Humiliation no more

Have you ever heard of a game called "Humiliation"? Evidently, the author David Lodge invented it in his novel Changing Places. It's a party game to be played at gatherings of the snobbish and overeducated: everyone goes around the room naming the title of the book they are most embarrassed that they have never read. The person with the most humiliating admission is declared the winner.

Thinking that I might one day find myself a participant in a game of Humiliation, I got my answer ready: I would say that, to my great chagrin, I had neither seen nor read Chekhov's Three Sisters.

But now I'll have to think of a new answer, because I finally corrected this embarrassing gap in my knowledge, and I'm so glad I did. I don't know what took me this long. I mean, it would be one thing if I didn't like Chekhov. (Yes, there are people who have that opinion... even if I find it inexplicable.) But I love his three other plays! I wrote a research paper on him and Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater when I was in high school! And yet I had never read Three Sisters. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to preserve it, knowing that Chekhov wrote so few plays, and that once I read Three Sisters I would never again experience the thrill of reading a major Chekhov play for the first time.

So, this probably isn't news to any of you, but Three Sisters is a gorgeous play, and the passage where Tuzenbach and Vershinin debate what life will be like in 200 years might be my favorite thing Chekhov ever wrote. The play so perfectly balances joy and despair... where The Seagull is all about unrequited love, the sadness of Three Sisters is offset by our knowledge that no matter what happens to them, the sisters will always love and support each other. It's the kind of play where the characters declare that they're happy, and it breaks your heart.

And yet, it's funny, too. I made a friend of mine read the Tuzenbach/Vershinin dialogue I mentioned above, and her first reaction was "It's funny," and I could have kissed her for that, because so many people don't see the humor in Chekhov, and she did, right off the bat. Then she said "But you realize that people these days don't care about this kind of thing. They all want to see, like, The Matrix."

Maybe. But I remain hopeful that, as Tuzenbach says, "Life won't change. It will still be hard and happy and mysterious. Three hundred years from now, people will still go around complaining 'Oh, life is so hard,' and they will still be afraid to die, the same as they are now." And if that holds true, then there will always be a place for Chekhov.

Any idiot can misattribute a quote

Today in a bookstore I saw a greeting-card for sale emblazoned with a quote from Chekhov: "Any idiot can face a crisis--it's the day-to-day living that wears you out." I think I ran across this quote a few weeks ago, too (can't remember where) and was of course struck by its utter Chekhovishness. The truth, the humanity of it. The scorn for the "idiots" who think that our true personalities are revealed only in extreme situations, rather than by the routine ways each of us spend our lives; mixed with a tender, if wry, sympathy for the problems of the "little man."

So when I got home I looked it up--to find out from what play or story or essay it derived. And I couldn't find a source for it at all.

So does this mean that the quote is just too good to be true? Too Chekhovian to be genuine Chekhov? Something that some other clever person once dreamed up, said "Hey! That sounds like Chekhov!" and pretended that it was Chekhov's own words?

I would love to know what the story is with this quote. Sometimes the history of how something gets falsely attributed--and how the lie gets perpetuated--is even more interesting than the quote itself.

My quest for the source of this quote did enable me to spend some quality time with the Wikiquote page on Chekhov--always a valuable undertaking. Two of the quotes there absolutely broke my heart: "I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one" and "Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields." These come from letters he wrote in the late 1880s--by the time he died in 1904, had he changed his beliefs, or did he go to his too-early grave convinced that his output was too meager to qualify him for artistic greatness, still doubting his own ability?

On the other hand, I--who have still never written a one-act play that I consider to be any good--found this quote surprisingly heartening: "In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength. "

Happy Baptism, Billy S.!

Hundreds of years of convention dictates that we celebrate Shakespeare's birthday on April 23 (also the anniversary of the day he died) but we don't know his birthdate for a fact--all we know is that today, April 26, is the day that he was baptized. So, let's take a moment to celebrate, shall we? We have these plays, and that's so much more important in the long run than knowing the exact date their author was born, isn't it?

In 2016--just a few years away, really--I expect there will be a massive outpouring of interest in Shakespeare to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death. Which got me thinking: this means that nearly all of Shakespeare's plays have also turned 400 within the last 15 years or so--and the remainder, such as The Tempest, will very soon follow. So why hasn't there been more of an interest in commemorating this? Why haven't I seen plays advertised as "The 400-Year Anniversary Production of Hamlet?" Sure, it sounds a bit crass and commercial to put it like that, but since the theater is a huckstering and commercial art form anyway, why not take advantage of this anniversary?

