THEATER IN TIME:

THE META-TEMPORAL DRAMA OF CHEKHOV,

VVEDENSKY, AND HAVEL

Cole M. Crittenden

A dissertation presented to the faculty of Princeton University

in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Recommended for acceptance by

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

May 2005
 UMI Number: 3169725

Copyright 2005 by
Crittenden, Cole M.

All rights reserved.

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 iii

Abstract

This dissertation examines temporalities in dramatic works by three playwrights:

Anton Chekhov, Alexander Vvedensky, and Václav Havel. It is my contention that these

playwrights, whose works have heretofore been viewed as unrelated, all engage time in

ways that make it the central preoccupation of their plays, both thematically and in terms

of structure. Chekhov’s drama is surprisingly Modernist in this regard, and the affinities

between his Three Sisters and later plays by Vvedensky and Havel suggest a shared

approach to drama as a genre uniquely capable of presenting and critiquing temporal

constructs.

Drama has always been particularly focused on its temporal structuring, in large

part because drama’s element is time. With its connections to theatrical performance,

dramatic literature must simultaneously account for two temporal paradigms: the internal,

fictional time of the text; and the uninterrupted, real time of performance. All

playwrights create dramatic worlds that engage these two distinct time frames. But the

plays discussed in this dissertation (Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Vvedensky’s Christmas at

the Ivanovs, and Havel’s Unveiling) are constructed in a way that actively draws attention

to their potential, as dramatic works, for this dual framing of time. These plays make

time itself their subject, showing an awareness of the temporal experience, as both a

theme and a problem of representation.

Chekhov can be viewed as an originator of what I term “meta-temporal” drama.

He is a playwright who anticipates and defines the dramatic concerns with time that

twentieth-century dramatists continue to explore. Vvedensky and Havel, two later

 iv

playwrights in the Slavic tradition, are presented here as dramatists who follow in

Chekhov’s footsteps, creating their own Absurdist versions of meta-temporal drama.

Using philosophical, scientific, and historical sources (Bergson’s philosophy, the

development of Greenwich Mean Time, the Einsteinian Revolution, French Absurdism,

etc.) to supplement literary scholarship, I contextualize Chekhov’s innovation and these

later playwrights’ variations, and I discuss the insights that all three of these authors bring

to an understanding of the temporal experience.

 v

Acknowledgements

While these acknowledgements come at the beginning, it is endings they address.

My time in the Slavic Department at Princeton has been richly difficult, and I am sad to

see it end. Dissertations, on the other hand, often seem just plain difficult, and although I

have learned a lot in the writing process, I am happy the end is finally here. For this

latter ending it is to Olga Hasty that I owe my greatest debt. Although I occasionally hid

behind filing cabinets to avoid her and her questions about my progress, she never

abandoned me. She read drafts quickly (even when I wrote them slowly), and her

guidance resulted in work that was improved, but still recognizably mine. She was the

right advisor for this dissertation – and for this dissertator. No department is just one

person, however. Michael Wachtel, Caryl Emerson, and Ellen Chances have all had a

profound influence on my understanding of literature as a professional discipline, and I

am thankful to each of them. Charles Townsend taught me Czech and significantly

deepened my understanding of Russian. Herman Ermolaev, Mirjam Fried, Ksana Blank,

and David Freedel have added to my positive experience here. And perhaps most

importantly, Fran Carrol (a.k.a. Bobie), Christine Ricci, and Kate Fischer made the

department feel like home. I’ll miss them most of all.

For the past three years, my actual home has been in Rockefeller College here at

Princeton. Besides a domicile, Rocky has provided me with regular meals, challenging

work, and superb colleagues, and I have grown in ways both professional and personal

because of the time I have spent as an assistant master. Special thanks go to Maria
 vi

DiBattista, Pat Heslin, and the remarkably dedicated group of juniors and seniors that I

have overseen in my work.

I found some of my closest friends in graduate school, and they have come from a

variety of departments here on campus. First and foremost, I owe Phi Delta Phi (my co-

ed dissertation sorority) most of the big laughs I’ve had in the past few years. Dunja

Popovic (and Jacob Hosler, the husband who is joined to her hip), Sarah Dunn, and

especially Laura Davies have made life here livable. Sarah Clovis Bishop, Julia

Zarankin, Antonio Garcia, Michael Taylor, Anne-Marie Alexander, Ipek Yosmaoglu,

Peter Turner, and Rob Richter (who isn’t a grad student, but is an essential part of my

grad student years) have also provided moral support and conversations (high and low)

that confirm over and over how lucky I am to have found true comrades in this world.

There are others, of course – some who have arrived more recently, and some who have

moved on (both geographically and in other ways). Perhaps the hardest thing about

graduate student life – and, ultimately, of life in general – is that good friends cannot stay

with us for good.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my parents. Their support and concern

over the last six and a half years have kept me afloat and reminded me that individual

worth is never simply a reflection of professional output. Work is important, but it

cannot be the only measure of life.

 vii

For my parents,
Charles and Gloria Crittenden,
who believe that time is precious – and never stop worrying.
 viii

Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...iii

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………..viii

Introduction: Changing Time(s) and the Twentieth Century……………………………...1

Chapter One: The Dramatics of Time……………………………………………………17

Chapter Two: Three Sisters and the Mistake of Counting: Chekhov and Dramatic
Temporality………………………………………………………………54

Chapter Three: Always Never the Same: Time in the Absurdist Theater of Vvedensky
and Havel……………………………………………………………….111

Conclusion: What (When) Is Meta-Temporal Drama?....................................................169

Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………..177
 1

Introduction

Changing Time(s) and the Twentieth Century

Time is not an entity which is encountered, or a concept which is perceived, in

isolation. Indeed the history of thought about time includes theories which deny
the existence of time and the perception of time. Even if it exists and can be
experienced, time comes into being and knowledge only in connection with
something else.
-Richard McKeon1

The twentieth century has been characterized by an interest in the nature of time

so widespread as to be termed, in A. A. Mendilow’s words, a “time-obsession.”2 Nearly

every area of human activity, in one way or another, reflected this preoccupation. The

accompanying changes in human behavior were nothing short of astounding. National

and international synchronization of timepieces was well underway by the beginning of

the century, and the subsequent invention of the quartz- and then battery-operated

watches allowed for affordable mass production of personal time-keeping devices.

