„Uncle Vanya“ – „Oh, if all this could be over quickly …”

Even though I tried, this time I cannot keep up with my reading. As I am reading on – having now worked my way through “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard” and starting again on “Uncle Vanya” - what I have written before just gets cancelled and I start anew. Of course I like this – but “Chekhov” proves almost too complex and dynamic for my taste. Though, right now, it feels again as if I was going deeper …

And it appears that, by making these “moves”, I learned a lot about a fictional world that I hadn’t been aware of – and about the “vortex”. (I am actually looking forward to elaborating on the concepts I have used “instinctively” when I was reading, but there is always so much reading to do that there will probably be a long period of looking forward still …)

“Why is it we have hardly started living before we all become dull, drab, boring, lazy, complacent, useless and miserable?”

definitely was one of these moments where I OBSERVED the vortex grinding to a halt. They are always great moments. It felt as if I had an answer to one of the nagging questions I was dealing with when I was reading, even though it is itself a question. When I am not looking for causality but am getting into the mode of answering “Chekhov” provides, it even appeared like a surprisingly precise answer. I just didn’t really know what the QUESTION was.

However, I remember WHEN the question came up. It came up the moment I began to read Chekhov – when, in the first act of “Uncle Vanya”, Dr. Astrov is talking about the mindless destruction of woods, and the opportunity of doing something about the CLIMATE!!!? - Even though I was thrilled – and shocked! – I think I “put this away” the moment I read it because I couldn’t deal with the timelessness right away but had to figure out the characters first. And, even though I talked with Claudia about this when we met, I never got round to dealing with it. The closest I came to asking the “timeless” question in “Chekov” was – after having identified the parallel state of our worlds as some kind of “atmosphere” of neglect and carelessness: Why does nobody CARE? And to this question the RHETORICAL question from “Three Sisters” provided a shockingly precise answer.

“Why is it we have hardly started living before we all become dull, drab, boring, lazy, complacent, useless and miserable?”

Indeed it is BECAUSE “we” become dull, drab, boring, lazy, complacent, useless and miserable before we even have a chance to know it that we are unable to genuinely care about things like trees and climate change. Besides, the quote appeared to provide an answer to my overall observation (and question) about “Chekhov”: that (or why) - even though rather disruptive things happen on that stage (like people shooting themselves, shooting at others, leaving for good …) - there is never any genuine CHANGE in people’s lives. So, that made me feel as if the carelessness and indifference about the state of the world and the inability to move forward towards happiness were somehow connected. Having struck this connection, it appears instantly trivial, but I found THE WAY Chekhov made me discover it totally exciting.

Reading on, I came upon some kind of explanation about how they might be connected – which is not satisfying AS AN EXPLANATION. However, I felt that it struck the core of the issue more than any explanation could. I found it at the end of the third act of “The Cherry Orchard”, and it comes from Lopakhin who has just been celebrating the greatest triumph of his life. He, the son of a poor peasant, who has been nothing but beaten and mistreated as a child, buying the finest piece of property in the neighbourhood to “develop” it! Immediately after almost dancing with joy, he blurts out in distress:

“Oh, if all this could be over quickly, if our miserable, mixed-up lives could somehow hurry up and CHANGE.”

This was the most “timeless” moment for me reading Chekhov. Taking up the first act of “Uncle Vanya” again, reading closely, I gathered that there isn’t THAT much of a parallel situation ON THE SURFACE as the catchword “climate” suggests. It is just that we tend to separate such issues from their context to create timelessness – something I am trying to avoid, but this time it happened to me as well. What Chekhov was writing about has nothing to do with global warming, of course, but with the protection the woods offer to create a milder, more wholesome climate. In a northern continental climate woods offer protection from rough weather and chill - whereas, in my own world, they alleviate the overheated urban atmosphere in summer. (Which, however, is kind of two ends of the same stick.) “But I love trees!” proved more “sustainable” – as I realized that trees have a lot more impact on my life - and state of mind - than I have been aware of. To my own surprise, I actually stuck with it and KEPT thinking about trees. It helped a lot that a documentary called “Das geheime Leben der Bäume” (= “The Hidden Life of Trees”) had just come to the cinema, and I watched it. And there is a book as well which I am going to read, and I know already that it is something I could have recommended to Richard Armitage for him to understand how his character is FEELING about trees. By the way, it is not the kind of esoteric crap it sounds like. It was written by a forester who has been working with trees all his life, but who also LOVES them. Who has his ear on nature, and has been trying to learn everything about them. (And it immediately answered all the questions I had about raising a forest – by cutting down and planting anew or by letting it grow.)

