Abstract
Chekhov's Platonov has been plundered on a number of occasions by directors and playwrights, to create "new" works (such as Michael Frayn's Wild Honey) — but never, perhaps, so successfully as in Nikita Mikhalkov's 1976 film, Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano (Neokollchennaya p' esa dlya mekhanicheskogo piaino). Mikhalkov's screenplay, co-written with Alexander Adabashyan, eliminates a number of characters and strips the play of some its melodramatic excesses. It draws on a number of Chekhov's short stories for characters, themes, and dialogue, and it transplants motifs and devices found in the later plays. Platonov, for example, ends with the protagonist's death at the hands of his jilted lover, Sofya. Mechanical Piano, on the other hand, ends with a grotesque, failed suicide attempt. Platonov leaps into a river — only to find that it is too shallow to drown in. He is comforted by his wife, Sasha, in words that echo Sonya's final speech in Uncie Vanya:
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