Advances in modern industry, where assembly-line workers now performed repetitive

tasks that had no clear beginning or end, resulted in a workforce whose labor was bought

according to the measurements of these ubiquitous clocks (rather than by the more

1
Richard McKeon, “Time and Temporality,” The Human Experience of Time, ed. Charles M. Sherover
(Evanston: Northwest Univ. Press., 2001) 573.
2
A. A. Mendilow, “The Time-Obsession of the Twentieth Century,” Aspects of Time, ed. C. A. Patrides
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976) 69-74.
 2

traditional methods of completion of a set task). In terms of entertainment and

communication there were also watershed changes in the way time was represented and

conceptualized. Motion picture technology, which expanded throughout the world in the

twentieth century, could now capture moving images of events as they occurred in time

and replay them in exactly the same way – and in exactly the same amount of measurable

time. And developments in wave broadcasting could now unite audiences separated by

considerable space, letting them hear and later see transmissions simultaneously. On a

more theoretical level, the very definition of measurable time was changing. Einstein’s

Theory of Relativity and his most famous equation, E = mc2, ushered in the atomic age,

changing the way physicists conceived of time but also allowing for advances such as

radiocarbon dating and atomic clocks, advances that had a tremendous impact in fields

outside of physics. This convergence of popular and radical shifts in time-keeping and in

the scientific definition of time at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the

twentieth century put time at the center of nearly everything, and made it, according to

Samuel Alexander, “the most characteristic feature” of modern thought.3

With so much human activity tied to and controlled by time, the question of what

time is versus how it is represented inevitably took on particular significance in modern

thinking. Psychological studies on cognition and time became common.4 And most

important for this study, humanistic explorations of the experience of time were also

prevalent, not only in philosophy, but also in the arts, where “temporality” became

3
Cited in J. A. Gunn, The Problem of Time: An Historical and Critical Study (London: Allen and Unwin,
1929) 24.
4
For an overview of work on time among such contemporary fields of research as cognitive, physical, and
natural sciences, as well as philosophy, see Harald Atmanspacher and Evan Ruhnau, eds., Time,
Temporality, Now: Experience Time and Concepts of Time in an Interdisciplinary Perspective (New York:
Springer, 1997).
 3

something of a catchword in both artistic creation and in its theory and criticism. To be

sure, an interest in time was nothing new. Man has been measuring time for thousands of

years,5 and there is a long tradition of inquiry into the meaning and make-up of time, both

in religious and philosophical writings and in the sciences. But never before the Modern

Age had interest in and discussion of time reached such proportions. The trajectories of

Modernist thought were unprecedented. A number of thinkers associated with

Modernism – Husserl, Wittgenstein, Bergson, Schreiner, Einstein, Freud, Bakhtin – came

to see time not as an object, but as a process that defies a single stable definition.

Articulations replaced definition, and nowhere was this more evident than in literature,

where many writers made temporality the focus of their works.

One type of literature that has always been particularly focused on its temporal

structuring is drama, and this is not surprising since, as Eric Bentley has noted, drama’s

element is time.6 With its connections to theatrical performance, dramatic literature must

simultaneously account for two temporal paradigms: the internal, fictional time of the

text; and the uninterrupted, real time of performance. All playwrights create dramatic

worlds that engage these two distinct time frames. But certain plays are constructed in a

way that actively draws attention to their unique potential, as dramatic works, for this

dual framing of time. These plays make time itself their subject, showing an awareness

of the temporal experience, as both a theme and a problem of representation. Such plays

come under the category of “meta-temporal” drama. As this dissertation will show, it is

in the twentieth century that such drama primarily appears, and in a very early twentieth-

5
Carved bones and rocks that depict the lunar cycle date from 13,000 to 30,000 years ago. A twelve-
month calendar is a more recent innovation, dating back to the Sumerians, who are the first known people
to name their lunar cycles. See Alexander Waugh, Time: Its Origins, its Enigma, its History (New York:
Carroll & Graf, 2000) 87-94.
6
Eric Bentley, The Life of Drama (London: Methuen, 1965) 79.
 4

century Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov, that it achieves its seminal – and in many

ways fullest – expression. Chekhov can be viewed as an originator of meta-temporal

drama – a playwright who anticipates and defines the dramatic concerns with time that

later twentieth-century dramatists continue to explore. Alexander Vvedensky and Václav

Havel, two later playwrights in the Slavic tradition, will be shown as dramatists who

follow in Chekhov’s footsteps, creating their own Absurdist versions of meta-temporal

drama. There are a number of historical reasons for the rise of meta-temporal drama, and

by examining them in this introductory essay we can gain an understanding of the context

in which Chekhov’s innovation and these later playwrights’ variations came into being.

