A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  Hedda’s first and dearest dream had been to find contacts with life through the attractive young man of letters, Eilert Løvborg. That hope ended in driving him from her at the point of a pistol – not, as one eminent critic has said, “in the ostentation of outraged purity which is the instinctive defence of women to whom chastity is not natural.” Hedda drove Løvborg from her in disgust; disgust at the new aspects of vulgar sensuality which her curiosity about life had led him to reveal. She never denied it was her doing that he revealed these things; it was not her doing that he had them to reveal. They made her gorge rise. The man who had wallowed in that filth must not touch Hedda Gabler – certainly not fresh from the latest orgy. The effect ofthat experience, plus the conditions of her own life and upbringing, was to throw her into marriage with the least ineligible man she can find who is decent, and no one can deny that poor Tesman was entirely decent.

  The result was not peculiar to Ibsen characters. In one form or another, as we all know, it is a commonplace in the history of people whose nervous system generates more force than the engine of their opportunity can use up. Hedda speculates, like many another woman, on the opportunity politics would give to her husband, and, through him, give to her; but she is too intelligent to have much hope of Tesman in that direction. She is no sooner home from her boring honeymoon than she finds that a girl she had looked down on and terrorised at school – shrinking, gende Mrs Elvsted – has reclaimed the dissipated Løvborg. More than that, largely by her faith in him, she has helped him to write what they are calling a work of genius. The timid Thea Elvsted has actually left her husband and her home to watch over Løvborg, so that he may not fall into evil courses again. How on earth had it all come about? Hedda, by turns, worms and coerces the facts out of Thea; “He gave up his old habits not because I asked him to, for I never dared do that; but he saw how repulsive they were to me – so he dropped them.”

  As simple as that! None of those shady stories told to Thea – but the pretty little fool has his dreams in her keeping; she has helped to turn them into reality. And Hedda has lost him. For Hedda there would be “others.” The insinuating Judge Brack, with his aristocratic profile and his eyeglass, is already at the door – but never the man whose faith in his own genius, faith in life, had given Hedda the one respite she had known from mean standards, mean fears.

  Those had been times for Løvborg, too, of respite from his meaner self. Hedda’s passion for external material beauty was not the only kind of beauty that swayed her. Løvborg in his moods of poetic exaltation had given her, too, a glorious sense of freedom, of daring. She had her phrase for those high moods of his. It was the phrase that, with a truly Ibsenite irony, became famous in England in a totally different sense. When Hedda asks eagerly, “Did he have vine leaves in his hair?” she was not inquiring whether Løvborg was drunk with the fiery Scandinavian punch, but whether he had been tasting a diviner draught. She was using her symbol for his hour of inspired vision, which had had for her, too, its intoxication. Now she has lost all that – unless – unless she can break the hold of this irritating little goose. Thea had said she’d been so frightened of Hedda at school. Well, she should be frightened again!

  It is a commentary on actress psychology that though in those days I accepted, and even myself used, the description of Hedda as a “bloodless egoist,” I was under no temptation to play her like that. Here I was in debt to Ibsen’s supreme faculty for giving his actors the clue – the master-key – if they are not too lofty or too helplessly sophisticated to take it. Ibsen’s unwritten clue brought me close enough to the “cold-blooded egoist” to feel her warm to my touch; to see Hedda Gabler as pitiable in her hungry loneliness – to see her as tragic. Insolent and evil she was, but some great celebrators of Ibsen have thought more meanly of Hedda than the text warrants […]

  It is perhaps curious Ibsen should have known that a good many women have found it possible to get through life by help of the knowledge that they have power to end it rather than accept certain slaveries. Naturally enough, no critic, so far as I know, has ever noticed this governing factor in Hedda’s oudook, her consciousness of one sort of power, anyway – the power of escape. The reason men have not noticed the bearing this had on Hedda’s character and fate seems plain enough. Certainly the particular humiliations and enslavements that threaten women do not threaten men. Such enslavements may seem so unreal to decent men as to appear as melodrama.

  Ibsen not only knew better; he saw further than the special instance. He saw what we at the time did not; I mean the general bearing of Hedda’s story.

