SWAN SONG

by Anton Checkov

Translated From The Russian, With An Introduction By Marian Fell

Contents

INTRODUCTION

ANTON TCHEKOFF

THE last years of the nineteenth century were for Russia tinged with doubt
and gloom. The high-tide of vitality that had risen during the Turkish war
ebbed in the early eighties, leaving behind it a dead level of apathy
which lasted until life was again quickened by the high interests of the
Revolution. During these grey years the lonely country and stagnant
provincial towns of Russia buried a peasantry which was enslaved by want
and toil, and an educated upper class which was enslaved by idleness and
tedium. Most of the “Intellectuals,” with no outlet for their energies,
were content to forget their ennui in vodka and card-playing; only the
more idealistic gasped for air in the stifling atmosphere, crying out in
despair against life as they saw it, and looking forward with a pathetic
hope to happiness for humanity in “two or three hundred years.” It is the
inevitable tragedy of their existence, and the pitiful humour of their
surroundings, that are portrayed with such insight and sympathy by Anton
Tchekoff who is, perhaps, of modern writers, the dearest to the Russian
people.

Anton Tchekoff was born in the old Black Sea port of Taganrog on January
17, 1860. His grandfather had been a serf; his father married a merchant’s
daughter and settled in Taganrog, where, during Anton’s boyhood, he
carried on a small and unsuccessful trade in provisions. The young
Tchekoff was soon impressed into the services of the large,
poverty-stricken family, and he spoke regretfully in after years of his
hard-worked childhood. But he was obedient and good-natured, and worked
cheerfully in his father’s shop, closely observing the idlers that
assembled there, and gathering the drollest stories, which he would
afterward whisper in class to his laughing schoolfellows. Many were the
punishments which he incurred by this habit, which was incorrigible.

His grandfather had now become manager of an estate near Taganrog, in the
wild steppe country of the Don Cossacks, and here the boy spent his
summers, fishing in the river, and roving about the countryside as brown
as a gipsy, sowing the seeds of that love for nature which he retained all
his life. His evenings he liked best to spend in the kitchen of the
master’s house among the work people and peasants who gathered there,
taking part in their games, and setting them all laughing by his witty and
telling observations.

When Tchekoff was about fourteen, his father moved the family to Moscow,
leaving Anton in Taganrog, and now, relieved of work in the shop, his
progress at school became remarkable. At seventeen he wrote a long
tragedy, which was afterward destroyed, and he already showed flashes of
the wit that was soon to blaze into genius.

He graduated from the high school at Taganrog with every honour, entered
the University of Moscow as a student of medicine, and threw himself
headlong into a double life of student and author, in the attempt to help
his struggling family.

His first story appeared in a Moscow paper in 1880, and after some
difficulty he secured a position connected with several of the smaller
periodicals, for which, during his student years, he poured forth a
succession of short stories and sketches of Russian life with incredible
rapidity. He wrote, he tells us, during every spare minute, in crowded
rooms where there was “no light and less air,” and never spent more than a
day on any one story. He also wrote at this time a very stirring
blood-and-thunder play which was suppressed by the censor, and the fate of
which is not known.

His audience demanded laughter above all things, and, with his deep sense
of the ridiculous, Tchekoff asked nothing better. His stories, though
often based on themes profoundly tragic, are penetrated by the light and
subtle satire that has won him his reputation as a great humourist. But
though there was always a smile on his lips, it was a tender one, and his
sympathy with suffering often brought his laughter near to tears.

This delicate and original genius was at first subjected to harsh
criticism, which Tchekoff felt keenly, and Trigorin’s description in “The
Sea-Gull” of the trials of a young author is a cry from Tchekoff’s own
soul. A passionate enemy of all lies and oppression, he already
foreshadows in these early writings the protest against conventions and
rules, which he afterward put into Treplieff’s reply to Sorin in “The
Sea-Gull”: “Let us have new forms, or else nothing at all.”

In 1884 he took his degree as doctor of medicine, and decided to practise,
although his writing had by now taken on a professional character. He
always gave his calling a high place, and the doctors in his works are
drawn with affection and understanding. If any one spoke slightingly of
doctors in his presence, he would exclaim: “Stop! You don’t know what
country doctors do for the people!”

