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  • Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre: Archive Illustrations of the Original Productions
  • Felicia Hardison Londré
Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre: Archive Illustrations of the Original Productions. Translated and edited by Vera Gottlieb. London: Routledge, 2005; pp. xv + 85. $115.00 cloth.

The strikingly designed dustjacket of Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre features a blow-up of illustration 129, the actor Artem in the 1904 premiere of The Cherry Orchard as the elderly butler Firs, head bowed, eyes lowered, white-gloved hands presenting a card tray. His stance subtly evokes the gift from the past that is contained within this slender, fourteen-inch-tall volume. The back flap of the dustjacket provides four color renderings (lagniappe for the 196 black-and-white photographs in the book) of settings by Viktor Simov for four original Chekhov productions at the Moscow Art Theatre. Yet the name of the author of the bulk of the text is not immediately evident on the cover. The title page credits him: "From the original journal edited by Nikolai Efros, 1914." [End Page 161]

In her introduction, the late Vera Gottlieb recounts how she came into possession of Efros's collection of photographs, published in St. Petersburg on "different colours and types of paper" and resembling "a hand-made scrapbook" (xi). No other copy of this publication has yet surfaced, but quite a few of the photographs are familiar. Many are studio portraits of the actors as the characters they portrayed; others, after 1902, are production photographs taken in the theatre. The sheer number of photographs brought together conveys an unprecedented visual sense of the original productions. For example, the sitting room off the ballroom in act 3 of The Cherry Orchard is shown in no fewer than ten photographs taken in the setting at different moments in the action. Only one of these appears in Claudine Amiard Chevrel's Le Théâtre artistique de Moscou (1898–1917), and there is one in Laurence Senelick's The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance, both works frequently cited in Gottlieb's ample endnotes.

Nikolai Efimovich Efros (1867–1923), the Moscow Art Theatre's first literary manager, was an early and ardent admirer of Chekhov's plays. Indeed, as Gottlieb notes, he seems extraordinarily prescient in his appreciation of what was still original and innovative about Chekhov's dramaturgy in 1914. Gottlieb's substantial introduction explains how Efros was caught in the cross-hairs of the Moscow Art Theatre's backstage factionalism, and she elucidates her process of translating his text. The task of translation included deciphering the truncated quotations from the plays that Efros used as captions for the photographs; thanks to her efforts, it is possible to tie the visual images to specific lines in the plays.

In addition to prefatory notes on each of the five plays represented, Efros wrote an extensive reminiscence about Chekhov's relationship with the Moscow Art Theatre. Embedded in the wordy style of nineteenth-century criticism are his strong opinions about individual performances. Fascinating as the material is, it is slow going, because Gottlieb's seventy-six endnotes—one or two per paragraph of Efros's text—are necessarily followed up during the reading, for she points out errors and enhances his views with the advantage of historical hindsight. The photographs in this section include several of Chekhov and of MAT company members at leisure as well as the models for some of Simov's settings.

Although the 1914 text and photographs could not be reproduced in facsimile, there are some graphics from the original publication, as well as MAT cofounder Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko's signature after Gottlieb's translation of his introduction. What is not explained is whether the sizes and layout of the photographic reproductions correspond to the original. Some are full-page photographs twelve inches across, while others are small enough to fit up to ten on a page.

Completing the book are four pages of Biographical Notes on over 120 associates of the Moscow Art Theatre and other figures.

Felicia Hardison Londré
University of Missouri–Kansas City
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