In Our Time - Chekhov

Episode Date: March 14, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Anton Chekhov. Born in 1860, Chekhov trained as a doctor and for most of his adult life divided his time between medicine and writing. Best known for plays including The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, he is also celebrated today as one of the greatest of short story writers. His works are often powerful character studies and chronicle the changing nature of Russian society in the late nineteenth century.With:Catriona Kelly Professor of Russian at the University of OxfordCynthia Marsh Emeritus Professor of Russian Drama and Literature at the University of NottinghamRosamund Bartlett Founding Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation and former Reader in Russian at the University of Durham.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, a little over a century ago, the Times Literary Supplement reviewed the first English translation of plays by Anton Chekhov. The reviewer wrote, Chekhov died some eight years ago, not much over 40 years of age. loved and admired at last by his countrymen

after the artistic theatre at Moscow rescued him from oblivion and contempt. Will he attain to love and admiration in England? We believe not. History has proved that verdict wrong. Today, Chekhov's one of the most popular playwrights in the world, said to be rivaled only by Shakespeare in the number of performances his works receive.

But he was also one of the 19th century's great short storywriters. In his brief life, he worked as a doctor, overcoming early literary setbacks, who become one of Russia's best-loved, most perceptive and influential writers. With me to discuss the life and work of Anton Chekhov are Katrina Kelly, Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, Cynthia Marsh, Emeritus Professor of Russian Drama and Literature at the University of Nottingham,

and Rosamund Bartlett, founding director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation and former reader in Russian at the University of Durham. Katrina Kelly Tolstoy was born in Southern... I'm going to start that again. That's what it says here. Well, there you go. Let's just go back to the start. Chekhov was born in southern Russia in 1860.

Would you give us a sketch of the country he was born into? Yes, I've got one caveat to begin with, which is that, like all interesting writers, Chekhov refracts his own time in quite an idiosyncratic way. And to give one example of how that works, his friend Alexei Sovorin records that when they first visited Italy, Shekhov wasn't remotely interested. in the famous site. Instead, he was interested in the kind of songs on the streets,

the way that Hall Porter's sort of handled luggage. I mean, that sort of microscopic detail. But we do need a sort of macro sketch of the time. And I think the things that are important, I mean, it was a period that in some ways, well, very varied, of course, because one year after Chechhoff was born, where the serfs are emancipated. So this starts Russia on the very rapid path to modernisation, which characterises the period up to the revolution. And on the other hand, when Chechhoff was in his early 20s, Alexander II was assassinated, and that introduces a period of really quite severe political repression. I mean, not severe political repression compared with what had been going on under Nicholas I.

But nevertheless, a period where people felt that things were very stagnant, I mean, despite the fact that the country was developing fast economically. So that's the outline. I mean, things that are particularly relevant to Chekhov include the rise of the professions. I mean, the fact that being a doctor is one thing in the early 19th century very much a sore bones and it becomes one of them lead professions. The rise of the Russian intelligentsia, so the development of these famous journals, the so-called thick journals of the journals that are publishing politics insofar as they could get away with it, general social commentary and literature alongside that. And many of Chechhov's most famous stories were published. in Russian thought, which is one of the lead journals of the period. And that's one of the marking points of the late 90th century,

the great flowering of Russian literature. I mentioned Tolstoy inadvertently at the beginning, but there was Dostoev, and Grigorovic, and on and on, it went, Lermontov. That's a bit earlier, though. So, I mean, I think that one of the things is that in the 1890s, people felt that they'd hit a bit of a plateau. And so Chekhov is writing in between the sort of Russian realist golden age, which is the 1860s, 1870s, and the rise of the Russian modernist movement proper,

which is the 1900s and 1910. But the fact he's writing after it, my point is that he's influenced by it. He's taking on these writers. I think negatively influenced in some ways. I mean, when you look at his relationship with Tolstoy and Togyniav, I mean, I think it's quite possible that Rosamund and Sinti will want to argue about this, but I certainly see him as sort of taking Torgenev and Tostoi's starting points and arguing with them, and not in a very overt.

Yeah, but that's an influence, isn't it? Yes, but I mean, I think there's a lot that differs in... Of course there are differences, but he's influenced by Tolstor. I think he says something in fact that to be a writer at the time of Tolstoy is to be enough of a writer. Yes, but on the other hand, he also said, I mean, it depends on the context. Of course, he's varied that Tolstoy irritates him because he writes about lots of subjects he doesn't really know about, and of course Chechhov, by implication, writes about things that he doesn't know about.