Background

Specific reasons for the historical change in thought about time at the dawn of the

twentieth century, both in terms of volume and of kind, have recently been investigated in

a number of interesting studies that tend to focus on social, political, and economic

factors at work in the years of the “second Industrial Revolution” from about 1880 to

1920. According to Perry Anderson, Modernism is “triangulated” by three key

coordinates: first, an aesthetics that is dominated by an aristocratic class; second, an

emergence of technologies and inventions of the second Industrial Revolution, including

the telephone, radio, automobile, and aircraft; and third, the rise of labor movements in

connection with the assumed proximity of social revolution. Anderson ultimately

attributes Modernism to the collision of these three coordinates’ different temporal

allegiances: “European modernism…flowered in the space between a still usable classical

 5

past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future.”7

Stephen Kern, in reference to the remarkable surge in availability of material, intellectual,

and human resources, characterizes this period as facing a “crisis of abundance”8 that

changed the phenomenology of everyday life and resulted in, among other things, a

threshold change in both the intellectual and everyday experience of time. Ronald

Schleifer, building on Kern, writes:

The historical moment of twentieth-century Modernism…is the collision of two

modes of conceptualizing and apprehending temporality: the Enlightenment view
of objective temporality and a newer view, born of a world of abundance rather
than need, where the particularities of temporality – like the very products created
by the ‘means of production’ – cannot be fully subordinated to atemporal
mathematical formulations, hierarchies of meaning, or antecedent causal
explanations.9

All three of these scholars point to the combination of factors that made modern life

substantively different from previous eras, and they view the shifts in thinking about time

as an interpretive response to these changes. Since the world seemed a different place, it

follows that constructs of time, which shape our apprehension of the world, would also be

different. There are a number of specific historic events, discussed below, that

contributed in a significant way to the Modern concern with temporality. And while

interdisciplinary scholarship might view them as effects as much as causes of the Modern

zeitgeist, their influence on the conceptualization of time was enormous.

7
Perry Anderson, “Modernism and Revolution,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Carey
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 198) 326.
8
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1983) 9.
9
Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture,
1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2000) 109-110.
 6

Time-Keeping and the Turn of the Century

Part of the intense interest in time at the turn of the century certainly had

something to do with the very fact that it was the turn of the century.10 As recent events

have again shown, the inception of a new calendared era can generate great excitement,

and the beginning of the twentieth century was no exception. What made the dawn of the

twentieth century particularly noteworthy, however, was that much of the world was now

united under the same system of time-recording; it was a new century, in other words, for

more people than ever before. The current system of dating years was instituted

relatively recently in the history of civilization,11 but by the end of the eighteenth century,

all Western Christian countries, as well as their colonies in the Americas, had adopted a

reformed version12 of this calendar. Colonial expansion in the nineteenth century brought

the calendar to the Indian subcontinent, the Pacific islands, and the African continent.

Japan adopted the calendar in 1873 during its Westernization period. Even Eastern

Christian countries such as Russia, which used the older version of this calendar until the

10
The concept of decades, centuries, and millennia in the now ubiquitous system of numbering years is a
purely human construct, having no connection to phases of the moon or rotations and orbits of the earth.
Their importance is a result of the decimal system, which uses ten as its base because of the influence on
Western mathematics of Pythagoras, who believed that ten was a perfect number for religious reasons.
Punctilious observers of this delineation of time insist that new decades, centuries, and millennia never
begin at the commonly celebrated moment when a zero appears in final position, but only when a one
occupies this place, since there is no year numbered 0 (B.C. or A.D.). For instance, on January 1, 2000,
only 1,999 years have passed since January 1, 1 A.D. Since the year may be said to begin at any point, and
since there is nothing in nature that marks the new century or millennium, it makes sense that more
excitement is generated by seeing multiple numbers in the counting system flip over, as that is the only
thing that does noticeably change. January 1, 1900, then, was seen as the watershed date that began the
new century. See Waugh 143-146 and 183-185.
11
The current system of dating things in relation to the birth of Christ was begun in 532 A.D. by Dionysius
Exiguus, a Roman monk and preeminent scholar of church records who was given the task of setting the
prescribed dates for future Easter celebrations by Pope John I. For an excellent history of the calendar’s
development, as well as changes to it and adoption of those changes in Protestant European countries, see
Duncan Steel, Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 2000).
12
The Gregorian Reform of 1582, which deleted the days from October 5 to October 14 of that year
because the calendar had become ten days longer than the solar year, was initially accepted only by
Catholic countries. See Steel 157-182.
 7

Bolshevik Revolution, still recognized January 1 of 1900 as the start of a new century,

although that date came a week and a half later in Russia than it did in Western Europe.

Of all the major populations and world powers at the turn of the century, only China was

not using the Western calendar for official purposes.13

It was not, however, only the common system of numbering years that most of the

world now agreed upon. The spreading availability of accurate time-keeping devices and

the establishment of universal time and standard time zones in the latter half of the

nineteenth century contributed to the unification of time measurement at the level of

hours, minutes, and seconds. Here again the Western model dominated. The division of

a solar day into 24 units is a Babylonian legacy and was a social convention in Greek and

Roman civilization,14 but the division of an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60

seconds is most directly a result of the writings of Adam Bede, an eighth-century English

monk who backed the theoretical divisions of the day as we now have it and whose

writings found their way into libraries all across Europe.15 The concept of minutes and

seconds may have been widespread by the time mechanical clocks began to be developed

in the thirteenth century, but the systems of weights and springs these clocks were built

