Chekhov's Plays: An Opening into Eternity by Richard Gilman (review)

Book Reviews RICHARD GILMAN. Chekhov's Plays: An Opening into Eternity. New Haven and London : Yale University Press 1995. pp. 261. $30. Richard Gilman's book on Chekhov's plays will delight those who wish to locate Chekhov's work beyond the critical cliches of bittersweet mood and atmosphere, inconclusiveness, and lack of traditional action or sensation, for Gilman offers new and different ways of understanding, performing. and directing these plays. ]n 1974. in his book The Making 0/ Modern Drama, Gilman eloquently sketched many of these ideas in his Chekhov chapter. Now, he painstakingly elaborates and develops. During the intervening years, Gilman switched translations from Ronald HingJey to Kristin lohnsen-Neshati for The Seagull and Paul Schmidt for Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Gilman still uses Magarshack's Platollov and Hingley's Ivanov and Wood Demon. On The Seagull, Gilman writes that the play's chief subjects are an and love, yet "the reigning spirit of The Seagull is antiromanticism." This seemingly unusual opposition propels the drama since many of the characters alternately and perhaps immaturely or unwiseLy rhapsodize their overevaluations of both love and artistic work. Here, we experience the clash of fact and desire and recognize that Chekhov purposefully provides neither solutions nor pat prescriptions. Like Nina, one must stick to "it," it being one's character or one's work. Therein, in the stick-to-it-ness, resides one's dignity. Salvation, as Gilman elucidates, is beside the Chekhovian point. The Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters chapters, the two richest of the book, have subtilles from Beckett: "How It Is" and "I Can't Go On, I'll Go On." In these chapters, Gilman apologizes for digressing. But his "digressions" are preCisely what makes this work so valuable. He carefully shows us Chekhov's dramatic and theatrical similarities to Beckett: the absences, the circumscribed situations and locales. and the disconsolate beauty in grief. Of Uncle Vanya, Gilman writes: Chekhov's imaginativ~ point is that time to come is always unreal, or what amounts to the same thing. not yet real, but that we habitually ignore or suppress this obvious truth, hypostatizing futurity and so allowing it to live illegitimately, and most often destructively, in the present.ln rather the same way, we reify love and work. Sonya in Uncle Vanya expresses the burden and lyricism of sorrow. And, according to Gilman, Lyricism doesn't transform or redeem the weight of sorrow, it doesn't even physically lighten it. What it does is place it, environ it, bring it into intimacy with the soul which, tested by grief, learns about itself. At the same time lyricism makes visible the hidden and speaks of how grief makes us human; the beauty that inheres in sorrow is our recognition of mortality, which happiness obscures. Time,living in time, is the condition or field for Gilman's exploration of Three Sis· Book Reviews ters. He shows us that the details of this uneventful plot accumulate - they do not progress nor proceed. Quite like Waiting for Godor, here we have a version of "While Wanting to Go to Moscow." In between lime, love and work - that Freudian couplet prove insufficient. Time piles up. "What keeps the sisters where they are?" Gilman asks. "The text." Gilman ends the Three Sisters .chapter with a grim one-word sentence : "Stamina." All of this is not to say that Gilman neglects the comedic aspects of Chekhov's work, particularly in The Cherry Orchard. Comedy in Chekhov, howsoever difficult and mirthless is remains, "rests on the question of fate and destiny; how it unfolds and whether or not it's free to some degree." Be that as it may, Gilman's book persuades more when he suggests that through the grimness "what at a distance appeared to be shadowy folds turns out to be an aperture into Eternity." EILEEN FISCHER, NEW YORK CITY TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF CUNY EDWARD BRAUN . Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. Iowa City: Iowa University Press 1995· Pp. 347, illustrated. $35·00. Meyerhold and Stanislavsky seem to define antithetical poles of twentieth-century attitudes toward theatre: theatricalism and psychological realism; the actor as director's pawn and the actor as...