Chekhov and the Vaudeville: A Study of Chekhov's One-Act Plays by Vera Gottlieb (review)

Book Reviews 153 pursuits ofindividual texts. Some ofthe writers' contributions seem negligible when one considers their output, and even more negligible as they attempt to fill the gap with pretentious self-pontificating. I suspect that, in another decade's time, perhaps half these playwrights may be wholly forgotten. The Work will then provide echo as much as resonance. The volume, however, is almost beyond serious consideration because of the appalling standards of its editing and proof-reading. The blame must be shared among Wallace and Zimmerman, their editor Martin Kinch and The Coach House Press. But a volume about modem culture which misspells Leni Riefenstahl and Jimi Hendrix; a volume about dramatic literature which misspells Lady Bracknell, Lizzie Borden and Arrabal; a volume about Canadian theatre which misspells Erika Ritter, Chappelle Jaffe and Brenda Donohue; and a volume about Canadian writing which misspells both Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro - such a volume is The Work, and, from this perspective, a monstrosity. URJO KAREDA, TORONTO VERA GOTTLIEB. Chekhov and the Vaudeville: A Study of Chekhov' s One-Act Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982. Pp. xii, 224, illustrated. $44.50. Vera Gottlieb sets out to examine the validity ofChekhov's own often expressed view of himself as a writer of comedies rather than dramas. She refers to the one-act plays she has chosen as farce or vaudeville, but she demonstrates that these comedies reveal Chekhov's philosophy and technique as a playwright, features which were already evident in his short stories and later in his full-length plays. Gottlieb points out that, from the start, Chekhov saw life itself as a blend of the comic and tragic; consequently, his works contain the same blend of the sublime and the ridiculous, and thus defy categorization. At the same time, the depiction of truth "need not imply or assume verisimilitude in presentation." She blames Chekhov's critics for not understanding that compassion and objectivity can be combined, a combination that was precisely Chekhov's intention. For the Russians, a writer without a moral message is a contradiction in terms, but message is what Chekhov avoided all his life. Gottlieb begins by examining the theatre ofthe I 880s and all the reasons why it was so difficult to make any changes in the established routine. "It was this situation, symptomatic of the general decadence of Russian culture at the end of the nineteenth century, produced by political and economic causes, which prompted Stanislavsky to say: 'in those days [theatre] was controlled by restaurateurs on the one hand, and by bureaucrats on the other. ' " Thus, in the 1880s and 1890s, Russian theatre was ripe for change, and several people tried to bring it about. Chekhov's plays at the beginning were conventional. In describing the mood of the times, Gottlieb attributes too much to the environment: "This climate of constant surveillance inevitably left a profound mark: ... most people retreated into the frivolous or the superfluous and this, undoubtedly, was a contributing factor in the hopelessness 154 Book Reviews and inertia which characterises many of Chekhov's characters...." To demonstrate her point, she turns to the short story The Man in a Case. If anything, The Man in a Case demonstrates Chekhov's elevation of the concept of boredom from the sociopolitical level onto the philosophical one. It is here that Chekhov analyzed boredom as a state of consciousness in universal terms. In presenting the term "vaudeville," Gottlieb quotes Theophile Gautier's definition, which ends in the following manner: "This is a purely French genre. The Greeks had their tragedy; the Romans, their comedy; the English and the Germans, their drama; but the vaudeville is completely ours." Gottlieb asserts that Chekhov took the vaudeville beyond its previous boundaries and thus extended the meaning of comedy. It is in vaudeville that he began to erase the distinction between comedy and drama. Tolstoy, in fact, praised Chekhov's vaudeville highly for the absence of "French nonsensical surprises." Gottlieb sees in this remark Tolstoy'S awareness of the innovative nature of Chekhov's vaudeville. "Serious, or tragi-comic, techniques of [Chekhov's] later plays," Gottlieb states, "may be seen as initially farcical in the earlier one-act plays...