13
China abandoned its dynastic year count after the revolution of 1911, following which it adopted the
Gregorian calendar for official business. See Steel 292.
14
The Babylonians separated the day into daytime and nighttime, dividing each period – daylight from
sunrise to sunset and nighttime from sunset to sunrise – into twelve segments of equal length, a number that
corresponded to the twelve months in the calendar. See Gerhard Dorn-van Rossum, History of the Hour,
trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996) 19.
15
Alexander Waugh writes about the likely origins of time divisions via Bede: “Minutes and seconds must
originally have been devised as a theory, calculated as a parallel to the ancient geometric divisions of the
circle into 360 degrees. It was only a matter of time until the scholars of the medieval Church in the late
eighth century, encouraged by the writings of Adam Bede, had arrived at a general consensus that divisions
of the hour should likewise be based on the radix of 60. By the time the first mechanical clocks were made,
some 400 years later, what was once a general consensus had now evolved into established fact. The
Christian Church was, after all, entirely responsible for these matters. To the average citizen, minutes and
seconds would have seemed whimsical and oblique, yet the symbolic convenience of the circular clock face
corresponding to the ancient geometry of the circle would not have escaped the notice of the medieval
theologians to whom these matters were of the utmost importance.” See Waugh 27-28.
 8

with could not account accurately for minute and second divisions, since even their hours

were not always of uniform length. The development of the pendulum clock in the

seventeenth century allowed for more uniform and precise time-keeping, as well as for

the subsequent coordination of time within cities at the level of minutes and, eventually,

even seconds.16

By the beginning of the nineteenth century accurate clocks could be found

throughout Europe and America, but there was little intercity or international

coordination of time-keeping, and little need for it. The need for such coordination arose

with the invention of the steam engine (in 1803) and the ensuing development of railway

systems throughout much of the world. Increasing train travel in the latter half of the

nineteenth century gave much of the impetus for a standard time,17 and although clocks

which kept accurate time while in movement made some coordination possible, the

invention of the telegraph mid-century made communication of a standard time much

simpler. International coordination soon followed. In 1884 delegates from 25 nations

met in Washington, D.C., for the International Meridian Conference. An initial meridian,

running through the observatory in Greenwich, England, was set as the center from which

all longitudes would be measured18 and from which a universal day would be calculated.

16
Galileo’s demonstration in 1583 that successive beats of a pendulum always take place in the same
length of time opened the possibility of pendulum clocks that could accurately account for minutes, and
Christiaan Huygens, a Dutchman, constructed the first pendulum clock in 1656. It had an error of less than
one minute a day. Minute hands soon appeared on clocks, followed by second hands. In 1721 George
Graham, an Englishman, improved the pendulum clock’s accuracy to within one second per day by
modifying the escapement that controls the pendulum to eliminate recoil, a design still in use in pendulum
clocks today. For a history of clock developments, see Ernest L. Edwardes, The Story of the Pendulum
Clock (Altrincham: John Sherratt & Son, 1977).
17
See Dohrn-van Rossum 347-350.
18
In 1761 John Harrison, an Englishman, refined Graham’s pendulum technique and built a highly accurate
clock, called a marine choronometer, that allowed the British government to determine longitude on the sea
and around the world. Longitudes were determined by setting one clock by observed noon at the unknown
locale and comparing it to a clock carried on board that had kept accurate time since being set at the
 9

The world was divided east and west from this prime meridian into 24 time zones, with

time in each zone differing from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) by an integral number of

hours; official minutes and seconds would be the same everywhere, as calculated by the

clocks at Greenwich.19

The New Scientific Definition of Time

A common calendar and coordination of time-keeping at the end of the nineteenth

century allowed most of the world for the first time to agree on what time it was, a

condition which in part helps to explain the pervasive fin-de-siecle interest in the

question of what time is. But perhaps the single largest catalyst for subsequent interest in

time came from physics. The scientific definition of time that was emerging at the end of

the nineteenth century would have profound effects on the course of the twentieth

century, and one name and one concept would come to dominate most discussion of time:

Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity. But to sense the extent to which Einstein’s

theories changed modern science’s conception of time, it is necessary first to briefly

discuss the scientific tradition that Einstein revolutionized.

From the beginning, measuring time involved measuring movement. The path

and cycle of the moon and the sun were obvious gauges of the passing of time, and these

starting point for measuring longitudes, known as prime. The difference in hours was then divided by 24
and multiplied by 360, which would equal the longitude in degrees.
19
The universal day is the mean solar day beginning at Mean Midnight (in Greenwich) and counted on a
24-hour clock. Longitudinal lines are calculated east and west from the prime meridian up to 180 degrees.
At that place (conveniently located in the Pacific Ocean), the east and west lines meet at the International
Date Line, where the date to the west of the line is one day ahead of the date to the east of it. 24 standard
meridians of longitude, each 15 degrees apart, serve as the centers for each of the 24 resulting time zones.
Since the system’s institution, some sub-divisions of zones and small movements of lines have occurred for
the convenience of affected inhabitants. In 1986 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was replaced by
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is based on atomic measurements rather than the earth’s
rotation. For a history of GMT, see Derek House, Greenwich Time and the Longitude (London: Philip
Wilson and National Maritime Museum, 1997).
 10

celestial coordinates could also be used to measure terrestrial distances, which could be

described in terms of time taken to cover them.20 Time, then, was largely equated with

motion, especially as understood by Classic philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle.21

