Master of the Monologue

...But she cannot help seeing that if they and their disorganized brother, now her husband, take over the home and estate, they won't know how to manage...

...She generally likes the works that enjoy public esteem and frowns on those that have been superseded by rewrites (like The Wood Demon, which became Uncle Vanya) or have passed into neglect...

...and Solyony, a duelist who will kill the only man in the play who befriends him...

...He felt, he said, "as lonely as a comet...

...Badmouthed before by one of the sisters, she enters the play as a shy girl embarrassed at having to meet their standards of dress and behavior...

...It is hard to believe that the first unveiling of The Seagull was a failure at St...

...Nowadays the full-length, full-strength plays lead secure lives...

...When an actor with acute sensitivity to pathos models the same material, though, he may well convert it into tragedy...

...Early on Chekhov turned out a prodigious number of short stories...

...Petersburg to Yalta and provincial settings...

...Asked to provide biographical information for ajournai called Sever, he responded jokingly, saying in part: "I have been translated into all languages, with the exception of the foreign ones...

...Petersburg production Chekhov was 26...

...The stories and plays came to another 12 volumes...

...Malcolm reports that at a youthful 32, Chekhov said he once "wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes...

...In "The Bishop" we encounter the portrait of a saintly man dying of typhus: "And now that he was unwell, he was struck by the emptiness, the triviality of everything which [certain congregants] asked and for which they wept...

...At the time of the ill-fated St...

...Over the past century The Seagull's renown has not dimmed...

...But "now I'm afraid when I write...

...Malcolm does not appear to have taken account of this distinctively Chekhovian gift...

...Malcolm finds Natasha "unbearable," as if she were a living person, instead of an artificial construct...

...But since we don't live under her sway, we can laugh at Natasha and still feel the discomfort of the other poor souls in that household, who are unable to resist her tyranny...

...The Cherry Orchard, his final play, was then resoundingly alive on the Moscow Art Theater's boards...

...in Chekhov crop up in unexpected sentences and phrases...

...It is characteristic of Chekhov's pliable speeches that we find amusing lines scattered amid deadly serious ones...

...Such rigidity can become a serious handicap in judging theater...

...And all that despite his battling tuberculosis for some 20 years before dying in 1904 at the age of 44...

...A string of writers from David Magarshack, Princess Toumanova and Henri Troyat to V S. Pritchett, Raymond Carver and Philip Callow have dipped into it for fact...

...like Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Seagull, it would become the object of unceasing devotion and experiment...

...She imposes direct, single meanings on dialogue that is gloriously flexible and at times equivocal...

...He had over 300 published in a five-year period while he was studying full time for his medical degree...

...Yarmolinsky revels in Chekhov's candor, telling us that the handwritten letters, business as well as personal, display "no reticence...

...In his final years Chekhov persuaded Olga Knipper, a star of the Moscow Art Theater, to become his wife...

...In Central Park this summer, Mike Nichols' direction divvied it up into an exercise in star turns...

...Write whatyou want...

...that bragging and assurances of happiness abound—until all of a sudden the lines change course or break down or, more accurately, break away from the actor and make him look as if he is telling glossedover untruths...

...But more than likely this familiarity arises from mundane roots: Anton and his siblings were forced to attend choir practice and services by their father as a disciplinary measure, rather than out of any sacred impulse...

...she sees the speeches as firm packages that will probably not change from one actor to the next—or from one act to the next...

...Some of the monologues in his plays run forward enchantingly into comedy, fantasy or farce...

...The last, according to Desmond MacCarthy, "Chekhov left in an unfinished, not to say chaotic, condition...

...Olga's original, however, remains the most beautiful version, and Malcolm deserves thanks for providing it...

...Even in his apprenticeship plays, like Ivanov or the short farces, Chekhov had a playwright's sure instinct for altering, for broadening roles...

...he was vexed at their ignorance, their timidity...

...The "he" throughout is the bishop...

...Avrahm Yarmolinsky, who edited a fine selection of 500 Chekhov letters, mentions that in 1944 when the Council of the People's Commissars issued the complete writings, correspondence alone, "nearly 4,200 items," filled eight volumes...

