Chekhov, 1860–1904 by Sophie Laffitte

Abstract

86 Comparative Drama made by Ariosto can be studied. They tend to darken his original char­ acters, as though he were applying more rigorously Aristotle’s dictum that comedy portrays men as worse than they are. The Necromancer’s servant, originally faithful, deserts his master in the revised play; the girls of the second Casket are undismayed at the prospect of being hired out by the hour if the purchase money cannot be raised; the young men who buy them no longer intend to keep them except for a few days. Other changes reflect the taste of Ariosto’s audience, which obviously enjoyed local references and social satire. In the second prologue to Lena, as well as in the play itself, passages ridiculing the vanity of men are added to the more traditional mockery of women’s cosmetic and sartorial extravagances. There are also more frequent allusions to Ferrarese buildings, streets, and public ordinances, as well as a number of barbed references to Rome. The audience must also particularly have liked complicated intrigues and comic characters. In the second Casket only four of the twenty-three characters are not comic, and there are fourteen servants. This may be contrasted with the fourteen characters (five servants) of the Necromancer, much closer in this respect to its Latin models. The translation is faithful, a credit to the painstaking method de­ scribed in the editors’ Preface, and the problem of gergo in the Casket has been cleverly solved. One archaic word however has been misinter­ preted: bambola di specchio (pp. 71 and 135) is not a glass doll but a mirror. And there is an awkward shift from it to she at the beginning of the prologue to the second Casket. It was a commonplace for an author to speak of a comedy or tragedy (both feminine in Italian) as his daugh­ ter, and the convention should have been observed throughout the passage. The volume is an important contribution to comparative studies in the theater, and it may be hoped that drama departments will stage these comedies, which lend themselves so admirably to experiments in acting styles and production methods. It is also to be hoped that other translations will follow, to make available in English more of the plays which were so assiduously read and imitated in England, France, and Spain. BEATRICE CORRIGAN University of Toronto Sophie LafBtte. Chekhov, 1860-1904. Translated by Moura Budberg and Gordon Latta. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. Pp. viii + 246. $8.95. One should read again the remarkable story of a man gravely ill from pulmonary tuberculosis, exhausted from spitting blood and violent headaches, suffering from haemorrhoidal troubles contracted as a boy, a man so selfless as to undertake the long, arduous journey to the frozen island of Sakhalin in order to report on the wretches in its penal colony. Chekhov wrote, Reviews 87 It appears that we have made millions of people rot in prison, rot needlessly, for no good reason and in a barbaric manner. We have forced men in chains to cross thousands of versts in the cold. We have turned them into syphilitics, depraved them, begotten criminals and shelved the responsibility for all this on to the prison warders with their red, drunkards’ noses. Now, all enlightened Europe knows that it is not the warders who are guilty, but all those of us who show no interest or concern. Chekhov saw it as the duty of a writer, one with the gift of conscience and the power to speak eloquently to his contemporaries, to observe human conditions at their worst, and his account of his 2,700-mile jour­ ney in 1890, and of the squalor and depravity he found among the men, women, and children of Sakhalin, makes terrifying reading. Chekhov’s life could have provided the copy for a hundred sensa­ tional novels, but all his writing is characteristically understated. Bom in poverty the grandson of a serf in the small town of Taganrog, whipped frequently by his father who had been whipped by his father before him in the callous life of serfdom, a slave to his father’s store from five in the morning when not...