Natasha's Dance (35 page)

Sadko
and
May Night
(with the 24-year-old Rachmaninov conducting) in 1897,
The Tsar’s Bride
in 1899, and
Kashchei the Immortal
in 1902. These were tremendously important productions - their great strength being their visual elements, with colourfully stylized folk-like sets and costumes by Korovin, Maliutin and Vrubel in perfect keeping with the music of these folk-based opera fantasies. They were a major influence on the synthetic ideals of the World of Art movement and the Ballets Russes. Such, indeed, was Mamontov’s success that in 1898 he agreed to co-finance the costs of Diaghilev’s review the
World of Art.
But then disaster struck. Mamontov was accused of appropriating funds from his railway empire to support the Opera. There was a scandal and a noisy trial in 1900. Mamontov was acquitted of corruption on a wave of public sympathy for a man whose love of art, it was generally concluded, had carried him away. But financially he was ruined. His company collapsed and the Private Opera closed. Mamontov himself was declared bankrupt, and the effects of his Moscow house were sold off by auction in 1903. One of the sale items was a peasant’s wooden model of a railway station crafted at Abramtsevo.
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    Private theatrical undertakings were something of a Moscow fashion following the lifting of the state monopoly in 1882. The actress Maria Abramova, for example, set up her own theatre, with the help of merchant patrons, where Chekhov’s
Wood Demon
(1889) had its premiere; and in the 1900s another well-known actress, Vera Komis-sarzhevskaya, owned a private theatre in St Petersburg. By far the most important of these private ventures was the Moscow Arts Theatre, founded by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky in 1898. Here Chekhov’s last great plays were first performed. Stanislavsky was born in Moscow to a merchant family which ‘had already crossed the threshold of culture’, as he would later write. ‘They made money in order to spend it on social and artistic institutions.’ His maternal grandmother was the French actress Marie Varley, who had made herself a star in Petersburg. But while his parents were rich enough to put on lavish balls, they basically inhabited the old Moscow

    mercantile world. Stanislavsky’s father slept (with his grandfather) in the same bed.
¹⁰⁶
As a student Stanislavsky took part in the Mamontov amateur productions. These convinced him that, while huge efforts had been put into the music, the costumes and the sets, very little had been done about the acting, which remained extremely amateurish, not just in the operas but in the theatre, too. He trained himself as an actor by standing for hours before a mirror every day and developing his gestures over several years to make them appear more natural. His famous ‘method’ (from which ‘method acting’ was to come) boiled down to a sort of naturalism. It was acting without ‘acting’ - which fitted in so well with the modern dialogue (where the pauses are as important as the words) and the everyday realities of Chekhov’s plays.
¹⁰⁷
Later his method was made more systematic through a series of techniques to help the actor convey the inner thoughts and emotions of a part. They were all about recalling moments of intense experience in the actor’s own life, supposedly to help him produce the emotion on demand. Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote a blistering satire of the Moscow Arts in his farcical, unfinished
Black Snow (1939-
), ridiculed these methods in a scene in which the director tries to get an actor to feel what passion is by riding round the stage on a bicycle.

    Stanislavsky’s vision of an independent theatre brought him together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Both men were committed to the idea that the theatre should reach out to the masses by producing plays about contemporary life. The Moscow Arts was originally called the Accessible Arts Theatre. Cheap seats for students and the poor were mixed in with the expensive ones at the front of the stalls. Even the building, the rundown hermitage in Karetny Row, had a democratic feel. It had previously been used for circuses, and when the actors first moved in there was an all-pervasive smell of beer.
¹⁰⁸
After a quick coat of paint, they began in 1898 rehearsals for the opening performances of Alexei Tolstoy’s
Tsar Fedor
(1868) and Chekhov’s
The Seagull
(1896).

    Nemirovich was a great admirer of Chekhov’s play. In St Petersburg it had been a dreadful failure; the critics had panned it. But in the simple, lifelike style of the Moscow Arts’ production it was a triumph. ‘The public lost all sense of the theatre’, wrote Nemirovich: ‘the life they now beheld in these simple human contacts on the stage was

    ”real”, not theatrical.’ People felt ‘almost embarrassed to be present’, as if they were eavesdropping on a mundane domestic tragedy. There was ‘nothing but shattered illusions, and tender feelings crushed by rude reality’.
¹⁰⁹
The production relaunched Chekhov’s career as a playwright - and he now came home to Moscow as its favourite literary son.

