Chekhov and Soviet Doublethink:

...After considerable literary detective work, I submit some examples of such editorial tampering...

...Nor do the editorial notes supply any information about Meyerhold, though even the least important people mentioned in Chekhov's correspondence are adequately identified...

...But will anyone dare to mention the deliberate deletions in that monumental edition--deletions that betray the Communist doublethink in all its contempt for cultural values...

...But in 1949, when this volume of the new "complete" edition of Chekhov was brought out, the anti-Western witch-hunt was in full swing...

...But he will try in vain to find out who this fellow Meyerhold was...

...This beginning is duly reproduced in the new Soviet edition...

...For Kherson is neither Russia nor Europe...

...Those in a position to look up this letter in the 1913 volume edited by Chekhov's sister will discover that the three dots stand for the following omission: "I looked at this Duse woman and the thought worried me that we have to train our temperaments and tastes on such wooden actresses as N. and her like, whom we call great because we have not seen any better ones...

...But, while stressing that in Chekhov's works they were able to restore passages originally suppressed or altered by censorship, they themselves proceeded to censor Chekhov's "epistolary legacy" in keeping with the latest Party line...

...He was so entranced by her acting that he wrote an enthusiastic letter to his sister Marie, which begins as follows: "I have just been to see the Italian actress Duse in Shakespeare's Cleopatra...

...Many hypocritical words will be spoken about Chekhov's "democratic humanism...

...who controls the present controls the past"--thus runs the Party slogan in George Orwell's 1984, whose hero's job is the continuous alteration of the past "applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance...

...The editors of the new edition carefully avoid all references to Chekhov's correspondence with Meyerhold, though the letters mention at least one more letter to Meyerhold, and a very interesting letter which the latter wrote to Chekhov, dealing with Meyerhold's production of The Cherry Orchard in his theater at Kherson, has been quoted by Balukhaty in Chekhov the Playwright...

...But, with the coming of the Zhdanov era in 1946, even this seemingly inviolable domain of literature was invaded...

...One can imagine the puzzlement of a younger Soviet reader who has never heard of Meyerhold...

...his famous statement about his haired for falsehood and violence in any form will doubtless be quoted over and over again...

...But then follow again the three dots in square brackets...

...their books are no longer available and their names have been deleted from reference works...

...Looking at Duse, I realized why one feels so bored in the Russian theater...

...It is common knowledge by now that recent history, including literary history, is constantly revised and rewritten in the Soviet Union on orders emanating from some invisible and unacknowledged "Ministry of Truth...

...Nor is it possible to say off-hand, without careful collation with all the earlier editions, how many of Chekhov's letters have been omitted altogether now...

...There is no public for straightforward plays there...

...He described the letter as "extremely interesting...

...One of these deletions is from a letter to Olga Knipper, dated March 13, 1902...

...I have, however, been able to lay my hands on at least one such example which significantly completes the pattern described above and illustrates another aspect of Soviet "alteration of the past...

...I have in mind an interesting letter which Chekhov wrote at the end of 1899 to Vsevolod Meyerhold...

...For foolproof results, it would be necessary to check all the letters against earlier editions, remembering that, while Marie Chekhov's edition contained about 2,000 letters, there are over 4,000 in the new Soviet compilation...

...It was first published in 1909 in the Yearbook of the Russian Imperial Theaters...

...A number of Soviet writers have disappeared into limbo...

...Yes, I thought, the Englishman does exploit the Chinese, the Sepoys, the Hindus, but in return he gives them roads, drains, museums and Christianity, and what about you--you also exploit, but what do you give...

...He will learn from Chekhov's letters that Meyerhold played the part of Treplev in the original production of The Seagull and that of Tusenbach in Three Sisters, and that, for some unspecified reason, he left the Moscow Art Theater...

...The twenty-volume Soviet edition of Chekhov, the most complete ever, will probably be held up as a monument to the esteem and affection in which Chekhov is held today in the Soviet Union...

