constraints of the traditional novel – the concerns for realism and realistic detail and realistic settings and realistic plots, which she so dislikes in Wells-Arnold-Galsworthy – and strike out for new points of interest.

She thinks the new, the modern style will concern itself with a new psychology. She cites a short story by Chekhov, ‘Gusev’, for its obliqueness. She tells us that it is, at first reading, a little hard to work out what this story is ‘about’, whether it’s comic or tragic or really has an ending. It is this type of inconclusive obliquity which she thinks presages The Modern.

The last paragraph of this important essay briefly tells us that any serious conversation about modern fiction has to defer to the Russians. Why? Because of their superior spirituality.

If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit.

Woolf is that very characteristic modern type, the spiritual and superior woman who, however, rejects all established religions (as male and sexist). They became a very common type in the 1920s, heavily satirised in their stories by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but nonetheless real for that.

As to Russia’s superior spirituality, regular readers of my blog will know that I despise this point of view. The classic Russian authors (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) defined the superior spirituality of the great Russian soul by comparing it with the decadence and superficiality of the West, of the corrupt France and materialist Britain. My view is, look where Russia’s supposed superior spirituality got it in the following hundred years and look where Russia’s superior spirituality has landed it today? Woolf was just one of many sensitive souls who identified with the superior spirituality of the Russian soul.

In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery.

Well, Stalin wiped out any tinsel and trickery in his Russia. The great Russians wrote about the nobility of suffering and their children and grandchildren got the revolution, the civil war, the gulag archipelago and the Great Patriotic War. After a decade of drunken chaos under Yeltsin we are now back to traditional Russian values with Vladimir Putin, who has made speeches asserting the superior civilisation of Mother Russia and the hopeless decadence of Western democracies. Russia’s superiority over all other civilisations is an essential part of Russian culture and here we have Woolf espousing it.

Woolf backs up a little and concedes there is some merit to the English tradition:

English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body.

For me it is telling that she doesn’t really draw the obvious conclusion from this thought, which is that maybe the characteristic tone of the greatest English literature is comedy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens are comedians, to which Bennett and certainly Wells, in their smaller ways, are the heirs. But Woolf has little or no sense of humour and so doesn’t see it. Given a choice between Dickensian humour and the solemn pieties of Romantic poetry, she chooses Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson every time.

She ends with more manifesto:

Nothing – no ‘method’, no experiment, even of the wildest – is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. ‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

This essay is an impressive and resounding rallying cry for the type of novel she was to write over the next decade even if, like so many manifestos, it has to be unduly critical of her contemporaries in order to clear the space for her new approach.

3. The Modern Essay (1922: 10 pages)

The best essays are highly personal and express personality.

This was a review of a hefty five-volume collection of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920 which was published in 1922. It explains why this review refers freely to a variety of the essayists included in the set. It contains the paragraph on what makes a good essay which Bradshaw quotes in his introduction and I quoted above, the paragraph about the main purpose of an essay being to entertain and give pleasure.

The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. (Modern Essays)

The review rambles through the famous names in these volumes but the striking thing about Woolf is that, despite the vast amount she wrote about fiction and literature, she’s not a particularly useful critic, either in theory or practice. What I mean is, she very, very rarely analyses a passage by someone to tell you whether and why it succeeds or fails. And she has few general critical ideas apart from the ones which help her gather her thoughts for her own endeavours.

For example, she thinks Walter Pater’s essay is best because ‘he has somehow contrived to get his material fused‘. Not very useful. She thinks Max Beerbohm’s essay is a success because in it ‘he is himself’.

He has brought personality into literature… We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes.

Not dazzlingly insightful, is it? And his style? ‘The triumph is the triumph of style.’ These are close to platitudes and she hits a kind of low when she tells us that the important thing in writing an essay is ‘to know how to write.’ Yes. Sounds likely.

This is pretty thin pickings, isn’t it? Barely exists as criticism. You can see why, despite fans like Bradshaw bigging her up, few if any of Woolf’s critical ideas are widely used or cited for the simple reason that she hardly has any critical ideas, apart from the ones where she is working out her own approach – but those passages are cited everywhere.

4. How It Strikes A Contemporary (1923: 9 pages)

The present age lacks one commanding critical figure, a symbol of the way that, since the war, literature has become fragmented and difficult.

The ‘it’ in the title isn’t the modern world or politics, it refers to contemporary literary criticism i.e. it’s a commentary on contemporary literary criticism circa 1923.

Why are there such radical disagreements about new books? Because there is no one critic who dominates the age. Like all conservatives, Woolf looks back to supposed Golden Ages when there was one towering critical figure who dominated their era – to the ages of John Dryden (the 1680s and ’90s), Dr Johnson (1760s to ’80s), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1810s to ‘1830) or Matthew Arnold (1860s, ’70s, ’80s). The fact that these are nostalgic conservative tropes is given away by her own phraseology:

Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline, which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown…

‘Once upon a time…’ reveals that this is a fairy tale version of history, removing all its complexity and conflict.

Anyway, in Woolf’s opinion the real problem is simply the scale of output. No one critic could read everything that is produced nowadays and so the situation she laments, with thousands of reviewers scribbling away but no one central Man of Letters setting a standard.

It is revealing who she picks but then dismisses as possible contenders for this title of Master of the Age: Thomas Hardy has retired from novel writing; Conrad is an exotic outsider. No, like all cultural conservatives, Woolf thinks the present day (1923) was one of special collapse, decline, decay. It is an age of fragments, ‘it is a barren and exhausted age’ etc.

Interestingly, she gets it wrong about W.B. Yeats, thinking he will only be remembered for a few poems. Similarly and notoriously, she thinks that James Joyce’s Ulysses was a disaster and failure. In both of these opinions, she was, of course, dead wrong.

There are several passage of incoherent impressionism before she emerges with a tangible point: the present age is defined by The War. The First World War changed everything.

Nor has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed… The most casual reader dipping into poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of our time.

But:

Our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction.

We live in a special age, uniquely cut off from the past. Many writers are capturing this new spirit. But there is something unsatisfactory about their work. This is a useful impression and certainly a very useful background to understanding her own practice from ‘Jacob’s Room’ onwards.

But the essay also conveys a sense of Woolf feeling adrift in this new age. As so often with Woolf you feel that this is due, in part, to her own personal intellectual inadequacy. In her essays and her novels, you get the impression that things are always just a bit too much for her to cope with. She needs help. She needs Daddy.

And Daddy, here as everywhere, takes the form of looking back nostalgically to the age of Wordsworth, Scott and Austen. She likes those old authors because they were so sure of themselves. By contrast, her contemporaries:

afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world.

Her conclusion uses a silly metaphor to make a valid point:

It would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made.

The great critics of the past spoke with confidence for their entire age. The Great War has made that impossible because it has shattered all traditional values. This explains the daring experiments but also the failures and sense of blockage and frustration among so many of her contemporaries. But she nonetheless cleaves to the hope that out of the current chaos great things will come. And she was, of course, correct. She was in fact living in an age of masterpieces, which included her own works.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on April 16, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Literary criticism, Literature

Posted by Simon on April 16, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/16/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-1-reading-and-writing-1/

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (1901)

‘When you read a novel this kind of thing seems so trite and obvious…’
(The youngest of the three sister, Masha Prozorov, accurately commenting on this play)

‘Nothing ever works out as you want it.’
(Olga summing up the plays miserable defeatism)

Characters

The play represents snapshots, at roughly one year intervals, of the three sisters, their brother, their partners and friends, as their lives slowly unfurl in ways they never expected…

The Prozorov family

Introducing the three Prozorov sisters. Their parents are dead and they live in a house in a provincial town with their brother, Andrew. They were born and brought up in Moscow but moved to this (unnamed) provincial town (population about 100,000, p.182) eleven years ago when their father, Colonel Prozorov, ‘got his brigade’. The father who moved them there died one year ago.

Andrew is clever and aims to become an academic but also laments his laziness. Their father drove all the children hard (‘inflicted education on us’), forcing them to learn modern languages but, since his death, the pedal’s been taken off the gas. Apart from anything else, Andrew’s put on a lot of weight. In the first act Andrew declares his love for a local young lady, Natalia (Natasha). Natasha is 28, gauche and awkward: the sisters mock her for her clumsy dress sense (‘downright pathetic’, p.180).

Olga is the oldest Prozorov sister and assumes the role of matriarchal head of the family although she’s only 28. She’s a spinster and so, inevitably, wishes she had married. Olga is, also inevitably, a teacher at the high school, where she frequently fills in for the headmistress whenever he’s absent.

Maria (Masha) is the middle sister, 23 at the beginning of the play. She married her husband, the dull pedantic Latin teacher at the local high school, Kulygin, when she was 18 and just out of school. After five years of marriage she has, inevitably, grown tired of her husband. (Chekhov wrote this part for his wife, the Moscow Art Theatre actress Olga Knipper.)

