I received my copy of the second edition of George’s Two Plays by Tchekhof from a distinguished bookseller in Cumbria, and promptly set about comparing its Introduction with that of both the first edition and the Chekhov volume edited by Kittie and published in 1924. George made six changes to the Introduction for his second edition, including the philosophical-religious one my last two posts have been about, and the last paragraph in the second edition is identical to that in the 1924 edition. Kittie could not, therefore, have made the change in the last paragraph that I have been discussing.
Nevertheless, I think she must have been pleased to see that in his revision of the last paragraph George replaced his pantheistic (Taoist?) suggestion that the meaning of life is immanent in ‘this husk of a planet’, with the insistence that we ourselves ‘put meaning into it’. The synonyms he gives for this meaning are unchanged since the first edition: ‘hope itself, God, man’s ideal’. George’s mention of God may well have surprised Kittie, as he hardly ever used the word and was, as we know, an agnostic. Note, however, that he is merely listing forms of meaning that other people put into the world. He is keeping the concept of God at arm’s length. Moreover, he completes the sentence by saying that all these forms of meaning, including God, ‘continually progress and develop’, so there cannot be anything absolute and finished about them; they too are grounded in the human spirit, they are products of unending human endeavour.
All this is very reminiscent of Chekhov himself, who has been paradoxically described by Harvey Pitcher as a ‘devout humanist’. One of my favourite letters of Chekhov was written to Diaghilev on 30 December 1902 and contains this:
Modern culture is the beginning of work in the name of a great future, work that will continue for tens of thousands of years perhaps, in order that, if only in the distant future, humanity will know the truth of the real God — i.e. not hazard guesses about this truth, not look for it in Dostoyevsky, but know it clearly, just as humanity discovered that two times two is four.
George refers indirectly to this letter in one of his footnotes, and it may well have influenced him in writing his last paragraph.
* * *
Interestingly, the cover of the second edition of Two Plays by Tchekhof, published like the first by Grant Richards, is green, not red. So if you ever come across a copy of the book without its title page, the colour of the cover should be diagnostic. A quick clincher, however, would be whether page 24 looks like this:
Cast lists as they appeared from the second edition onwards
As long as the cast lists are on page 24 and consist of three sets, as above, you may be sure it is the second edition, because when the first edition appeared on 29 January 1912 the London production featuring Lydia Yavorskaya as Nina had not taken place. The verso of the second edition’s title page says ‘Second Edition . . October 1912‘, and by then the London production had come and gone.
Lydia Yavorskaya, c. 1910
The launch of Two Plays by Tchekhof was cleverly crafted by Grant Richards, and George himself contributed to its marketing. In December 1911 Yavorskaya had staged the first London production of Gorky’s On the Bottom of Life. She had probably met George through the Stage Society. She invited him to give a lecture on Gorky in the theatre and it drew a large audience. In return, George persuaded her to act in a performance of The Seagull at the Little Theatre with that theatre’s actress-manager, Gertrude Kingston. The performance was timed as close to the publication of George’s translations as Yavorskaya’s theatre engagements would permit — Sunday 25 February 1912.
A biography of the bisexual and magnificently outrageous Lydia Yavorskaya (1871-1921) would be sensational. Having abandoned her first husband in Kiev, she rapidly slept her way to the top of the Moscow theatre. Chekhov was both attracted and repelled by her. He had a brief affair with her in 1894 and it was rumoured he was going to marry her. Instead, she created priceless publicity by marrying Prince Vladimir Baryatinsky in scandalous circumstances. She was mendacious, manipulative, determined and very hard-working. The Prince’s opinion was: ‘You either adore her or you can’t stand her.’
But as Chekhov himself said, she was intelligent. She had been professionally coached with her stage English, but was not going to perform in The Seagull until she was sure that George’s translation was bona fide. She seems therefore to have taken herself off to Brighton, where her great friend Kropotkin lived (Yavorskaya was very left-wing), and asked him to vet it, as his English was excellent and he knew Chekhov’s work well. Quite possibly it was as a result of this process that the performance was postponed a month, to 31 March 1912. However, without Kropotkin having pointed out a few errors of translation in the first edition, and supplied a new footnote, George might not have revised Two Plays by Tchekhof for the October edition at all.
There is an intriguing sentence tucked away in one of George’s footnotes that suggests he had sussed Yavorskaya. She discreetly put it about London’s theatrical world that Chekhov had written The Seagull for her and that she was Chekhov’s original Nina. In fact she had turned down the play and the part in Russia and Chekhov’s friends recognised her as, in Aleksei Bartoshevich’s words, ‘the prototype of the cabotine [ham actress] Arkadina’. Now, in London at the age of forty-one, she was insisting on playing the teenage part. George concludes his footnote on the kind of ‘star’ actress Arkadina was: ‘In The Seagull Arcadina [sic] would have insisted on playing Nina.’