...The editorial preface pointed out that it differed from all previous editions chiefly in its inclusion of Chekhov's "vast epistolary legacy," and the editors were indeed to be congratulated for not only assembling all the letters scattered among various publications but also adding more than a thousand previously unpublished ones...

...Contrary to widespread opinion, Orwell's novel was not meant to be a grim, prophetic vision of things to come, but rather an imaginatively hyperbolized picture of things that were already to he observed in the totalitarian regimes of our own time, particularly in Stalin's Russia...

...I bought all kinds of junk from the Chinese, and I waxed indignant when I heard my Russian fellow-travelers criticize the British for their exploitation of the natives...

...For some reason, it was omitted from Marie Chekhov's edition, but it was included by the well-known literary scholar Piksanov in the 1927 edition of Chekhov's Uncollected Letters, and Piksanov quoted a long passage from it in his preface...

...p. 130), in the passage referring to Hong Kong, the words "The bay is wonderful, the sea traffic such as I have never seen before, not even in pictures" are followed by three dots enclosed in square brackets, to indicate an omission...

...The dots stand for the following passage: "Excellent roads, street-cars, a railway going up the hill, museums, botanical gardens...

...In fact, Meyerhold's name was studiously excluded from the long indices to all the individual volumes of letters as well as from the general index at the end of Volume XX...

...Chekhov wrote: "I should like to see Meyerhold, to have a talk with him and buck him up--after all, he won't find things easy in the Kherson theater...

...1. On December 9, 1890, after returning from the island of Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote his friend Suvorin a long letter in which he described his return voyage and mentioned a short stopover at Hong Kong...

...Gleb Struve, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of California, is the author of Soviet Russian Literature...

...Chekhov wrote this letter soon after Meyerhold had left the Moscow Art Theater as a result of disagreements with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko over what appeared to Meyerhold and others as the excessive realism, bordering on naturalism, of the two directors...

...All this shows that the letter was well known to Soviet scholars and was even regarded by them as important...

...And in the new collection the letter is treated as non-extant, because Meyerhold has become--to use Orwell's Newspeak--an "unperson...

...An example of this is the recent scholarly edition of Chekhov's Complete Works and Letters in twenty volumes...

...In the new Soviet edition (Vol...

...Yes, we are great talents, we are pan-human, and we are simply 'bursting' with it, but were Leo Tolstoy to die there would be no one to write an article...

...Each volume was provided with an extensive scholarly apparatus: notes, variants of texts, biographical notes about Chekhov's numerous correspondents, and detailed indices...

...Referring to the recent death of Alphonse Daudet, Chekhov notes that everything written about it in France was "intelligent and elegant," and goes on to say: "Even Rochefort wrote well...

...Until now, however, this "prevention of literature" had seemed to stop short at the great Russian writers of the past, most of whom are held in great esteem today in the USSR...

...In the 1920s and 1930s, much was done in the way of providing new scholarly editions of nineteenth-century Russian writers, publishing their letters, restoring texts disfigured by pre-Revolutionary censorship, supplying new textual comments, and unearthing fresh biographical facts...

...A great deal of care had doubtless been lavished on this edition...

...Apparently, Chekhov's strictures on Russian actresses offended the patriotic sensibilities of the present-day masters of Russia...

...Intimately connected as he was with the Moscow Art Theater, he nevertheless expressed a wish to buck up the actor who was the very life and leader of the 'dissent.'" In 1950, however, when Fridkes was editing Volume XIX of the Complete Works and Letters (curiously enough, in 1927 the same Fridkes had commented favorably on Chekhov's letter to Meyerhold in the Piksanov edition), this sympathetic interest of Chekhov in Meyerhold was a forbidden subject...

...Of these, over a thousand are now published for the first time, and there would be no way of verifying their accuracy except by comparing them with the originals...

...I don't understand Italian, but her acting was so good that it seemed to me that I understood every word...

...I have never seen anything like her before...

...Publication of the Complete Works was decreed in April 1944 by the Council of People's Commissars, and it was to be the first truly complete edition of Chekhov...