And, I mean, I think that tradition, the realist tradition of write what you know is something that, I don't know whether Chekhov started it, but he was right there. So what we're used to about people kind of working their passage across the Atlantic and then writing a book about it. I mean, Chekhov is very much in that tradition. Yes. Rosamund Bartlett, as we know, he was born in 1860. Would you tell us about his family and his early life?

Yes. Chekhov was born in the southern city of Tagun Rog, down on the Azov Sea, and not too far from the Crimea where he'd end up at the end of his life. and he was born into a rather unusual family for a future writer because his father was a merchant, and it's very important to understand how socially segregated Russian society was in the imperial period. The social classes were enshrined by law,

and it's rather different to the kind of social system of classes we have in our country, for example. And the merchants were really the most precarious of all these social classes. They had to prove that they had enough capital to have the privilege of being a merchant. Otherwise, they got sort of demoted. It was like a snakes and lattice. And Cherko's father was the manager of a grocery shop.

He was a terrible businessman. But by and large, the merchants had traditionally and historically done all their business with the Orient. So they were a very sort of closed section of Russian society too. They tended to keep their business within the family. it was very patriarchal. There were usually quite a lot of children, and De Chekhov was one of five children. And the way in which children were brought up

in Merchant of Feminist too was very disciplinarian. And Chekhov used to famously say, I had no childhood in my childhood because he had to endure beatings from his father, along with his brothers. He was forced to sing in the numerous church choirs that his father organised because the merchants were also

usually very, very devout. And the one sort of great good quality about Chekhov's father, who was a fairly limited man, he really believed in education. And the other great privilege of being a merchant was that you could send your sons, at least, to the gymnasia. This is the state

school, and they had a very rigid and rather stuffy curriculum of classical languages. However, the Tagunrog School, because Taganrog was a way more interesting city than we might expect for a provincial Russian town. It was the oldest of these state schools in southern Russia. And indeed, Tagunrog was a really quite interesting place to grow up. I mean, in a lot of biographies of Cherkov, you read that, you know,

it was just a provincial dusty town. But Catherine the Great had settled a lot of Greeks along the southern seaboard in the hopes of making Constantinople Greek again. and she'd given them tax break. So it was way more cosmopolitan. And Tagunrog was also the most important Russian port in the 90th century. So way more interesting than perhaps we might think. But to centre a bit more on Chekhov's family

and particularly his relationship with his father, who beat him, who was a severe Orthodox Christian and sent them to church, they sang in church and so on and so forth. But he was the son of a serf. And it's difficult to get a grip in English class towns, but I've read people who are people spoken to him as a working class life. Does that have any relevance that phrase to what Czechos background was? Well, it was not so much, yeah, I don't know if we'd associated with working class.

I think that would be sort of one tier down. I think the merchants saw themselves as slightly above that. But he was a sort of, he just was a fingernail merchant, and as soon as he got his fingernails on it, he slipped off it and went badly broke and fled to Moscow, to escape his creditors, leaving behind Chekhov and to look after one of his brothers. Well, he just got out of the way in Moscow. But Chekhov's day to finish his education in Tagunrog.

That's right. And in fact, that was probably the best years of his life because he was free to do what he wanted. And as we know, one of the other great things about Tagun Rog, there was a theatre there. There was also a big Italian population. And the Italians had built a little theatre in the 1860s. And when Chekhov joined his parents,

must go to the medical school. That's when he started to write. Can you tell us just about the beginnings of his writing and why he took it up? Yeah, he never planned to be a writer. He always thought he was going to be a serious doctor. And yet he found, because his two older brothers were wasterels, that he was very soon in the position of being the one providing for the family.

And so he started writing funny little stories to keep his family going. And his father was pretty hopeless at this stage. So he was really the sort of head of the family looking after his mother and his sister and his younger brother. And so he started writing tiny little vignettes and sketches for the new journals which were cropping up in Moscow. There were numerous.