Furthermore--from a more idealistic standpoint--wouldn't it have been wonderful if at least one theater company, somewhere in the world, made an effort to produce each of Shakespeare's plays exactly 400 years after it was first performed? Yes, I know that the chronology of Shakespeare's works is disputed, so the order of performance would never be strictly accurate. But we do have a general idea of the order in which the plays were written, and it would be amazing for everyone involved--the artists and the audience--to be able to trace the evolution of Shakespeare's style in "real time," the way his original audiences did. Why didn't the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, or a similar organization, commit to this? (I assume this would have to be done by an established company, because it is a huge undertaking that would have to go on for about 20 years. Pleasant as it is to imagine a scrappy little theater company taking on this task, beginning in 1990 with an enthusiastic production of Henry VI part I, they'd probably fold by 1998 and the Henry IV plays.)

Maybe there is some theater company that's doing this--but if so, I haven't heard of it. Or maybe it's just a lost opportunity that I'm acknowledging too late to do anything about it.

As I said, I've never seen a "400th anniversary" production of any Shakespeare play, but I did see a 100th-anniversary production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in 2004. In nearly every respect, it was a dreadful and misconceived endeavor, but the one part of it that really moved me is the speech where Gaev pays homage to the family bookcase:

But Lyuba, do you know how old this bookcase is? I pulled out the bottom drawer last week, and I looked, and there were some numbers burnt into the wood with a poker. This bookcase was built exactly one hundred years ago. So how about it? We could celebrate its centenary. It’s an inanimate object, but all the same, whichever way you look at it, it’s still a bookcase. […] Dear bookcase! Most esteemed bookcase! I salute your existence, which for more than a hundred years now has been directed toward the shining ideals of goodness and of truth. For a hundred years your unspoken summons to fruitful labor has never faltered, upholding, through all the generations of our family, wisdom and faith in a better future, fostering within us ideals of goodness and of social consciousness. (source)

Naturally, I could not help thinking about the one hundred years that Chekhov's play had endured and how it, too, is a monument to truth and to fruitful labor. I can only imagine that the effect would be similar if one was to hear some of Shakespeare's beautiful poetry that deals with the nature of time and memory and existence (e.g. "Age cannot wither her...") exactly four hundred years after it was first written...

Anton Chekhov, Ladies' Man

I discovered the following anecdote while flipping through a pile of old theatre programs/directors' notes for work. I wish I could find an actual corroborated source for it, because it's almost too good to be true--nasty, clever, and hilarious.


Evidently women were always falling madly in love with Anton Chekhov. Which I guess I understand. He was cute, and tubercular, and worked as a doctor, and wrote little gem-like short stories. Kind of like a real-life Doctor Zhivago, now that I think about it. Very tragically attractive in that melancholy, Russian way. But, he also had a wicked sense of humor...

In his first major play The Seagull, the young and innocent Nina falls in love with Trigorin, a famous writer who is summering nearby. The day he goes back to the city, she gives him a medallion engraved with the title of his book, plus a page and line number: "Days and Nights, page 121, lines 11 and 12." They direct Trigorin to the line "If ever you have need of my life, come and take it."

Now, supposedly, Chekhov based this on an episode from his own life. Lydia Avilova, an unhappily married aspiring author, was one of the many women who threw themselves at Anton. Indeed, she gave him a medallion engraved with a book title, page, and line number, referring to a line Chekhov had once written: "If ever you have need of my life, come and take it."

But it gets better. Chekhov ignored Lydia's gift. He never replied. (Men!) But some months later, he ran into her at a party--a masquerade ball.

"What happened, Antosha? Didn't you like it?" begged Lydia.

"The medallion? What?--oh yes--sorry I never got back to you," said Chekhov hastily. "But, actually, I've got this new play opening in a couple of weeks--it's called The Seagull--and you must come see it. Opening night, I insist. I know I haven't treated you right--but come see The Seagull and All Will Be Revealed."

So Lydia showed up in the opening-night audience. The performance was a disaster. This was before Chekhov partnered with Stanislavski; people had a hard time understanding his plays. (They still do!) Lydia strained to make out the actors' words above the jeering of the audience, so she could hear Chekhov's answer to her. And in Act III, when Nina gives Trigorin the medallion, Lydia felt absolutely humiliated. Betrayed.

But not so humiliated that she didn't notice a fine detail: the line and page numbers (page 121, lines 11 and 12) on the medallion in The Seagull were different from the ones on the medallion that Lydia had actually given to Chekhov. She memorized the new numbers and rushed home immediately after the performance was over. Perhaps this was Chekhov's real answer! She pulled his book of stories off the shelf and paged through it. But lines 11 and 12 of page 121 were nonsensical, irrelevant.

Then she realized that Chekhov might have been directing her to her own recently published book of stories. She took it from her desk--flipped through it with trembling fingers--found page 121, counted down 11 lines, and discovered this sentence:

"It is not proper for young ladies to attend masked balls."