Somehow, all this came into “Oh, if all this could be over quickly …” not by chance. The hour of Lopakhin’s greatest triumph is also the hour of death for the cherry orchard which gets chopped down as a consequence in the last act. I even understand why this HAS to happen. There is money to be made, which is also the most important kind of energy for making things move FORWARD. And I think that this ANTAGONISM – that cannot be resolved! – is fundamental in Chekhov.

My observation about the historical and economical background having such an impact on people’s lives might have been created because I noticed PARALLEL STRUCTURES from the beginning where the representation of the world “outside” and the domaine of people’s feelings are concerned. The reason why I was drawn into Chekhov’s world in this way is that the “Chekhov vortex” plays almost entirely on an instrument I know so well – but very seldom give up so unrestrictedly to “somebody else” to play on: MY OWN FEELINGS. I noticed this already when I read the first lines of “Uncle Vanya” – so much that it spooked me and I actually closed the book. But of course I wanted to read on – and noticed that I would be fine. I suppose it was the irony that I discovered subconsciously which made me feel safe. Reassured me that I was in no danger of being stuck with this gob of “mixed-up” feelings I didn’t want … And this feature I described as “flightiness”: the experience that feelings can be cancelled. Even though I MUST feel them strongly at the moment, they will go away. This reassurance made it possible that I could open up towards these characters in a way I usually don’t. To leave the ground of analyzing them more than I usually do, and instead treat them like genuine human beings. Even more - that I WANTED to be kind and understanding and perceive them the way I think Chekhov did. To allow that there is this GRAIN of – I wouldn’t say “goodness” because this is already too much of a moral term – but of human quality and genuine feeling in EVERBODY. And, doing this, I learned to use Chekhov’s TECHNIQUES of creating emotional complexity. One of them I noticed explicitly, among others in the bit I quoted from “The Cherry Orchard”, as a parallel to the antagonism in the outside world. Chekhov always makes these extensive stage directions, not just about what has to happen on the stage but also about how people are supposed to be feeling at that  precise moment – and which emotions actors are supposed to express. I tend to read over these, but very soon noticed that I shouldn’t. Reading them, I discovered that people often express CONTRADICTORY feelings. For example, saying rather funny or trivial things while they are crying. And – like people in real live! – they are saying one thing and are doing the opposite. And this opens some kind of gap where I begin to reach out for an explanation.  At the moment he is saying this, Lopakhin is exultant and  distressed AT THE SAME TIME. He is himself an example for the “mixed-up” state he is talking about. And this makes me QUESTION what he is saying. So - even though he should be! - he isn’t EXACTLY an example for the way “we” would want these lives to “hurry up and change”. Not even in his own mind.

  

And this is where I felt this striking parallel with my own historical situation – which is, of course, not one made of given facts but of interpretation. The way Chekhov put this, he expresses MY OWN experience of the antagonism. AT THAT MOMENT, I couldn’t help feeling that we were standing at this parallel “junction” in history - where everything that appeared relatively stable is about to change with lightning speed, whereas we – “mixed-up”, dull, lazy and miserable as we are – are unable to keep up, neither emotionally nor in our actions. If Lopakhin’s wish and vision were ever to come true, we would have to become DIFFERENT people. And how is this ever supposed to happen???