And his stories weren't there? It wasn't there scores and hundreds even, weren't there? He was dashing them off between one of mansions between looking at operations. Yes, he wrote several stories a week. And of course he had a deadline and he had a word limit. And at that stage... And he had a necessity to please the audience,

or he didn't get commissioned for the next one. Absolutely, and he would hear in the back page of these journals whether his story had been accepted for the next issue or not. So, yes, he had to make people laugh, otherwise he wouldn't have succeeded. Curious, isn't it? I mean, I'm a curious beginning for a man who's now held in such an august position that merely writing for cash on the back of a mag while he was finishing his medical studies. But it meant he kept his lack of pretentiousness.

Yes. Cynthia, we've heard a little bit about Taganrog, which seems to be an exceptional Russian provincial city. Provincial cities in general, Chekhov hammers in a lot of his work, but not Tag and Rock. Can you just develop what Rosamund said a little bit about it? Yes, I think apart from the gymnasium, which was really the making of Chekhov in the kind of classical, rigorous education that it provided.

And I think we have to remember, too, that one of the reasons that his father was so keen that his boys had an education and that they could then aspire to higher education would mean that they wouldn't be conscripted into the army. So I think that is a really important point to bear in mind. Now, as well as the grammar school itself, the public library was an important institution in Taganrog

and much later in his life, Chekhov devoted a lot of time to improving its facilities. But I think it's quite clear that he made excellent use of it, especially in those years when he was left in Taganrog by the family who'd gone. off to Moscow. With his brother. With his brother.

It's important. I'm not just being, because he was a looker after, wasn't it? He looked after his family. He looked after people, particularly his family. And he was looking after his brother

in Tag and Rock, and there was a theatre. There was a theatre. And I think it was one of the few places of entertainment for the young people of Tag androg. And there was quite a consensus of opinion among the boys

at the grammar school, that the theatre was a good place to be, not for the reasons that they necessarily wanted to acquire an education in theatre contemporary to the time, but because, of course, they could be fans of the actresses, they could engage in the gossip that was going on backstage and so on. Now, what would he have seen at that theatre, I think,

is an interesting point to bear in mind. And I'm not going to run into a whole list of different authors, but I think I can characterise, yes. I think one of the things to remember about the repertoire in Russia at that point, this is the 80s, that is, that is that over a half of it was translated theatre. So as well as the Russian classics like Gorgul, Astrovsky in particular, who was still very, very popular,

they would have been watching French boulevard theatre translated into Russian, German romantic dramas, and above all, I think, Shakespeare. So where people find connections between Czechos writing and Shakespeare, that comes from a very, very early experience. And there's one interesting thing that he also saw, he also watched operetta and musicals, and for example he saw La Belle Elen, and that kind of tied in with his classical education

in Greek theatre as well. So all these things are in the crucible, they're in the melting pot at this early point. And the ladies on stage, which we will come to, but we mustn't forget that he had a life, and he was a handsome... I always thought he was a rather slight Edwardian figure as sort of transmitted by Edwardian Rer.

readers and raptures. Six foot one we discover a hearty chap with... Extraordinary so, yes, I think. I think that's his British reputation, if I may say. What's the previous one? The previous one that he's rather ascetic and held in and... It's a scholarly chap. He didn't cause much fuss and except do these players

from the back of his hand or something like that. It doesn't like that at all. Not at all. Good, let's explode that one. He really came into his own in Moscow in that respect when he began to mix. His two older brother, One was a painter, and he, Nikolai, to whom he was particularly close.

And Nikolai introduced him, he was a scene painter, and he introduced him into the theatre world in Moscow in the 80s when Chekhov was studying to be, when he was writing the things that Rosalind was described. He just set this Moscow, because he went from Taganong, which was by provincial citizen, but he went to a place which was having, we had a big cultural buzz, not least all these magazines, publishing all these stories and theatres and. and actors and actresses and writers.

And he got into that, a sort of hedonism and an artistic circle for this. Must have been heady stuff for this bold, handsome young man. Oh, I think it was, and I think he enjoyed every minute of it. And as a result of that involvement, he began to write a column in a newspaper which dealt with the gossip that was backstage about celebrity.

