the satirist, and Chéhov. Griboyédov’s comedy Woe from Wit (1824), recently translated into English under the title “The Misfortune of Being Clever,” was the last of the early Russo-European masterpieces. The reader feels it might have been written less than twenty years ago; in the strict sense of literary chronology, it actually was written twenty years ago.
The function of Anton Pávlovich Chéhov — this transliteration has been preferred to the less correct forms, “Tschekhoff,” “Tchekhof,” “Chekhof,” etc. — has been to pioneer the return of Russian literature into the normal path of European civilization. He was born in 1860, at Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, the grandson of a serf and the son of a grocer. He was taught Greek at a church school and then went to the local classical school. His father’s little shop came to grief and the whole family moved to Moscow, where he studied medicine at the University. He started writing, often forced to work in one room with his parents and brothers and their friends. In 1884 he qualified as a doctor, and in 1886 published a first book of stories that had already appeared in a score of newspapers and reviews. He practised as a doctor merely on occasion, but was a most prolific writer of stories and plays, in which the influence of French literature, especially de Maupassant, conflicted with the current ultra-nationalism. Some, in fact most, of his work is simply Russian, for example, The Three Sisters, of his plays, and The Duel, of his stories. At the same time there are innumerable short stories European in style and, among his plays, The Wedding and The Jubilee, here translated, show the best quality of his work and the service he was rendering Russian literature. His life was cut short by consumption, which forced him to leave the intellectual centres of the north for the warm, barbaric Crimea. In 1890, however, he travelled in Siberia to observe the conditions of the political and criminal exiles. A complete edition of his works was published in 1903, and in the next year he died quietly at Badenweiler in the Black Forest.
Chéhov is not a great writer; he is really a great journalist, and his work has no permanent importance. A French critic has compared his work with the cinematograph, he himself called it “sweet lemonade.” It was not vodka — there lies its significance. He was an embryo European, peculiarly of France, of the France he had come to know in his profession and his reading. Now that he had led Russian literature out of its purely Russian groove, the natural step was for it to become more and more European, without losing its national impulse. The decadence of such modern writers as Andréyev, Górki, and Sólogub lies in their refusal to recognise this fact; they continue to write in a narrow style, dwarfed even in that by the genius of their forerunners, uninspired by the renaissance of European solidarity that the war has revealed, the spirit that Von Vízin had and Griboyédov.
The first modern Russian author to work in the recovered tradition is Nicholas Evréinov, who is represented in this book by his own favourite plays A Merry Death and The Beautiful Despot. He is still a young man, being born on February 13,1879. He was educated at the aristocratic Imperial School of Law, in Petrograd, and afterwards studied music under Rimsky-Korsákov. The present translator had the pleasure of making his acquaintance at Petrograd last year and was given several volumes of his collected plays and parodies. Evréinov has not only an instinct for drama, but is professionally bound to the theatre, for, in addition to his plays, he is the author of several books on stage-craft. What this means in technique will be seen from A Merry Death, a masterpiece both of drama and of the theatre. It is the best Russian play since Woe from Wit, and, so European is it, its excellence could be reproduced and appreciated in any country. So far as the more recent works of Evréinov permit us to judge, he is unlikely to excel it in the future.
C. E. Bechhofer.
THE WEDDING [trans. by C. E. Bechhofer Roberts]
Characters
| Aplombov Jigalov Miss Zmewkin Dimba | Dashenka Mrs. Jigalow Yat Mozgovy |
Captain Revunov-Karayúlov
| M.C. Guests | Newnin Waiters |
The Wedding
(A brightly lit room, with a big table laid for supper. Around the table bustle waiters in frock-coats. The last figure of a quadrille can be heard. Enter Miss Zmewkin — accoucheuse, thirty years old, in a bright scarlet dress — Mr. Yat, and the Master of Ceremonies. They pass across the stage.)
Zmewkin: No! No! No!
Yat (following): Be merciful! Be merciful!
Zmewkin: No! No! No!
Master of Ceremonies (hurrying after them): Please, you mustn’t, you mustn’t! Where are you going? But the grand-chain, silvooplay. (Exeunt. Enter Mrs. Nastasia Jigalov, mother of the bride, and Aplombov, the bridegroom.)
Nastasia: Instead of worrying me with all your talk, you’d do better to go and dance!
Aplombov: I'm not Spinosa anyhow, to make cracknels of my legs. I'm a man of position and character, and I don’t find any distraction in empty pleasures. But this has nothing to do with dancing. Excuse me, Mama, but I don’t understand a lot of your behaviour. For instance, besides all the things for the house, you promised to give me your two lottery-tickets with your daughter. Where are they?
Nastasia: How my head aches! — If this weather keeps on, there ought to be a thaw.
Aplombov: You won’t wear my teeth out with talking! I found out to-day that your tickets were pledged at the bank. Excuse me, Mama, but only exploiters behave like that. Now, I'm not speaking from selfishness — I don’t want your tickets! — but from principle; I don’t let anybody deceive me. I’ve made your daughter happy, and, if you don’t hand me over those tickets to-day, I’ll eat your daughter with pudding! I’m a man of noble feelings.
Nastasia (looking at the table and counting the places): One, two, three, four, five ——
Servant: The cook wants to know how you order the ices to be served, with rum, with madeira, or without anything.
Aplombov: With rum. And tell the proprietor there’s only a little wine. Tell him to send up some Haut-Sauterne. (To Nastasia.) And you promised and we agreed that a general would be at the supper to-night. Where is he, I should like to know.
Nastasia: It’s not my fault, my dear!
Aplombov: Whose, then?
Nastasia: Andrew’s fault. Yesterday he was here and promised to bring a real general. (Sighs.) He can’t have found one or he’d have brought him. You don’t think we begrudge the expense? We grudge our children nothing. But, after all, what’s a general!
Aplombov: Well again, surely you knew, Mama, that this telegraph fellow, Yat, was running after Dashenka until I proposed to her? Why did you invite him? Didn’t you really know that lie’s an enemy of mine?
Nastasia: Oh, Epaminondas, what’s the matter with you? The wedding-day isn’t over yet and already you’re tiring me and Dashenka to death with your talking. What will it be like as time goes on? You’re wearisome, wearisome.
Aplombov:
