How to Read Chekhov: by Paul Schmidt

Over and over we see Chekhov reducing action and dialogue to their simplest terms, to
endure his audiences’ identification with their own lives. He wanted the people onstage
to be recognizably normal for the audience and to speak a language that the audience
understood was theirs.

And he succeeded. The enduring qualities of the later plays are manifest in the
everyday reaches of human speech. The silences of missed opportunity, the nonsense
phrase that suddenly seems laden with meaning, the jealousies and envies and despairs
that drive people to drink instead of expressing their feelings – all are revealed in an
increasingly fragmentary language. The commonplace words and phrases in the plays
function as replacements for the passions that unite or separate us. Melodrama put
these passions onstage, used artificial language and removed them to the realm of
fantasy. Chekhov moved the passions off the stage, as it were, and his characters refer
to them obliquely, uncomprehendingly. What Chekhov accomplished, in a kind of
miraculous progression through those four last plays, was gradually to cut away the
melodramatic moments of the “plot” or shift them offstage, leaving finally only his
characters’ helpless unheeding responses to those moments.

The rule of causality, the idea that every act is subject to consequences, that morality is
a matter of rectitude or retribution – all that vanishes. Chekhov’s characters pull actions
and phrases out of the air (as happens in reality) and let them loose. Chekhov said:
“What happens onstage should be just as complicated and just as simple as things are in
real life.” And that makes the language of his plays so critical. There are no great
poetic passages in these plays; the long hopeful speeches about the future are spoken
by ineffectual characters. Heightened speech is often mocked, as in Konstantin’s play.
And along with the language being ordinary, the characters also need to be close
enough to us for us to identify with them. They are not nobility put on a pedestal, but
have the same qualities and responses that we do. That is the way to interpret
Chekhov.