Chekhov Days In Russia

A physician by profession, a man of letters by devotion and a divine playwright, Anton Chekhov took his fame with a touch of irony. Jokingly placing his contemporaries in “seats of honour” he used to call Leo Tolstoy “Celebrity No.1” Number 2 was Pyotr Tchaikovsky, whereas for himself he reserved number 877.

He would be quite skeptic about translations of his plays. He could not understand what make his vaudeville The Bear, because, he wrote ”a Russian vaudeville, no matter how masterly done would never make a success at the Paris stage with its hundreds of superb vaudevilles…” (Chekhov’s letter, August 12, 1889). The translation of The Cherry Orchard for Berlin and Vienna theatres also embarrassed him, thinking that the production would not be a success, “given there is neither billiards, nor students a’ la Trofimov” (A letter dated March 4, 1889). He did not believe that after his death his writings will be read and he himself will be remembered for just about seven years, not longer.

Chekhov died in the German city of Badenweiler where he was treated of tuberculosis. According to his bibliographers, shortly before his last gasp he said he was dying and asked for a glass of champagne. Without too much fuss he dried it up, turned on his left side and very soon he was dead. Anton Chekhov was then only 44.

The seven years that Chekhov programmed for the memories about him, turned into totally different dimensions lasting for more than a century. In the theatre of the 20th and 21st centuries he was the biggest playwright in demand. To quote The Guardian’s editorial “Chekhov at 150: Still the one to trust” “Of the many major European playwrights of the late 19th century, Anton Chekhov has lasted best of all. Of Chekhov’s contemporaries, Shaw is in eclipse, Ibsen somewhat becalmed, Maeterlinck almost forgotten. Strindberg and Wilde still cut it in their different ways. None of them, though, connects as directly with such a large 21st-century public as Chekhov, born 150 years ago this month, still does. His short stories, his most important works, are revered. His four mature plays are rarely absent from the stage… Shakespeare excepted, it is hard to imagine any other dramatist who inspires such loyalty.” (The Guardian, January 16, 2010) www.guardian.co.uk

The article in The Guardian appeared during Chekhov Days in London January 18 to 23, 2010. The organizer company, Hampstead Theatre, offered its audiences Chekhov’s own plays and those about him, channeling all the revenues to the authorities of Yalta, a Black Sea resort town, where Chekhov’s memorial house is in a lamentable state. www.hampsteadtheatre.com

Chekhov Days were held in many countries. The author of The Cherry Orchard has outgrown his Russian origin, becoming the world’s playwright. But the most important events devoted to his jubilee were staged at his homeland, Russia. Preparations for the celebrations had started long before the date. The theatre seasons of 2009 and 2010 with a number of premieres and theatre festivals almost in their entirety are linked to his name.

Festival “The Duel” was held in St.Petersbourg from November 19th to December 15th. www.baltichouse.spb.ru. The name was given it on the grounds that the organizer of the festival, theatre “Baltic House” challenged the participating theatres to “one-on-one duels” in their renditions of Chekhov’s plays. All told, shown at the festival were “duel” versions of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard and Ivanov. All the productions then became the subject of public discussions, then there was the scholarly practical conference “The Space of the Chekhov Theatre” and screenings of films and video recordings of Uncle Vanya’s previous productions by a number of theatres, starting from Laurence Olivier’s 1962 production to the 1986 televised version by the Vilnius State Youth Theatre’s TV version under Eimuntas Nyakrosius.

Every Russian city with a theatre recalled Anton Chekhov (and there are about 600 only state-managed theatres). The main place to celebrate was Moscow.

On January 26 Chekhov MXAT staged a party called “Our Chekhov”. Its literary part was based on the letters and documents written in the years when the newly created MXAT (Moscow Art Theatre) and the beginner dramatist “getting to know each other better, becoming co-authors of the art discipline that has changed both Russian and the world’s theatre.” www.mxat.ru

That same day a large-scale jubilee programme was launched to run throughout the next year. Its initiators were the International Confederation of Theatre Associations and the Chekhov International Theatre Festival from May 25 to July 30, to be held this year for the 9th time. All the info about the festival is available at the web-site www.chekhovfest.ru.

