The usual charge laid against English productions of Chekhov is that they are sentimental. As with so many aspects of our understanding of Russia, the real problem is slightly different. Give or take a samovar or a teapot, Russia's greatest dramatist (who died in 1904) has earned a natural place on the English stage. In his Anglicised form, he's upper class. The struggling country estate, the charm of a life surrounded by ancient retainers and, above all, the sense that it wouldn't be good form to express one's secret woes belong to a refined ethos from which a more general definition of Englishness has trickled down over the last century. It's gone to ground in vulgar contemporary Britain, but it's out there somewhere, part of our emotional heritage. It is from this Anglo-Russian coincidence that the danger of sentimentality, but also the possibility of sentiment, arise when Chekhov's plays are put on the English stage. Two productions are currently touring the country: Peter Hall's Uncle Vanya, for the English Touring Company, and an adaptation of Three Sisters—Three Sisters on Hope Street—which in late January kicked off Liverpool's year as European cultural capital.
The real Chekhov is an unsurpassed animator of suppressed emotions—for which read, in part, the English stiff upper lip. We love him in this country without realising what an unsparing writer he was—how impatient of social mores—or how deeply his disillusion ran. One of his best critics from the early 20th century, Lev Shestov, called Chekhov "the singer of despair" who "lies in wait to derail every human hope." Chekhov's early work was straightforwardly humorous, and then something happened. In the progressive Russia of his day, he went deeply against the optimistic, social democratic grain.
Peter Hall's Uncle Vanya, which recently left on an eight-week sweep of the country after a grand premiere at London's New Rose theatre, sets new standards for revealing the constrained heart of the matter. Hall's Chekhov is luminous and human—and his production is all the better for being neither particularly Russian nor English.
The plot of Vanya is simple. An elderly professor and his young wife, Yelena, return to settle at their country estate—which has for years been looked after by "uncle Vanya," the professor's brother-in-law by his first marriage—upsetting the lives of everyone in the house. Give or take the legal complications of who owns the estate (it in fact belongs to Sonya, the professor's daughter by his first wife) the emotional stress proves too much for everyone, a gun goes off to prove it, and the newcomers leave.
For a brief interlude, love, success and happiness are in the air. The distinguished but decrepit Vanya, who has spent far too long in the country, and the idealistic local doctor, Astrov, both fall in love with Yelena. Vanya's old-world courtship climaxes in a bunch of roses. Astrov, by contrast, is a virile sexual prospect. Yelena almost allows herself to be carried away by her feelings him. But life is generally disappointing. For the plain, kind Sonya, there's no chance of happiness; equally there is none for Vanya. This gentle, desperate, middle-aged booby is erotically doomed. Yelena and Astrov are thwarted by circumstance. Astrov goes back to his green-minded thoughts on saving the land from deforestation, while Yelena contents herself with her beauty.
Chekhov's first great director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, always wanted to understand why Chekhov laughed at untoward moments; why he had Astrov whistle when Vanya was in tears. From the "inner line" of the plays he discerned that there was no answer. Chekhov, for complex reasons, didn't believe in anything except perhaps that people were justified in banging their heads against the wall at the conditions of life. The idealistic words he gave to Sonya at the end of Uncle Vanya simply showed her hiding in her self-delusion.
There wasn't a lot of laughter in the audience the night I saw this production. Nor did Hall invite involvement and weeping. This was the purest of spectacles, its emotional action almost estranged in the manner of Brecht, the better to deliver its bleak but highly artistic message. (As Brecht once put it: "The artistic means of alienation made possible a broad approach to the living works of dramatists of other periods.")
There is a Shakespeare in Chekhov. Yet at other times he seems like the father of an unsparing soap opera, showing people touching the limits of their lives and otherwise deluding themselves. What he is not is remotely political, as critics used to maintain when they wanted to blame the tsarist or the Soviet systems for so much personal unhappiness.
What would the classic and infinitely renewable Russian bard have made of Russia today? My feeling is that it's glib to say he would have been appalled by the return of authoritarianism. The man who stuck his hands in his pockets and laughed and whistled whenever a grand moral or political question came up would more likely have retreated into his interest in individuals.
Last October, the Russian cultural world was rocked by a television phone-in in which the presenter, writer Viktor Yerofeyev, confronted filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov over his vocal support for Vladimir Putin. Mikhalkov, who won an Oscar in 1994 for his powerful portrait of Stalinist Russia, Burnt by the Sun, had written a sycophantic letter claiming tens of thousands of writers and artists wanted Putin to serve a third term. Mikhalkov later made a pro-Putin election commercial and a fulsome birthday tribute to the outgoing president that was shown on state-run television.
Yerofeyev and his allies cite this allegiance and other recent events in the arts world, such as the pulling of exhibits from a Paris exhibition of Russian art under Kremlin pressure, as signs of a new age of authoritarianism reminiscent of the days of Soviet socialist realism. The Orthodox church is another re-emerging force trying to bring Russian art and literature back within an acceptable ideological framework. Mikhalkov has countered by pointing to the enormous freedoms enjoyed by Russian writers and artists compared with Soviet days.
We don't know what Chekhov would have said to all this—only that he knew all about disappointment and sorrow at the same time as he declined to be anyone's hero.
