Some years have passed since I last took down my copy of Two Plays of Tchekhof: Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by George Calderon (1912). I remembered the book with affection, especially the introduction, but going back to old books, like going back to old places, can sometimes be a let-down. In the event, I was far from disappointed.
He describes himself as ‘a fumbling amateur’. Of course, he was nothing of the sort. He was clearly an excellent linguist, and he had done his homework. In the eight years that had passed since Chekhov’s death a considerable literature had built up about him in Russian, with which Calderon appears fully conversant. I wondered if he was as familiar with Chekhov’s stories as with his plays, but a reference to the little-known short story of 1887, ‘Happiness’, shows that he was.
Apart from the two years he had spent in Russia, Calderon had the further advantage in translating the plays of being an active dramatist. He would have appreciated Tom Stoppard’s comment that ‘a play is an event, not a text’: words that are lost on today’s text-oriented academic readers. Translators, of plays in particular, always face the problem that what seems the mot juste in one decade may sound dated a decade later. This is a trap that Calderon avoids. Even his translation of the notorious nyedotyopa, the contemptuous term used by the aged butler Firs in The Cherry Orchard to describe young upstarts like the manservant Yasha, as ‘a job-lot’, has lasted better than many other versions of this impossible word.
In the course of fifteen pages of introduction Calderon touches on most of the subjects that critics have written about at great length subsequently, but he does so with a much lighter touch. Commenting on how unsuited the English style of acting is to Chekhov’s plays, he writes: ‘As each actor opens his mouth to speak, the rest fall petrified into an uncanny stillness, like the courtiers about the Sleeping Beauty, or those pathetic clusters that one sees about a golf-tee, while one of the players is flourishing at his ball in preparation for a blow.’ Calderon played golf, but his choice of vocabulary (‘pathetic clusters’, ‘in preparation for a blow’) conveys an intellectual’s undisguised contempt for the golfing fraternity.
What Calderon offers the reader is his ‘meditations’ on Chekhov, as he calls them. This is such a good word, as it hovers appropriately between thought and emotion. I hope I am not alone in finding the term ‘literary criticism’ unappealing when applied to Chekhov’s plays, as it is too exclusively cerebral and thought-oriented; if one has to choose a term, ‘appreciation’ is preferable, since it covers both exercising judgement and cherishing good writing. But we can all meditate on Chekhov, examine our feelings and think about our reactions, comparing notes and sharing opinions.
Calderon’s choice of plays was intended to show Chekhov at two extremes: The Seagull is easy, not much unlike a Western play, whereas The Cherry Orchard is difficult and very Russian. In a key passage he writes:
The most general idea under which I can sum up the essential characteristics of his plays [not so much The Seagull, but Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard] is this: That the interest of them is, so to speak, ‘centrifugal’ instead of self-centred; that they seek, not so much to draw our minds inwards to the consideration of the events they represent, as to cast them outwards to the larger process of the world which those events illuminate.
This is very open-ended, and rightly so; Calderon is reaching here for that elusive quality which makes Chekhov’s plays distinctive and so unlike the work of any other playwright.
His plays, Calderon writes later, are ‘tragedies with the texture of comedy’. What a godsend for the hard-pressed examiner searching for a ‘Discuss’ question! But as a canny candidate, I don’t think I’d have tackled it. ‘Tragedies’ is a difficult word to apply to Chekhov’s plays, and there is an element here of contrived paradox. The phrase that Calderon uses soon after, ‘the admixture of comedy with pathos’, would have been the easier option.
In the section describing ‘Group Emotions’ in the plays, Calderon writes:
In real life there is nothing of which we are more urgently, though less expressly, conscious, than the presence of other life humming about us, than the fact that our experiences and our impulses are very little private to ourselves, almost always shared with a group of other people. […] For many reasons this truth, however well ascertained, has hardly found its way as yet on to the stage. Tchekhof is a pioneer.
But in the later section about ‘Soliloquies’, we read: ‘the characters seem to converse, but in reality sit side by side and think aloud.’ Both these observations strike me as valid and interesting, but on the face of it they seem inconsistent. They make sense, however, within the wider context of a culture that places special emphasis on the emotions, and in which an individual sometimes feels the need to express the feelings welling up inside him or herself, whether anyone else is listening or not.
More than a hundred years on and the introduction to Two Plays is still required reading for anyone who feels inclined to meditate on Chekhov.