...Petersburg's Alexandrinsky Theater in 1896, after the author drastically reworked it before opening night—and after The Wood Demon similarly foundered...

...he wrote in unbuttoned ease...

...Malcolm pays tribute to the criticism of Robert Louis Jackson, Julie de Sherbinin and Michael Finke, who have pointed out, she says, "repeated [positive] references to religion" in Chekhov...

...MALCOLM serves up assorted quotations from the Chekhov palette and from reported conversations that feature him as artist, brother, husband, friend, friendly stranger (to inquiring readers), and, not infrequently, prophetic social commentator...

...She expresses a strong distaste for two of the figures in Three Sisters: the peasant girl Natasha, who marries the sisters' brother and takes over their home...

...Malcolm also makes the not infrequent mistake of taking a personal like or dislike to a Chekhov character...

...By Act IV she has turned into a kvetch who gripes about such earth-shattering matters as servants who misplace tableware...

...In an opposing vein, a speech relaying sad news may reveal a character making life seem harder than it has any right to be—and then falling into farcical self-ridicule, as in the monologue "On the Harmfulness of Tobacco...

...The journey of the book's subtitle takes her on a pilgrimage to places Chekhov lived or stayed in and captured memorably in print, from Moscow and St...

...And for offering, overall, a readable introduction to an author with a wise, astoundingly good-natured personality...

...He may slide the speech into confessions of heartbreaking letdowns and betrayals, attacks on himself for his inadequacies...

...Within two years...

...The bulk of the short stories were each written in one day and were under 20 pages...

...He had already attracted wide attention as the author of one-act farces—many of them, like TheBear, The Proposal, and A Tragedian Against His Will, still popular today —plus a pair of longer plays: Ivanov, in four acts, and Platonov, also called Don Juan in the Russian Manner by a British translator...

...Chekhov does reveal a commanding knowledge of Russian church ritual and decorum...

...From what we learn from friends and relatives, Chekhov senior was a drunk who beat his children and wife and gave up working, but believed fervently in religious orthodoxy...

...A chronic self-deprecator, he would never dream of seeking esteem with his pronouncements...

...If there are no facts, substitute something lyrical...

...Unfavorable religious allusions (or memories...

...Thus in the story "Karelin's Dream" we read: "When I feel cold, I always dream of my teacher of scripture, a learned priest of imposing appearance, who insulted my mother when I was a little boy...

...In this late story Chekhov proves that he is the master of the monologue as an art form...

...and now seemed to have forgotten everything, and to have no thoughts of religion...

...Some of his later fiction, notably Three Years and My Life—published, respectively, shortly before and between those first two stagings of The Seagull—ran the length of novellas...

...He ends: "This is all rubbish...

...As the main source of his family's finances, he could not help being concerned about the possible consequences of unfavorable theater reviews on his growing fame...

...no euphemisms...

...Janet Malcolm has reprinted Chekhov's death scene as Olga recorded it in her memoirs...

...He pushed them into becoming, rather than simply being, so that they grew—not always in wisdom or understanding...

...He lived in a warm climate far away from her as she continued to play the leading role in The Cherry Orchard with the company...

...Using the identical words, he can turn the role into an expression of disappointment with himself...

...Notice how conscientiously Chekhov introduces and develops Natasha's part...

...the French also relate to me: I grasped the secrets of love at the age of 13...

...and all this useless, petty business oppressed him by the mass of it, and it seemed to him that now he understood the diocesan bishop who had once in his young days written on 'The Doctrines of the Freedom of the Will...

...Reviewed by Albert Bermel Author, "Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies" In her exploration of Anton Chekhov's writings, life and reputation, Janet Malcolm includes the contemporary testimony of such critics and artists as Dmitri Grigorovich, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky along with her own appreciations and occasional disparagements...

...though, the Moscow Art Theater took hold of the play and turned it into a triumph that established the company as a world-class troupe...

...Yet she seems cautious in her support for their view, and I think rightly so...