Tchekoff fully realised later the influence which his profession had
exercised on his literary work, and sometimes regretted the too vivid
insight it gave him, but, on the other hand, he was able to write: “Only a
doctor can know what value my knowledge of science has been to me,” and
“It seems to me that as a doctor I have described the sicknesses of the
soul correctly.” For instance, Trigorin’s analysis in “The Sea-Gull” of
the state of mind of an author has well been called “artistic diagnosis.”

The young doctor-writer is described at this time as modest and grave,
with flashes of brilliant gaiety. A son of the people, there was in his
face an expression that recalled the simple-hearted village lad; his eyes
were blue, his glance full of intelligence and kindness, and his manners
unaffected and simple. He was an untiring worker, and between his patients
and his desk he led a life of ceaseless activity. His restless mind was
dominated by a passion of energy and he thought continually and vividly.
Often, while jesting and talking, he would seem suddenly to plunge into
himself, and his look would grow fixed and deep, as if he were
contemplating something important and strange. Then he would ask some
unexpected question, which showed how far his mind had roamed.

Success was now rapidly overtaking the young author; his first collection
of stories appeared in 1887, another one in the same year had immediate
success, and both went through many editions; but, at the same time, the
shadows that darkened his later works began to creep over his
light-hearted humour.

His impressionable mind began to take on the grey tinge of his time, but
much of his sadness may also be attributed to his ever-increasing ill
health.

Weary and with an obstinate cough, he went south in 1888, took a little
cottage on the banks of a little river “abounding in fish and crabs,” and
surrendered himself to his touching love for nature, happy in his passion
for fishing, in the quiet of the country, and in the music and gaiety of
the peasants. “One would gladly sell one’s soul,” he writes, “for the
pleasure of seeing the warm evening sky, and the streams and pools
reflecting the darkly mournful sunset.” He described visits to his country
neighbours and long drives in gay company, during which, he says, “we ate
every half hour, and laughed to the verge of colic.”

His health, however, did not improve. In 1889 he began to have attacks of
heart trouble, and the sensitive artist’s nature appears in a remark which
he made after one of them. “I walked quickly across the terrace on which
the guests were assembled,” he said, “with one idea in my mind, how
awkward it would be to fall down and die in the presence of strangers.”

It was during this transition period of his life, when his youthful
spirits were failing him, that the stage, for which he had always felt a
fascination, tempted him to write “Ivanoff,” and also a dramatic sketch in
one act entitled “The Swan Song,” though he often declared that he had no
ambition to become a dramatist. “The Novel,” he wrote, “is a lawful wife,
but the Stage is a noisy, flashy, and insolent mistress.” He has put his
opinion of the stage of his day in the mouth of Treplieff, in “The
Sea-Gull,” and he often refers to it in his letters as “an evil disease of
the towns” and “the gallows on which dramatists are hanged.”

He wrote “Ivanoff” at white-heat in two and a half weeks, as a protest
against a play he had seen at one of the Moscow theatres. Ivanoff (from
Ivan, the commonest of Russian names) was by no means meant to be a hero,
but a most ordinary, weak man oppressed by the “immortal commonplaces of
life,” with his heart and soul aching in the grip of circumstance, one of
the many “useless people” of Russia for whose sorrow Tchekoff felt such
overwhelming pity. He saw nothing in their lives that could not be
explained and pardoned, and he returns to his ill-fated, “useless people”
again and again, not to preach any doctrine of pessimism, but simply
because he thought that the world was the better for a certain fragile
beauty of their natures and their touching faith in the ultimate salvation
of humanity.

Both the writing and staging of “Ivanoff” gave Tchekoff great difficulty.
The characters all being of almost equal importance, he found it hard to
get enough good actors to take the parts, but it finally appeared in
Moscow in 1889, a decided failure! The author had touched sharply several
sensitive spots of Russian life—for instance, in his warning not to
marry a Jewess or a blue-stocking—and the play was also marred by
faults of inexperience, which, however, he later corrected. The critics
were divided in condemning a certain novelty in it and in praising its
freshness and originality. The character of Ivanoff was not understood,
and the weakness of the man blinded many to the lifelike portrait.
Tchekoff himself was far from pleased with what he called his “literary
abortion,” and rewrote it before it was produced again in St. Petersburg.
Here it was received with the wildest applause, and the morning after its
performance the papers burst into unanimous praise. The author was
enthusiastically feted, but the burden of his growing fame was beginning
to be very irksome to him, and he wrote wearily at this time that he
longed to be in the country, fishing in the lake, or lying in the hay.