Irina is the youngest sister and the play opens with celebrations of her ‘name day’ (she is turning 20) which is the pretext for half a dozen other characters to visit the household, mainly a bunch of soldiers from the local barracks, being:

The soldiers

Aleksandr Vershinin (42) – Lieutenant colonel who’s just been appointed head of the artillery battery. He knew the girls’ father in Moscow and reminds them that when they were little they called him the ‘Lovesick Major’. He is married to his second wife who’s mentally unstable and regularly talks about killing herself.

Baron Nikolaj Tuzenbach (29) – A lieutenant in the army and not handsome, Tuzenbach often tries to impress the youngest sister, Irina, whom he has loved for five years.

Captain Vasily Solyony – irritating man who continually makes bad jokes, keeps quoting refrains from songs, teases the other soldiers, sprinkles scent on his chest and hands.

Dr Ivan Chebutykin – 59-year-old army doctor, Chebutykin starts off as a fun, eccentric old man who enjoys his position as family friend. He is all courtesy and hand kissing, boasts of his own idleness, always has a newspaper stuffed in his pocket.

Minor characters

Ferapont – Doorkeeper at the local council offices, Ferapont is comedy deaf (‘eh?….what?…what d’ye say?’). Also given to blurting out random facts, usually about Moscow.

Anfisa – An elderly family retainer and former nurse, Anfisa is 81 years old and has worked forever for the Prozorov family. Natasha begins to despise her for her feebleness and threatens to throw her out but Olga rescues her, taking her to live at Olga’s teacher’s flat.

Unseen characters

The play has several important characters who are talked about frequently but never seen onstage. These include Protopopov, head of the local council and Natasha’s lover; Vershinin’s suicidal wife and two daughters; Kulygin’s beloved superior the headmaster of the high school, and Natasha’s children (Bobik and Sofia).

Act 1

It’s 5 May, one year since their father died and, coincidentally, Irina’s name-day. The three sisters are sitting together and quickly give their backstories: Olga is marking her pupils workbooks and complains about being exhausted by long hours teaching at the school, while Irina has woken up in a wonderful mood on this lovely sunny day!

Family friends – the soldiers Lieutenant Tuzenbach and Captain Solyony, along with old Dr Chebutykin – walk in very casually. Irina, in her naive gushing way, praises the joy of honest work; Tuzenbach quickly establishes his hobby horse, which is that a great avalanche is coming which will sweep away all their rottenness and boredom (and, indeed, there was to be a revolution 4 years after the play was produced).

Dr Chebutykin boasts about how idle he is, never read a book since he left university, only ever reads the newspapers and pulls one out of his pocket.

Masha announces she’s going home to her boring husband, says she is so depressed, kisses Irina through her tears of unhappiness. This triggers Olga who starts crying.

Dr Chebutykin re-enters with a soldier carrying a silver samovar which he presents to Irina as a birthday present. This is, apparently, a crass gift so Irina, Olga and the soldiers all mock it. Chebutykin responds with self pity: ‘I’m an old man, a lonely, insignificant old man.’

Enter Vershinin, the new battery commander. When he mentions he’s from Moscow, the homesick sisters excitedly crown round, as he remembers, all those years ago, coming to visit their father, and remembers the three little sisters, and they enthusiastically revive their memories, turns out they even lived on the same road, Old Basmanny Road, and Olga and Masha start crying (as usual).

Someone mentions their dead mother and Masha laments that she’s already starting to forget what she looked like which prompts Vershinin to a bit of cheap philosophising, pointing out that everything they think important will pass away and be forgotten. Tuzenbach counters that maybe later generations will look back and find their lives admirable, after all there are no longer torture and executions etc (they will be revived by the Bolsheviks in just 16 or so years’ time).

Enter Andrew who the sisters praise for his ability on the violin, and at making picture frames, but then tease for being in love. Every time he opens his mouth Vershinin talks philosophically about the future:

VERSHININ: In two or three hundred years life upon this earth will be beautiful beyond our dreams…’ (p.182)

Tuzenbakh picks up on this and says they all need to work for this better future. (In his history of Russia Orlando Figes comments on a recurring feature of Russian culture being its belief in utopias here on earth, whether the peasants dreaming of owning their own land or intellectuals dreaming of a free society. That’s why even pre-revolutionary literature sounds the same as communist exhortations to build a better future, because it’s a thread that runs through Russian culture no matter what the political system. This thread occurs in several Chekhov plays.)

Enter Kulygin, the senior assistant master at the local school who Masha married when she was young and impressionable. he establishes his crushingly boring character by presenting Irina with a history of the school over the last 50 years which he has written. It includes a list of every pupil who’s passed through it in the previous 50 years! Irina points out that he already gave her this as a present, at Easter. Unfazed, Kulygin turns to offer it to Vershinin.

Kulygin delivers a pedantic schoolteacher lecture about how summer is coming, they’ll soon have to take up the carpets and take down the curtains. He puts his arm round Masha and tells everyone his wife loves him, but Masha irritatedly frees herself and moves away. When he reminds her they’re due to attend a little party at the headmaster’s later in the day Masha irritatedly says she’s not going.

Everyone goes through to the back room for lunch, leaving Irina and Tuzenbakh alone so that he instantly declares his love for Irina. She is so young and fresh, he says he feels a tremendous zeal for life, to work and struggle and this is mixed up with his love for her.

But Irina bursts into tears. A little incomprehensibly she says that life is like weeds strangling the three sisters. What’s wrong is they ‘don’t know the meaning of work’. An odd thing to say seeing as how Olga is exhausted by her work.

Enter Natasha wearing a bright green sash, to the horror of all the other female characters.

The big birthday lunch starts with the characters swapping chit-chat. Notable that all this irritates Andrew whose main wish is to be left alone.

Enter the minor characters second lieutenants Vladimir Rodé, who is given the habit of rolling his r’s, and Alexei Fedotik, who is given the hobby of photography i.e. he’s always snapping whatever situation he finds himself in.

Someone notices there are 13 at the table, they joke that this means someone at the table is in love. When Dr Chebutykin jokingly mentions Natasha’s name she gets up and runs out the room, followed by Andrew. He tells her how much he loves her and how happy she makes with the characteristically bluntness, with the straightforward statement which is so typical of Chekhov:

ANDREW: I feel so wonderful, my heart is so full of love and joy. (p.189)

He kisses her and tells her he wants to marry her.

Act 2

It’s a year later. Andrew and Natasha have gotten married and had a baby, Bobik, which Natasha endlessly fusses over. Since the scene is the same as Act 1, clearly Andrew and Natasha are living in the Prozorov family home. As the act opens it’s 8 o’clock at night. We find out in quick succession that Irina has now got a job, working at the post office, that Natasha is harsh on the servants, that it’s the carnival and some revellers have been invited to the house which Natasha inevitably disapproves off since it might upset precious Bobik.

Natasha goes on to say that Bobok ought to have Irina’s room and Irina move in to share with Olga. In other words, Natasha is trying to take over running the Prozorov household and Andrew is too weak/scared of upsetting her, to intervene. Natasha leaves, the old servant Ferapont enters. He’s brought some papers from the council which triggers Andrew to give us his backstory, in that characteristically Chekhov way: this is that all his brave fantasies about becoming a university professor in Moscow, ‘a distinguished scholar, the pride of Russia!’ have been crushed and he’s ended up becoming secretary to the county council and his highest ambition is to be allowed onto the council itself.

He ponders the way that, if he were in Moscow he could drop into a restaurant for dinner and not know anybody there but somehow still feel part of the swing of things, whereas here in this provincial town, if he goes to a restaurant he knows everyone and everyone knows him but he still feels out of it.

He can tell old Ferapont all this because Ferapont is deaf and doesn’t actually hear him, instead telling some inconsequential stories told by a recent contractor from Moscow to the council.

Andrew stretches and exits to be replaced by Masha and Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin. They are a bit flushed from a night out. She repeats the story that she married her husband when young and still scared of him. They both lament how boring this provincial town is, how everyone here is fed up with their wife, with their house, with their estate and with their horses. Moan moan moan.

Then Vershinin moans about his unstable wife, they had an argument this morning, and ends up telling Masha he has no-one but her, ‘You’re a wonderful marvellous woman, I love you love you love you’.

While Vershinin is prattling on Irina and Baron Tuzenbakh enter at another door. He is telling Irina how much he loves her, how he loves to walk her home from work every evening, how he’ll do it for the next ten or twenty years if she’ll let him. But Irina ignores him because she is tired. We know this because, with Chekhovian lack of subtlety she says it six times.

The two couples spot each other and start a general conversation. Irina complains that working at the post office is not at all the intellectual adventure she romantically envisioned but just tiring drudgery (welcome to the world, baby). Irina and Masha share the news that Andrew has started going to some gambling club with the doctor and is losing heavily.

The doctor enters, combs his beard, sits and takes out a newspaper and the other characters laugh at this stereotypical behaviour.

