ABSTRACT
It is no secret that Tennessee Williams deeply loved Chekhov’s prose and plays: he admitted it many times himself. But did Chekhov influence Williams’s plays and creativity in general as much and as deeply—both in content and form—as the latter wanted us to believe? Williams’s final play, The Notebook of Trigorin , was based upon Chekhov’s play The Seagull, which had been his lifelong artistic and literary infatuation. A study and comparative analysis of these two plays allow us to observe an exciting process described by Yury Lotman as the development of a “meaning-space created by the text around itself [which] enters into relationship with the cultural memory (tradition) already formed in the consciousness of the audience” (18). On the one hand, Tennessee Williams is a perceiver of the play. On the other, while translating the play from one cultural mode into another, he gave the play new meanings, in which the themes, topics, and motifs have mutated. The text of Chekhov’s play itself, if we use Lotman’s image, is like a grain of wheat, which contains within itself a program for its own development, which “is not given once and for all [ . . . ] The inner and as yet unfinalized determinacy of its structure provides a reservoir of dynamism when influenced by contacts with new contexts” (18). Hence Williams, by giving his own interpretation of The Seagull, modified Chekhov’s play: he decoded it from Russian culture and then re-encoded it in American culture, presenting it to American audiences in a way that he assumed would be better understood than in even the best literal and literary translation of the original. By doing so, Williams changed the play’s capacity for cultural memory, which now included historical events and other interpretations that occurred outside the text and in the twentieth century in general, as well as in Williams’s personal life. Thus, Williams’s play becomes a most interesting example of Chekhov mutations, and it allows us to see how the Chekhovian modes—his style, themes, and characters—have been transformed in the laboratory of the world’s most popular American playwright.