The Aristotelian belief that the earth was the unmoving center of the universe was

adopted and upheld by the Catholic Church until Copernicus began circulating his

heliocentric model in 1514 A.D. Copernicus’ discovery had far-reaching effects in

scientific inquiry over the next five hundred years.22

Since the earth was no longer viewed as an immobile center after Copernicus,

there was good reason to question any absolute spatial standard for measurement. This

emerging concept of relativity of motion was furthered by Galileo, whose experiments

supported Copernicus’ model of the universe by showing that certain patterns of motion

hold whether they are carried out in an “unmoving” laboratory on the ground or on an

obviously moving one such as a ship. The work that pushed this line of thinking farthest,

however, was Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, published in 1687. Newton

based his entire work on the premise that there is no unique standard of rest, no absolute

position in space. As Newton’s First Law states, a body in motion will continue in that

motion unless acted upon by another force. Since movement is the natural state of things,

it is impossible to determine whether two events that took place at different times

occurred in the same spatial position. But Newton, like Aristotle before him, still

20
A custom still used – humorously – in Gogol’s Revizor (The Government Inspector) of 1836, when in
Act One the vastness of the Russian Empire is indicated by one character’s noting that a person could ride a
horse for three years and still not reach a foreign state.
21
See Aristotle’s Physics, trans. Richard Hope (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961) 79-89.
22
This cursory overview of the development of scientific thinking on time from Copernicus up to Einstein
is taken primarily from Stephen Hawkings, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1996) 1-35; and
Igor D. Novikov, The River of Time, trans. Vitaly Kisin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998) 2-68.
Among the many popular introductions to the subject now available to the non-specialist, these are among
the best that I have found.
 11

believed in absolute time. That is, he believed that the interval of time between two

events could be unambiguously measured by any observer, even though the spatial

coordinates might be impossible to fix. Time for Newton was separate from space:

“Absolute, true, and mechanical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably

without relation to anything external, and by another name is called ‘duration.’”23

Newton’s notion of constant time would hold until the beginning of the twentieth

century.24 But the roots of that notion’s undoing predate Newton’s Principia

Mathematica by eleven years. In 1676 the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer

argued that light moves at a constant and finite speed. He based this claim on his

observations that the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons appeared later the farther the earth was

from Jupiter, and he reasoned that this was because light from the moons took longer to

reach the earth the farther away they were. A number of important observations and

experiments over the next two centuries would support Roemer’s claim of a fixed speed

of light, but the most important work to corroborate Roemer’s came only at the end of the

nineteenth century. In 1887 Albert Michelsen and Edward Morley, two American

scientists, compared the speed of light moving in the same direction as the earth’s motion

with the speed of light moving at a right angle to the earth’s motion and found that they

were the same. The measurements, calculated at 186,000 miles per second, were

identical. The speed of light was constant, regardless of the motion of the light source or

the observer. But constant in relation to what? Newton had done away with the notion of

23
Taken from the Scholium to the definitions in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Book 1
(1689), trans. Andrew Motte (1729) as revised by Florian Cajori (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1934).
24
It should be noted that Newton’s views on absolute time did not go unquestioned in his own lifetime.
The German philosopher and scientist Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, a contemporary of Newton’s,
proposed that time is not uniform, although he did not work out any evidence for the claim. Newton’s
views, which were tied to his experiments in physical theory and mechanics (and which align themselves
more easily with everyday human experience), prevailed in the scientific world. See Novikov 33-35.
 12

fixed space. Everything is in motion: the earth revolves around the sun, the sun is in orbit

around the center of our galaxy, our galaxy is moving towards a large group of other

galaxies, etc. For a while scientists relied on the idea of “ether,” an undetectable

substance that filled empty space and was the supposed constant medium through which

light traveled. But ether’s undetectable nature was not the only problem with this model

of the universe. Speed is distance traveled divided by the time taken. If a pulse of light

were sent from one place to another, then under a constant model of time two observers

with different velocities would agree on the amount of time the journey took but would

record different distances the light traveled. But the speed of light had already been

shown to be constant, meaning it always covers the same distance in the same amount of

time. The solution to this problem was proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905.

Einstein’s revolutionary claim was that time in fact is not an absolute constant,

but like measurement of distance it is relative to the frame of reference of the observer.

For observers in different frames of reference to measure the same speed of light (as they

always do), their temporal measurements must be different. That is, one observer moving

at a faster velocity relative to another observer would record a shorter distance traveled

by the pulse of light, but would get the same measurement for speed because time is

slowing down for the observer. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, as the 1905

paper has come to be called, showed that both space and time are relative to the motion

of an observer and are not independent of one another. Instead, they are connected to

make a four-dimensional “spacetime.”25

25
This admittedly simple explanation of one of the most complex ideas of all time is culled from both
Hawking and Novikov, as well as Einstein’s own Relativity: The Special and General Theory – A Popular
Exposition, trans. Robert W. Lawson (New York: Crown Publishers, 1961).
 13

Literary Modernism’s Treatment of Time and the Chekhov Connection:

A Brief Overview of Chapters

The standardization of time-keeping and the emerging scientific concept of time-

space at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries foregrounded

the question of time in the Modern world. No doubt influenced by these events, writers

of the Modern Period (and after) show an interest in the nature of time, not only as a

structuring device (which is true of most literature), but also as its theme. Modern

literature if often characterized by its move towards the exploration of the structuring

devices and generic conventions within which the writer creates; literature becomes more

self-conscious of the material from which it is created. Interest in time is just one

example of this self-consciousness, but it is a prevalent one, probably because of the

general interest in time during the period.