  4.4.6 William Archer, Letter to Charles Archer, 8 July 1891

  I have just been correcting the proofs of the last act of Hedda … The last act of Hedda quite thrilled me as it acted itself before me in the proofs. Miss Robins was really fine in it – she had moments of inspiration. I must tell you what poor old Joe Knight said to me one day. We were talking about Barrie’s Ibsens’s Ghost, which was produced on the afternoon before the last performance of Hedda. I said it was rather funny. He said: “Well, yes – but I assure you, Archer, at the point where Miss Vanbrugh changed from Thea into Hedda, and I saw the black figure and the long white arms glimmering through the darkness of the stage, the feeling of the real thing gripped me and thrilled me, and I could hardly resist going back that night and seeing it once more.” Certainly it was a big thing, that last act, and how it held even the densest of audiences! They always used to hiss Hedda at the lines “I did it for your sake, George”, and “I couldn’t bear that anyone should throw you in the shade” – and certainly Miss Robins was diabolically feline in those lines. What always fetched me most in her performance was a point in which she departed from Ibsen’s strict intention. It is where Hedda is sitting by the stove, absorbed in the contemplation of Løvborg’s having “had the will and the courage to turn away from the banquet of life – so early.” Instead of starting, where Brack says he must dispel her pleasant illusion, Miss R. used to speak three speeches: “Illusion?” “What do you mean?” and “Not voluntarily!” – quite absently, looking straight in front of her, and evidently not taking in what Brack was saying. She used to draw deep breaths of relief (“befrielse”), quite intent on her vision of Eilert lying “I skonhed” [beautifully], and only woken up at her fourth speech: “Have you concealed something?” Now the old min [Archer’s pet name for Ibsen] evidently didn’t intend this but it is one of those things I’m sure he would be grateful for, it was so beautiful.

  1

  Luigi Capuana (born 1839), an Italian novelist and dramatic critic, translated A Doll’s House into Italian. It was the famous actress, Eleonora Duse, who wished him to alter the last scene of the play; but she finally accepted and acted it in the original form.

  It so happens that two or three formal generalisations of Ibsen’s have recently been going the round of the press; but they are all taken from letters or speeches, not from his plays.

  Both of them, each in his and her own way, have seen in their common love for this house a sign of their mutual understanding. As if they sought and were drawn to a common home.

  Then he rents the house. They get married and go abroad. He orders the house bought and his aunt furnishes it at his expense. Now it is their home. It is theirs and yet it is not, because it is not paid for. Everything depends on his getting the professorship. (Ibsen’s note)

  This note is omitted in the Centennial Edition. It is translated from Else Høst, Hedda Gabler: En monografi (Oslo: 1958), p. 82.

  But, my heavens, Tesm. was unmarried. H.: Yes, he was. Th.: But you married him. H.: Yes, I did. Th.: Then how can you say that … Well now –

  5

  ANTON CHEKHOV: 1860–1904

  1 CONTEXT

  The conditions in Russia during Chekhov’s lifetime were quite different from those facing naturalistic dramatists elsewhere. The legislative and judicial as well as executive powers of government were embodied in an absolute monarch. Under the au
tocracy of the Czar individual liberties were far more restricted than in Western countries at the close of the nineteenth century, social divisions were more extreme and the vast mass of the people impoverished and illiterate. Indeed, up until the year after Chekhov’s birth the mass of the Russian population lived under a form of indentured slavery, serfdom only being finally abolished in 1861; and its effects were still working their way through society at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Even more than in England, there was censorship of the stage – both centrally and through official committees attached to major theatres – while any political writing was likely to be suppressed. Although official censorship had only been established in 1804, in 1848 the Czar took over personal control of the system, which forbade any representation of the Czar – causing the banning of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov – as well as any satire on the social establishment or state officials. Despite a certain arbitrariness (staging of Gogol’s The Inspector General was permitted because it apparendy amused the Czar), any form of overt social criticism was almost automatically censored; and among the more notable plays to be suppressed were Turgenev’s A Month in the Country and Tolstoi’s The Power of Darkness.

  From today’s perspective there seems to be a sharp divide between that era, and the Soviet state established by the October Revolution in 1917. Pardy perhaps because of the picture painted in Chekhov’s plays, the image of Russian life in the latter part of the nineteenth century seems one of comparative stability. In actuality Chekhov lived through a period of reform and reaction, assassination and repression. The social unrest, which was particularly violent in his student years, led up to the first revolution of 1905 shortly following his death.