    Born in Taganrog, in southern Russia, to a devout, old-style merchant, Anton Chekhov came to Moscow at the age of seventeen and two years later, in 1879, enrolled as a student of medicine at the university. He fell in love with the city from the start. ‘I will be a Muscovite for ever’, he wrote in a letter of 1881.
¹¹⁰
As a hard-up student, and then as a doctor, Chekhov was acquainted with the city’s slums, and he was a lifelong client of its brothels, too. His first literary efforts were as a journalist (‘Antosha Chekhonte’) for the humorous tabloids and weekly magazines aimed at Moscow’s newly literate labourers and clerks. He wrote sketches of street life, vaudeville satires on love and marriage, and stories about doctors and magistrates, petty clerks and actors in Moscow’s poor districts. There were many writers of this kind - the most successful being Vladimir Giliarovsky, author of the 1920s classic
Moscow and the Muscovites
(still widely read and loved in Russia today) and something of a mentor to the young Chekhov. But Chekhov was the first major Russian writer to emerge from the penny press (nineteenth-century writers such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had written for the serious or ‘thick’ periodicals that combined literature with criticism and political commentary). His concise written style, for which he is so famed, was fashioned by the need to write for commuters on the train.

    Chekhov knew these trains. In 1892 he purchased Melikhovo, a delightful small estate a short journey to the south of Moscow. Moscow often featured as a backdrop to his stories from this period - for example in ‘Three Years’ (1895) and ‘Lady with the Dog’ (1899). But the city was now felt by its absence, too. In all his greatest plays Moscow is perceived as a distant ideal realm, a paradise beyond the provinces, where his characters are trapped in a stagnant way of life. Chekhov understood their claustrophobia - he too yearned for city life. ‘I miss Moscow’, he wrote to Sobolevsky in 1899. ‘It’s boring without Muscovites, and without Moscow newspapers, and without

    the Moscow church bells which I love so much.’ And to Olga Knipper in 1903: ‘There’s no news. I’m not writing anything. I’m just waiting for you to give me the signal to pack and come to Moscow. “Moscow! Moscow!” These are not the refrain of Three Sisters: they are now the words of One Husband.’
¹¹¹
In
Three Sisters
(1901) Moscow becomes a symbol for the happiness so lacking in the sisters’ lives. They long to go to Moscow, where they lived as children and were happy when their father was alive. But they remain stuck in a provincial town, unable to escape, as youthful hopes give way to the bitter disappointments of middle age. There is no clear explanation for their inertia - a fact which has led critics to lose patience with the play. ‘Give the sisters a railway ticket to Moscow at the end of Act One and the play will be over’, Mandelstam once wrote.
¹¹²
But that is to miss the whole point of the play. The three sisters are suffering from a spiritual malaise, not a geographical displacement. Stifled by the petty routines of their daily life, they strive for a higher form of existence, which they imagine there to be in Moscow, yet in their hearts they know does not exist. The sisters’ ‘Moscow’, then, is not so much a place (they never go there) as a legendary realm - a city of dreams which gives hope and the illusion of meaning to their lives. The real tragedy of the three sisters is voiced by Irena when she comes to realize that this paradise is a fantasy:

    I’ve been waiting all this time, imagining that we’d be moving to Moscow, and I’d meet the man I’m meant for there. I’ve dreamt about him and I’ve loved him in my dreams… But it’s all turned out to be nonsense… nonsense.
¹¹³

    Chekhov’s Moscow, then, is a symbol of the happiness and better life to come. From Chekhov’s point of view, as a Russian and a liberal, its promise was in progress and modernity - a far cry from the image of inertia which Musorgsky saw just thirty years before. Chekhov put his faith in science and technology. He was a doctor by training, and by temperament a man who looked to practical solutions rather than to religion or ideologies. In a veiled attack on Tolstoy in 1894, Chekhov wrote that ‘there is more love of humanity in electricity and steam than in vegetarianism’.
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Progress is a constant theme in Chekhov’s plays. Noblemen like Astrov in
Uncle Vanya
(1896) or Vershinin in