The second and third decades of the twentieth century are particularly rich in

literature that explores temporality. The year 1921 is often singled out in the history of

Modernism for two reasons: it was the year that Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize;

and it was also the year that James Joyce’s Ulysses, often called the literary equivalent of

Relativity, was published. Writes such as Joyce, as well as Proust, Woolf, Lawrence,

Eliot, and Nabokov, foreground the theme and enactment of time in their works, and

scholarship on these writers has often focused on this characteristic.26

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), arguably Russia’s greatest playwright, predates

these writers, but in light of the overwhelming concern with temporality in his lifetime,

this dissertation situates Chekhov as a precursor to Modernism, one who realized the

26
The number of scholarly works on time in various Modernist writers is overwhelming. For a recent book
that treats temporality in many of these writers collectively, see Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake:
Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
 14

potential of making the material of time the focus of his drama, especially his penultimate

play, Three Sisters (1901). Chapter One will address how literature in general and drama

specifically engages various models of time. After an examination of the way time helps

to construct a fictional literary world by looking at, among other things, Bakhtin’s

concept of the chronotope, models of time that coexist in drama will be discussed, paying

special attention to drama’s unique demand for embodiment in real time through the

vehicle of performance. Aristotle’s poetics will be examined as the dominant approach to

the dramatic depiction of time, an approach that denies an individual and inherently

unshared experience of time, both in dramatic characters and in their audiences. But as

will be shown, theatrical realization of drama insists on multiple and contradictory time

schemes, and the possibility for exposing this juxtaposition of times is always present (if

rarely exploited).

Chekhov’s move away from a plot-centered, Aristotelian conception of drama

results in plays that do not solely seek to unify their characters within an all-

encompassing depiction of fictional time. Chapter Two will begin by looking at the

difficulty scholars have had in assigning Chekhov’s drama to a particular school. With

an eye on previous scholarship on temporality in Chekhov, this chapter will examine

Three Sisters as a seminal Modern play, one that strongly prefigures the concern with

temporality that in part defines the twentieth century aesthetic. Three Sisters will be

discussed as an innovative text that engages time not only as a structuring element, but

also as the play’s central thematic focus. The experience of time’s passing – something

on which drama as a genre is predicated – becomes the very thing the play is about, and

Three Sisters will be shown to associate various characters’ models of time with certain
 15

spatial consequences, a pattern that reflects the concurrent cultural tendency to explore

the connections between time and space. The philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose work

is known to have influenced subsequent Modernists, will be shown to inform Chekhov’s

approach to time in the play, especially as it critiques the meaning of mechanistic clock

time and the spatial implications of such a model. Chekhov’s investigation of time

reaches beyond the fictional world of his text, however. By exposing the devices and

examining the implications of temporal structuring that characters engage to organize

their own lives, Chekhov also draws attention to the ways he, as a playwright, temporally

structures the fictional dramatic space he creates and the theatrical experience that results.

Chekhov’s approach to drama as a form that explores how varying modes of

structuring and conceptualizing time affect the space (both fictional and theatrical) that

characters inhabit is developed in interesting ways by later Russian and Czech

playwrights of a seemingly unrelated tradition. If Chekhov’s innovation was to show

time as a construct of character (and not the other way around), then Absurdist theater

pushes that temporal individualization to its unsettling conclusion, where there is a

complete absence of any meaningful systematic model of time. After examining the

historical background and philosophy of the various strains of Absurdism, Chapter Three

will present Alexander Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs and Václav Havel’s

Unveiling as plays in which the measuring of time is as central as it is in Three Sisters,

but the absurdity of measured time is more obvious. Clocks in these plays constantly

announce the time, but the measures cannot correspond to any reality. The uncertainty of

any temporal meaning results in replays of time and repetitions of character dialogue, and

these playwrights play off the notion of repetition as non-repetition, where nothing is the
 16

same because time has passed, or because characters (and a viewing audience) experience

spans of time differently. The Absurdists seem to question the use of time in constructing

a dramatic world, even while necessarily engaging it. The dramatic implications of such

a move will be discussed.

 17

Chapter One

The Dramatics of Time

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.

-Shakespeare, As You Like It

Overview

Time helps us to structure our experiences in the space we inhabit, but how do we

define this category on the basis of which we define so much else? As discussed in the

Introduction, temporality became assumed a central place in modern thought in a broad

range of disciplines, and the definitions of time were as diverse as the disciplines that

investigated it. For all the efforts at universal coordination of time keeping that were

being carried out at the end of the nineteenth century, in many ways Einstein’s Theory of

Relativity at the beginning of the twentieth century provides a better metaphor for

describing the abundance of thought on the subject of temporality during the period: not

time, but times.

This chapter begins with the premise that the experience of time is one important

component of defining it. After a discussion of early seminal works on the nature of

experiential time, including the work of Augustine, the focus moves to literature and the

reasons literature is particularly well-suited to address time as experience. Bakhtin’s

 18

concept of the chronotope is examined as a useful way to define genre according to the

ways a spatio-temporal fictional world is constructed and experienced. From a general

discussion of literary time, the focus then shifts to time in drama, a type of literature that

has always been concerned with its spatio-temporal construction because of its ties to

performance, i.e., the realization of the literary text in real space and in real time.

Aristotle’s plot-centered poetics is examined as the dominant mode of constructing

temporality in a dramatic text, a mode that is limited because of its tendency to subjugate

any representation of an individual character’s experience of time to the exigencies of

plot. The chapter ends with a discussion of the potential of non-Aristotelian types of

drama (especially what I term “metatemporal” drama) to account for and represent the

experience of time in a way unmatched by any other genre.

