Unfinished Pieces: From Platonov to Piano

Unfinished Pieces: From Platonov to Piano DA VID ALLEN with MARCO GHELARDI Chekhov's Platonov has been plundered on a number of occasions by directors and playwrights, to create "new" works (such as Michael Frayn's Wild Honey) - but never, perhaps, so successfully as in Nikita Mikhalkov's 1976 film, Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano (Neokollchennaya p'esa dlya mekhanicheskogo piallino). Mikhalkov's screenplay, co-written with Alexander Adabashyan, eliminates a number of characters and strips the play of some its melodramatic excesses. It draws on a number of Chekhov's short stories for characters, themes, and dialogue, and it transplants motifs and devices found in the later plays. Platonov, for example, ends with the protagonist's death at the hands of his jilted lover, Sofya. Mechanical Piano, on the other hand, ends with a grotesque, failed suicide attempt. Platonov leaps into a river - only to find that it is too shallow to drown in. He is comforted by his wife, Sasha, in words that echo Sonya's final speech in Uncie Vanya: Misha, my darling. my husband. You're alive ... then I'm alive too. 1 love you so much, Misha. You're my whole world.... Misha, you're tired. You'll resl and we'll again be happy, and we'U live a long, long time and we'll be lucky. and we'll see a bright, new, pure life, and new, wonderful people who will understand us and forgive us. Onlyonc musllove ... love, Misha. As long as we love, we shall live a long, long time and be happy.I The new ending is at once "Chekhovian" and almost "Chaplinesque." The screenwriters, the Russian critic Zinovy Paperoy wrote, "have consistently sought to capture Chekhov's polyphonic blend of tragedy and farce.'" In interviews, Mikhalkov claimed that "the greatness of Chekhov lies in being anti-ideological and anti-pedagogical. His characters hurry in the search for answers which they never fInd."3 Similarly, Alexander Kalyagin, who played Platonov, has observed: "Making a Chekhovian film, we tried, above Modern Drama,42 (Winter (999) 595 DAVID ALLEN all, not to change his artistic method, his writing style. We know that any kind of declarations, pamphleteering slogans, the open, naked authorial judgement of people, events, deeds - these things were alien to Chekhov. He tried above all to make a diagnosis, to define the character of the disease."4 Both actor and director were repeating a standard line on Chekhov's work. The notion that he was not an "ideological" writer derives from comments he made in letters to friends. When Alexey Suvorin, for example, criticised Chekhov for failing to offer solutions to social problems in his stories, he replied, You are right to demand that an artist should take a conscious attitude to his work, but you are confusing two concepts: ansrvering questions andformltlating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an artist. There's not a single question answered in Anna Karenina or Eugene Onegin, but they are fully satisfying, simply because all the questions they raise are formulated correctly. It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but lei the jury answer them, each accord· ing to his own preference.5 This has been termed Chekhov's "great credo.,,6 But his avowed neutrality and refusal to offer solutions have been, at times, almost willfully misinterpreted to imply that he was an apolitical writer with no interest whatsoever in social or political issues. In fact, the absence of definite "answers" or a defin- . able ideological program in his work does not mean that Chekhov did not ask the "questions." An issue that taxed many writers and intellectuals in Chekhov's time was the so-called "peasant question." Chekhov himself made a number of signifi· cant contributions to this debate. Stories such as "My Life" ("Moya zhizn': rasskaz provintsiala," 1896) and "Peasants" ("Muzhiki," 1897) reflect the inequities and brutalities of peasant life. The following passage is from "Muzhiki": During the summer and winter there had been hours and days when it seemed that these people lived worse than beasts. Living with them was terrible; they were coarse, dishonest, dirty, drunken ... but alllhe same, they were...