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 spoke16 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 gathering18 the drollest stories, which he would afterward19 whisper in class to his laughing schoolfellows. Many were the punishments which he incurred20 by this habit, which was incorrigible21.
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 witty22 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 remarkable23. 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 forth24 a succession of short stories and sketches25 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 censor27, 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 tragic28, are penetrated29 by the light and subtle satire30 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 passionate31 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 decided32 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 drawn33 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 fully17 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 diagnosis34.”
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 vividly35. Often, while jesting and talking, he would seem suddenly to plunge36 into himself, and his look would grow fixed37 and deep, as if he were contemplating38 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 immediate39 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 tinge1 of his time, but much of his sadness may also be attributed to his ever-increasing ill health.
Weary and with an obstinate40 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 touching41 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 verge42 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 fascination43, tempted44 him to write “Ivanoff,” and also a dramatic sketch26 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 lawful45 wife, but the Stage is a noisy, flashy, and insolent46 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 gallows47 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 doctrine48 of pessimism49, 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 salvation50 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 marred51 by faults of inexperience, which, however, he later corrected. The critics were divided in condemning52 a certain novelty in it and in praising its freshness and originality53. 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 farce54 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, exquisitely55 drawn, and strung together on the slenderest connecting thread. Tchekoff’s delicate and elusive56 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 interpretation57, and it is almost essential to its appreciation58 that it should be seen rather than read. The atmosphere of gloom with which it is pervaded59 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 poignant60 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 Orchard61” 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 epoch62 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 peculiar63 to himself, in scattered64 scenes, in haphazard65 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.
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1
tinge
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| vt.(较淡)着色于，染色；使带有…气息；n.淡淡色彩，些微的气息 | |
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tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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vitality
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| n.活力，生命力，效力 | |
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ebbed
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| （指潮水）退( ebb的过去式和过去分词 )； 落； 减少； 衰落 | |
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apathy
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| n.漠不关心，无动于衷；冷淡 | |
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stagnant
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| adj.不流动的，停滞的，不景气的 | |
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provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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tedium
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| n.单调；烦闷 | |
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outlet
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| n.出口/路；销路；批发商店；通风口；发泄 | |
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ennui
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| n.怠倦，无聊 | |
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gasped
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| v.喘气( gasp的过去式和过去分词 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
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stifling
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| a.令人窒息的 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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portrayed
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| v.画像( portray的过去式和过去分词 )；描述；描绘；描画 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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17
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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incurred
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| [医]招致的，遭受的； incur的过去式 | |
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incorrigible
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| adj.难以纠正的，屡教不改的 | |
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22
witty
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| adj.机智的，风趣的 | |
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23
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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sketches
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| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
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sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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censor
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| n./vt.审查，审查员；删改 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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satire
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| n.讽刺，讽刺文学，讽刺作品 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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diagnosis
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| n.诊断，诊断结果，调查分析，判断 | |
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vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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plunge
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| v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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contemplating
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| 深思，细想，仔细考虑( contemplate的现在分词 )； 注视，凝视； 考虑接受（发生某事的可能性）； 深思熟虑，沉思，苦思冥想 | |
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39
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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40
obstinate
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| adj.顽固的，倔强的，不易屈服的，较难治愈的 | |
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41
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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42
verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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43
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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44
tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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45
lawful
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| adj.法律许可的，守法的，合法的 | |
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46
insolent
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| adj.傲慢的，无理的 | |
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47
gallows
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| n.绞刑架，绞台 | |
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48
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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49
pessimism
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| n.悲观者，悲观主义者，厌世者 | |
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50
salvation
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| n.（尤指基督）救世，超度，拯救，解困 | |
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51
marred
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| adj. 被损毁, 污损的 | |
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52
condemning
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| v.（通常因道义上的原因而）谴责( condemn的现在分词 )；宣判；宣布…不能使用；迫使…陷于不幸的境地 | |
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53
originality
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| n.创造力，独创性；新颖 | |
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54
farce
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| n.闹剧，笑剧，滑稽戏；胡闹 | |
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55
exquisitely
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| adv.精致地；强烈地；剧烈地；异常地 | |
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56
elusive
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| adj.难以表达(捉摸)的；令人困惑的；逃避的 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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pervaded
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| v.遍及，弥漫( pervade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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poignant
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| adj.令人痛苦的，辛酸的，惨痛的 | |
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61
orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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epoch
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| n.(新)时代；历元 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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64
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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haphazard
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| adj.无计划的，随意的，杂乱无章的 | |
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