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annotation Gottlieb, Vera. Chekhov And Vaudeville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Lingering images from Chekhov and His Times, a book depicting the vaudevillian origins of Anton Chekhov's final play, "The Cherry Orchard", prompted me to take a chance on this volume while searching for supplementary material to the ongoing, ever-in-progress, daunting read of Donald Rayfield's Chekhov: A Life. It turned out to be a good choice. A determinedly academic and dead-serious study of the effects of "lowbrow" slapstick comedy upon the writings of Chekhov, Vaudeville proved to be a focused, concise and insightful study on a limited topic, containing none of the wandering tributaries of thought noted in Iconoclast and Women. In her introduction, author Vera Gottlieb states her intention to explore "Chekhov's 'sad comicality', and the validity of Chekhov's often-expressed view of himself as a writer of comedies. Although her study focuses upon Chekhov's earlier one-act plays, "dramatic studies", and monologues, Gottlieb's deft weaving of examples from these earlier works along with like segments of the later, major plays, provides solid insight into Chekhov's entire body of work. Gottlieb begins her study with a subtly ironic look at how the highly censored, frivolous nature of the Russian theater of the 1880s spawned the revolutionary Moscow Art Theater that would showcase Chekhov's greatest works. Chekhov himself commented in 1888 that, "the contemporary theater is like a rash...it is necessary to sweep away this disease with a broom..." (15). That same year, four members of Moscow's Society of Art and Literature, including Konstantin Stanislavsky, issued a bold and open challenge to the "conventional theatricalism" of the Imperial theaters. Ten years later, Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theater. The move had been so long forthcoming largely due to the atmosphere of constant surveillance and censorship. "For fear of compromising themselves," Gottlieb notes, "most people retreated into the frivolous [and] the superficial." She further speculates that this fear "was a contributing factor in the hopelessness and inertia which characterizes many of Chekhov's characters" (20). To put it as clumsily and awkwardly as I feel oddly compelled to at this moment, Chekhov took a bunch of lemons...and made lemonade. Working in a closely-watched, oppressive atmosphere with little latitude, Chekhov took conventional, acceptable vaudeville components, and turned them into something much greater, into the style of writing now recognized as uniquely Chekhovian. Gottlieb describes the vaudeville of the 1880's Russian theater as having at its center "a couple striving towards a happy union, a union finally achieved at the end of the play. Before the finale, however, the couple have to overcome various obstacles to their match, and the action of the play consists solely in overcoming those obstacles" (41). Sound at all familiar? Sort of like late 20th-Century American prime-time television? Chekhov and the Vaudeville consistently demonstrates with enviable clarity and insight how Chekhov took these base conventions of mass entertainment and crafted them into instruments of timeless human longing. As an example, Gottlieb cites Chekhov's use of the vaudevillian standard of wringing laughs from addressing the deaf or hard-of-hearing character. "In the vaudeville, the convention relates to comedy of situation or intrigue and is rarely given a wider application or deeper significance," Gottlieb observes in a typically studious passage. Citing several examples of Chekhov's straight-ahead application of this technique in his early writings, Gottlieb then uses this device to demonstrate how Chekhov transformed this common comedic schtick into something much larger and poignant. "In Chekhov's last plays, the convention of 'inability to hear' becomes the innovation 'inability to listen', with all the irony that this implies." As an inspired example even better than the more obvious one of Gayev haranguing the old butler Firs in "The Cherry Orchard", Gottlieb chooses a passage from "The Three Sisters" to underscore her point, a passage in which Andrey addresses Ferapont specifically because he cannot hear well. "If you could hear properly I don't suppose I would talk to you at all. I must talk to someone, but my wife doesn't understand me and I'm somehow afraid of my sisters, afraid they'll laugh at me and make me look a complete fool. I don't drink and I don't like going into bars, but if I could drop in at Testov's in Moscow right now, or the Great Muscovite Hotel, well, it would suit me down to the ground, old boy." To which Ferapont, hearing only the word "Moscow", replies, "There was a contractor at the office a few days back telling us about some businessmen in Moscow. They were eating pancakes, and one of them ate forty and died, or so he said. It was either forty or fifty. I don't rightly remember." This is a classic Chekhovian exchange between two people; one trying to articulate some deep, amorphous inner longing, the other consumed with innocuous trivia. It is also an example of author Gottlieb's consistent ability to demonstrate the evolution of rank vaudeville conventions in Chekhov's work into something much larger and universal. Chekhov and the Vaudeville is an excellent analysis of the genesis and evolution of Chekhov's work, and a valuable counterpoint to his still-lingering image as a dour "poet of ultimate gloom." Copyright © 2001 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |