Chekhov's Tatyana Repina:From Melodrama to Mystery Play

Abstract

Anton Chekhov's one-act play Tatyana Repina (1889), for which he borrowed the title as well as the characters from a comedy written by his friend Alexey S. Suvorin, was intended neither for production nor for publication. On 6 March 1889, he sent Suvorin, the publisher of the newspaper New Times, "a very cheap and, according to the sender, a useless gift," a play entitled Tatyana Repina that "he had written in one sitting." In addition, the writer asked his friend to show the work to no one and, after having read it, to throw it into the fireplace. Chekhov's play, however, has continued to live somehow on the periphery of literature, where a number of readers have taken notice of it. First of all, Suvorin himself did not destroy his present but, on the contrary, gave it life by printing two or three copies of the play' and sending one of them to the author. In 1924, the writer's brother, Mikhail P. Chekhov, published the play, having made several cuts in the liturgy performed on stage, and supplied his own commentaries. The uncut play first appeared a year later in an edition brought out by the Atheneum publishing house, and later it was included in the complete edition of Chekhov's works and letters, published in thirty volumes. The first production of the play took place in the summer of 1998, when Moscow's Young Spectator Theatre opened the Avignon Festival with Valery Fokin's production. Yet, to be fair, it should be pointed out that in 1997, in Moscow's Gogol Theatre, the director Alexey Govorukho mounted a production called The Hunt for Women in which he combined Suvorin's Tatyana Repina and Chekhov's.