# The Social Significance of the Modern Drama/Anton Tchekhof

Part II of The Russian Drama
WHEN Anton Tchekhof first came to the fore, no less an authority than Tolstoy said: "Russia has given birth to another Turgenev." The estimate was not overdrawn. Tchekhof was indeed a modern Turgenev. Perhaps not as universal, because Turgenev, having lived in western Europe, in close contact with conditions outside of Russia, dealt with more variegated aspects of life. But as a creative artist Tchekhof is fitted to take his place with Turgenev.
Tchekhof is preëminently the master of short stories, Within the limits of a few pages he paints the drama of human life with its manifold tragic and comic colors, in its most intimate reflex upon the characters who pass through the panorama. He has been called a pessimist. As if one could miss the sun without feeling the torture of utter darkness!
Tchekhof wrote during the gloomiest period of Russian life, at a time when the reaction had drowned the revolution in the blood of the young generation,— when the Czar had choked the verybreath ​out of young Russia. The intellectuals were deprived of every outlet: all the social channels were closed to them, and they found themselves without hope or faith, not having yet learned to make common cause with the people.
Tchekhof could not escape the atmosphere which darkened the horizon of almost the whole of Russia. It was because he so intensely felt its oppressive weight that he longed for air, for light, for new and vital ideas. To awaken the same yearning and faith in others, he had to picture life as it was, in all its wretchedness and horror.
This he did in "the Seagull," while in "The Cherry Orchard" he holds out the hope of a new and brighter day.
In "The Seagull" the young artist, Constantine Treplef, seeks new forms, new modes of expression. He is tired of the old academic ways, the beaten track; he is disgusted with the endless imitative methods, no one apparently capable of an original thought.
Constantine has written a play; the principal part is to be acted by Nina, a beautiful girl with whom Constantine is in love. He arranges the first performance to take place on the occasion of his mother's vacation in the country.
​She herself—known as Mme. Arcadina—is a famous actress of the old school. She knows how to show off her charms to advantage, to parade her beautiful gowns, to faint and die gracefully before the footlights; but she does not know how to live her part on the stage. Mme. Arcadina is the type of artist who lacks all conception of the relation between art and life. Barren of vision and empty of heart, her only criterion is public approval and material success. Needless to say, she cannot understand her son. She considers him decadent, a foolish rebel who wants to undermine the settled canons of dramatic art. Constantine sums up his mother's personality in the following manner:
Treplef. She is a psychological curiosity, is my mother. A clever and gifted woman, who can cry over a novel, will reel you off all Nekrassov's poems by heart, and is the perfection of a sick nurse; but venture to praise Eleonora Duse before her! Oho! ho! You must praise nobody but her, write about her, shout about her, and go into ecstasies over her wonderful performance in La Dame aux Camélias, or The Fumes of Life; but as she cannot have then intoxicating pleasures down here. in the country, she's bored and gets spiteful. . . . She loves the stage; she thinks that she is advancing the cause of humanity and her sacred art; but I regard the stage of to-day as mere routine and prejudice. When the curtain god up and, the gifted beings, the high priests of the sacred art, appear by electric light, in a room with three sides to it, representing how people cat, drink, love, walk and wear ​their jackets; when they strive to squeeze out a moral from the flat, vulgar pictures and the flat, vulgar phrases a little tiny moral, easy to comprehend and handy for home consumption, when in a thousand variations they offer me always the same thing over and over and over again—then I take to my heels and run, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower, which crushed his brain by its overwhelming vulgarity. . . . We must have new formulæ. That's what we want. And if there are none, then it's better to have nothing at all.
With Mme. Arcadina is her lover, Trigorin, a successful writer. When he began his literary career, he possessed originality and strength. But gradually writing became a habit: the publishers constantly demand new books, and he supplies them.
Oh, the slavery of being an " arrived " artist, forging new chains for oneself with every " best seller"! Such is the position of Trigorin: he hates his work as the worst drudgery. Exhausted of ideas, all life and human relations serve him only as material for copy.
