ABSTRACT
Moscow), a parody of Russian ‘Hamletism’ as originally exposed by Ivan Turgenev in his seminal essay Hamlet and Don Quixote (1850). Chekhov treats the ‘Hamlet figure’ in Russian literature in two inter-related ways. He often parodies those characters who see themselves as ‘Hamlet but are really more like Tartuffe’. Thus the stereotypic ‘Moscow Hamlet’ constantly provides himself (the historical position of women means that this is invariably a male character) with a whole series of alibis for doing nothing positive or significant – or, simply, for doing nothing. Or Chekhov treats the stereotype by exposing the mental cost and disability as represented by the title-character in Ivanov where the attempt to meet the challenge of changing contemporary reality first saps then destroys the individual. In his Appendix to Ivanov, R. Hingley quotes Chekhov on the character: ‘But at hardly 30 or 35 he’s already tired and bored. He hasn’t grown a decent moustache yet, but he’s already laying down the law…’, The Oxford Chekhov, op. cit., Ivanov, Appendix II, p.291. This relates also to Vanya in Uncle Vanya, to Andrei in Three Sisters, but centrally to Ivanov. The ‘type’ (which nonetheless always remains an individual in Chekhov’s work) lives in a milieu clearly described by Viktor Simov, the MAT’s designer of all Chekhov’s plays, as one in which: ‘colours fade, thoughts become debased, energy is smothered in a dressing-gown, ardour is stifled by a house-coat, talent dries up like a plant without water’ (quoted in M.N. Pozharskaya, Russkoe teatralnodekoratsionnoe iskusstvo, Moscow: 1970, p.124). This milieu is summed up by the Russian word ‘poshlost’ – ‘untranslatable by any single word…it encompasses philistinism, the petty, the trivial, the mundane, and the banal: indicative of human behaviour and attitudes, it becomes a social disease and thus also a spiritual disease. . .’, V. Gottlieb in Chekhov and the Vaudeville, op. cit. p.147. See Efros on Ivanov, p.17, and Note 55.