At a loose end Vershinin and Tuzenbakh start off on their familiar hobby horse, the world of the future which will bring in a new and happy life. As per my citing of Orlando Figes’ point about the ubiquity of utopian thinking in Russian culture:

VERSHININ: Two or three hundred years, or a thousand years if you like – it doesn’t really matter how long – will bring in a new and happy life. We’ll have no part in it of course, but it is what we’re now living for, working for, yes suffering for. We’re creating it and that’s what gives our life its meaning and its happiness too… (p.197)

The good life is always round the corner. Of course this is the deep Russian mentality which the communists exploited throughout the Soviet era. Just one more five-year plan, comrade! All these sacrifices we’re making are for the future, it is people of the future who will benefit from our misery, our sacrifices, our starving and gulags and imprisonment. So:

VERSHININ: Our business is to work and go on working and our distance descendants will have the happiness that’s going…I won’t have it but my children’s children may. (p.197)

Anyway, Tuzenbakh completely disagrees. Forget all this ‘happiness in the far future’ stuff. our job is to be happy today! What if he’s happy right now! Masha enters with a third point of view which is life is meaningless without a point or purpose.

MASHA: What’s the point of it all?…Man must have a faith or be trying to find one otherwise his life just doesn’t make any sense…Either you know what you’re living for or else the whole thing’s a waste of time and means less than nothing. (p.198)

This is, maybe, the existentialist frame of mind which dominated so much continental thought and literature in the twentieth century but is obviously wrong. It is nostalgic for ‘faith’, it believes there’s a God-shaped hole in our hearts etc etc. But if there is no God and never was one and all faiths are psychological fantasies, then better to live in truth, face and overcome and be happy with who we are and the world we live in and the conditions on which we live in it (frailty, contingency, illness, accident) and so make the best of every day. Freud’s view in his little essay on transitoriness.

After reaching no conclusion, as discussions like this never can because there is no conclusion to an unnecessary question, to a question framed using invalid concepts (God, faith, meaning) the conversation collapses into general banter with the doctor inconsequentially pointing out facts in his newspaper, the junior officer Fedotik has brought Irina a box of crayons. He shows her a different type of patience (with cards). Servants bring in a samovar to prepare tea… It’s more like a youth club than a family home, the way in each scene this main room fills up with ten or more characters.

The room disintegrates into people saying things to themselves, continuing their hobby horse lines of thought, dialogue criss-crossing over others… Vershinin has another bit of gloomy philosophising:

VERSHININ: We have no happiness. There’s no such thing. It’s only something we long for. (p.200)

But the psychological basis of this view is revealed seconds later when he is handed a note which has been sent from his daughter to say his wife has taken poison again so he has to go in a rush, just time to tell Masha what a splendid marvellous woman she is…Leaving Masha in a filthy mood because she is in love with a man who is tied to a maniac, which explains why she (Masha) now wanders round the room losing her temper with everyone, telling off the servant Anfisa and scrambling the cards Irina was playing patience with.

Tuzenbakh carries a decanter of brandy over to Solyony and says they must make it up but Solyony says there’s no ‘it’ to make up before admitting that he’s alright when with one other person but in larger company feels tense and comes out with boorish and rude comments.

Tuzenbakh announces to several people that he’s resigning his commission because he wants to work, to do good honest work, he bets peasants sleep like logs after a good day’s labour. What an idiot. The Tolstoy view that authenticity is down among the mindless labouring peasants.

Solyony and the doctor get into a pointless argument about escalopes and shallots.

Tuzenbakh, Andrew and Solyony get into a pointless argument about how many universities Moscow has.

Tuzenbakh sits at the piano and starts to play a waltz, Masha dances by herself singing made-up words.

God these people really need to get lives.

As if to confirm that view Natasha enters and tells them they’ve all got to go because her baby Bobik is ill. Also it is announced that the promised carnival revellers will not now be coming to the house – for the sake of the baby, of course. All the other characters say goodbye and make various exits, all grumbling about Natasha, some saying it’s her that’s ill, mentally ill.

Leaving just Andrew and Dr Chebutykin who have obviously made a plan to go to a gambling club again tonight. Chebutykin admits that he was always in love with Andrew’s mother. Andrew takes this with surprising indifference because what he really wants to say is that marriage is rubbish (it’s clear that after just one year he’s had enough of small-minded but bossy Natasha). Yes but loneliness is a terrible thing, Chebutykin replies.

They exit whereupon there’s knocking at the hall door. It’s the carnival revellers who were promised a reception here. Irina tells the maid Anfisa to tell them there’s nobody home. At that moment Solyony enters, is surprised the carnival revellers are being turned away but, finding Irina by herself, takes the opportunity to tell her how much he loves her, ‘My happiness! My joy!’ (p.205) Unsurprisingly Irina very coldly tells him to shut up and go away, at which Solyony says he shall have no rival.

SOLYONY: By God I mean it, if there’s anybody else I’ll kill him! (p.205)

Enter Natasha with candle checking all the doors are shut. She imagines her husband is in his room reading so doesn’t look in, then encounters Irina and Solyony.

Natasha takes this opportunity to suggest to irina that she vacates her room and moves in with Olga to make way for precious Bobik. This is such an outrageous suggestion that Irina doesn’t at first understand her and then the doorbell goes. The maid comes to tell Natasha that it’s the leader of the council, Protopopov. Natasha switches from trying to ease Irina out of her room to giggling girlishly that Protopopov has come to take her for a spin in his sleigh and skips out. It’s pretty obvious that Natasha is infatuated with / having an affair with Protopopov.

Enter the oldest sister, tired Olga, and the boring schoolmaster Kulygin, obviously arriving from work, and they quickly tell us it’s because they’ve been attending a school meeting. When they quiz Irina, Irina says she’s too tired to talk. Olga announces that she feels ill with fatigue. Vershinin comes in, says his wife has stabilised after her latest suicide attempt and invites Kulygin to go somewhere with him but Kulygin completes the trio of characters saying he’s too tired.

Well, since there’s no party (the carnival people being turned away) both Vershinin and Kulygin say they’ll be off then, and take their leave of the two sisters (Olga and Irina).

Olga heads to bed leaving Irina alone onstage just long enough for Natashe to re-emerge with her outdoor clothes on and obviously off for a spin, a snog and maybe something more with Protopopov.

When she’s gone there’s only Irina onstage, with the weight of all these issues on her shoulders:

the wife of her brother, Andrew, is being unfaithful to him
in despair Andrew has taken to staying out late and gambling away the family patrimony
her older sister (Olga) is a sad old spinster
her second sister (Masha) is bored of her dull husband and wants to have an affair with Vershinin but Vershinin is tied to his suicidal wife and two daughters
she, Irina, is loved by dashing (if not handsome) Tuzenbakh but is the subject of unwanted attentions from the vile Solyony

It’s no wonder, then, that she ends the act with the play’s well-known refrain:

IRINA: [alone on stage, with intense longing]: Moscow, Moscow, Moscow!

Act 3

About a year later in Olga and Irina’s room – a clear sign that Natasha is taking over the household, as she asked them to share a room so that Bobik could have a separate room.

But we’re thrown straight into a high stress situation. it’s 3 in the morning, there’s a fire raging in the town, red from the fire can bee seen through the windows along with the sound of fire engines in the road outside.

People are running in and out in panic. Old Anfisa wants clothes for people who’ve taken refuge with them which turns out to be a lot of people: ‘the Kolotilin girls’ as well as the entire Vershinin household, Baton Tuzenbakh, the doctor, Fedotik. Obviously Olga and the nanny, Anfisa, both complain of being tired out.

Natasha enters and is only concerned that a) her beloved children are sleeping safely and b) tell-tale sign of self-absorbed narcissistic women everywhere, checks herself in the mirror and worries that she’s put on a bit of weight. In the middle of a huge fire and crisis when people are dying.

With similar selfishness she spots the 80-year-old servant Anfida sitting down and says How dare she sit in here presence? and orders her out. This, Natasha’s cruelty and the harsh words, make Olga cry which makes Natasha soften to her and kiss her. But they are mutually incomprehensible. Natasha thinks Anfisa is too old to work and so should be sent back to her village; Olga says she has served the family loyally for 30 years and so should be allowed to stay at which Natasha loses her temper and tells Olga that she runs the household.

Kulygin comes in with more news of the fire and to announce that he is, of course, tired out. These characters all need to take more exercise and multivitamin pills!

Enter the doctor who’s got very drunk. He talks to himself morosely, lamenting that he’s forgotten everything he ever knew about medicine and the other day, Wednesday, killed a woman. He hates himself, says he’s barely even human.

Just as in the previous acts the other characters drift in, Irina, Tuzenbakh, Vershinin. Tuezanbakh is in civilian dress and praises the soldiers for saving the day and the town. He says people are suggesting a concert to raise money for people who’ve lost their homes and says Masha must play at it.