But as a matter of fact the festival started already in January. January 26 to 31 Chekhov Days were held in Moscow. The organizers of the event invited Moscow’s theatre-goers to watch a number of premieres of Chekhov plays, specially prepared for the jubilee, and January 28 the conference “A Word about Chekhov” was held, with actors, directors and playwrights from 30 countries in attendance. The conference was an unusual one. There was no – as it frequently happens – trite words and long tedious discourses, because “words about Chekhov” were spoken by outstanding theatre practitioners, who themselves had the first-hand experience of the mysterious phenomenon of Chekhov. Peter Stein, Decklan Donnelan, Daniele Finzi Pasca, Frank Castorf, Mark Zakharov, Andron Konchalovsky and many other stage directors of the world renown spoke about the enigma of Chekhov that is too hard – if possible at all - to unriddle. “I was under impression that it is a very complicated mission for a contemporary director to stage Chekhov,”- said Robert Sturua, for one. - “At least I am afraid I have failed to do this. It is possible to stage a play with an intriguing plot, but then there is something hidden deep inside it, that you just cannot figure out. If someone is able to guess Chekhov’s secret, their production will be a success. But notwithstanding this, I dream of producing The Cherry Orchard at my theatre in Tbilisi.”

The organizers of the conference plan to sum up its results in a collection of its proceedings in Russian and English that will definitely be informative and exciting reading.

As is known Chekhov’s attitude to jubilees was very ironical, so speaking about the pageants and important celebrations in the metropolitan cities attended by the Russian VIPs, we would like to say a few words about a rather unusual international event.

Yuri Alshits, an actor, stage director and the head of the AKT-ZENT centre in Berlin decided to celebrate the birthday of his favorite writer in his own way. In the final act of The Seagull one of the play’s protagonists, Nina Zarechnaya sounds dismal, saying she had gotten an engagement for the winter at a theatre in the town of Elets: “To go to Elets early in the morning tomorrow in the third class.., with these muzhiks (rednecks), and in Elets educated merchants will annoy me with their compliments…”

Using this passage as a starting point Yuri Alshits proposed that his friends, actors and stage directors from a number of European countries to follow the steps of Nina Zarechnaya and go to the little provincial town of Elets, intentionally in the third-class railroad cars. (The management of the Russian Railroads supported this romantic act, promising to give the company seats in the cars known in Russia as “common” ones.) But there was more to this trip than just its form, as all these people went to Elets to lay the foundation of a monument to a nameless Actress of a provincial theatre, the Actress who goes out on the stage of poorly heated little theatre every day being confident that what she is engaged in is a great deed for the human souls. Actors, actresses, directors and students from a number of countries, and shortly before the jubilee the 50-strong team left Moscow for Elets. www.lipetsktime.ru/news/2010-01-28/3445.htm

They had Chekhov on their minds, excerpts from productions in different languages, sketches of the would-be monument to Nina Zarechnaya and stones from their native countries to lay them in the foundation of the monument, the first one to the theatre profession.

The question why Chekhov is so loved nowadays – directors love to stage him, actors – to play, and spectators – to watch, was frequently on the minds of many festival participants, but the answers were diverse. Chekhov has a different “it” for everyone. Speaking about his unbelievable popularity in an interview with Radio Liberty www.svobodanews.ru Anatoly Smeliansky, a theatre historian and Dean of the Moscow Art Theatre School (MXAT) said that Chekhov does much to the contemporary theatre, even to such its novel directions as, for example, the documentary drama.

“The ways his people speak, communicating or imitate communication, or vice versa, passionately address one another but not hear the answers …all this has become poignantly actual, hitting the bull’s eye, coinciding with the development of the blogosphere. All his protagonists and personages are some sort of bloggers releasing their sad melancholy melodies and never hearing in return anything but roaring laughter and comments…Chekhov is one of the few Russian authors whom God made strong enough to liberate himself from any doctrines and ideologies. He gives a morphological description of the human being as a sort of certain stationary creature, a natural-born loser, and here lies a tremendous energy potential for describing our present-day life.”

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