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Chekhov on “Ivanov” Extract from a
letter from Anton Chekhov to A.S. Souvorin, Moscow, Dec. 30, 1888
In
“Ivanov” it seems that I did not write what I wished.
Remove it from the boards. I
do not want to preach heresy on the stage.
If the audience will leave the theatre with the conviction that
Ivanovs are scoundrels and that Doctors Lvov are great men, then I’ll
have to give up and fling my pen to the devil.
You won’t get anywhere with corrections and insertions.
No corrections can bring down a great man from his pedestal, and
no insertions can change a scoundrel into an ordinary sinful mortal.
You may bring Sasha on the stage at the end, but to Ivanov and
Lvov I can add nothing more. I
simply don’t know how. And
if I should add anything, it will spoil the effect still more.
Trust in my intuition; it is an author’s, you know.
If the public does not understand “iron in the blood,” then
to the devil with it, i.e., with the blood in which there is no iron.
. .
. Characteristically, Ivanov often lets fall the word “Russian.”
Don’t be cross about it. When
I was writing the play I had in mind only the things that really
matter—that is, only the typical Russian characteristics.
Thus the extreme excitability, the feeling of guilt, the
liability to become exhausted are purely Russian.
Germans are never excited, and that is why Germany knows nothing
of disappointed, superfluous, or over-tired people . . . The
excitability of the French is always maintained at one and the same
level, and makes no sudden bounds or falls, and so a Frenchman is
normally excited down to a decrepit old age. In other words, the French do not have to waste their
strength in over-excitement; they spend their powers sensibly, and do
not go bankrupt. 
1972
It
is understood that in the play I did not use such terms as
“Russian,” “excitability,” etc., in the full expectation that
the reader and spectator would be attentive and that for them it would
not be necessary to underscore these.
I tried to express myself simply, was not subtle, and was far
from the suspicion that the readers and spectators would fasten my
characters to a phrase, would emphasize the conversations about the
dowry, etc. I suppose I could not write the play. Of course, it is a pity.
Ivanov and Lvov appear to my imagination to be living people.
I tell you honestly, in all conscience, these men were born in my
head, not by accident, not out of seafoam, or preconceived
“intellectual” ideas. They
are the result of observing and studying life.
They stand in my brain, and I feel that I have not falsified the
truth or exaggerate it a jot. If
on paper they have not come out clear and living, the fault is not in
them but in me, for not being able to express my thoughts.
It shows it is too early for me to begin writing plays.
(A.S. Souvorin—editor, publisher of the Russian Newspaper Novoé
Vremya.)
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
A
master of the short story and of a particular form of drama, Chekhov’s
achievement was somewhat limited by the tradition (Ostrovsky, Turgenev)
that he completed and perfected. His
literary career began in 1890 with humorous sketches written under the
lugubrious pen name Chekhonte but whereas his goodness as a person, his
sense of humor, and his faith in the future have acquired (particularly
in the Soviet Union) hagiographic hues, an equally strong case can be
made for seeing Chekhov as a cheerful fatalist.
Much of his strength undoubtedly lies in this ambiguity of mood.
Among his finest stories are “Ward No. 6” (1892), “The
Teacher of Literature” (1894), “The Black Monk” (1894); “Three
Years” (1895), “The Darling” (1898), and “In the Ravine”
(1900); his best plays are The
Seagull (1898) and The Cherry
Orchard (1903). His
only book-length work as a documentary study on prison conditions in
Siberia, Sakhalin Island (1891). (Andrew
Field)
1978
 Pyotr Bitsilli on Anton Chekhov (1930)
Chekhov
sees everything in its true light, he reduces everything, he pardons
everything, and in the end everything that he has observed and
understood awakens his pity. Pity,
Chekhov’s chief feeling, is ubiquitous in his work.
He has pity on his heroes, tiresome, awkward, incapable of loving
and of being heroic, he has pity on the steppe, pity on its sunburnt
grass, pity on a lone poplar standing on a hill.
To speak about a writer means
necessarily to speak about oneself, about one’s own impressions of
that writer.
In
the end all criticism is an analysis of our own reception of an author.
I must confess that I do not know what place in the hierarchy of
Russian writers Chekhov deserves. But
I do know that there are writers who produce an immeasurably greater
impression upon me. Tolstoy
astounds us with his vital force, Dostoevsky amazes us with the titanic
collisions of his ideas embodied as images.
But they also repel us, Tolstoy by the hopelessness of his
feeling about the world,
Dostoevsky by not allowing us respite from his
dictatorship, by the exaggeration so essential to his gigantic ideas.
Chekhov always attracts and never repels us.
There are things in Chekhov, as in Gogol, that you continually
wish to reread: “The
Letter,” “The Requiem,” “The Archbishop,” “The Kashtanka,”
“On the Road,” all of his stories about children (these, for the
most part, are the stories in which Chekhov’s pity is felt with the
greatest force). In
Chekhovian pity there is no brokenheartedness and no effort.
Dostoevsky forces, wishes to force us to feel pity toward what
repulses us, but more often than not he imbues us with feelings of
hatred and terror. It may
seem strange, even blasphemous, to compare Chekhov, “the writer
without a world view,” to Dostoevsky, the religious thinker and
prophet. But in Russian
Orthodoxy is something that Dostoevsky knew well, that he endeavored
with all his powers to convey, but that he failed to convey:
the quiet poetry, the spirit of meekness, forgiveness, and pity
about which he preached, but which was intrinsically alien to his
nature. But the unreligious
Chekhov, even though he is “without a world view,” is suffused with
this spirit and communicates its gifts to us.
(Pyotr Bitsili is one of the major Russian literary critics of
this century.)
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