Chekhov Anton - A Country Scandal (Platonov)

A C OUNTRY S CANDAL (P LATONOV ) DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS Anton Chekhov Translated and Adapted by Alex Szogyi D OVER P UBLICATIONS , I NC . M INEOLA , N EW Y ORK DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS G ENERAL E DITOR : S USAN L. R ATTINER E DITOR OF T HIS V OLUME : J ANET B. K OPITO Theatrical Rights This Dover Thrift Edition may be used in its entirety, in adaptation, or in any other way for theatrical productions, professional and amateur, in the United States, without fee, permission, or acknowledgment. (This may not apply outside of the United States, as copyright conditions may vary.) Bibliographical Note This Dover edition, first published in 2016, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Coward-McCann, New York, in 1960. International Standard Book NumberISBN-13: 978-0-486-81116-1ISBN-10: 0-486-81116-6 Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley 81116601 2016 www.doverpublications.com For my parents, Ammon, Barbara, and Eliot A.S.

PREFACE Chekhovs first full-length play has until quite recently been unknown to any large theatregoing public. In the past few years, it has become part of the repertory of two of Europes finest companies: The Thtre National Populaire of Avignon and Paris, France, and the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, Italy. This year it entered the repertory of the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow, chosen as the play to celebrate the Chekhov centennial in Russia. Ever since I first discovered the play five years ago, I have wanted to re-create it for an American audience. I felt that it was a fine play, less sophisticated and elusive than the last four great plays of Chekhov, but nevertheless a worthy example of his comic art and one which goes a long way in explaining the origins of his theatrical preoccupations, perhaps even in elucidating his prodigious comic technique. I also wanted to find the way to render Chekhovs succinct, direct language in a modern American idiom which wouldnt falsify (too much) the basic rhythms of the speeches.

The major problem posed by this untitled play was that it had to be translated and shaped from a huge manuscript longer than Chekhovs last three plays together. Were it playable, it might have run some six hours. It is Chekhovs earliest extant play, probably his third full-length theatrical effort, written sometime during his twenty-first year, when he was a medical student. After having submitted the manuscript to a well-known actress of the time, Yermolova (at the Maly theatre), who promptly rejected it, Chekhov presumably never again tried to have it performed. He tore up the original; what remains to us now is a long draft with several successive versions indicated in different colored pencils and ink. The speeches of the original manuscript were unwieldy, overstuffed with detail, like fragments from an enormous sketchbook.

The play contained some of Chekhovs most irresistible comic writing. What it needed was judicious pruning to retain its silhouette. The plays title page was destroyed. It was perhaps called Platonov, after its hero, a verbose and philosophical Don Juan-in-reverse (another of his early plays, Ivanov, was also named for its hero). This gentle and surprisingly elegant farce would be astonishing even if it were not a remarkably coherent play. It contains the largest gallery of characters in all the Chekhov plays.

In its prodigious exuberance, it seems almost a pastiche of his later work, for it contains bits and pieces of the later plots and themes, especially The Cherry Orchard. It is, however, no pastiche. It simply serves to point up how intact and integral Chekhovs theatrical imagination was at so young an age. It also led me to discover that the translations we have of his plays have often neglected his pungent humor as well as the direct rhythms of his dialogue. It is as if one were to recognize only the sentimentality of Charlie Chaplins work without any of the comic subtlety. Chekhovs healthy humor had perhaps been stifled in long-winded phrases devoid of the ironic twists of his comic imagination.

Chekhov was a doctor and he began his literary career as a Sunday writer who scribbled for money to support his family. (He called medicine his wife and writing his mistress.) Writing for an audience that readily bought comic vignettes, he chose the farce as his medium in his early theatre, especially in the one-act plays. Yet, despite his labeling his plays as comedies, they have attained the reputation of being ponderous, sad documents of provincial late-nineteenth-century Russia. Chekhov himself was distressed by the false self-pity which was the dominant tone of the Stanislavsky productions. Although Chekhov depicted situations which are ultimately tragic, his characterizations in all the plays are comic in the best Molire and Chaplin tradition. Although A Country Scandal is not a good old French bedroom farce, it does however capitalize on the surprise entrance and the acceleration of parallel incidents, especially in Act III, when the hero receives many surprise visits.

I believe that the play helps to show that Chekhov belongs to the lineage of writers best exemplified by Molire. They both wrote humane and very funny comedies which hold the mirror up to nature, exposing the foibles, deceptions and hypocrisies which epitomize us all. They had the same gift of trenchant wit and scalpel-sharp accuracy of expression. I have taken a few liberties for the sake of fashioning a coherent play. Chekhovs original ending was interminable; his hero died too slowly, and the other characters lamented too much over him. Every version of the play has in some way modified the ending.

I have often reinstated dialogue from Chekhovs first version which seemed fresher than the embroideries of a later version. I have taken one liberty with the plot which no other version has: in order to develop and justify the role of Vengerovich, the usurer, and to make him a more sympathetic and comprehensible individual, I allow him to admit to Anna Petrovna that he wishes to marry her. I have omitted a few characters and a few of the early scenes; Chekhov wrote several characters in pairs where one would easily suffice. I have added some exposition for Sofia, explaining how she met Platonov before the play began. All in all, the liberties I have taken do not exceed those of other versions. What I have tried to do is to give, in a contemporary idiom, an idea of the delicious comedy inherent in the play.

Not only does it provide us with some of Chekhovs richest characterizations, it gives the person interested in Chekhovs development as a dramatist the prototypes and themes of all the later plays. Madame Arkadina and Ranevskaya are spiritual sisters of Anna Petrovna. Triletski gives a hint of Astrov and Dorn. Platonov is another Ivanov and Konstantine. Grekova has moments of Varya. Glagolaev Junior is an incipient Yasha.

Only Ossip, the genial horse thief, is unique, and he is one of Chekhovs wildest creations. A translator-adapters task is not an easy one. He must revive, resurrect, make live again his is an archeological expedition into words, an experience in an alien language expressing alien concepts in an alien way. Sometimes, ironically enough, in order to capture the spirit of a work, he must violate the strict letter. Nothing is further from a good translation than that misnomer, a literal one. Whatever a translator does, he can never give us the original; what he conjures up in his miraculous hocus-pocus is his conception of what the original was really like.

And in the theatre, where a performance depends on a collaboration of many forces, the translator-adapters work is an endless search for a meaningful language which will make the play live again. The re-creation of a play in the idioms of another languagea blueprint for a special occasion or a particular generationrequires re-translation from decade to decade. Above all, the play must