Whether it be garden parties or the bonds of matrimony, social conventions carry oppressive connotations in the plays of Anton Chekhov. This is established in the first and least famous of his multiple-act plays, Ivanov.
Despair is a common thread running through his plays, making them tough for me to enjoy the way others do. But for all its angst and despondency, Ivanov does have some things going for it, like humor and an active plot, that make for a more positive reading experience.
If only the title character wasn’t so much of a pill, even if his character is what makes this a full-blown tragedy.
Nikolai Ivanov is a struggling middle-class farmer who finds himself in a major midlife crisis. Even with a dying wife and a heavy debt to pay off, he can concentrate only on his sudden loss of personal vitality and a miserable outlook on life he can no longer shake off.
He lays this out in Act I:
IVANOV [after a pause]: Superfluous people, superfluous words, having to answer stupid questions – all this has exhausted me, Doctor, to the point of illness. I’ve grown so irritable, so short-tempered, harsh, and petty, that I no longer recognize myself.
 |
| Burdened with despair by the expectations of others, Ivanov is unable either to act or to explain his feelings. Above a scene from a 2016 St. Louis Actors' Studio production. Image from https://www.laduenews.com/arts-and-culture/features/chekhovs-ivanov-those-were-the-depressing-days-my-friend-theater-review/article_752d30e8-0651-11e6-80ec-8b18a469d289.html |
Reading Chekhov is frustrating for me, so much so I wonder if I should stick to cheerier playwrights like Ibsen and Strindberg. Ivanov is characteristically mopey, yet the play kept me invested more than The Cherry Orchard or Uncle Vanya. The characters may be limited, but there is some subtlety about the way they are presented, along with a theme of oppressive conformity which connects to Ivanov’s central dilemma.
The characters all coo endearments to one another’s faces and bring out their scorn when backs are turned, except for a doctor named Lvov who makes a point of trumpeting his “honesty” until everyone is dead sick of him. They wile away the hours on games of bridge and drinking, while plotting marriages solely for the purpose of acquiring wealth:
BORKIN: It’s not a question of Marfutka, but of Marfutka’s assets.
LEBEDEV: What do you want – two skins from one cow?
BORKIN: When he marries her and fattens his pockets, then you’ll see how you get two skins from one cow. And you’ll be licking your chops! [Act III]
 |
| Borkin is a habitual line-stepper who makes Ivanov pay for trusting him. He can be played as both agent of ruin and comic relief. Here, in the play's opening scene, we see him point a gun at Ivanov as a carefree prank. Photo from a 2009 Cal State Fullerton performance featuring Ben Lambert as Ivanov and Andrew Campbell as Borkin. Photo by Jim Volz from http://calstate.fullerton.edu/news/Inside/2009/ivanov-play.html |
This was Ivanov’s game as well, people agree, when he married his besotted bride Anna Petrovna, except that her Jewish parents cut her off financially for abandoning her religion. The fact they don’t have the story straight doesn’t stop their narrow-minded gossip:
BABAKINA: If it were not for reasons of interest, why should he have married a Jewess? Aren’t there enough Russian girls? He made a mistake, darling, a mistake! [Eagerly.] And, Lord, doesn’t he make her smart for it now!
The irony that Babakina has something of a point in that last statement doesn’t lessen her overall wrongness about Ivanov. In fact, Ivanov is neither a schemer nor a doer. He is called “a whiner” early on, and even if the man who calls him that is the unscrupulous leech Borkin, he has a point.
Ivanov likens himself to Hamlet, but in fact he’s just a nervous wreck who can’t bring himself to care about anyone other than himself, something Anna suffers for. Still, he almost shines in comparison to the people we see around him, which is pure Chekhovian irony.
 |
| Ivanov gets no respect, a fact made clear when we open on a scene of three men helping themselves to liquor at an absent Ivanov's desk. Jonathan Coy as Lebedev, Peter Egan as Shabelsky, and Des McAleer as Borkin in a 2015 production revised by David Hare. Image from https://peterviney.com/stage/ivanov/ |
Being a bystander doesn’t protect Ivanov from the designs of others, whether it be Borkin, who uses his supervision of Ivanov’s farm to his own ends, leaving Ivanov to take the blame when he is exposed; or Sasha, lovestruck daughter of Ivanov’s friend and debtee Lebedev, who wants Ivanov for a husband.