  All this provides the background to his plays, although it is mainly expressed in mood and tone, and only very obliquely through the speeches of his characters. Similarly, the one brief autobiographical outline of his career completely omits any mention of political or social events, even if political awareness is clearly implied in his fact-finding tour of a penal colony. It is notable that the analysis of the Russian prison system, which came out of this, is the only one of his literary works specifically mentioned by Chekhov. However, this autobiographical statement – written for an album commemorating the alumni of the 1884 graduates from the Medical School of Moscow University, which had been agreed on at an 1899 class reunion that Chekhov attended – does define some of the principles on which his naturalistic plays were based.

  5.1.1 Anton Chekhov, Letter to Grigory Rossolimo, 11 October 1899

  Translated by Michael Heim

  I’m sending a photograph of myself (a pretty poor one, taken when my enteritis was at its worst) to your address, registered mail. My autobiography? I have a malady called autobiographophobia. It is real torture for me to read any details whatsoever about myself, to say nothing of writing them up for the press. I am enclosing several dates entirely unadorned on a separate sheet of paper. That’s the best I can do. If you like, you may add that on my application to the rector for admission to the university I wrote: The School of Medicine.

  […]

  Yours, A. Chekho

  I, A. P. Chekhov, was born on January 17, 1860, in Taganrog. I was educated first at the Greek school of the Church of the Emperor Constan-tine and then at the Taganrog gymnasium. In 1879 I entered the Medical School of Moscow University. I had a very dim idea of the university at the time, and I do not remember exactly what prompted me to choose medical school, but I have had no reason to regret the choice. During my first year of studies, I began publishing in weekly magazines and newspapers, and by the early eighties these literary activities had taken on a permanent, professional character. In 1888 I was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I traveled to the Island of Sakhalin and wrote a book about our penal colony and hard labor. Not counting trial reporting, reviews, miscellaneous articles, short news items and the columns I wrote from day to day for the press and which would be difficult to locate and collect, during the twenty years I have been active in literature I have written and published more than forty-eight hundred pages of novellas and stories. I have written plays as well.

  There is no doubt in my mind that my study of medicine has had a serious impact on my literary activities. It significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate. It also served as a guiding influence; my intimacy with medicine probably helped me to avoid many mistakes. My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard; I have tried wherever possible to take scientific data into account, and where it has not been possible I have preferred not writing at all. Let me note in this connection that the principles of creative art do not always admit of full accord with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented on stage as it actually happens. But some accord with scientific data should be felt even within the boundaries of artistic convention, that is, the reader or spectator should be made to realize that convention is involved but that the author is also well versed in the reality of the situation. I am not one of those writers who negate the value of science and would not wish to be one of those who believe they can figure out everything for themselves.

  As for my medical practice, I worked as a student in the Voskresensk Zemstvo Hospital (near the New Jerusalem Monastery) with the well-known zemstvo doctor Pavel Arkhangelsky and spent a brief period as a doctor in the Zvenigorod Hospital. During the years of the cholera epidemic (1892 and 1893) I headed the Melikhovo Region of the Serpukhov District.

  *

  If the absolute rule of an Autocrat – the Czar’s official title – was one dominant factor which distinguished Russia from the West in the late nineteenth century, the other unique element was the history of Serfdom. As indentured peasants, the serfs had been tied to the land and literally the property of the landlord or the state. They had been unable to own land (though this had been modified in 1848), subject to 25 years’ military service (reduced to 15 years in 1834) and liable to physical punishment by their owners (restricted by a law of 1856). Before its abolition Serfdom had been a significant source of social unrest. There had been major peasant uprisings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while during the half-century before 1861 there had been over 700 peasant disturbances, and 173 landlords or bailiffs had been killed. Even if this violence was not the sole cause of reforms, which modern historians see as primarily a tool used by the Czar to diminish the independence of the gentry, by 1881 at least 84 percent of former serfs had become owners of the allotments they had been cultivating before 1861. However, the fees they had to pay for “redemption” – advanced by the government at 6 percent interest over 49 years – were calculated on an inflated basis of rents and services owed under Serfdom, rather than the value of the land. The psychological impact of the abolition of Serfdom was immense, both on the gentry and the peasants. But the ex-serfs’ general conditions hardly improved. Although gradually entrepreneurs (such as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard) began to emerge from the peasant class and by the 1880s the process of industrialization had begun in Russia, as an early account of Daily Life in Russia indicates, nostalgia for the old system (typified by the servant Firs in Chekhov’s play) was common among the older generation.

