Rough Draft, or Final Version?

Here Chekhov looks positively
cheerful, it seems to me!

Chekhov gets a bum rap as being a pessimist. My favorite indictment is by Lev Shestov, a turn-of-the-20th-century philosopher, who accused the writer of "killing people's hopes and dreams."

Ouch.

Others have suggested that he's just depressing. I've been asked to speak on Chekhov in Finland in January (where, granted, it is very dark in the winter, and people perhaps do their best to avoid thinking depressing thoughts). I propose to lecture on the topic of Chekhov and cemeteries, and even the professor who invited me found the topic to be rather "sad."

Nonetheless, I think a case can be made that Chekhov offers us ways to think about the world around us and our place in it which in fact uplift us and give us if not hope, then at least pause. (And the pause is one of Chekhov's most important dramatic tools in the plays. On that another time.)

Costume sketch for Three Sisters
(from the Daphne Dare
collection, Ohio State University)

In his play Three Sisters (1900), we tend to focus on the sisters themselves -- dressed in black (Masha), blue (Olga) and white (Irina), they offer a spectrum of possibilities.

As the play opens, it is Irina's name day, she is twenty years old, and she feels happy: "Tell me," she says, "why am I so happy today? I feel as if I'm skimming along at full sail, with the wide blue sky above me and big white birds drifting by." (An ominous reference to the Lermontov poem "The Sail," but about that another time!)

Awakening on this day, the anniversary of her father's death and the end of her mourning period, Irina feels she has a new lease on life. "When I woke up today, I got out of bed and washed, and suddenly it dawned on me that I understand everything in the world and I know how a person ought to live. ... A person has to work hard, work by the sweat of his brow, no matter who he is, and that's the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to his life, his happiness, his moments of ecstasy."

Costume design for Masha (Daphne Dare) 

Olga, the oldest, has chosen to devote her life to work -- but in Act I she already regrets it, thinking that perhaps she should have gotten married after all. "Everything is for the best, everything is God's will, but I do think that if I were married and could stay home all day, things might be better. (Pause.) I'd love my husband."

In black, Masha -- like her predecessor and namesake from The Seagull -- is "in mourning for her life." She is married, and she can stay home all day, but she too regrets her choice. In this first scene, as the sisters think of their future -- will they find purpose and satisfaction here in their provincial town, will anyone interesting come along to distract them from the same old same old of their lives, will they finally go to Moscow? -- Irina comments "the only thing holding us back is our poor old Masha." According to the stage instructions, Masha herself broods, quietly whistles (a violation of Russian superstition and an invitation to bad luck), and recites lines from Alexander Pushkin's Ruslan and Liudmila. Eventually Masha declares that she is going home. "Laughing through tears" she acknowledges that she is feeling sad, and she doesn't want to ruin the party.

Masha doesn't leave, though, because someone new does arrive, almost in answer to her whistling and her quotation of poetry. Lt. Col. Vershinin represents for Masha bad luck -- a married man for whom she will fall, a man who will give her joy but who will not save her from her bad marriage, nor abandon his own unhappy wife. Vershinin also gives her a way to "read" her life, a way to understand events and to posit some usefulness to her own sadness. He may also give her a way to rewrite that life.

"I often think," declares Vershinin, "what if a man were to begin life anew, and fully conscious at that? If one life, which has already been lived out, were---how shall I put it?---a rough draft, and the other---a final version!"

Though Vershinin, here and elsewhere throughout the play, admits that he is merely "philosophizing," in fact this thought resonates for Masha and for all of us. If Masha's youthful mistake, the marriage to a schoolmaster who seemed so clever when she was eighteen but turned out to be a bore and a lickspittle was just a rough draft -- why then in the final version she can take another route. If Olga's work as a teacher wears her out, and if in the end she discovers that she cannot make a difference in the lives of the girls she teaches, she can rewrite her story in the next version. If "life is hard," as Vershinin notes by Act IV, we can still imagine telling the story another way.

The Pushkin quote from Ruslan and Liudmila which sticks in Masha's mind in Act I is still torturing her in Act IV. Pushkin's text reads like this in translation:

By an arc of sea a green oak stands;
to the oak a chain of gold is tied;
and at the chain’s end night and day
a learnèd cat walks round and round.
Rightwards he goes, and sings a song;
leftwards, a fairy tale he tells.

At the end of Chekhov's play, the three sisters clutch each other as they listen to the sounds of the military march playing while Vershinin and the rest of the detachment head out of town. Their old family friend, the helpless doctor Chebutykin who has failed to prevent the fatal duel that changed the ending of Irina's story, sings a ditty "quietly": "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay . . . I sit in gloom all day . . . What does it matter?"

Masha whistled her bad luck into the house, and told herself a fairytale of a happier ending, a version where she is able to be with a man she loves. But watching the unhappiness of her sisters, her brother, even her husband, Masha realizes that no matter the rough draft, or even the happier alternative, she has to pull herself together to write yet another story.

"Oh, how the music plays! They're leaving us, one of them has gone forever and ever, we're left alone to begin our life anew. One has to go on living . . . One has to go on living . . . " Rough draft, or final version? It may be that every day brings an opportunity to "wake up, get out of bed and wash" and "begin our life anew"---to write a new version.

Life is hard. But one has to go on living. These two versions of a story do not, I think, kill hopes and dreams, but rather facilitate a daily renewal. It does matter . . . and we don't really have a choice. That thought does at least give us pause.