Introduction

Introduction RALPH LINDHEIM This collection offers a comprehensive picture of the state of contemporary Chekhov criticism and also points the way to new approaches and avenues of exploration. Written by a diverse group of scholars, writers, and critics from various countries, these essays deal with the four major plays of Chekhov, examine some less familiar plays by him, and also explore scripts "plundered ," as one of the contributors has phrased it, from the author's dramatic and fictional writings. Important productions of Chekhov plays, their directors , and theatrical modes of performance are also considered, together with such issues as the translation of Chekhov's drama and its impact on later playwrights and their work. A little under a half century ago, the Russian writer lIya Ehrenburg stimulated a critical reawakening of interest in Chekhov in Russia with his study Rereading Chekhov. And certainly most of the essays in this volume contribute to finishing his portrait of a more relevant, more contemporary Chekhov. Surprising to many will be the discovery of the modem, forward-looking intentions of Stanislavsky in staging The Cherry Orchard. Unlike the suggestive comments or vague theoretical statements by the leading figures of Russian modernism, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Andrey Bely, Stanislavsky's production score for Cherry Orchard reveals, according to Nick Worrall, a complex. modernistic fusion of gay and serious dramatic elements and of grotesque and tragic effects that is far from the heavy-handed atmospheric and psychological realism so often associated with this director's handling of Chekhov. And it was the far from realistic features of The Cherry Orchard, fIrmly asserted in the most famous and obviously theatrical of its stage effects, the breaking of the string, that George Bernard Shaw both emphasized and interpreted for the British public in Heartbreak House, A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes. Miriam Handley suggests in her essay on Shaw's Modem Drama, 42 (Winter 1999) 471 472 RALPH LlNDHEIM play how he employed sound to chasten actors, directors, and audiences for their lazy acceptance of commonplaces and for their simplistic reduction of the Russian playwright's vision. It was Shaw's insight into the play's theatricality and the broad, symbolic spectrum of its meanings, therefore, and the translation of his understanding into tenns more accessible to his own audience , that has been imitated by so many of the memorable productions of Chekhov in the rest of the century. Giorgio Strehler's gorgeous production of Cherry Orchard, about which Pia Kleber writes, is famous not only for ils striking set, costumes, and children 's toys, including a model train, but also for Ihe wit and vitality that Strehler and his Italian actors transplanted from commedia dell'arte into the Russian comedy and for the sociopolitical and meta-aesthetic images and problems at the heart of modem Italian drama that the director explicitly deployed in order to make more immediate the impact of Chekhov's work on an Italian audience. Here a major problem for any Chekhov production outside of Russia surfaces: the need not just 10 translate the playwright's words but to deploy reverberant, familiar variants of the central motifs and themes explored in the foreign play. The words written by the playwright are not, however, so flexible, and there is a limit to how far, as David Krause puts it so forthrightly, the dramatist's language and style can be manipulated for purposes other than his own. A contemporary translator like Brian Friel may have his own nationalist agenda and may legitimately suspect that the audience shares his anti-colonial concerns and welcomes a contemporary adaptation of a Chekhovian original that highlights these issues, some of which are linguistic. But how much liberty is the translator to be allowed? How far from the diction, syntax, metre, and rhythm of the characters' Russian words can the new players roam in other languages? Even the length of a character's lines cannot be increased or decreased without significant damage, and what happens if a significant linguistic trait of the work is entirely overlooked? Future studies of various translations of Three Sislers should pay more attention to the unusual language of the play shared by so many...