Nina, innocent of the ways of the world and saturated with the false romanticism of Trigorin's works, does not see the man but the celebrated artist. She is carried away by his fame and stirred by his presence; an infatuation with him quickly replaces her affection for Constantine. To her ​Trigorin embodies her dream of a brilliant and interesting life.
Nina. How I envy you, if you but knew it! How different are the lots of different people! Some can hardly drag on their tedious, insignificant existence; they are all alike, all miserable; others, like you, for instance — you are one in a million — are blessed with a brilliant, interesting life, all full of meaning. . . . You are happy. What a delightful life yours is!
Trigorin. What is there so fine about it? Day and, night I am obsessed by the same persistent thought; I must write, I must write, I must write. . . . No sooner have I finished one story than I am somehow compelled to write another, then a third, and after the third a fourth. : . . I have no rest for myself; I feel that I am devouring my own life. . . . I've never satisfied myself. . . . I have the feeling for nature; it wakes a passion in me, an irresistible desire to write. But I am something more than a landscape painter; I'm a citizen as well; I love my country, I love the people; I feel that if I am a writer I am bound to speak of the people, of its suffering, of its future, to speak of science, of the rights of man, etc., etc.; and I speak about it all, volubly, and am attacked angrily in return by everyone; I dart from side to side like a fox run down by hounds; I see that life and science fly farther and farther ahead of me, and I fall farther and farther. behind, like the countryman running after the train; and in the end I feel that the only thing I can write of is the landscape, and in everything else I am untrue to life, false to the very marrow of my bones.
​Constantine realizes that Nina is slipping away from him. The situation is aggravated by the constant friction with his mother and his despair at the lack of encouragement for his art. In a fit of despondency he attempts suicide, but without success. His mother, although nursing him back to health, is infuriated at her son's "foolishness," his inability to adapt himself to conditions, his impractical ideas. She decides to leave, accompanied by Trigorin. On the day of their departure Nina and Trigorin meet once more. The girl tells him of her, ambition to become an actress, and, encouraged by him, follows him to the city.
Two years later Mme. Arcadina, still full of her idle triumphs, returns to her estate. Trigorin is, again with her still haunted by the need of copy.
Constantine has in the interim matured considerably. Although he has made himself heard as a writer, he nevertheless feels that life to-day has no place for such as he: that sincerity in art is not wanted. His mother is with him, but she only serves to emphasize the flatness of his surroundings. He loves her, but her ways jar him and drive him into seclusion.
Nina, too, has returned to her native place, broken in body and spirit. Partly because of the memory of her past affection for Constantine, and mainly because she learns of Trigorin's presence, she is drawn to the place where two years before ​she had dreamed of the beauty of an artistic career. The cruel struggle for recognition, the bitter disappointment in her relation with Trigorin, the, care of a child and poor health have combined to change the romantic child into a sad woman.
Constantine still loves her. He pleads with her to go away with him, to begin a new life. But it is too late. The lure of the footlights is beckoning to Nina; she returns to the stage. Constantine, unable to stand the loneliness of his life and the mercenary demands upon his art, kills himself.
To the Anglo-Saxon mind such an ending is pessilmism, defeat. Often, however, apparent defeat is in reality the truest success. For is not success, as commonly understood, but too frequently bought at the expense of character and idealism?
"The Seagull" is not defeat. As long as there is still such material in society as the Constantines -men and women who would rather die than compromise with the sordidness of life—there is hope for humanity. If the Constantines perish, it is the social fault,—our indifference to, and lack of appreciation of, the real values that alone advance the fuller and more complete life of the race.
"The Cherry Orchard" is Tchekhof's prophetic song. In this play he depicts three stages of social development and their reflex in literature.
Mme. Ranevsky, the owner of the cherry orchard, an estate celebrated far and wide for its beauty and historic traditions, is deeply attached to the family place. She loves it for its romanticism: nightingales sing in the orchard, accompanying the wooing of lovers. She is devoted to it because of the memory of her ancestors and because of the many tender ties which bind her to the orchard. The same feeling and reverence is entertained by her brother Leonid Gayef. They are expressed in the Ode to an Old Family Cupboard:
Gayef. Beloved and venerable cupboard; honor and glory to your existence, which for more than a hundred years has been directed to the noble ideals of justice and virtue. Your silent summons to profitable labor has never weakened in all these hundred years. You have upheld the courage of succeeding generations of human kind; you have upheld faith in a better future and cherished in us ideals of goodness and social consciousness.
