Five Russian plays with one from the Ukrainian/Translator’s Introduction
Introduction
THE plays selected for translation in this volume are, for the most part, modern. Von Vízin alone belongs to an earlier date, that of the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless it will be found that they have this in common: they are, while still Russian, at the same time European. This separation of artists into two categories, the national and the European, is quite simple of comprehension.
The national author, often the favourite in his own country and one who has strengthened and enriched its language to a great degree, is nevertheless hardly to be appreciated in translation by readers of other European countries. Lomonósov, the “father of the Russian language,” poet, panegyrist and critic, is an example; so is Dr. Johnson. But a European artist can be appreciated by any foreign reader in an adequate translation, that is, a translation approximating to what the author would have written in that language.Von Vízin, the first real Russian dramatist, comes in the rank of European artists. He is in everything Russian; his subject, characters and treatment are all Russian, but his plays are written with that “brilliant common-sense” which may be regarded as the characteristic of the European artist. It is well worth pointing out how his work, coming to an end during the first period of the French Revolution, approaches in spirit the work of the other authors in this book, who wrote a round century after him. This phenomenon is similar to much that can be observed not only in Russian art, but in Russian politics and society.
Denis Ivánovich Von Vízin (the name at Pushkin’s suggestion was Russianised into “Vonvízin” during the nineteenth century) was descended from a German prisoner of war. He was born in 1745 and educated at first by his father, his gratitude to whom he showed in the characters of Oldthought, in The Minor, and Flatternot, in The Choice of a Tutor. In 1760, after five years in a preparatory school he became a student at the Moscow University. In the next year he published a book of translations of Holberg’s fables. In 1762 he joined the Imperial Guard, but this life did not please him and he became a translator in the Foreign Office. In 1766 he finished his comedy The Brigadier, which was at once greeted as “our first comedy of manners." The Minor, written in a similar style round a character resembling Goldsmith’s Tony Lumpkin, was produced in 1782. Most of the characteristics of these five-act comedies are to be found in the little farce in this book, The Choice of a Tutor, written probably in 1792, the year of Von Vízin’s death. A significant event in his life is that in 1774 he drew up a plan of a constitution for Panin, the minister, whose secretary he had become five years before, to present to the Emperor. This constitution, with a hundred others, had to lie aside for the whole of the nineteenth century, while the political progress of Russia was at a standstill. It is usual to consider this the fault of autocratic emperors, but perhaps it was due to the horror of the nation at the apparition of Napoleon as the result of the French Revolution. It is at least the characteristic of Russian literature after the first quarter of the nineteenth century that it attempted to withdraw from the course of European progress, and to find a national path instead. The marvellous Dostoiévsky is always exotic to us, so (in a less degree, as his genius was less) is Turgéniev, so is Ostróvsky the dramatist, so are all the Russian authors of the middle and later nineteenth century, until Sáltikov, the satirist, and Chéhov. Griboyédov’s comedy Woe from Wit (1824), recently translated into English under the title “The Misfortune of Being Clever,” was the last of the early Russo-European masterpieces. The reader feels it might have been written less than twenty years ago; in the strict sense of literary chronology, it actually was written twenty years ago.
The function of Anton Pávlovich Chéhov—this transliteration has been preferred to the less correct forms, “Tschekhoff,” “Tchekhof,” “Chekhof,” etc.—has been to pioneer the return of Russian literature into the normal path of European civilization. He was born in 1860, at Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, the grandson of a serf and the son of a grocer. He was taught Greek at a church school and then went to the local classical school. His father’s little shop came to grief and the whole family moved to Moscow, where he studied medicine at the University. He started writing, often forced to work in one room with his parents and brothers and their friends. In 1884 he qualified as a doctor, and in 1886 published a first book of stories that had already appeared in a score of newspapers and reviews. He practised as a doctor merely on occasion, but was a most prolific writer of stories and plays, in which the influence of French literature, especially de Maupassant, conflicted with the current ultra-nationalism. Some, in fact most, of his work is simply Russian, for example, The Three Sisters, of his plays, and The Duel, of his stories. At the same time there are innumerable short stories European in style and, among his plays, The Wedding and The Jubilee, here translated, show the best quality of his work and the service he was rendering Russian literature. His life was cut short by consumption, which forced him to leave the intellectual centres of the north for the warm, barbaric Crimea. In 1890, however, he travelled in Siberia to observe the conditions of the political and criminal exiles. A complete edition of his works was published in 1903, and in the next year he died quietly at Badenweiler in the Black Forest.
Chéhov is not a great writer; he is really a great journalist, and his work has no permanent importance. A French critic has compared his work with the cinematograph, he himself called it “sweet lemonade.” It was not vodka—there lies its significance. He was an embryo European, peculiarly of France, of the France he had come to know in his profession and his reading. Now that he had led Russian literature out of its purely Russian groove, the natural step was for it to become more and more European, without losing its national impulse. The decadence of such modern writers as Andréyev, Górki, and Sólogub lies in their refusal to recognise this fact; they continue to write in a narrow style, dwarfed even in that by the genius of their forerunners, uninspired by the renaissance of European solidarity that the war has revealed, the spirit that Von Vízin had and Griboyédov.
The first modern Russian author to work in the recovered tradition is Nicholas Evréinov, who is represented in this book by his own favourite plays A Merry Death and The Beautiful Despot. He is still a young man, being born on February 13,1879. He was educated at the aristocratic Imperial School of Law, in Petrograd, and afterwards studied music under Rimsky-Korsákov. The present translator had the pleasure of making his acquaintance at Petrograd last year and was given several volumes of his collected plays and parodies. Evréinov has not only an instinct for drama, but is professionally bound to the theatre, for, in addition to his plays, he is the author of several books on stage-craft. What this means in technique will be seen from A Merry Death, a masterpiece both of drama and of the theatre. It is the best Russian play since Woe from Wit, and, so European is it, its excellence could be reproduced and appreciated in any country. So far as the more recent works of Evréinov permit us to judge, he is unlikely to excel it in the future.
A word or two may be said of Laríssa Petróvna Kossátch (1872-1913), whose pseudonym is “Lésya Ukráinka”—“Lesya of the Ukraine.” The same influence that is visible in Chéhov and ripe in Evréinov has been felt also in the newly revived Ukrainian, or Little Russian, literature. Lésya Ukráinka gave it a depth and wealth of vocabulary it sadly needed and, by introducing the European, has countered the decadent spirit of the ultranational Ukrainians. The Babylonian Captivity, translated as an epilogue to this volume, represents the enslavement of the Ukraine by its powerful neighbours; but its style is a victory.
The translator is indebted to the Editor of The New Age for permission to reprint five of the plays in this volume. The translation of The Babylonian Captivity from the Ukrainian is due mainly to Miss Sophie Volska, of Kiev. The translations of Evréinov’s two plays, by the way, have his
authorisation. In them, as in the others, stage directions have been as far as possible omitted.