A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New type: Chess, Literature and Film (review)

V. Ulea (previously known as Vera Zubareva) has produced a feast of a book: the chess and film in the sub-title play a relatively small part. There is a great deal of philosophy of systems, notably the ideas of predispositioning she has adopted from her mentor and the book's dedicatee, Aron Katsenelinboigen; the literature ranges over Molière, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoevsky and the Old Testament. There is a bewildering number of analogies taken from mythology, Aristotle, the Torah. After reading these dense 200 pages, one is certainly sated intellectually, but after a period of digestion one suspects that the nutritional value is limited.

There are two strands that go through V. Ulea's work. One is a taxonomical mania. She takes the rough divisions of comedy, drama and tragedy and subdivides each into three, so that we get a scale from pure farce to black tragedy, from which the middle elements, Ulea's CNT (comedy of new type), are taken to be re-analyzed as comedies (or dramedies or succedies, to use Ulea's often macaronic terminology) that are best understood as explorations of character potential rather than of plot. The taxonomy goes further at the end of the book with a number of matrices in which Vision and Conclusion are measured for disjointedness or Inner Strength and Character's Outer Strength give us eighteen categories from Funny Comedy to Pessimistic Dramedy. This seems to me to repeat the errors of Victorian botanists and zoologists who obfuscated their sciences by multiplying variants into species.

The second strand in Ulea's outlook is the indeterminate: a concatenation of circumstantial evidence in her view can have the same informational value as a sequence of documented and logically convincing information. One's hackles rise when she uses the popular Russian "historian" Victor Suvorov and his speculations on Stalin's plans for a Third World War as an analogy for her speculations on Chekhov's views of the genre of his plays. Likewise, God's creation of light before the existence of luminary bodies does not help one understand the predispositioning of comic character, even if it works as an analogy for Platonism.

The conventional aspect of this book is by far the best: the central core looks at Chekhov's plays with considerable sympathy for the mythological aspects (St George and the Dragon, classical gods etc) so fashionable with American scholars such as de Shcherbinin and Senderovich. Ulea's critical instincts are sharp. She argues that Three Sisters was intended as a comedy, without apparently being aware that Stanislavsky had already pointed this out when he wrote to his sister that he was afraid he would never understand the funny side of The Cherry Orchard because "Chekhov already thinks that Three Sisters is a very merry little piece."

It is questionable, though, whether Chekhov's comedy really is of a fundamental new type. As Ulea points out, Molière was there before. She cites Don Juan, but Le misanthrope is a far better example of comedy primarily of character, rather than of plot. And even in plot, there is more continuity between Old Type comedy and CNT than Ulea supposes. All Chekhov had to do (as Griboedov did before him) was to take the conventions and reverse them: no wedding bells for the young couple, no help from the servants, and the older generation are not thwarted but reinforced in their tyranny. The difference between tragedy and comedy lies not only in the degree to which a character's inner mind is explored: as in symphonic music, it is also a matter of tempo. Play Uncle Vanya adagio and you get a tragedy. Play it presto (as doubtless Chekhov would have preferred) you get a comedy. Drama really doesn't exist until it is performed, and the concentration on text rather than realization undermines Ulea's discussion.

For all this...