The Human Experience of Time

In the modern age, the sciences hold claim to analysis and explanation of much of

the material from which life is constructed. The observable world – space – lends itself

well to scientific inquiry. The sciences can provide detailed analyses of the material

world’s composition and behavior through experiments. A hypothesis is formed, tested,

and then corroborated by identical experiments with identical results. As discussed in the

Introduction, the Einsteinian Revolution in physics changed the way the world defines

time, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century progress in the standardization and

proliferation of time-keeping technologies put mechanistic clock time at the center of

modern life. But unlike space, time is neither tangible nor directly observable. Clocks

and calendars measure time, but they are not the thing itself; there is nothing of time that
 19

is directly available to us but our subjective experience of it, experience based on present

perception and memory of the past. To be sure, the physical and cognitive sciences have

important things to say about what constitutes time and what it comes to signify. But

because of the nature of temporality, which is not a thing itself but is rather the

persistence and change perceptible in other things, science does not have the only – or

even definitive – word.

Experience is different from experiment.1 Human life is a composite of

experiences that are often unexpected and always unrepeatable. It resists laws and

generalization. As the philosopher Stephen Toulmin has aptly put it:

Little in human life lends itself fully to the lucid, tiny analysis of Euclid’s
geometry or Descartes’ physics…all abstraction involves omission, turning a
blind eye to elements in experience that do not lie within the scope of the given
theory, and so guaranteeing the rigor of its formal implications. Unqualified
agreement about these implications is possible, just because the theory itself is
formulated in abstract terms…Once we move outside the theory’s formal scope,
and ask questions about its relevance to the external demands of practice,
however, we enter into a realm of legitimate uncertainty, ambiguity, and
disagreement.2

Of course, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man made a similar observation when he claimed

that 2 x 2 = 5 can be a very good thing. Abstractions and rules serve a useful purpose,

but human experience will invariably extend beyond them. Mechanistic time – the

system of clock-time that we all agree on – is precisely this sort of abstraction that cannot

take into account the human experience of time. Scientific advances at the dawn of the

twentieth century significantly altered the modern definition of mechanistic time, moving

away from the Newtonian model of constant and unalterable increments and towards the

concept of relative time put forward by Einstein. But the scientific definition has little

1
This important distinction is taken from Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of
Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
2
Toulmin 199-200.
 20

itself to say about experiential time, which is inherently subjective. The importance of

accounting for subjective experience in a definition of time has been addressed by Hans

Meyerhoff:

Nowhere, perhaps, is the dichotomy between the world of experience and the world
of scientific concepts more striking than in the case of time – precisely because time
as experienced has such crucial significance for human life in general and because the
scientific analysis of time seems to disregard this significant connection.3

Experiential time may have little place in scientific discussion, but, as Meyerhoff points

out, its central place in the human experience means that any definition of time that

disregards it fails to define the very thing humans encounter.

Approaches to time were not always grounded in the scientific methodology that

often dominates modern discussion of the question. While science has focused on an

empirical temporal model that claims to be disconnected from the cultural and subjective

meanings that might affect an accurate conception of time, the earliest attempts to define

time were conversely based primarily on such meanings. The ancient Greeks, to whom

the Western world owes much of its cultural foundation, had two words for time: chronos

and kairos. Chronos designates quantitative measurement and specific chronological

ordering, the concept of time that dominates modern discussion. Kairos, however, is

much more psychological and personal. It is a qualitative, event-oriented term that

indicates a unique moment in time or the “right” time for something, a concept that

cannot be accounted for in a mechanistic, impersonal model. This qualitative approach is

the basis for most of the oldest thought on the nature of time. Religion and philosophy

are two traditions that have long concerned themselves with the question of the nature of

time, and both of them historically approached it not so much in terms of what it is, but

3
Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1955) 6.
 21

rather what it means. Kairos, not chronos. Of course, the aims of these disciplines were

not identical. But even if their conclusions were very different, their approaches to time

were often based on the same assumptions. And perhaps most enlightening (at least for

this work), they both employed artistic narrative in their inquiries. Narrative is a medium

that is particularly well suited to account for time in terms of experiential meaning.

One of the earliest extant writings on time – and of the most influential on

Western thought – is the Bible. The Book of Genesis attributes the creation of time to

God and defines it in general as the division of light from dark. Circadian and seasonal

cycles are a natural starting point for defining time, but the Hebraic approach tends

toward a portrayal of time not as a cycling constant but instead as the vehicle for

fulfillment of divine destiny. Time in the Bible is, in the words of Norman H. Snaith, just

one more manifestation of “direct action of the active God.”4 Like all things within this

worldview, it is a creation of divinity, with origins outside of man, and it is subject to the

will of the creator, whose ultimate apocalyptic purposes will bring about an end of time.

This is true of time in the chronological sense (chronos in the Greek), which is heavily

invoked as an organizing system of the historical narrative, but it is also true of time in

the personal, meaning-laden sense (kairos). “To every thing there is a season, and a time

to every purpose under the heaven,” according to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, but the

one who appoints the seasons and gives meaning to them in this worldview is not man,

but God. Time in all its forms is, in other words, a means to a more glorious end, and

whatever meaning there is to time is not to be found in the human mind. Religious

writings have been described by S. G. F. Brandon as “the expression of man’s

4
Cited in C.A. Patrides (ed.), Aspects ofTime (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1976) 2.
 22

fundamental instinct to seek security from the menace of Time,”5 and the central position

that concepts such as eternity and immortality hold in the Bible leaves little room for an

examination of time on its own terms. Because it is often associated with change and

mortality, time is in a sense overcome by the doctrine it organizes. Time as it pertains to

human life is, from the beginning, simply not the Biblical focus. The New Testament,

although written in a later Hellenistic world, shares this approach to time, as do most pre-

Renaissance religious writings in the Western tradition. In Russia, where literary

secularization did not take hold until the 18th century, the Hebraic religious influence was

especially tenacious. The meaning of time within this religious worldview is that time

ultimately does not have to mean anything, at least for the faithful. But the very fact that

such religious texts raise the question of time’s (non)meaning is surely important.