Out of nowhere the doctor drops a valuable clock he’d been looking at and it smashes to pieces. Irina says it belonged to their mother but drunk Chebutykin rambles on saying what if he didn’t drop it what if they just think he did, what if he doesn’t exist, what if none of them exist. then changing tack he blurts out that Natasha is having an affair with Protopopov and they all pretend not to notice, before exiting.

There’s a pregnant pause which Vershinin breaks by leaping in to describe his actions earlier that night namely grabbing his children out of their house and the flames came closer. In his fanciful way, he wonders how much more his children will have to witness in their lives. (Well, if they’re 5 in 1901 they’ll witness Russia being trounced in the war with Japan, the 1905 revolution, the outbreak of war in 1915, the two revolutions in 1917, the Bolshevik coup and then the civil war lasting till 1922 or 3, millions dead from war, civil war and famine, then Bolshevik dictatorship leading to the collectivisation famines in the early 30s, the rise of the gulags and Stalin’s terror state, then the German invasion of 1941. Quite a lot, then.)

Continuing his theme he says that ‘in two or three hundred years’ people will lead wonderful lives…

Fedotik comes in to tell them his house has burned to the ground and he’s lost all his possessions, guitar, camera, everything.

Solyony enters but Irina tells him he can’t come in. He sprinkles himself with scent and Verishinin takes him into the dining room.

Tuzenbakh tells everyone how tired he feels before going on to kiss Irina’s hand and wishing she would come away with him. He reminds he how happy and optimistic she was on her name day i.e. the first act, but how somehow all the energy and optimism has been crushed. Rashly, he tells her that he would give his life for her.

Masha, exhausted of course, tells him to shut up and go away. This triggers her husband, Kulygin to tell her how much he loves her and has lovey every day of their seven years of marriage, but as schematically as in a masque or allegory she replies:

KULYGIN: I’m happy, happy, oh so happy.
MASHA: I’m bored, bored, oh so bored. (p.216)

Kulygin exists, leaving the Three Sisters alone.

Masha tells her sisters that Andrew has mortgaged the house and given the cash to his horrible wife but all four of them own the house so it’s unfair. Irina laments that Andrew’s gone to seed, lost all his ambition, once he wanted to be a professor but now he’s delighted just to get a place on the council. And his wife is having an affair with the head of the council, Protopopov, the whole town is laughing at him behind his back but he’s the only one who doesn’t know. It’s all too much for her and Irina bursts into tears.

IRINA: What’s become of everything, where’s it all gone? Where is it?… Life is slipping away, it will never, never come back again and we shall never get to Moscow… (p.217)

Once she naively looked forward to ‘work’ but after working at the post office she now works for the town council and hates it. She’s 23 and she’s shrivelled up, she’s thin and old. She’s sinking into a bottomless pit of despair. Why hasn’t she killed herself?

Olga, the spinster, advises Irina to marry, marry Baron Tuzebakh, he’s not very good looking but he’s a good man. Admittedly they were all upset when he resigned his commission from the army and turned up wearing civilian clothes – they just brought out how ugly he is.

Irina replies that she’s been waiting till they move back to Moscow, convinced she’ll meet her true love there. But now she’s coming to realise that was all a fantasy.

Masha takes the opportunity to confess that she’s fallen head over heels in love with Vershinin but Olga refuses to listen. Masha laments that life is not like a novel. In real life you discover that nobody knows anything and you have to find your own way through.

Enter Andrew in a bad mood and telling off Ferapont who’s only brought a message from the firemen asking if they can lay a hose through their garden to the river. Andrew realises it’s just the Three Sisters and suggests they have it out, this is an opportunity for them to tell him what their complaint is against him.

Masha goes out and Olga and Irina say they’re both too tired but Andrew insists on continuing. He delivers a massive monologue clearly fighting against his own bad conscience. Firstly, he insists his wife Natasha is a fine honourable woman and he loves her and he doesn’t know what they’ve got against her and demands they give her the respect she’s owed. Secondly, he thinks they somehow disapprove of the way he never became the university professor he wanted to be but he’s on the town council now and very proud of being a councillor and it’s an important job. Thirdly, he admits he’s mortgaged the house and used the money released to pay off his gambling debts which had reached 35,000 roubles but…but… the three sisters had annuities awarded them while he had no income, so…so…

Obviously he’s looking for their approval and forgiveness but neither Olga nor Irina say anything so he walks out.

The last piece of dialogue is Irina telling Olga that ‘their’ regiment is due to leave town. Oh what will they do without their soldiers, the only friends they have? As to Tuzenbakh, yes, alright, she’ll marry him.

IRINA: He’s a very good man and I will marry him, I will, I will, only do let’s go to Moscow. We must go, please! There’s nowhere in the world like Moscow. Let’s go, Olga, do let’s go!

Act 4

Act 4 is set in the garden of the Prozorovs’ house with the verandah just on the right. The regiment is leaving and our guys are saying their farewells. Tuzenbakh, Irina, Kugylin are saying farewell to Rodé and Fedotik who keeps telling everyone to stand still so he can photograph them. And then with a few more farewells, they part and walk away.

Dr Chebutykin announces he’ll be going with them but only for a year or so at which point he’ll retire and come back here to live off his pension.

Now the soldiers have gone Irina asks what was this fracas in town the night before involving Tuzenbakh. Tuzenback refuses to discuss it and walks off across the lawn and into the house so Kulygin tells Irina that objectionable Solyony encountered Tukenbakh on the boulevard, started picking on him until the Baron insulted him.

Irina shudders at the thought. She announces that she’s marrying Tuzenbakh tomorrow and then they’re moving to ‘the brick works’ [that Tuzenback is going to manage?] while she starts work as a teacher at the school and, she hopes, a New Life will begin. Although we, the audience, know that of course it won’t…

Irina has finally resigned herself to never going to Moscow so she’s going to stay here and make the best of it. But she does find it hard in the big house now that Olga’s been made headmistress of the high school and lives on the premises. But when she finally made up her mind to say Yes to Tuzenbakh she felt a revival of that old urge to work, work, work and now she’s almost looking forward to the future.

Masha appears to share with Dr Chebutykin how she feels that all their hopes have come to nothing. She was in love with Verishin but he’s leaving today and she’ll be back to being lumbered with boring pedantic Kulygin.

Andrew has been seen pushing a pram (with another baby in it?) presumably a symbol of his fall from the high ambition of becoming a world-renowned professor. Now he comes over and in turn asks about the incident on the boulevard the night before. Dr Chebutykin gives us a staggeringly significant new detail which he failed to mention earlier, when Irina was around, which is that when Tuzenbakh insulted Solyony, the latter challenged him to a duel and … that it’s scheduled to happen just about now, in the woods across the river (which we can see painted on the backdrop of the scenery). A duel!

Masha and Andrew all take it very lightly that the man their sister is engaged to is about to fight a duel. Instead of rushing to stop it or call the cops Andrew just feebly says it’s all very immoral. In a further development we learn that the duellists have requested Dr Chebutykin to attend on them!

Masha is disgusted with all this talk so walks away leaving Andrew to confide to Dr Chebutykin that he loves his wife, he loves her dearly, but sometimes he really doesn’t like her, she’s so bossy and vulgar. the doctor gives him the advice to put on his hat, pick up his stick set off walking and walk and walk and walk and never come back.

Enter Solyony and two of his seconds backstage. Solyony spots the doctor, walks over and tells him it’s time to go to the duel and they leave. Enter Irina and Tuzebakh. He tells her he just has to pop into town to, er, see some friends off. She knows he’s lying but wonders why (so she’s more or less the only character who doesn’t know about the duel). He tells her how much he loves her, that he’s loved her for five years, that she gets more beautiful every day…just a shame she doesn’t love him.

Irina cries and says yes, she doesn’t love him, she’s never loved anyone. Her heart feels like a grand piano that’s locked and nobody can find the key. I supposed it’s a scene of great poignancy because the audience strongly suspects Tuzenbakh is going to his death while his half-hearted fiancée knows nothing. He wants to say something mighty and significant, to sum up his love of life and her, but all he can think of is to ask her to ask one of the servants to put some coffee on for when he gets back.

Now, something has to fill the time it’s going to take Tuzenbakh to go and get in a boat, be ferried across the river to the forests beyond, find his way to the duelling place etc and so Chekhov gives Andrew, alone onstage, a massive speech asking where did it all go wrong leading into a long description of how awful this town is, how everyone is like everyone else, bored out of their minds, and are bringing up children who will be bored to death in turn. (Of course we latecomers know that Russians born around 1900 were fated to have anything but a boring life.)

The retainer Ferapont enters with some papers to sign so there’s some more business with reading anc complaining about these, before Andrew tries to cheer himself up by adopting the Verishin strategy of imagining what life will be like for his heirs two or three hundred years in the future. Hopefully their lives will be completely different.

He works himself up into such a state that Natasha leans out the window and yells at him to shut up. Which in turn wakes up baby Bobik who starts to cry and she turns her yelling indoors to tell him off etc. Stage business to cover Tuzenbakh’s journey to the duelling place.