Apparently Ivanov’s helpless self-loathing only spurs her on:
IVANOV: No, my clever child, it’s not a question of romance. I tell you in all honesty, I can bear anything: depression, mental illness, ruin, the loss of my wife, my own premature old age in solitude, but I cannot bear, cannot endure, the contempt I feel for myself….
SASHA: I’ll go with you to the ends of the earth, wherever you want me to go, even to the grave, only let it be soon, for God’s sake, otherwise I won’t be able to breathe… [Act II]
Chekhov has Sasha explain her attraction as a natural matter of a woman wanting a weakened man to bring up to strength. It rings false but is needed to give the plot a hinge. For when Anna finds out what is what, the melodramatic result gives Ivanov another cross to bear.
 |
| Sasha seems oblivious to the impact her pursuit on Ivanov has on his dying wife, caught up in a kind of youthful romantic narcissism. Above, Evgeny Mironov as Ivanov and Elizavetta Boyarskaya as Sasha in a 2016 State Theatre of Nations performance. Image from https://www.nycitycenter.org/pdps/2017-2018/ivanov/ |
I wouldn’t call Ivanov engaging. I wouldn’t use that word for anything I have read by Chekhov. But as long as the focus is around Ivanov rather than on him, the dialogue is crisp and recognizably human, and kept me reading. Never exactly naturalistic, not the way Chekhov is credited for making modern theater, but alive and socially relevant.
The relationship between Anna and Ivanov’s uncle Shabelsky, who won’t believe she is suffering from a deadly disease and complains it is just a doctor’s scam even as she wastes away, speaks to the way people brush off reality until it is too late. And the machinations of Borkin ring with spiky authenticity, especially the way he skirts past a long-overdue reckoning with his fast talk and oily charm.
When we meet Sasha’s mother, Zinaida Savishna, her one-note cheapskate persona is played up egregiously, as when we witness the guests at her fancy garden party discuss how famished they are because she won’t serve any food. As they all rush up to complement her to her face, this plays up the social falsity of Ivanov’s world.
The play does lay this on thick. Everyone comes off shallow here. Even Sasha the young romantic seems heedless of the heartache she is causing, commenting idly on how lifelike she finds a painting of a horse in Ivanov’s study while the man is edging toward a breakdown urging her to leave before his sick wife finds them together.
Anna is a more sympathetic character, a tragic figure far more easy to emphasize with than Ivanov, but she trails after her man with puppy-like pathos, somehow unaware of her own impending death despite it being topic A among the other characters.
 |
| Young Anton Chekhov. Still in his twenties when he wrote Ivanov, Chekhov took just ten days to write the four-act play. Then he went back and revised it after being dissatisfied with its inaugural staging. Commissioned as a comedy, Ivanov wound up a drama. Image from https://donalclancy.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/checkout-checkov/ |
Perhaps it is Ann Dunnigan’s translation, but I sensed Chekhov pressing here and in other places. Chekhov wrote this as a very young man, and in a white heat. Supposedly it took him just a fortnight to complete. [He went back to it later and revised it, though it was a success from the start.] Passion is certainly there, more than I expected and to the good.
In Ivanov you get something more than a ripping melodrama; you get a statement of purpose as far as Chekhov the playwright is concerned. He will use the stage to call out society as he knew it at the turn of the 19th century, focusing on domestic issues that roil and distract Russia’s emergent middle class, teetering toward impending revolution. For many of his day and generations to come, this would prove theater that matters.
There
is a sense of another revolution, one involving the human psyche. As Ivanov
tells the angry doctor Lvov, “in every one of us there are far too many wheels,
screws, and valves for us to be able to judge one another by first impressions,
or by two or three external signs.” Ivanov is not a play that brings
this out, only suggests it, but it is good enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment