Chekhov's Tatyana Repina: From Melodrama to Mystery Play

Chekhov's Tatyana Repina: From Melodrama to Mystery Play MARGARITA ODESSKAYA Translated by RALPH LINDHEIM Anton Chekhov's one-act play Taryana Repina (1889), for which he borrowed the title as well as the characters from a comedy written by his friend Alexey S. Suvorin, was intended neither for production nor for publication. On 6 March 1889, he sent Suvorin, the publisher of the newspaper New Times, "a very cheap and, according to the sender, a useless gift," a play entitled Taryana Repina that "he had written in one sitting." In addition, the writer asked his friend to show the work to no one and. after having read it, to throw it into the fireplace.' Chekhov's play, however, has continued to live somehow on the periphery of literature, where a number of readers have taken notice of it. First of all, Suvorin himself did not destroy his present but, on the contrary, gave it life by printing two or three copies of the play' and sending one of them to the author. In 1924, the writer's brother, Mikhail P. Chekhov, published the play, having made several cuts in the liturgy performed on stage, and supplied his own commentaries.3 The uncut play first appeared a year later in an edition brought out by the Atheneum publishing house,' and later it was included in the complete edition of Chekhov's works and letters, published in thirty volumes. The ftrst production of the play took place in the summer of 1998, when Moscow's Young Spectator Theatre opened the Avignon Festival with Valery Fokin's production. Yet, to be fair, it should be pointed out that in 1997, in Moscow's Gogol Theatre, the director Alexey Govorukho mounted a production called The Hullf for Women in which he combined Suvorin's Taryana Repina and Chekhov's. It's possible that Chekhov was right to oppose the publication of his play. Writing to Suvorin on 14 May 1889, after he received his published copy, he said, "In the proofs I crossed out my last name, and how it survived is incomprehensible to me" (P 3, 213). And, truly, Valery Fokin's production,like the play itself, leaves the impression of something unfinished, fragmentary, and an unsophisticated audience leaves the theatre somewhat perplexed. French Modern Drama, 42 (Winter 1999) 475 476 MARGARITA ODESSKAYA critics responded to the production with a certain degree of skepticism. The title alone of a review published in the newspaper Liberation, "Chekhov pas a la noce,"5 speaks volumes. Tom from the literary context and the everyday conditions of the time of its creation, this play by Chekhov seems truly incomprehensible , but, in the light of its many points of contact both with the established tradition and with the concurrent experimentation with new theatrical devices and dramaturgical principles, it holds a certain fascination. Chek1)ov's Tatyana Repina was intended as the fifth act to Suvorin'5 comedy in four acts. The modern viewer is unfamiliar not only with Chekhov's drama but even more with Suvorin's play, which was produced with great success on the stages of St. Petersburg and Moscow with M.N. Yennolova in the main role. But how tightly bound is Chekhov's fifth act to Suvorin's original play? Must we regard Chekhov's work as the epilogue to Suvorin's play, or can we examine it as an independent work of art? Let's turn to Suvorin's comedy. At the base of the plot of Tatyana Repina lies a real event, the tragic death of the actress Yevlamiya Pavlovna Kadmina. A talented opera singer first discovered by Nikolay G. Rubenstein, she performed on the stages of the Bolshoi Theatre and the Mariinsky Theatre, and also in the theatres of Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkov, after she had perfected her craft in Italy. She also had great success on the dramatic stage. Abandoned by the man she loved, a nobleman for whom marriage to an actress would be considered a misalliance, Kadmina took poison during a performance of A.N. Ostrovsky's Vasilisa Melen/'eva on the stage of the Kharkov Dramatic Theatre and died in terrible torment.6 Such an unexpected...