Even more business follows when a couple of travelling musicians wander onstage and start performing. Olga tells the ancient nanny Alfisa to give them some money, which she does and they move on. This allows Anfisa to explain that although Natasha’s kicked her out of the house Olga has found a nice little crib for her at the school, so her story’s ending happily.

Enter Verishin who’s also leaving with the regiment and wants to say a private goodbye to Masha which is going to be difficult into the always hyper-busy Prozorov household. Olga asks him if they’ll ever meet again and he simply replies, No.

Masha enters and they have a short heart-breaking parting with a long kiss then lots of tears, then she won’t let him go but he extricates himself and hands her over to Olga. Kulygin enters, he saw some of this but tells Masha he forgives her and now they can go back to the old way of living which is, somehow, absolutely crushing.

Masha sings to herself the little song about a green boat which she has sung at moments of crisis throughout the play and that’s when a shot is heard in the distance.

The triviality continues. Masha’s anguish is made unbearable by the complete reasonableness and forgiveness of her husband who pulls out a fake moustache and beard he confiscated off a boy in class. Now he puts it on to make them laugh and Masha laughs then bursts into hopeless sobbing again. All her hopes for life have been utterly crushed.

Natasha arrives on the scene and it is clear how she has totally defeated the Prozorov family. She bosses everyone around, tells the maid to push the pram, criticises Kulygin for wearing the silly beard, says the minute Irina leaves the house she’s going to move Andrew into her room so he can scrape away on his violin and first thing she’s going to do is have the beautiful avenue of trees chopped down (anticipating the massacre of trees in The Cherry Orchard). She criticises Irina for dressing so plainly which, of course, reverses the sisters’ chiding of Natasha for dressing so gaudily at the start of the play.

They hear a military band in the distance as Dr Chebutykin enters in a hurry. He goes up and whispers in Olga’s ear. She says, No no it can’t be true. Irina begs to know and Chebutykin quite brutally tells her Tuzenbakh’s just been killed in a duel before wandering off, sitting down, taking out a paper and delivering his trademark line, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter anyway’ and then humming his stupid song’, Tarara boom di-ay.’

Now you might have expected a world-shattering howl of anguish and a long speech about the Injustices of Life but in fact Irina starts to weep quietly and just says, ‘I knew it’. Instead all three sisters are given a kind of collective last word as they speak in sequence, almost inn unison, almost with a musical effect.

And what they say is oddly, eerily cool and unmoved, a kind of vision of philosophical passivity, of how they must commit themselves to hard work and how this will bring about a better future. Did Chekhov in the slightest believe this or is it just a trope to thread throughout the play and, here, to end it with i.e an entirely aesthetic strategy? Or is is designed to convey the puzzlement, the bewilderment at life’s imponderability of the three sisters?

MASHA: Oh, listen to the band! They’re all leaving us and one has gone right away and will never never come back , and we shall be left alone to begin our lives again. We must go on living, we must.
IRINA: [puts her head on Olga’s breast]: What is all this for? Why all this suffering? The answer will be known one day and then there will be no more mysteries left, but till then life must go on, we must work and work and think of nothing else. I’ll go off alone tomorrow to teach at a school and spend my whole life serving those who may need me. It’s autumn now and it will soon be winter, with everything buried in snow, and I shall work, work, work.
OLGA [embraces both her sisters]: Listen to the band. What a splendid, rousing tune, it puts new heart into you, doesn’t it? Oh, my God! In time we shall pass on forever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices and how many of us there were. But our sufferings will bring happiness to those who come after us, peace and joy will reign on earth, and there will be kind words and kind thoughts for us and our times. We still have our lives ahead of us, my dears, so let’s make the most of them.
[The music becomes fainter and fainter. KULYGIN, smiling cheerfully, emerges from the house with a hat and coat while ANDREW continues to push the pram with Bobik in it.]
CHEBUTYKIN: [singing softly]: Traraboomdeay, ley’s have a tune today. [Reads the newspaper.] None of it matters. Nothing matters.
OLGA: If we could only know, oh if we could only know!

Fates

Olga will continue as an unmarried head teachers.

Masha will continue to be unhappily married to Kulygin.

Irina has said she wants to persevere as a teacher.

Natasha is mistress of the family home, in charge of everything.

Andrei is stuck in his marriage with two children, unwilling and unable to do anything for his wife or himself.

The characters describe themselves

As I’ve pointed out it’s a trick or trait of Chekhov that, rather than have the audience deduce how they’re feeling from their dialogue or actions, he always has his characters declare it in the most straightahead, bluntest kind of way. Strikes me as the opposite of subtle:

IRINA: I’m in such a good mood, I don’t know why. (p.172)

MASHA: I’m down in the dumps today, I feel so depressed… (p.175)

VERSHININ: I’m more pleased than I can say, I really am. (p.177)

Similarly, he has them just come out and describe their backstories or situations with equal lack of subtlety:

VERSHININ: I have a wife and two little girls, my wife is in poor health… (p.183)

KULYGIN: My name is Kulygin and I teach at the local high school, I’m a senior assistant master. (p.183)

KULYGIN: I’m happy today. I’m on top of the world. (p.184)

RODÉ: I teach gymnastics at the high school here. (p.188)

Leave me alone

MASHA: Don’t talk to me then…leave me alone. (p.200)

ANDREW: Leave me alone, for heaven’s sake, leave me alone. (p.229)

Characters in all Chekhov’s plays continually ask to be left alone but no-one does leave them alone. Nobody can escape. They seem to live in these households of eight or so people who are constantly prying and spying and commenting on each others’ behaviour. The effect is very claustrophobic. They seem to be walking demonstrations of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known epigram that hell is other people.

Sssshhh, there’s somebody coming!

Chekhov’s houses are always very populous and, as someone or other is always declaring inappropriate love to someone else because they’re married or the other person’s married, I noticed the number of times when women (it’s always women) say things like:

MASHA: There’s somebody coming! You’d better talk about something else. (p.194)

And men have to reassure and cajole them:

ANDREW: Oh, they can’t see us, they really can’t. (p.189).

Hyperbole

Three (miserable) sisters:

IRINA: I feel as I’d gone out of my mind.

MASHA: I feel so depressed.

MASHA: Oh damn this life, it’s the absolute limit!

IRINA: Life has been choking us like weeds in a garden.

IRINA: Do you know I dream about Moscow every night? I feel as if I’d gone out of my mind.

OLGA: It really depressed me, actually makes me feel ill.

IRINA: Oh, it’s frightful, absolutely frightful. I’ve had as much as I can take, I just can’t stand it any more.

IRINA: I feel I’m losing touch with everything fine and genuine in life. It’s like sinking down, down into a bottomless pit. I’m desperate.

IRINA: I’m lonely and depressed with nothing to do and I hate my room…

MASHA: I feel I’m going to burst…

MASHA: I’ve made a mess of my life. I don’t want anything now.

Visions of the future

In ‘Uncle Vanya’ Dr Astrov is given a hobby horse subject completely separate from the action namely his concern for the ecology of forests. This gives him something to deliver speeches about for pages and which is, I think, designed to act as a relief from the characters’ obsessive self-centredness.

The same thing, structurally, happens in this play: Baron Tuzenbakh and Vershinin are both given the same talking point which is what life will be like for people in the future and what, looking back, they will think of the people of this time.

These subjects may or may not be relevant or interesting in their own right but, in dramatic terms, they’re part of giving all the characters identifiable, repeating tics or topics:

Solyonyi and his stupid jokes and splashing scent on himself
Dr Chebutykin and his pockets full of newspapers, but also his oft-repeated conviction that we aren’t really here and we don’t really exist
Rodé snapping away on his camera
Olga telling everyone how tired she is
Masha forever singing ‘A green boat by a curving shore’
Irina forever wishing they were off to Moscow

It sets the scene of the debate between Tuzenbakh and Vershinin where the two men propose their opposing points of view about the future, namely in the future everything will be great versus in the future everything will be exactly the same (p.197).

Thoughts

It’s complicated, isn’t it? Once the eight or so key characters are up and running they have all kinds of interactions. Onstage this may well work but, for me, there are two problems:

the characters’ personalities are too schematic, they are given 2 or 3 tropes, tics or topics each and then trot them out like robots
I suppose they’re put through their paces with admirable inventiveness (the town fire was unexpected) and yet, somehow, it all feels mechanical to me, like the parts of a Swiss watch, beautifully engineered, reliably ticking over, yet somehow pointless

Natasha’s victory

One of the many ways of looking at this complicated narrative is that Natasha wins. The bourgeois Prozorov sisters mocked her dress and manners at the start of the play but by the end Natasha is in complete, unquestioned control. She has outfaced and outwitted them all.

From this perspective the most notable thing about the Prozorov sisters, and four siblings, is how pathetic they are. To quote that great literary critic Donald Trump, they are losers. From this point of view all the rhetoric about work and finer futures and sacrifice and all the rest of it is the self-justifying excuses of people who lose.