But the social consciousness of Gayef and of his sister is of a paternal nature: the attitude of the aristocracy toward its serfs. It is a paternalism that takes no account of the freedom and happiness of the people,—the romanticism of a dying class.
​Mme. Ranevsky is impoverished. The cherry orchard is heavily mortgaged and as romance and sentiment cannot liquidate debts, the beautiful estate falls into the cruel hands of commercialism.
The merchant Yermolai Lopakhin buys the place. He is in ecstasy over his newly acquired possession. He the owner — he who had risen from the serfs of the former master of the orchard!
Lopakhin. Just think of it! The cherry orchard is mine! Mine! Tell me that I'm drunk; tell me that I'm off my head; tell me that it's all a dream! . . . If only my father and my grandfather could rise from their graves and see the whole affair, how their Yermolai, their flogged and ignorant Yermolai, who used to run about barefooted in the winter, how this same Yermolai had bought a property that hasn't its equal for beauty anywhere in the whole world! I have bought the property where my father and grandfather were slaves, where they weren't even allowed into the kitchen.
A new epoch begins in the cherry orchard. On the ruins of romanticism and aristocratic ease there rises commercialism, its iron hand yoking nature, devastating her beauty, and robbing her of all radiance.
With the greed of rich returns, Lopakhin cries, Lay the ax to the cherry orchard, come and see the trees fall down! We'll fill the place with villas."
​Materialism reigns supreme: it lords the orchard with mighty hand and in the frenzy of its triumph believes itself in control of the bodies and souls of men. But in the madness of conquest it has discounted a stubborn obstacle — the spirit of idealism. It is symbolized in Peter Trophimof, the perpetual student," and Anya, the young daughter of Mme. Ranevsky. The "wonderful achievements" of the materialistic age do not enthuse them; they have emancipated themselves from the Lopakhin idol as well as from their aristocratic traditions.
Anya. Why is it that I no longer love the cherry orchard as I did? I used to love it so tenderly; I thought there was no better place on earth than our garden.
Trophimof. All Russia is our garden. The earth is great and beautiful; it is full of wonderful places. Think, Anya, your grandfather, your great-grandfather and all your ancestors were serf-owners, owners of living souls. Do not human spirits look out at you from every tree in the orchard, from every, leaf and every stem? Do you not hear human voices? . . . Oh! it is terrible. Your orchard frightens me. When I walk through it in the evening or at night, the rugged bark on the trees glow with a dim light, and the cherry trees seem to see all that happened a hundred and two hundred years ago in painful and oppressive dreams. Well, we have fallen at least two hundred years beyond the times. We have achieved nothing at all as yet; we have not made up our minds how we stand with the past; we only philosophize, ​complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It is so plain, that, before we can live in the present, we must first redeem the past, and have done with it.
Anya. The house we live in has long since ceased to be our house; I shall go away.
Trophimof. If you have the household keys, throw them in the well and go away. Be free, be free as the wind. … I am hungry as the winter; I am sick, anxious, poor as a beggar. Fate has tossed me hither and thither; I have been everywhere, everywhere. But everywhere I have been, every minute, day and night, my soul has been full of mysterious anticipations. I feel the approach of happiness, Anya; I see it coming … it is coming towards us, nearer and nearer; I can hear the sound of its footsteps. … And if we do not see it, if we do not know it, what does it matter? Others will see it.
The new generation, on the threshold of the new epoch, hears the approaching footsteps of the Future. And even if the Anyas and Trophimofs of to-day will not see it, others will.
It was not given to Anton Tchekhof to see it with his bodily eyes. But his prophetic vision beheld the coming of the New Day, and with powerful pen he proclaimed it, that others might see it. Far from being a pessimist, as charged by unintelligent critics, his faith was strong in the possibilities of liberty.
This is the inspiring message of "The Cherry Orchard."