There was a great attraction, I think, towards celebrity at this period. You mentioned earlier that I think it was, Katrina, who was talking about the 80s, and how difficult a decade that was. And I think you have to think of it in terms of comparing it with the 60s and 70s, which had been a period of reform, of liberation, of radical thought. All that was curtailed in the 80s because the Alexander III coming after the assassination really wanted to control what was going on in Russian intellectual life. And one of the ways that the gap was filled, where you'd had this extraordinary wealth of

intellectual life beforehand, was through a notion of celebrity and of theatre coming out of its shell. It was released from its imperial monopoly, the theatre, in 1882. And also Chekhov slipped under the wire, didn't he? He did. He was a quiet, somebody said he was a quiet subversive. And so he wasn't, they didn't set out the censors with that guns to mowing him down. He kept going. He not only kept going, he flourished at that time and people were sort of falling like,

his reputation grew and he became very young, centrally thought or brighter. Because he began to be, Grigoroovich wrote him a letter saying, you're really good, you can do better than these short stories, develop this and spend more time on it, worse that effect. Yes. Slipping under the Y is a very good way of explaining. I think he was a naturally modest person as a young writer. I mean, he was continually doubting his skills as a dramatist.

I mean, we don't really get a sense of confidence emerging from Chekhov as dramatist until much later. And so when he starts to understand what the theatre is about in Russia at that time. He takes on the writing of a play actually as a bet, almost. He's challenged by one of these new commercial managers in the Russian theatre to write, okay, if you disapprove of my play, write a better one than yourself.

Well, let's just take, we're not at the plays yet. Well, we are, because he's doing sketches. He's doing sketches at the beginning. He's doing everything, but just for the sake of neatness. Okay, fine. I'll just dig with the choice stories for a moment. Katerna, can you, we sort of, Fudged around Class, but got as near as we can,

because it's not the same as here, and it wasn't quite this, that and the other, but Class plays a big part in some of his writing. Can you unpack that of it? Well, I mean, one thing that was interesting, I mean, just sort of looking at an article that came out in a medical magazine about Chekhov as a doctor, was that he wasn't admitted to the best quality houses unless it was to give medical treatment of the servants.

I think that tells you quite a lot. In other words, there's a below-stairs attitude. I mean, whether you see him as a member of the merchant class or as the near transfer, the sort of next class down, the sort of urban free class, you have to remember his grandfather was a freed surf. I mean, in other words,

this is the family that's kind of tracked the rising classes and he was seen also in his time rather condescendingly as a writer of the middle classes. So this word... So you got in a neck both ways. Yes, exactly. No, so you can't get it right. I mean, as always happens.

I mean, those are the stupid people, the clever people are convinced only of what. Well, it's like Hillar Bellock with the people in between, you know, sort of whatever it is and mean, yes. So that, I mean, he, I think feels very sensitive about that. And, of course, he also is sensitive to the changes that are happening, famously the decayed land-owning classes. I mean, something that is really happening in the world around him, people having to sell their estates because they can no longer afford to run them in a commercial world. and then also people who are, from the point of view of traditional Russian intellectual values,

completely nondescript, and I think he describes them absolutely wonderfully. I mean, there just isn't a better writer who portrays unremarkable peoples than Chechhoff, and it's one of the great beauties of his writing. And also he goes for it in a very specific way, doesn't he, the peasants, which is a story about de peasants, and it scandalised Tolstoy. What did he say? It was a sin to the people. Yes.

Oh, sorry. Well, that's what he said. A sin before the people. Sin before the people, this description of the peasants. Because all story glorified them and idealised them and went out one day and did a bit of siding in a cornfield. But Chekhov knew about them and had lived among them. Well, yes, Chekhov's own view of this was,

I have peasant blood in my veins, and there's no way that I could idealise that. It's an extraordinary bleak, depressing story. Yes, and I think welcomed is perhaps the wrong word, but recognized as such by some at the time. It's a very controversial story. of kerfuffle that it stirs up. I mean, there is a tradition of the so-called bestialisation of the Russian people as a theme,

which goes back to the 1860s. So he is developing that. But the point is that Tolstoy is the dominant figure at the period when he wrote it. Can we return to this influence his business for a moment because nobody exists in a vacuum and we have these great figures around. We have censorship, but they're still around.

They're books around. Czechos Breeding Club. Can we just talk a little bit more about how Tolstoy, Tuggenia, particularly, and Lementov, and those three little do, played into him and what he took from them. Yeah, well, he obviously was a writer who was quite intimidated by that tradition because coming from where he did, you know,

it took him a long time. Well, Tolstoy's aristocratic, Tugania was a great landowner, so that was sort of, to be good, you had to be rich and, and landed and that may help to make you thought of as good when he wasn't either. Yeah, and he didn't have the leisure to write in the way that those people had.