Harvey Pitcher is the author of The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (1985), Chekhov’s Leading Lady (1979) (a biography of his wife, the actress Olga Knipper), and Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime (2010). He is co-translator with Patrick Miles of Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-1888 (1999) and Chekhov: The Comic Stories (2004). His other books include When Miss Emmie Was in Russia (2011), and Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (1994).
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The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon c.1901
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Guest post: Harvey Pitcher, ‘Calderon on Chekhov’
Some years have passed since I last took down my copy of Two Plays of Tchekhof: Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by George Calderon (1912). I remembered the book with affection, especially the introduction, but going back to old books, like going back to old places, can sometimes be a let-down. In the event, I was far from disappointed.
He describes himself as ‘a fumbling amateur’. Of course, he was nothing of the sort. He was clearly an excellent linguist, and he had done his homework. In the eight years that had passed since Chekhov’s death a considerable literature had built up about him in Russian, with which Calderon appears fully conversant. I wondered if he was as familiar with Chekhov’s stories as with his plays, but a reference to the little-known short story of 1887, ‘Happiness’, shows that he was.
Apart from the two years he had spent in Russia, Calderon had the further advantage in translating the plays of being an active dramatist. He would have appreciated Tom Stoppard’s comment that ‘a play is an event, not a text’: words that are lost on today’s text-oriented academic readers. Translators, of plays in particular, always face the problem that what seems the mot juste in one decade may sound dated a decade later. This is a trap that Calderon avoids. Even his translation of the notorious nyedotyopa, the contemptuous term used by the aged butler Firs in The Cherry Orchard to describe young upstarts like the manservant Yasha, as ‘a job-lot’, has lasted better than many other versions of this impossible word.
In the course of fifteen pages of introduction Calderon touches on most of the subjects that critics have written about at great length subsequently, but he does so with a much lighter touch. Commenting on how unsuited the English style of acting is to Chekhov’s plays, he writes: ‘As each actor opens his mouth to speak, the rest fall petrified into an uncanny stillness, like the courtiers about the Sleeping Beauty, or those pathetic clusters that one sees about a golf-tee, while one of the players is flourishing at his ball in preparation for a blow.’ Calderon played golf, but his choice of vocabulary (‘pathetic clusters’, ‘in preparation for a blow’) conveys an intellectual’s undisguised contempt for the golfing fraternity.
What Calderon offers the reader is his ‘meditations’ on Chekhov, as he calls them. This is such a good word, as it hovers appropriately between thought and emotion. I hope I am not alone in finding the term ‘literary criticism’ unappealing when applied to Chekhov’s plays, as it is too exclusively cerebral and thought-oriented; if one has to choose a term, ‘appreciation’ is preferable, since it covers both exercising judgement and cherishing good writing. But we can all meditate on Chekhov, examine our feelings and think about our reactions, comparing notes and sharing opinions.
Calderon’s choice of plays was intended to show Chekhov at two extremes: The Seagull is easy, not much unlike a Western play, whereas The Cherry Orchard is difficult and very Russian. In a key passage he writes:
This is very open-ended, and rightly so; Calderon is reaching here for that elusive quality which makes Chekhov’s plays distinctive and so unlike the work of any other playwright.
His plays, Calderon writes later, are ‘tragedies with the texture of comedy’. What a godsend for the hard-pressed examiner searching for a ‘Discuss’ question! But as a canny candidate, I don’t think I’d have tackled it. ‘Tragedies’ is a difficult word to apply to Chekhov’s plays, and there is an element here of contrived paradox. The phrase that Calderon uses soon after, ‘the admixture of comedy with pathos’, would have been the easier option.
In the section describing ‘Group Emotions’ in the plays, Calderon writes:
But in the later section about ‘Soliloquies’, we read: ‘the characters seem to converse, but in reality sit side by side and think aloud.’ Both these observations strike me as valid and interesting, but on the face of it they seem inconsistent. They make sense, however, within the wider context of a culture that places special emphasis on the emotions, and in which an individual sometimes feels the need to express the feelings welling up inside him or herself, whether anyone else is listening or not.
More than a hundred years on and the introduction to Two Plays is still required reading for anyone who feels inclined to meditate on Chekhov.
Harvey Pitcher is the author of The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (1985), Chekhov’s Leading Lady (1979) (a biography of his wife, the actress Olga Knipper), and Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime (2010). He is co-translator with Patrick Miles of Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-1888 (1999) and Chekhov: The Comic Stories (2004). His other books include When Miss Emmie Was in Russia (2011), and Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (1994).
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