Ouch.
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Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Captain of the 11
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
George Calderon, 1912
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Kittie absolved, Lydia looks in
I received my copy of the second edition of George’s Two Plays by Tchekhof from a distinguished bookseller in Cumbria, and promptly set about comparing its Introduction with that of both the first edition and the Chekhov volume edited by Kittie and published in 1924. George made six changes to the Introduction for his second edition, including the philosophical-religious one my last two posts have been about, and the last paragraph in the second edition is identical to that in the 1924 edition. Kittie could not, therefore, have made the change in the last paragraph that I have been discussing.
Nevertheless, I think she must have been pleased to see that in his revision of the last paragraph George replaced his pantheistic (Taoist?) suggestion that the meaning of life is immanent in ‘this husk of a planet’, with the insistence that we ourselves ‘put meaning into it’. The synonyms he gives for this meaning are unchanged since the first edition: ‘hope itself, God, man’s ideal’. George’s mention of God may well have surprised Kittie, as he hardly ever used the word and was, as we know, an agnostic. Note, however, that he is merely listing forms of meaning that other people put into the world. He is keeping the concept of God at arm’s length. Moreover, he completes the sentence by saying that all these forms of meaning, including God, ‘continually progress and develop’, so there cannot be anything absolute and finished about them; they too are grounded in the human spirit, they are products of unending human endeavour.
All this is very reminiscent of Chekhov himself, who has been paradoxically described by Harvey Pitcher as a ‘devout humanist’. One of my favourite letters of Chekhov was written to Diaghilev on 30 December 1902 and contains this:
George refers indirectly to this letter in one of his footnotes, and it may well have influenced him in writing his last paragraph.
* * *
Interestingly, the cover of the second edition of Two Plays by Tchekhof, published like the first by Grant Richards, is green, not red. So if you ever come across a copy of the book without its title page, the colour of the cover should be diagnostic. A quick clincher, however, would be whether page 24 looks like this:
Cast lists as they appeared from the second edition onwards
As long as the cast lists are on page 24 and consist of three sets, as above, you may be sure it is the second edition, because when the first edition appeared on 29 January 1912 the London production featuring Lydia Yavorskaya as Nina had not taken place. The verso of the second edition’s title page says ‘Second Edition . . October 1912‘, and by then the London production had come and gone.
Lydia Yavorskaya, c. 1910
The launch of Two Plays by Tchekhof was cleverly crafted by Grant Richards, and George himself contributed to its marketing. In December 1911 Yavorskaya had staged the first London production of Gorky’s On the Bottom of Life. She had probably met George through the Stage Society. She invited him to give a lecture on Gorky in the theatre and it drew a large audience. In return, George persuaded her to act in a performance of The Seagull at the Little Theatre with that theatre’s actress-manager, Gertrude Kingston. The performance was timed as close to the publication of George’s translations as Yavorskaya’s theatre engagements would permit — Sunday 25 February 1912.
A biography of the bisexual and magnificently outrageous Lydia Yavorskaya (1871-1921) would be sensational. Having abandoned her first husband in Kiev, she rapidly slept her way to the top of the Moscow theatre. Chekhov was both attracted and repelled by her. He had a brief affair with her in 1894 and it was rumoured he was going to marry her. Instead, she created priceless publicity by marrying Prince Vladimir Baryatinsky in scandalous circumstances. She was mendacious, manipulative, determined and very hard-working. The Prince’s opinion was: ‘You either adore her or you can’t stand her.’
But as Chekhov himself said, she was intelligent. She had been professionally coached with her stage English, but was not going to perform in The Seagull until she was sure that George’s translation was bona fide. She seems therefore to have taken herself off to Brighton, where her great friend Kropotkin lived (Yavorskaya was very left-wing), and asked him to vet it, as his English was excellent and he knew Chekhov’s work well. Quite possibly it was as a result of this process that the performance was postponed a month, to 31 March 1912. However, without Kropotkin having pointed out a few errors of translation in the first edition, and supplied a new footnote, George might not have revised Two Plays by Tchekhof for the October edition at all.
There is an intriguing sentence tucked away in one of George’s footnotes that suggests he had sussed Yavorskaya. She discreetly put it about London’s theatrical world that Chekhov had written The Seagull for her and that she was Chekhov’s original Nina. In fact she had turned down the play and the part in Russia and Chekhov’s friends recognised her as, in Aleksei Bartoshevich’s words, ‘the prototype of the cabotine [ham actress] Arkadina’. Now, in London at the age of forty-one, she was insisting on playing the teenage part. George concludes his footnote on the kind of ‘star’ actress Arkadina was: ‘In The Seagull Arcadina [sic] would have insisted on playing Nina.’
Ouch.
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