And yet also you have to bear in mind that he's coming after those incredible decades of the big novels. And I think actually it's a slightly kind of David and Goliath situation because he, and this is where he is precisely the gentle subversive, which is the title of the article that Simon Carlinsky wrote about Chacon.

Very perceptive it is too. Because actually, in his own subtle way, he takes them on and he writes short stories. And rather than write huge great novels about the meaning of life and the existence of God, he actually writes stories. Which are about the meaning of life and the existence of God very often.

They are, but in a very bleak way. They don't seem to be about anything on the surface. That's the sort of clever thing about it. But, of course, he was incredibly influenced by earlier 90s century writers. Tolstoy said that he was Pushkin in prose and really every writer was influenced by Pushkin and he was also influenced the earlier period by Gorgal who was a great sort of comic satir. So all the parody of the early stories. Yeah, the situation comedies you find come from Gorgul and then the sort of lyricism, you know, he, Chekhov himself looked to

the story Taman in the novel Here of Our Time by Lermontov. I just haven't got quite a grip and we haven't got quite a grip, just well for a little bit. On this young man arriving in Moscow, it doesn't want to write, it's a way to make a living, to keep the family going, he takes to it. And quite soon, he's in great demand, he's making real money, keeps the family going, eventually he's buying things like a bigger place and eventually something in a country and so on. And the word hedonism has been mentioned.

Can you just give us a bit more of a sense of that? Well, actually, I would say that he wasn't so much of a hedonist. I think, yeah, he did certainly enjoy himself. but there was a strong ascetic streak to him as well. And he writes a very famous letter to his brother Nikolai, the elder brother, the artist, who's very wayward, saying, come on, you've got a talent. And he was very talented as an artist.

You know, pull yourself together, make something of yourself, honour your talent, and Nikolai didn't. And Chekhov, I'm sorry, he'd already contracted tuberculosis at that stage. And I think he was already, at that stage, beginning to actually become a little bit more, steer in Yeah But I can come back on that

I mean this is also a man who's a very keen gardener who's ordering plants for his country estate and then his Yalta garden later on and so I mean he acquires a country estate and that's two things I mean one of which is a sort of project

of being an improving landlord and he was a particularly good one and of course he worked as a medical practitioner and we're swinging back to the sort of young gardener I know look he died in his 40 we know at least well a kind of 33 affairs, a lot of them going for a long time and simultaneously.

He went to brothels. This is not condemnation. Just to get a bit of meat into it because he wrote about love, failed love. That's a lot of what he writes about. So I just want to bring that to the table as well because away it goes, being a gardener, being ascetic. You can be an ascetic and at the same time in art,

which he certainly is, and in his life go for a helpful other, which he certainly did. Is that right? Yes, I think he did. But he was a very responsible son. So I think there was a certain amount where he didn't totally dissipated life in the way that his brothers. Let's talk about this great trip to Sackalin,

which is a penal colony on the other side of Russia. And when he's writing these stories, if I get it right from, he still wants to write a great work to do with medicine. And he had a pseudonym writing the stories to say if his real name for the real work he was going to do as a writer on some great medical thing. You went to Sackling to do a report on the penal colony. He appears to have had an academic ambition, which is quite ironic, considered the way he treats professors later on,

to become a lecturer at the university. And to do this, he's got to write a dissertation of some degree. So this appears to be one of the motivations to the trip to Sakhilim. I think there are others, and I think one would go back to the discussion we were just having. I think there's a public check-o-in, a private cheque-loven. It's quite clear. I think that he wanted to escape Moscow at that point. Moscow was becoming too complicated, too many women, too many demands from the family,

too much demand on his writing skills. And as you say, there is this other serious side to the idea to write an academic dissertation. There's also, I think, in Chekhov, he's come from the south, he's settled in Moscow, but he wants to travel. The Great Russia, yeah. I think so. He wants to find something of... to understand the distance and the geography of Russia.

And I think that's something which becomes, and I'm sorry to bring the plays in again, but something that becomes absolutely crucial to the kind of concept that he has at the plays later on. Can you just tell listeners where Sackling is and what a journey it was from Moscow? It's a terrific journey. It took him nearly three months to get there.