His next play to appear was a farce entitled “The Boor,” which he wrote in
a single evening and which had a great success. This was followed by “The
Demon,” a failure, rewritten ten years later as “Uncle Vanya.”

All Russia now combined in urging Tchekoff to write some important work,
and this, too, was the writer’s dream; but his only long story is “The
Steppe,” which is, after all, but a series of sketches, exquisitely drawn,
and strung together on the slenderest connecting thread. Tchekoff’s
delicate and elusive descriptive power did not lend itself to painting on
a large canvas, and his strange little tragicomedies of Russian life, his
“Tedious Tales,” as he called them, were always to remain his
masterpieces.

In 1890 Tchekoff made a journey to the Island of Saghalien, after which
his health definitely failed, and the consumption, with which he had long
been threatened, finally declared itself. His illness exiled him to the
Crimea, and he spent his last ten years there, making frequent trips to
Moscow to superintend the production of his four important plays, written
during this period of his life.

“The Sea-Gull” appeared in 1896, and, after a failure in St. Petersburg,
won instant success as soon as it was given on the stage of the Artists’
Theatre in Moscow. Of all Tchekoff’s plays, this one conforms most nearly
to our Western conventions, and is therefore most easily appreciated here.
In Trigorin the author gives us one of the rare glimpses of his own mind,
for Tchekoff seldom put his own personality into the pictures of the life
in which he took such immense interest.

In “The Sea-Gull” we see clearly the increase of Tchekoff’s power of
analysis, which is remarkable in his next play, “The Three Sisters,”
gloomiest of all his dramas.

“The Three Sisters,” produced in 1901, depends, even more than most of
Tchekoff’s plays, on its interpretation, and it is almost essential to its
appreciation that it should be seen rather than read. The atmosphere of
gloom with which it is pervaded is a thousand times more intense when it
comes to us across the foot-lights. In it Tchekoff probes the depths of
human life with so sure a touch, and lights them with an insight so
piercing, that the play made a deep impression when it appeared. This was
also partly owing to the masterly way in which it was acted at the
Artists’ Theatre in Moscow. The theme is, as usual, the greyness of
provincial life, and the night is lit for his little group of characters
by a flash of passion so intense that the darkness which succeeds it seems
well-nigh intolerable.

“Uncle Vanya” followed “The Three Sisters,” and the poignant truth of the
picture, together with the tender beauty of the last scene, touched his
audience profoundly, both on the stage and when the play was afterward
published.

“The Cherry Orchard” appeared in 1904 and was Tchekoff’s last play. At its
production, just before his death, the author was feted as one of Russia’s
greatest dramatists. Here it is not only country life that Tchekoff shows
us, but Russian life and character in general, in which the old order is
giving place to the new, and we see the practical, modern spirit invading
the vague, aimless existence so dear to the owners of the cherry orchard.
A new epoch was beginning, and at its dawn the singer of old, dim Russia
was silenced.

In the year that saw the production of “The Cherry Orchard,” Tchekoff, the
favourite of the Russian people, whom Tolstoi declared to be comparable as
a writer of stories only to Maupassant, died suddenly in a little village
of the Black Forest, whither he had gone a few weeks before in the hope of
recovering his lost health.

Tchekoff, with an art peculiar to himself, in scattered scenes, in
haphazard glimpses into the lives of his characters, in seemingly trivial
conversations, has succeeded in so concentrating the atmosphere of the
Russia of his day that we feel it in every line we read, oppressive as the
mists that hang over a lake at dawn, and, like those mists, made visible
to us by the light of an approaching day.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE
PRINCIPAL WORKS OF ANTON TCHEKOFF

THE SWAN SONG

CHARACTERS

VASILI SVIETLOVIDOFF, a comedian, 68 years old
NIKITA IVANITCH, a
prompter, an old man

The scene is laid on the stage of a country theatre, at night, after
the play. To the right a row of rough, unpainted doors leading into the
dressing-rooms. To the left and in the background the stage is encumbered
with all sorts of rubbish. In the middle of the stage is an overturned
stool.