Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology ed. by Jean-Pierre Barricelli (review)

Book Reviews Musgrave's Dance is a "Eucharistic Christ," and Christy Mahon in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World is a parodic Christ in a play that preaches a "savage sennon." Pinter's "Christ of Complicity" is a particularly intriguing avatar, for though Ditsky does not claim that Stanley in The Birthday Party is a redeemer, he does draw parallels between his suffering and that of Jesus in the Passion, as he does also in treating Grandier in Whiting'5 The Devils. The most unusual contender for Christ status, however, is Osborne's Jimmy Porter (Look Back in Anger), for whom Ditsky claims only secular Christ status, calling him an "existential hero-in-the-making," a "social saviour" who improves on the Biblical Christ. Despite such liberal interpretations of the onstage Christ, Ditsky's study is almost uniformly credible, for it combines dose textual reading with tempered analysis that resists extravagant claims. Ditsky himself acknowledges that his interpretation of these plays offers only one possible approach to them. Yet he so skillfully toes the line between speculation and authority that the result is an appealing study of significant critical worth. Perhaps the measure of the book's achievement is the impulse that nearly every scholar who reads it will feel to suggest other playwrights - Chekhov, PirandelIo, Beckett, Genet, for example - who might have been included but were not. JUNE SCHLUETER, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE JEAN-PIERRE BARRICELLI, ed. Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology. New York and London: New York University Press 1981. Pp. xvii, 268. Jean-Pierre Barricelli's anthology of Chekhov criticism has appeared as part of New York University Press's commendable series, the Gotham Library. It consists of seventeen essays, eight of them devoted to individual plays and nine to general topics. To this division there corresponds another, unmarked division between essays by scholars who have studied andlortaught in California and essays by those who have not. Here again there are eight of the former and nine of the latter. When we consider the essays themselves, yet another division - not so distinct. yet clearly perceptible - becomes apparent. This is the distinction. at once so very Russian and so very American. between the old and the new, categories which rarely achieve anything like peaceful coexistence in either country. Francis Fergusson wrote his "The Cherry Orchard: A Theater-Poem of the Suffering of Change," the most obvious example of the old, as part of his well-known book The Idea of a Theater in 1949. and postwar internationalism pervades it. Fergusson is concerned to distinguish Chekhov from Ibsen, and to analyze The Cherry Orchard in Aristotelian terms; he quotes Cocteau and Dante. Yet he finds no evolution in all this Kulturgeschichte, only decline. He speaks of the decline of the English theater after Shakespeare, and concludes: "The progress of modem realism from Ibsen to Chekhov looks in some respects like a withering and degeneration of this kind ... " (p. 77). The essay has not, in short, stood the test of time as well as The Cherry Orchard. Similarly Maurice Valency ranges over Western literature with learned references from Restoration comedy to Pirandello in "Vershinin"; he quotes from a number of Chekhov's letters and discusses several of his short stories without ever satisfactorily Book Reviews 439 addressing his subject. By way of apology, as it were, he ends the essay with two quotations, one from Giraudoux and the other from Renoir. But the most old-fashioned essay in the book, although in a different tradition, is Nicholas Moravcevich's "Women in Chekhov's Plays," an exercise in identifying "types" very much in the spirit of nineteenth-century Russian criticism. Like such criticism, it isolates the characters from the complex of images and situations which makes them meaningful. As with concepts, so with vocabulary; I find it nothing less than astounding thatany critic nowadays could seriously use such termsas "the fairer sex" (p. 202) and "her physical charm" (p. 212). In comparable fashion leva Vitins in "Uncle Vanya's Predicament" and Karl D. Kramer in "Three Sisters, or Taking a Chance on Love" treat character as an absolute entity, with the result that it is difficult to argue with...