It's on the far eastern seaboard of Russia. It's an island off the coast, which had been set up as a penal colony some decades before Chekhov decided to go. It was written up in former reports and so on. So he was intrigued, I think, to make a personal visit. And I think he was one of the very few people who made a personal visit. He thought he'd got official sanction and had the doors open for him.

But some of those arrangements fell by the wasteover when he finally got there. So to get there, he left Russia by train. He then went down the Volga and then took the... the river to Pemm, so on a steamer. Then he went over land, and then he crossed, I think he got, somebody correct me on this, if I've got some of this wrong, he crossed a whole swath of Russia in a cart. So, I mean, we're not talking about a simple train journey.

And you made a report, which was very disapproving of the place if he came back through Japan and by the Mediterranean and the Plexia. That sort of brought him to Russia. Let's start talking about the work. a bit more now. Katrina, one of his best-known short stories is The Lady and the Little Dog. Why do you think that was important and why do you think it's good?

I think there would be different opinions about what Jacob's most important stories were. I didn't say it was most important. I said why do you think that was because that was certainly one of the important ones. Well, for me it's important because partly because of the sort of anxiety of influence to use that sort of Harold Bloom term that we've been talking about. I mean, it's very clear that it bounces off Anakidena.

I mean, this is a sort of reduction in size terms of a similar plot in certain respects. I mean, in the most simple sense, because it's about an adulterous affair. And on the other hand, it's quite clear that the hero thinks that this is tragic, but that the hero is not prepared to think of it like that. I mean, in other words, that he takes a very sort of down-to-earth view of this. I mean, while she is crying her eyes out and sort of saying, oh, you're never going to respect me again. He's eating a slice of watermelon.

That's early on. Later, he's obsessed with her. Well, I mean, obsessed is probably... Well, he was the one he revives it. He goes to Moscow to see her again. Not to Moscow. He lives in Moscow. He goes to see her again.

He goes to see her in the provinces, and there's a famous scene which in the book of actually who very much admired the story mentions that there's this grey fence and, I mean, everything about the town is depressing. Her husband looks like an idiot. And there's a absolutely fantastic passage where he pursues her right through the theatre and Chekhov who usually writes these laconic sentences, he's famous for it,

suddenly writes this enormously long sentence with the pursuit going on. You have a sort of sense of pace building up. And it's somebody acting in a way that just couldn't have been predicted about really on the base of any detail that you've been supplied before. So again, an unremarkable person, I mean, a sort of a low-rent philanthropic, sort of, Philander, one could put it like that, and somebody whose main purpose in being in a seaside resort has been to have an affair,

it's made absolutely clear, and it's the only way he can think of passing the time. Well, I think it turned into something else, actually, but maybe I'm completely wrong. I've read it a lot of times, including again for this programme, but what do you think is, it's often priced for its technique, Rosamund, and it's been compared already by Katrina to Anna Karanina, which is, well, there you go.

So why do people say that? Why do they say that it's like... Why do they praise its technique? Well, Chekhov was a writer coming after these great novelists who was much more meticulous with writing with a short form. And there's an incredible musicality to his prose that is different to the predecessors in Russian literature. And he creates a kind of rhythm.

He doesn't use a very interesting lexicon. His words are rather plain. But the way he puts his prose together is very interesting. He combines short and long sentences, and often his paragraphs will end with three dots, which is a way of creating atmosphere. And in the story Gorsiev, that use of three dots is excessive. He uses them, I counted them, once, but 88 times.

But that was what caused Shostakovich to say that Goussiev is the most musical prose in all of Russian. literature. So it wasn't just that the stories had interesting moral conundrums, which left readers, in fact, provoke readers to think about what was going on for themselves, rather than being told what to think. But the way the story was written was also very interesting as well. He gives the reader an awful lot to do, which is good, because he moves so fast that you have to move fast with him or you don't get the real flow or punch of the story. I think that's one of the things. Is that right?

Yes, and he puts a lot into a very short... He's very impressionistic in his day and quite often I think with the plays, it's the same thing. There's an awful lot that's left unsaid. So the reader is there to actually fill that gap, and I think that was a good... Can we turn to...