...Others, fortunate or clever enough to survive and continue writing, have had to revise their works in conformity with the current Party line and the latest official version of history...

...A remarkable actress...

...Reference to the Marie Chekhov edition reveals that the missing sentence reads: "We should send our young writers on assignments abroad, honestly we should...

...there is even a club for sailors...

...In 1939, an even longer quotation from it was included among Chekhov's utterances on literature in the collection entitled Russian Writers About Literature, of which S. Balukhaty was the principal editor...

...this passage is duly reproduced in the new edition...

...The journalists will write something or other, but the novelists, with Grigorovich and Boborykin at their head, will just scratch themselves...

...But the original letter had one more sentence, and this has been deleted from the new edition...

...This last example shows the difficulty of discovering all the cases of editorial interference with Chekhov's letters...

...and the editors deemed it necessary to suppress this proof of Chekhov's admiration for the benefits, both material and spiritual, which the "British imperialists and warmongers" were bestowing on the people of their colonies...

...Their texts were apparently regarded as sacrosanct, and whatever strictures were necessary took the form of "Marxist" comments reinterpreting them...

...2. An equally telling example is found in the same volume on p. 174...

...English-speaking readers can find it in Constance Garnett's translation of selections from Chekhov's letters (New York, 1920...

...By 1939, however, Meyerhold had already been denounced as an "enemy of the people" and had disappeared from the scene, so his name was withheld in Balukhaty's anthology...

...This suppressed passage will be found in the Derman edition of the Chekhov-Knipper correspondence...

...This time, its absence is not even indicated by dots--it is simply not there...

...then an actor of the Moscow Art Theater, later one of the pioneers of the modern Russian theater, and the outstanding figure in the Soviet theater until his fall from grace in 1937...

...In the letter, Chekhov gave Meyerhold some advice about interpreting the part of Johannes Vockerat in Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen...

...The fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov's death in July 1904 has been chosen as the theme for various Communist-sponsored "peace" meetings throughout the world...

...With one exception, only bare mentions of his name or insignificant references to him have been retained in the text, while on two occasions, when Chekhov spoke of him with sympathetic interest, we find the familiar three dots in square brackets...

...they still need a puppet-show...

...Here, too, what was forbidden in 1949 was considered all right in 1936, when the same passage was quoted in full by S. Balukhaty (one of the editors of the new Chekhov edition) in his little book, Chekhov the Playwright...

...On March 16, 1891, Chekhov went to see the famous Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who was then visiting Russia, in Antony and Cleopatra...

...So far, so good...

...It is interesting to note that, in editing the second volume of the Chekhov-Knipper correspondence in 1936, Derman commented on this passage: "Chekhov's attitude to the split which occurred in the Art Theater cast is extremely characteristic of his interest in, and sympathy with, any fresh current in art...

...What is more, we find a specific reference to it in a biographical and critical study of Chekhov published during the Soviet period by A. Derman (Moscow, 1939...

...In 1934, a longish excerpt was given by A. Derman, who edited Chekhov's correspondence with Olga Knipper (his wife...

...They are not many, considering the vastness of Chekhov's epistolary output (over 4,000 letters), but they are significant and, taken together, amount to an outright literary fraud...

...The Soviet editors obviously thought that Chekhov's impulsive exclamation might give ideas to young Soviet writers, and therefore decided to suppress not only the sentence itself but the evidence of its suppression...

...3. A third example of suppression will be found in Volume XV, p. 189, in a letter to Suvorin written from Nice on December 14, 1897...

...wherever you turn, you can see the tenderest solicitude of the British for their employes...

...without the assistance of the three dots, I had only luck or my detective flair to help me...

...This suppressed passage will be found in an earlier edition of Chekhov's letters published by his sister Marie in 1912-16...

...The vast editorial undertaking, divided into two series (twelve volumes of works, diaries and notebooks, and eight volumes of letters), was completed in 1951...

...I was driven in a jinricksha, that is, by men...