Natasha doesn’t need any fancy ideas, she is notably uneducated, she goes with her instinct to dominate and control…and she cleans up, she wins, she triumphs. The triumph of the uneducated but unforgiving and determined working class over the feeble bourgeoisie was to be the subject of Chekhov’s final play – and, maybe, to be played out in the huge stage of Russian history less than a generation later…

Comparison with Waiting for Godot

The sense of stasis, of the characters being stuck in a situation they find hellish, kept reminding me of Waiting For Godot.

ESTRAGON:
Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR:
Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]

Compare with:

IRINA: I esteem, I highly value the Baron, he’s a splendid man; I’ll marry him, I’ll consent, only let’s go to Moscow! I implore you, let’s go! There’s nothing better than Moscow on earth! Let’s go, Olga, let’s go!

They do not move.

Credit

Quotations are from the 1980 World’s Classic paperback edition of Five Plays by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Hingley.

Related reviews

Chekhov reviews
Russian reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 23, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on September 23, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/23/three-sisters-anton-chekhov/

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (1897)

‘I’m so depressed, Sonya, you can’t think how depressed I am.’
(‘Uncle’ Vanya Voynitsky, aged 47, at the end of ‘Uncle Vanya’)

Summary

Vanya Voynitskaya is 47. He lives with his widowed mother Mrs Voynitskaya on the latter’s country estate which he manages full time. Alongside this work he has devoted his life to the service of his sister’s husband, the art scholar and professor Aleksander Serebryakov. Vanya’s sister and the professor had a daughter, Sonya, now in her 20s, who lives with Vanya and his mother on the estate and helps them to run it. She is dutiful and loyal and, as the play makes clear numerous times, ‘plain’ i.e. not beautiful or glamorous, but loyal and hard working.

Vanya’s sister i.e. the professor’s first wife, died young and he has recently remarried a considerably younger woman, Helen, who is young and beautiful.

The professor is retired and he and this young beautiful wife have been staying on the Voynitsky estate because his publications never brought him much money. This has brought to a head Vanya’s simmering feelings of resentment at having worked tooth and nail at the mind-numbing work of managing the estate and, in the evenings, copying out and proofreading the professor’s papers and articles. Now, too late, at the age of 47, he realises it’s all been an absurd and futile waste of time.

As in all the other plays there’s a local doctor, Dr Astrov, who both commentates on the family woes but also gets involved in the farcical love plot. Because central to the plot is mismatched love interests which the characters take as tragic but the audience is free to regard as farcical. Here it is that both Vanya and Dr Astrov are head-over-heels in love with the glamorous young wife, Helen, but she rejects both of them, preferring to be loyal to her wizened and ill old husband; while (sub-plot 2) ‘plain’ Sonya is in love with Dr Astrov, at least in part because he’s the only other man who enters the terribly small, closed, isolated world of the estate.

The first three acts slowly introduce us to the characters and all their mixed and conflicted feelings before the play comes to a climax in the fourth act when Professor Serebryakov announces to the assembled cast his plan to sell the estate and invest the money so as to secure a better return and in order to fund his lifestyle in the city.

Vanya snaps, delivering a long rant about how he’s sacrificed his entire life for the selfish professor who now proposes to sell off his family’s estate and chuck him, his mother and Sonya out on the street. Vanya runs offstage and gets a pistol with which he chases the professor backstage then back onstage, taking potshots at the terrified old man.

But Vanya is a failure in this as in everything else, misses, then throws away the gun and collapses on the floor, sobbing his heart out. Everyone forgives him but the professor, wisely, senses it’s time to terminate his stay and go somewhere else – as does beautiful Helen who, during the previous acts, had been subjected to kisses and embraces by both Dr Astrov and Vanya – so they pack and leave.

Which leaves Mrs Voynitskaya, Vanya and Sonya and their old Nanny, Marina, to resume their quiet, calm, stiflingly dull existence with Vanya shown returning to the mind-numbingly boring chore of doing the estate accounts, Mrs Mrs Voynitskaya reading, Nanny sowing a sock and the hanger-on, Telegin, quietly strumming his guitar in the background.

The play ends with a page-long speech by plain dutiful Sonya, who has had her love for Dr Astrov rejected, declaring that everything will be alright when they die and go to heaven, God will wipe away their tears etc. Meanwhile, they must live lives of faith and hope. It’s open to directors and actors how this is delivered but it seemed to me to be a kind of peak of pitiful self-deception.

Characters and cast

Aleksandr Serebryakov – retired university professor, who has lived for years in the city on the earnings of his late first wife’s rural estate, managed for him by Vanya and Sonya
Helena Serebryakova – Serebryakov’s young and beautiful second wife, 27 years old
Sofia Serebryakova (Sonya) – Serebryakov’s daughter from his first marriage, she is of a marriageable age, but is considered plain
Maria Voynitskaya – the widow of a privy councillor and mother of Vanya (and of Vanya’s late sister, Serebryakov’s first wife)
Ivan Voynitsky (‘Uncle Vanya’) – Maria’s son and Sonya’s uncle, also brother-in-law of Serebryakov, he is the title character of the play and is a disgruntled 47 years old
Dr Mikhail Astrov – a middle-aged country doctor who is deeply concerned about the destruction of the local forests; he has several lengthy speeches about the impact of destroying the forests on local wildlife which among the earliest discussions of ecological problems in world literature
Ilya Ilych Telegin, nicknamed “Waffles” for his pockmarked skin – an impoverished landowner, who now lives on the estate as a dependent of the family
Marina Timofeevna – an old nurse

Act 1

At Professor Serebryakov’s country estate, Astrov and Marina discuss how old Astrov has grown and his boredom with life as a country doctor. Vanya enters and complains of the disruption caused by the visit of Serebryakov and his wife, Yelena. Serebryakov, Yelena, Sonya, and Telegin return from a walk. Out of earshot of Serebryakov, Vanya calls him “a learned old dried mackerel” and belittles his achievements. Vanya’s mother, Maria Vasilyevna, who idolizes Serebryakov, objects. Vanya also praises Yelena’s beauty, arguing that faithfulness to an old man like Serebryakov is an immoral waste of vitality.

Astrov is forced to depart to attend to a patient, after making a speech on the preservation of the forests, a subject he is passionate about. Vanya declares his love to an exasperated Yelena.

Act 2

Several days later. Before going to bed, Serebryakov complains of pain and old age. Astrov arrives but the professor refuses to see him. After Serebryakov falls asleep, Yelena and Vanya talk. She speaks of the discord in the house, and Vanya speaks of dashed hopes. He feels that he has misspent his youth and he associates his unrequited love for Yelena with the disappointment of his life. Yelena refuses to listen. Vanya believed in Serebryakov’s greatness and was happy to support Serebryakov’s work; he has become disillusioned with the professor and his life feels empty. Astrov returns and the two talk. Sonya chides Vanya for his drinking, and points out that only work is truly fulfilling.

A storm starts and Astrov talks to Sonya about the house’s suffocating atmosphere; he says Serebryakov is difficult, Vanya is a hypochondriac, and Yelena is charming but idle. Sonya begs Astrov to stop drinking, telling him it is unworthy of him. It becomes clear that Sonya is in love with him and that he is unaware of her feelings.

Astrov leaves; Yelena enters and makes peace with Sonya, after mutual antagonism. Yelena reassures Sonya that she had strong feelings for Serebryakov when she married him, though that has proved illusory. Yelena confesses her unhappiness, and Sonya eulogises Astrov. In a happy mood, Sonya goes to ask the professor if Yelena may play the piano. Sonya returns with his negative answer.

Act 3

Vanya, Sonya and Yelena have been called together by Serebryakov. Vanya urges Yelena, once again, to break free. Sonya complains to Yelena that she has loved Astrov for years but he doesn’t notice her. Yelena volunteers to question Astrov and find out if he is in love with Sonya. Sonya is pleased, but wonders whether uncertainty is better than knowledge.

When Yelena asks Astrov about his feelings for Sonya, he says he has none, thinking that Yelena has brought up the subject of love to encourage him to confess his own feelings for her. Astrov kisses Yelena, and Vanya sees them. Upset, Yelena begs Vanya to use his influence to allow her and the professor to leave immediately. Yelena tells Sonya that Astrov doesn’t love her.

Serebryakov proposes to solve the family’s financial problems by selling the estate and investing the proceeds, which will bring in a significantly higher income (and, he hopes, leave enough over to buy a villa for himself and Yelena in Finland).

Angrily, Vanya asks where he, Sonya, and his mother would live, protests that the estate rightly belongs to Sonya, and that Serebryakov has never appreciated his self-sacrifice in managing the property. Vanya begins to rage against the professor, blaming him for his own failures, wildly claiming that, without Serebryakov to hold him back, he could have been a second Schopenhauer or Dostoevsky.