Katrina, quick... Well, I know, I just wanted to say one thing quickly in case there isn't the chance to say it later, which is that, I mean, I think we also might want to think a bit about Chechhev's heritage. I mean, he's been incredibly important, for example, for the Irish short story. I mean, so Elizabeth Bowen, Sean McFielan, I mean, other writers, and William Trevor is a recent example. And for exactly the sort of reasons that was a

just been describing, and that sort of unsaidness is hugely important. And the rhythm and sometimes the rhythm of speech. So, for example, a mishap or literally an unpleasantness is something you read it. It's sort of 1880's stories that's quite flat. But if it were read aloud, it would be completely transformed. And that's the sort of character. of his work as well. Well, the reading aloud most prominently comes to the play as Cynthia. You've been very patient, Cynthia, much about these plays. So let's get cracking on the plays.

He didn't start, and the big scene, he didn't start very well. The Seagull came on, was a floppy left the theatre and said, I'm never going to write for the theatre again. And it was down to Stanislavski, really, in the end, to take a shortcut with the Moscow Arts Theatre, who took him on at a time, for the right reasons, with the right theatre, he found the right playwright, and then we have glory, don't we for it?

the plays. It's not quite as simple as that. I know it isn't, but we haven't got much time. No, I know we've got a little time. I think the first thing to think about is that staging a play introduces a whole new element into interpretation, if that's what you want to do with the play. You have the director's interpretation

and it's very clear that the art theatre in its figure of Stanislavsky and Chekhov didn't always get on. That's very well known. It's well documented. and Chekhov wasn't always entirely pleased with the interpretations of his plays that Stanislavsky produced.

If I could go back to that point about geography I made and how important it is to the plays, if we take Three Sisters, for example, Chekhov's sense that he'd got of the geography of Russia from that terrific journey is so much the focal point of Three Sisters. If you know the play, you know that they're marooned in a garrison town

somewhere in the Urals. And their one dream is to get back to Moscow. Now, that in itself is an ironic statement, I think, on Chekhov's point, because to him, Moscow was problems. So that, in a sense, when you talked about influence on Chekhov from other writers, he doesn't always wholesalely want to receive an influence or pick up good bits from other writers. He's often writing in reaction to them.

He's restating what they might have done or what they might have said and throwing it up in the air again and said, please rethink this point. So that when we come, let's stick with Three Sisters for a minute, his influences here are the plays of Ibsen. They're the plays of Ostrovsky's influence in quotation marks. And he's rewriting his own version of Russian reality to, as it were, counter what's gone before.

Yes, I do want to, I know I rushed it, but I'm not going to let it go. No. The context was very important. Yes. He had abandoned the serious theatre. More or less, no, he wasn't interested. He was interested, but no he was doing. Stanislavski came in with a new idea that there should be equality among actors, no stars,

that there should be historical research done, that nothing that wasn't accurate should be on the stage. He had a very clear idea, which fitted in with, not quite, that's why they had. arguments, but often collaborators have great arguments. That's not the end of there. It's the work that matters. They collaborated to produce some very great plays, in my view. And if you could just talk about what was happening inside the theatre

and those two were working together, that would be a help. Right. In terms of the Moscow Art Theatre, their agenda was to produce a good contemporary Russian repertoire. And of course, Chekhov was going to fit that bill, because as we've heard, he was writing about ordinary Russians in ordinary places, provincial Russia, in particular. He was, by the time he, okay, the first seagull was a flock, but then it became a success, even in that early production.

The first night was a big flop. Yeah, quite a while later, and that was when Stanislavski took it up. No, no, no. The original production actually improved and it garnered an audience. As did Uncle Vanya. It had a bad first night in its first production, but it was then abandoned. It was the art theatre who really brought us the true Uncle Vanya rather than the seagull.

They were always praised. for the Seagull. And of course, once they got that contemporary Russian drama, they weren't going to let Chekhov go. And I think the figure who hasn't arisen as a contemporary of Chekhov, who's so important is Gorki. And it's Chekhov who introduces Gorki to the art theatre.

And Chekhov's and Gorki's plays are being performed on the same stage. We get three sisters in 1901. We get Gorki's first two plays. The Lower Depths of the first one, and then the lower depths at the end of the year. And there's clearly a done. dialogue going on between Chekhov and Gorki at this point.

Now, what does... No, I just want to... No, we've got to move on. Katrina, you said, or Chekhovone said, Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. What did medicine? What do you see medicine giving to his writing? It's very interesting.