  The widespread absence of any democratic rights, and lack of political equality meant that the position of women had far less prominence in Russia during the latter part of the nineteenth century than in Scandinavia or Western Europe. At the same time, under the feudal system female property owners had the same (restricted) rights as men. Perhaps as a result, while women characters are no less central in Chekhov’s plays, unlike other naturalistic dramatists there is nothing polemic in the way they are presented. Even so – as a survey on the status of women (conducted shortly after Chekhov’s death) shows – women’s access to education was at the mercy of arbitrary acts by the Czarist authorities, and although by 1900 they comprised
44 percent of the laboring population, their wages were so minimal that prostitution was an appealing alternative.

  Everywhere the oriental viewpoint has had its effect on the status of women. In general the standards of life are low; therefore the wages of the women are especially wretched … The Russian woman’s rights movement is forced by circumstances to concern itself chiefly with educational and industrial problems. All efforts beyond these limits are, as a matter of course, regarded as “revolutionary”… therefore they are dangerous and practically hopeless … In Bialystock, which has the best socialistic organization of women, the women textile workers earn about 18 cents a day; under favorable circumstances $1.25 to $1.50 a week. A skillful woman tobacco worker will earn 32 V2 cents a day. The average daily wages for Russian women labourers are 18 to 20 cents.

  (Dr. Kathe Shirmacher, The Modern Woman’s Rights Movement: A Historical Survey, 1912)

  These statistics illuminate the circumstances facing such characters as Varya in The Cherry Orchard. Being an adopted child, she is either the orphan of a peasant on the Ranevsky estate, or the illegitimate daughter of Gayev (Madame Ranevsky’s brother), and the only marriage open to her would be to one of the very few wealthy members of the peasant class. Refusing Lopakhin, her future is bleak.

  5.1.2 Henri Troyat, Daily Life in Russia: the Peasants

  Translated by Malcolm Barnes

  Once there had been two kinds of serfs: those who were tied to the soil (krepostnye) and those who were tied to the master (dvorovye). The dvorovye were not involved in agriculture, but served in the master’s house as porters, cooks, valets and coachmen. They could be sold at any moment and into no matter what conditions. The krepostnye, however, could not be removed from the soil they cultivated, and if the proprietor sold them properly, they passed under the authority of the purchaser without the boundaries of their fields being affected by it. Thus in the course of centuries the idea had taken deep root in the minds of the moujiks that the land was theirs, although their persons belonged to the master. The master could deprive them of everything except the land.1 When, on February 19, 1861, Alexander II promulgated the law emancipating the serfs, the latter received the news with a joy that was mixed with anxiety. According to this law, the dvorovye must, for two more years, either pay a fee to the master (30 roubles per man and 10 roubles per woman), or guarantee him personal service. After this brief interval they were free but, of course, received no share of the land. Thus a class of permanent servants was created. The treatment of the krepostnye, on the other hand, was inspired by the anxiety both to give land to former serfs and to safeguard, as far as possible, the right of the owners. The latter therefore found that they were forced to give the moujiks a part of their domains, but subject to compensation in accordance with a scale annexed to the act. The application of these extremely complex terms was entrusted to an arbitrator, chosen from amongst the nobility. The latter’s decisions could be submitted to a special court composed of the nobles of the Government. And it was the Senate, the noble assembly par excellence, which judged the differences in the last resort. This aspect of the reform aroused the suspicions of the moujiks; dimly convinced that they were the owners of the plots they cultivated, they were astonished that they now had to pay for them. Doubtless the owners had distorted the Emperor’s generous ideas! One day the truth would out! The Tsar would issue a new ‘ukase’, written ‘in letters of gold’, to make clear that he gave the moujiks both their liberty and their land.