Ivanov : The Perils of Typicality

Disenchantment, apathy, the ready yielding to fatigue, deterioration of the nerves are the inevitable consequence of inordinate excitability, and such excitability is characteristic to an extreme degree among our young men and women. Take literature. Take the present times. – Socialism is one kind of excitement. But where is it? It is in Tikhomirov's letter to the Czar. The Socialists have taken wives and are criticizing the zemstvos. Where is liberalism? Even Mikhailovsky is saying that all the checkers are mixed up nowadays. – And what price all Russian fads? The war has tired us out, Bulgaria has tired us out to the point of irony, Zucchi has tired us out, so have operettas.

—Chekhov to A.S. Suvorin, 30 December 1888, Yarmolinsky 99¹

I'm frightfully bored with Ivanov. I can't read about it and I feel awful when people start giving ingenious explanations of it.

—Chekhov to A.S. Suvorin, 5 March 1889 298.

It was Turgenev who taught Chekhov that, in an age of censorship, objectivity could have the force of polemic without overtly disclosing its critical intents. In the appropriate rhetorical situation, objectivity can function as a mode of "hidden polemic," a crucial part of the weaponry of the ironist. Even if the objectivity of Turgenev's presentation did not always guarantee that provocative voices and attitudes would evade the censor's pen, the mask of objectivity was a subtle rhetorical tool for any writer concerned with social and political criticism.² Does Ivanov need to be recognized as a play exploiting the rhetoric of objectivity? Can one deploy a rhetoric of objectivity and yet remain committed to an ethics of objectivity? In polemical terms, objectivity has it limits, since, functioning as an ironic mode, its "non-statement" is a severe form of understatement – and, as such, subject to the vagaries of indeterminacy. It is the threat of such indeterminacy, I think, that leads Chekhov to create a play in which the objective is always in tension with the grotesque and the satirical: but understatement counterbalanced by statement still runs the risk of remaining indeterminate. Many modern productions and readings of the play assume that there is a limited form of polemic in the work insofar as it offers an objective, psychological case study of a social stereotype of the time, the "superfluous man" – a reading that was calculated to challenge the clichés of the time. But the polemic at work in Ivanov goes beyond mere psychologism. Ivanov is a political play that, as surely as Coriolanus, asks that individual diagnosis be read as sociopolitical and cultural diagnosis. Any claims of objectivity in relation to cultural diagnosis can rarely be made good, and today Chekhov would probably be found guilty of "hubristic objectivism."³ In theatrical terms, the play has already been found guilty of "hubristic objectivism" insofar as it has been subject to the ideological reprocessing associated with revisions, versions, and adaptations. But such treatments tend to assume that the play works solely at the level of individual diagnosis. To do justice to the play's polemical force, we need to recognize the extent to which the individual diagnosis is part of a cultural diagnosis. My argument will focus initially on the nature of the individual diagnosis and the terms in which it is presented.

There is a series of intriguing paradoxes at the heart of Ivanov. The play aims to be the last word on a national psychological type, while satirizing the whole tendency to read human beings as mere "types." Through the use of the commonest Russian surname as the title of the play, a contemporary audience would have been led to expect Chekhov to offer some kind of "hero of our time" piece, or at the very least, a play about a significant type. It is clear from his letters that Chekhov remained apprehensive that his protagonist would be summed up as that familiar, Russian literary stereotype – the "superfluous man." Yet, at the same time, he wanted to insist that part of the originality of his project was that he had summed up everything that had been written...