He cries out to his mother, but Maria insists that Vanya listen to the professor. Serebryakov insults Vanya, who storms out. Yelena begs to be taken away, and Sonya pleads with her father on Vanya’s behalf. Serebryakov exits to confront Vanya further. A shot is heard from offstage and Serebryakov returns, chased by Vanya, wielding a pistol. He fires again at the professor, but misses. He throws the gun down in self-disgust.

Act 4

A few hours later, Marina and Telegin discuss the planned departure of Serebryakov and Yelena. Vanya and Astrov enter, Astrov saying that in this district, only he and Vanya were “decent, cultured men” and that years of “narrow-minded life” have made them vulgar. Vanya has stolen a vial of Astrov’s morphine, presumably to commit suicide; Sonya and Astrov beg him to return it, which he eventually does.

Yelena and Serebryakov bid farewell. When Yelena says goodbye to Astrov, she embraces him, and takes one of his pencils as a souvenir. Serebryakov and Vanya make their peace, agreeing all will be as it was before. Once the outsiders have departed, Sonya and Vanya settle accounts, Maria reads a pamphlet, and Marina knits. Vanya complains of the heaviness of his heart, and Sonya, in response, speaks of living, working, and the rewards of the afterlife: “And our life will grow peaceful, tender, sweet as a caress…. You’ve had no joy in your life; but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait…. We shall rest.”

Some observations

The characters give running commentaries on themselves

The characters don’t just talk about their feelings as we all do, they give a running commentary on their feelings, it’s their main topic of conversation. This might be amusing if the feelings in question weren’t monotonously the same old feelings of boredom, depression and despair. This crystallised for me in the scene where Serebryakov and Vanya have a stand-up shouting match about how the latter had sacrificed his life for the former, all witnessed by the feeble hanger-on Telegin. Telegin says:

TELEGIN: Vanya, my dear chap, don’t talk like this, for heaven’s sake. I’m trembling all over. Why spoil good relations? Please don’t.

Where I realised that nobody in real life would say ‘I’m trembling all over’. Either that’s an odd Russian locution which doesn’t translate very well, or – as I take it – it’s a typical Chekhov character describing how they feel, not in some subtle understated way, but in a tabloid headline way, describing how they’re shaking or (as with other characters) feeling faint or gripped with anguish etc etc. They might as well hold up a placard, as in a Brecht play, with a headline saying UPSET, ANGRY, IN LOVE and so on.

Ronald Hingley’s introduction and the Wikipedia articles about Chekhov’s plays talk about their subtle sub-texts, and I take the point that the plays’ numerous pregnant pauses are designed to let the audience savour the implications of remarks and dialogues between characters, which do sometimes have subtle effects. But, at the same time, the plays contain plenty of these I’m trembling all over type of remarks which are the opposite of subtle. The character might as well hold up a placard saying I’m very upset.

In fact, the characters are continually, obsessively telling everyone else exactly how they feel. Maybe there are ‘subtle subtexts’ at work but they struggle to surface between the characters’ continual tabloid headline exclamations of how they’re feeling.

Shabby gentility

In ‘Uncle Vanya’ we learn why the characters in all Chekhov plays can’t leave their estates, it’s financial. Their estates only give a small annual revenue (2% of the estate’s capital) which is enough to live off in the country but not to support an establishment in town. In other words, they are the poor landed gentry, the petit gentry. Which also explains why their social activities are so stunted.

Russian boredom, English gaiety

Why do all Chekhov’s go round the bend with boredom from living in the Russian countryside, becoming so miserable that they feel like killing themselves and often do, while Jane Austen’s characters living in the English countryside have a whale of a time?

Chekhovian farce

Two aspects of Chekhov’s plays combine to make them feel like Whitehall farces: 1) they way they have eight or so characters knocking around in large houses and 2) the way in each play characters are inappropriately in love i.e. in love with the wrong person. In Vanya I noticed something which crops up in the previous two plays as well, which is the women characters (it’s always women who are petrified of being found in compromising positions) hissing at the man who’s chatting them up and attempting to kiss them, ‘Shh someone might hear you’ or ‘Someone might come in’ or ‘I think someone’s coming’. So number one there’s the paranoia of illicit couples about being caught and then 2) half the time they do get caught, as Vanya walks in on Helen and Dr Astrov having a snog.

They live in big houses (Vanya’s house has 26 rooms!) which are far too big for them and has several consequences. One is to bring out the way the characters are like pygmies living smaller shrunken lives compared to their glorious ancestors who filled and used these house.

It also means the the plays have a strong element of Whitehall farce with characters running in and out of the numerous doors. I’m mentioned the way the female characters, when about to kiss their lovers, are always paranoid about being interrupted by someone coming in and seeing them. And the final scene where Vanya emerges from the door at the back before chasing the professor round the stage is, I think, meant to be tragic but is, at the same time, farcical.

Critique

Critics talk about ‘the emotional turmoil of Chekhov’s characters as they reveal their trauma and deeply complicated feelings’ – but are they ‘deeply complicated’?

Vanya regrets throwing his life away on a worthless academic. He thinks he’s fallen in love with Helen but she understands it’s just a function of his frustration. Similarly, Helen rejects Dr Astrov’s pitch for her, declaring she will stay loyal to her ageing (and probably worthless) husband. Astrov makes his pitch for Helen, is rejected, and barely even notices plain Sonya who loves him so much, riding off back to his house at the end of the play. And Sonya just has to put up with being plain and rejected, probably living the whole of her life unloved and turning into a spinster.

Far from ‘deeply complicated’ these feel to me to be mechanical pieces moving through a clockwork plot which, above all, rotates around FRUSTRATED LOVE, surely the oldest, corniest subject in all literature.

But then there’s no point me not really ‘getting’ Chekhov. He is universally accepted as one of the Greats of European theatre and countless productions, in his native Russia and here in England, have featured the very greatest acting talent who all agree on the scope his characters and plot give for depicting subtleties of feeling and the sense of fleeting emotions changing from moment to moment. I can read that that’s what people say about Chekhov. It just doesn’t come over at all to me, in actually reading the plays.

Credit

Page references are to the 1980 World’s Classic paperback edition of Five Plays by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Hingley.

Related reviews

Chekhov reviews
Russian reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on September 20, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Russian literature, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on September 20, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/20/uncle-vanya-anton-chekhov/

The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1895)

I thought Chekhov was all about bored middle-class Russians living on their country estates fantasising about getting away to Moscow. I thought his plays were notorious for being calm and bourgeois. I’ve been astonished to discover they are packed with melodramatic histrionics, wild declarations of passionate love and sudden suicides. Both Ivanov and The Seagull end with the young male lead shooting himself. It is hard to believe that Chekhov described a play in which at least three of the characters are stricken with unrequited love, and frustration, with a miserable sense of wasted lives, and the male lead’s misery leads him to commit suicide – as a comedy.

Summary

The play dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev. But as in Ivanov, a lot of the interest (and actual comedy) is in the ‘secondary’ characters.

I genuinely don’t understand how Chekhov can be said to have changed the face of modern drama when his plays are about love, frustrated love affairs, the wrong people being in love with each other, a naive young woman (Nina) being taken up by a cynical old writer (Trigorin) then cast adrift when he gets bored of her. It sounds more like a Restoration Comedy from the 1680s than a ‘modern’ play from the 1890s.

Maybe the modernity is something to do with the way ‘The Seagull’ has a range of characters and critics (and actors) point out how well developed each one is. And, apparently, in contrast to the melodrama of mainstream 19th-century theatre, lurid actions such as Konstantin’s suicide attempts take place offstage. But they still take place, just as in those lurid melodramas.

Note: the Russian word Ча́йка should be translated as ‘gull’ so the play should rightfully be titled in English ‘The Gull’. There is no sea involved, especially seeing as it’s set on an estate in inland Russia by a lake. Makes you wonder how much else has been lost or garbled in translation.

The following cast list and plot synopsis rely heavily on the Wikipedia article.

Cast

Irina Arkadina – an actress, married surname Trepleva (in love with the author Trigorin)
Konstantin Treplev – Irina’s son (in love with Nina)
Pyotr Sorin – Irina’s brother, owner of the country estate where the action is set

Nina Zarechnaya – daughter of a rich landowner (also in love with Trigorin)

Ilya Shamrayev – bad-temptered manager of Sorin’s estate
Polina Andreyevna – Shamrayev’s wife (secretly in love with Dr Dorn)
Masha – Polina’s daughter (loves Konstantin but resigned to marrying the schoolteacher Medvedenko)
Boris Trigorin – a novelist, plays off Irina and Nina who both love him
Yevgeny Dorn – a doctor (wise commentator on the action)
Semyon Medvedenko – poor teacher in love with Masha

Act 1

Pyotr Sorin is a retired senior civil servant in failing health at his country estate. His sister, actress Irina Arkadina, arrives at the estate for a brief vacation with her lover, the writer Boris Trigorin. Pyotr and his guests gather at an outdoor stage to see an unconventional play that Irina’s son, Konstantin Treplev, has written and directed. The play-within-a-play features Nina Zarechnaya, a young woman who lives on a neighbouring estate, as the ‘soul of the world’ in a time far in the future. The play is Konstantin’s latest attempt at creating a new theatrical form. It is a dense symbolist work.

