Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov's Prose and Drama by Donald Rayfield (review)

120 REVIEWS the last ten years. Paradoxically, it is only with this most knowledgeable witness that this reviewer would venture to disagree. Post-perestroika theatre, fragmented with the removal of state authority and funding, could be argued to have liberated a great deal of directorial talent, and Smelianskii's jaded Muscovite view underestimates the impact of a whole wave of directors from Artsybashev to Rozovsky and the excitement in the decentralized provinces. The dismal view of contemporary Russian theatre that one is left with in this penultimate chapter can be corrected by a month of theatregoing in Russia today. These strictures are unimportant compared with the achievement of this volume: and if Cambridge University Press still intends to discontinue their series in Russian and Slavonic literary studies, then this book should be used (physically if necessary) to batter their managing editors into a change of mind. DONALD RAYFIELD. Understanding Cllekllov: A Critical Study of Cilekllov's Prose and Drama. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Pp. xvii + 295· $22·95 (Pb). Reviewed by Felicia Hardison Lond,.,!, University of Missouri - Kansas City Theatre people tend to assume that we understand Chekhov fairly well. We've all read a couple of the biographies. We reread or see productions of his "big four" plays just about every year. We probably even worked on a one-act Chekhov comedy for a high school drama competition. Does "understanding Chekhov" really require nearly 300 pages of critical analysis (textual, intertextual , and biographical) so densely written that even the margins measure no more than one-half inch? Well, yes. Although dozens of English-language books on Chekhov's plays exist, Donald Rayfield's new study offers several advantages to the director or designer, as well as to the teacher of modem drama. One might begin with Rayfield's pre-eminence in the field. A quarter-century's research and publication on Chekhov have put him in a prime position to draw upon archival resources available only since the end of the Soviet Union. These materials informed his remarkable 1997 biography Allton Chekhov: A Life, in which Rayfield's access to 4,500 surviving letters written by Chekhov and 7,000 letters written to him illuminate hitherto unsuspected aspects of his relationships, especially with women. Inasmuch as the biography avoids litcrary critique and the present critical study provides only sparing points of biographical reference , the two works are complementary. Ideally, the biography would be read first, so that names like Lidia Iavorskaia or Isaak Levitan. mentioned fleetingly in the critical study, will resonate meaningfully. Reviews 121 Rayfield's expertise extends to particulars of Russian language, culture, and sociological context that allow one to make new sense of certain lines or bits of stage business. In Uncie Vanya, for example, "the lunch table shows this is a badly run household, in which only the samovar - which is off the boil - is left to unite the household around the table, an implicit reproach to the women of the house, preoccupied by their power strugglc" (167). Rayfield marshals evidence for the tone that Chekhov must have intended for the staging of Treplev 's playlet in The Seagull. In Three Sisters, "Tara-ra boom-de-ay" - which Doctor Chebutykin sings as if in ironic counterpoint to death and loss - was "the song understood all over Europe as the code for sexual intercourse" (122; see also 214, 225). Not only musical allusions but color-coding, folk superstitions , and - an unfortunate casualty of most translations - verbal acrobatics enrich that play. The etymological implications of character names in The Cherry Orchard may well aid the actor. Rayfield claims that "the rolc of the absent and of the silent is perhaps what we least understand in Chekhovian drama" (182) and then aids understanding with his discussions of the dramatic power inherent in the ghostly presences of Serebriakov's wife (Vanya's sister ), Colonel Prozorov (father of the three sisters), and both the son and the Parisian lover of Ranevskaya. Each of the "big four" plays gets an entire chapter , while a chapter on "The Early Plays" is devoted largely to Ivanov and The Wood Demon. The one-acts are scarcely mentioned. Understanding Chekhov is valuable also...