And, I mean, partly, of course, it gives him some characters. And often, well, they polarise. I mean, one type of character is the Zemstva doctors, so the people who are kind of harassed medical practitioners who might have been covering 200 square miles with a pony trap. I mean, really an extraordinary brief. And Aström in Uncle Vanya is a case in point. So the people who are at the end of their tether for understandable reasons,

I mean, dealing with epidemics, under-supported, I mean, with a drunken medical orderly perhaps alongside them, and it's quite clear that Czech have followed a lot of Russian doctors in thinking that medical orderlies were not an acceptable way to treat the population. And then there are the people who are the highly qualified academics, so right at the top end of the profession. And Chekhov shows their inner despair as well. So a boring story, which has got this deliberately provocative title,

is somebody who's looking back at his life right at the end of it and feeling the sort of emptiness of just about everything, including his commitment to science. I mean, sort of seeing himself as an empty theatrical performer, for instance. When we think of Chekhov, Rosam, when many people think of Chekhov, they think of the greatest, in the place. They think of the decaying estates, which were indeed happening at that time.

And the cherry orchid them being chopped down, mismanaged, being abandoned in them and abandoning themselves because of them. Can you just describe his relationship with that? Well, he himself was very interested in landowning. He got a little estate and worked it very carefully and helped the peasants and built the school and so and so forth. Can you describe the society that he was writing about and how well he was adapted to doing that?

Well, he had this great dream, yes, of having his own estate. And like Stanislavsky, he was also from the merchant background. Stanislavsky also wanted to sort of be in the nobility. So Chakoff, you know, bought actually a rather modest little bungalow because he couldn't afford any more. And he did so much work, you know, when he was living there, building schools. He never, he was able to live the land of the landowner. But he obviously is a writer who came into so many different,

social environments. His literally success catapulted him into their sort of intelligentsia. And when he was a younger writer, he would take his family off and they would have a dacha in the wing of one of

these older states. His family being his brothers and sisters. And his mother, yeah. At the very end did he marry and then he didn't want to live with he preferred to not to live with his wife who kept being an actress in Moscow. That's right, yes. So he'd seen the the estate from various levels.

And for him, it was a symbol of quite a lot of poetry, actually, the whole sort of way of life. It's like the cherry orchards in the play. It's sort of completely obsolete, and yet it's a thing of great beauty, and there's something sad about it going. So he writes rather wistful, elegiac stories, like the House of the Mezzanine about that.

This is a other elephant in the room, and I'm sorry to drop it in at this stage, but he knew from his early 20s that he had TB, and he held on until. he was 40 and considering the body of work, it's astonishing that and he was sometimes very ill and he recovered a bit and then he died and he was 40. Do you see any, or did it too late? Do you see a connection between his inevitable approaching early death and the writing he was doing with those plays? An intimate connection, I think. I think the knowledge that he was going to die

and of course he was a doctor, he knew exactly what was going to happen to him. It sort of sharpened his focus and the medical approach also gave him this incredible objective activity and I think yes it meant that he said it was just concentrated him his energies more on what he could do and using his

gifts in a sort of wise way I think I'd want to add though that I mean he's actually a very practical person and I mean he says in 193 to a friend I've got five years material left I mean I've got about 50 stories left and I mean this is what I'm going to do and I think he was what we'd now say

in denial I mean in other words that he He didn't want to think about dying. He wanted to think about what he was going to write. And the other thing, the great anxiety that keeps coming back is, and when I've done all that, my family will be set up. So there's this financial anxiety which is pushing him a lot of the time. Cynthia, final word about the plays and the connection with the tuberculosis. With the tuberculosis.

I would say that there's a private and a public check-off. And I don't think that the private... And similarly there's an artistic check-off and a practical chequev. And I think the artistic man was... totally dedicated, didn't allow anything to impede in that activity. To pick an earlier pointer up, if you look at the cherry orchard,

which I think in many ways is the play that's set the path for much of 20th century drama of a certain kind. I hate this bit, Cynthia. We're running out of time. I know, we are running out of time. There's so much to say.

There's so much to say we've only just scraped. Noelle, it's a good surface you've scraped. And a lot of good scraping has gone on. Thanks to Cynthia Mars, Katrina Kelly. and Rosamund Bartlett. Next week we'll be talking about Darwin's contemporary and even his challenger.

Alfred Russell Wallace. Thank you for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk slash radio 4.