Irina laughs at the play, finding it ridiculous and incomprehensible; the performance ends prematurely after the audience keeps interrupting and Konstantin storms off in humiliation. Irina does not seem concerned about her son, who has not found his way in the world. Although others ridicule Konstantin’s drama, the physician Yevgeny Dorn praises him.

Act 1 also sets up the play’s various romantic triangles. The schoolteacher Semyon Medvedenko loves Masha, the daughter of the estate’s steward Ilya Shamrayev and his wife Polina Andryevna. However, Masha is in love with Konstantin, who is in love with Nina, but Nina falls for Trigorin. Polina is in an affair with Yevgeny. When Masha tells Yevgeny about her longing for Konstantin, Yevgeny helplessly blames the lake for making everybody feel romantic.

So it is a play about misplaced love, a theme which goes back to the ancient Greeks.

Act 2

A few days later, in the afternoon, the characters are outside the estate. Arkadina, after reminiscing about happier times, engages in a heated argument with the house steward Shamrayev and decides to leave. Nina lingers behind after the group leaves, and Konstantin arrives to give her a gull that he has shot. Nina is confused and horrified at the gift. Konstantin sees Trigorin approaching and leaves in a jealous fit.

Nina asks Trigorin to tell her about the writer’s life; he replies that it is not an easy one. Nina says that she knows the life of an actress is not easy either, but she wants more than anything to be one. Trigorin sees the gull that Konstantin has shot and muses on how he could use it as a subject for a short story: ‘The plot for the short story: a young girl lives all her life on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake, like a gull, and she’s happy and free, like a gull. But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom. Like this gull.’

Arkadina calls for Trigorin, and he leaves as she tells him that she has changed her mind – they will be leaving immediately. Nina lingers behind, enthralled with Trigorin’s celebrity and modesty, and gushes, ‘My dream!’

Act 3

Inside the estate, Arkadina and Trigorin have decided to depart. Between acts, Konstantin attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head, but the bullet only grazed his skull. He spends the majority of Act 3 with his scalp heavily bandaged.

Nina finds Trigorin eating breakfast and presents him with a medallion that proclaims her devotion to him, using a line from one of Trigorin’s own books: ‘If you ever need my life, come and take it.’ She retreats after begging for one last chance to see Trigorin before he leaves.

Arkadina appears, followed by Sorin, whose health has continued to deteriorate. Trigorin leaves to continue packing. After a brief argument between Arkadina and Sorin, Sorin collapses in grief. He is helped by Medvedenko. Konstantin enters and asks his mother to change his bandage. As she is doing this, Konstantin disparages Trigorin, eliciting another argument. When Trigorin reenters, Konstantin leaves in tears.

Trigorin asks Arkadina if they can stay at the estate. She flatters and cajoles him until he agrees to return with her to Moscow. After she has left the room, Nina comes to say her final goodbye to Trigorin and to inform him that she is running away to become an actress against her parents’ wishes. They kiss passionately and make plans to meet again in Moscow.

Act 4

Two years later in wintertime and we are in the drawing room that has been converted to Konstantin’s study. Masha finally accepts Medvedenko’s marriage proposal, and they have a child together, though Masha still nurses an unrequited love for Konstantin. Various characters discuss what has happened in the two years that have passed: Nina and Trigorin lived together in Moscow for a time until he abandoned her and went back to Arkadina. Nina gave birth to Trigorin’s baby, but it died in a short time. Nina never achieved any real success as an actress, and she is currently on a tour of the provinces with a small theatre group. Konstantin has had some short stories published, but he is increasingly depressed. Sorin’s health is still failing, and the people at the estate have telegraphed for Arkadina to come for his final days.

Most of the play’s characters go to the drawing room to play a game of bingo. Konstantin does not join them, instead working on a manuscript at his desk. After the group leaves to eat dinner, Konstantin hears someone at the back door. He is surprised to find Nina, whom he invites inside.

Nina tells Konstantin about her life over the last two years. Konstantin says that he followed Nina. She starts to compare herself to the gull that Konstantin killed in Act 2, then rejects that comparison and says ‘I am an actress’. She tells him that she was forced to tour with a second-rate theatre company after the death of the child she had with Trigorin, but she seems to have a newfound confidence. Konstantin pleads with her to stay, but she is in such disarray that his pleading means nothing. She embraces Konstantin and leaves. Despondent, Konstantin spends two minutes silently tearing up his manuscripts before leaving the study.

The group re-enters and returns to the bingo game. There is a sudden gunshot from off-stage, and Dorn goes to investigate. He returns and takes Trigorin aside. Dorn tells Trigorin to somehow get Arkadina away, for Konstantin has just shot himself.

Histrionics

From the very opening words the characters are living in an overwrought world of extreme emotions, routinely describing themselves or each other as hopelessly miserable, flying off the handle at the drop of a hat and, whenever they have moments alone with their secret loves, liable to ludicrously over-the-top histrionics. Thus, the opening lines of the play are:

MEDVEDENKO: Why do you wear black all the time?
MASHA: I’m in mourning for my life.

And other characters routinely echo this mood of hopeless despair.

SORIN: It’s a nightmare, that’s what it comes to.

TREPLEV: I suffered agonies of humiliation.

NINA: Something seems to lure me to this lake like a seagull. My heart’s full of feeling for you.

MASHA: I’m so unhappy. No one, no one knows how I suffer.

They sound like emo teenagers, stroppy self-pitying adolescents.

MASHA: I feel about a thousand years old. My life seems to drag on and on endlessly and I often think I’d rather be dead.

IRINA: Why is he so terribly bored and depressed?

POLINA: It’s agony to me being jealous.

TREPLEV: If you only knew how wretched I am…It’s as if someone had banged a nail into my head, damn it! And damn the selfishness that seems to suck my blood like a vampire.

Like a vampire? I can’t imagine how these over-the-top, immature outbursts can possibly be delivered with a straight face by supposedly grown-up actors in the theatre.

TRIGORIN: I’m possessed by visions of delight. Do set me free.
IRINA: No, no, no, you can’t talk to me like that, I’m only an ordinary woman. Don’t torture me, Boris, I’m terrified.

Is The Seagull meant to be ‘a comedy’ because the characters are so laughably preposterous? Take the scene where the ageing actress Irina gets down on her knees and clasps the legs of the writer she adores – is it intended to be laughable because that’s how it comes over?

IRINA: My marvellous, splendid man, you’re the last page in my life. [Kneels down] My delight, my pride, my joy! [Embraces his knees] If you leave me for one hour I shan’t survive, I shall go mad, my wonderful splendid one. My master.

Surely any audience with a sense of proportion would start tittering at the characters’ absurd histrionics:

TREPLEV: Since I lost you and began having my work published, life’s been unbearable, sheer agony. It’s as if I’d suddenly stopped being young, I feel as if I was ninety. I call upon you, kiss the ground you have trodden on…

Critics go on about the subtle sub-texts in Chekhov, which may well be there in various moments, but the central impression is of amazingly unsubtle and forthright declamations of absurdly over-the-top emotions. Take the final speech of the young female lead, Nina, which sounds as if it comes from a kind of stirring Christian pageant:

NINA: I know now that in our work, whether we’re actors or writers, the great thing isn’t fame or glory, it isn’t what I used to dream of, but simply stamina. You must know how to bear your cross and have faith. I have faith and things don’t hurt me so much now. And when I think of my vocation, I’m not afraid of life.

With a few tweaks, this could be the speech of a Young Communist in a Soviet propaganda play. Subtlety my ****.

Credit

Page references are to the 1980 World’s Classic paperback edition of Five Plays by Anton Chekhov, translated by Ronald Hingley.

Related reviews

Chekhov reviews
Russian reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 18, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation

Posted by Simon on September 18, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/18/the-seagull-anton-chekhov/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (619)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (84)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (5)
- Books (780)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (584)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (64)
- French literature (52)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (703)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (64)
- Philosophy (42)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Chekhov

Stanisław Wyspiański: Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery

Summary

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (1)

1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905: 3 pages)

2. Modern Fiction (1919: 7 pages)

3. The Modern Essay (1922: 10 pages)

4. How It Strikes A Contemporary (1923: 9 pages)

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (1901)

Characters

The Prozorov family

The soldiers

Minor characters

Unseen characters

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Fates

The characters describe themselves

Leave me alone

Sssshhh, there’s somebody coming!

Hyperbole

Visions of the future

Thoughts

Natasha’s victory

Comparison with Waiting for Godot

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (1897)

Summary

Characters and cast

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Some observations

The characters give running commentaries on themselves

Shabby gentility

Russian boredom, English gaiety

Chekhovian farce

Critique

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1895)

Summary

Cast

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Histrionics

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Follow

Topics

Categories