Three Sisters
are constantly speculating about the future of Russia. They hope that one day life will become better and they talk about the need to work towards that end. Chekhov shared these dreamers’ hopes, although he was scathing on the subject of intellectuals who did no more than speak about the need to work. Trofimov, the eternal student in
The Cherry Orchard,
is always saying ‘we must work’, yet he himself has never done a thing. Chekhov thought that well-intentioned chatter was Russia’s greatest curse. He worked like one possessed throughout his life. He
believed
in work as the purpose of existence and as a form of redemption: it was at the heart of his own religious faith. ‘If you work for the present moment’, he wrote in his notebook, ‘your work will be worthless. One must work bearing only the future in one’s mind.’
¹¹⁵
Perhaps his credo was best expressed by Sonya in the final moving moments of
Uncle Vanya.
There is, she says, no rest from work or suffering, and only in the ideal world is there a better life.

    Well, what can we do? We must go on living! We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through a long, long succession of days and tedious evenings. We shall patiently suffer the trials which Fate imposes on us; we shall work for others, now and in our old age, and we shall have no rest. When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, in the other world, we shall say that we have suffered, that we’ve wept, that we’ve had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us. And then, Uncle dear, we shall both begin to know a life that is bright and beautiful, and lovely. We shall rejoice and look back at all our troubles with tender feelings, with a smile - and we shall have rest. I believe it, Uncle, I believe it fervently, passionately… We shall have rest!
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    Chekhov’s emphasis on the need to work was more than a Vol-tairean solution to the quest for meaning in one’s life. It was a critique of the landed gentry, which had never really known the meaning of hard work and for this reason was destined for decline. This is the theme of Chekhov’s final play,
The Cherry Orchard,
written for the Moscow Arts in 1904. It has often been perceived as a sentimental drama about the passing from an old and charming gentry world to a brash, modern, city-based economy. The plot is, indeed, quite remi-

    niscent of the ‘nest of gentry’ melodramas that had been in fashion since Turgenev’s time. The main characters, the Ranevskys, are forced by debt to sell their prized possession and inheritance (the orchard) to a merchant called Lopakhin, who plans to clear the land and build
dachas
on it for the new middle classes of Moscow. Stanislavsky, in the first production, played it as a sentimental tragedy: his actors cried when they first heard the script. No one was prepared to puncture the mystique of ‘the good old days’ on the estate - a mystique that had grown into a national myth. Journals such as
Bygone Years (Starye gody)
and
Town and Country (Stolitsa i usad’ba)
catered to this cult with their dreamy pictures and nostalgic memoirs about the old gentry way of life. The political agenda of these journals was the preservation of the landowners’ estates, not just as a piece of property, an economic system or ancestral home, but as the last remaining outposts of a civilization that was threatened with extinction by the social revolution of the towns. ‘Our country nests’, Count Pavel Sheremetev told the Moscow
zemstvo,
‘are carrying the ancient torch of culture and enlightenment. God grant them success, if only they are spared the senseless movement to destroy them, supposedly in the interests of social justice.’
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Had Chekhov’s play been written after 1905, when the first agrarian revolution swept through Russia and thousands of those country nests were set alight or ransacked by the peasants, it might have been conceived in this nostalgic way. But Chekhov was insistent that the play should be performed as a comedy, not a sentimental tragedy; and in this conception the play could not have been written later than it was, even if Chekhov had lived for another twenty years. After the 1905 Revolution the passing of the old world was no longer a subject of comedy.

    Chekhov called his play a ‘piece of vaudeville’.
¹¹⁸
Throughout
The Cherry Orchard
he is subtly ironic and iconoclastic in his treatment of the gentry’s ‘cultivated ways’. He is sending up the mystique of the ‘good old days’ on the estate. We are meant to laugh at the cliched sentimental speeches of Madame Ranevskaya when she waxes lyrical on the former beauty of the old estate or her happy childhood there: a world she had abandoned long ago for France. Her overblown expressions of sadness and nostalgia are belied by the speed with which she recovers and then forgets her grief. This is not a tragedy: it is a