The ancient Western philosophic approach to time, although it parallels the

Biblical tradition in some of its basic tenets, moved in a markedly different direction.

Early Classical inquiries into time also began from the starting point of nature and its

cycles, but rather than applying a teleological view, philosophy concerned itself more

with the process of change, and not just the presupposed ultimate result. Heraclitus of

Ephesus, as early as 500 B.C., drew attention to the continuity of change in the world, a

continuity which itself, however, is changeless. Life is likened to a river: “Those who

step into the same river have different waters flowing ever upon them.”6 This river –

constantly changing but always the same – is symbolic of an eternal Logos that would

find expression in both Plato and Aristotle, both of whom, like Bibilical writers,

conceived of time as based on a larger timeless reality. An important difference,

5
Cited in Patrides (ed.) 1-2.
6
In Charles M. Sherover, ed., The Human Experience of Time: The Development of its Philosophic
Meaning (Evanston: Northwestern U. P., 2001) 11.
 23

however, is that although Plato’s notion of the eternal Ideas relegated time to the status of

flawed copy of the eternal reality, it did not preclude an examination of that copy and its

meaning for human life. For both Plato and Aristotle visible movement and perception of

change account for a sense of time, which is finally nothing more than a measure of

motion, especially as Aristotle describes it in his Physics.7 Approximately 500 years

after Aristotle, Plotinus reversed Aristotle’s priority of motion by reasoning that since

motion takes place in time, time must be distinguishable from motion. But it was Saint

Augustine in the eleventh book of his Confessions (written 397-8 A.D.) who most

determinedly examined the personal nature of time, turning from the concept of time as

merely a mark of change to one of time as an extension of a perceiving mind.

Augustine, himself a religious writer and thinker, highlights the switch from

religious to philosophical mode in a jocular tone: “My answer to those who ask ‘What

was God doing before he made heaven and earth’ is not ‘He was preparing Hell for

people who pry into mysteries.’ This frivolous retort has been made before now, so we

are told, in order to evade the point of the question.”8 But neither is Augustine content to

approach time as philosophers in the past had done, i.e., as an objective measure of

change. Instead, Augustine examines time as an ongoing personal experience that is best

addressed from this subjective point of view, even if that view is difficult to articulate:

What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks
me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. All the same I
can confidently say that I know that if nothing passed, there would be no past
time; if nothing were going to happen, there would be no future time; and if
nothing were, there would be no present time. (264)

7
See Aristotle, Physics, trans. Richard Hope (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961) 79-89. For
commentary on Aristotle see Igor D. Novikov, The River of Time, trans. Vitaly Kisin (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998) 2-12.
8
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, (Penguin Books: New York, 1961) 262.
Subsequent citations refer to this edition and will be given in the text.
 24

Augustine then reasons that if only what is present is real, the existence of time is real

only as far as it is present in the perceiving mind:

From what we have said it is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past
exist, and therefore it is not strictly correct to say that there are three times, past,
present, and future. It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present
of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some
such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. The
present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct
perception; and the present of future things is expectation. If we may speak in
these terms, I can see three times and I admit that they do exist. (269)

Augustine approaches time as a category grounded in the human capacity for memory

and expectation, both of which are highly personal. This move to an internal point of

reference would become the dominant approach in later philosophical explanations of

time, although further major developments in this approach would not be seen for more

than a thousand years.9 As a philosopher, Augustine, in line with the Classic tradition,

never moved far beyond the task of definition. Only after the Cartesian revolution would

philosophers take seriously the implications of his move inward, away from the question

of “what” and toward the question of “how.” Still, Augustine’s approach marked the first

real attempt at accounting for time primarily in terms of the human psychological

experience of it. The seminal nature of The Confessions as philosophical work helps to

explain that lasting influence, but so does one other aspect of the text: its artistic merit.

9
Catherine Rau sums up the progression of thought on time among the ancient philosophers – and
Augustine’s impressive contribution – this way: “Plato gives us a handsome myth; Aristotle, inadequate
physics confused by a little psychology; Plotinus, rapturous metaphysics. Augustine gives a clear,
adequate, fully argued, critical theory – one not limited to solipsism, of course, for ‘private’ times can be
correlated to construct ‘public’ time. Furthermore, Augustine is interesting because his is the first serious
attempt at an account of time in seven centuries, and the last for fourteen more. He anticipates, everyone
knows, Kant’s subjective view of time as the a priori form on sensible intuition, but with this difference
that he is far more lucid, coherent, and consistent than Kant. And, finally, though St. Augustine now
belongs to eternity, he had anticipated the relativism of the theories of time of twentieth-century physics.”
See her “Theories of Time in Ancient Philosophy” in Aspects of Time, C. A. Patrides (ed.) 29.
 25

The Confessions is part religious tract and part philosophical tract, and both of

those traditions influenced its basic approach to the question of time. It is an important

work in the history of thought about time, but not only in the philosophical or religious

line of thought. Augustine’s work is also read as great literature: it is a memoir, a

recounting of his own life with a temporal structure that the author, himself, creates. The

philosophical exploration of the nature of time in book eleven is embedded within a

narrative work that, like all narratives, is guided by its own system of temporality. Often

book eleven is treated as separate from the rest of The Confessions, as independent of the

artistic narrative in which it is placed. Roland J. Teske, however, has commented on the

necessity of taking the context of the treatise into account: “Augustine’s discussion of

time occurs within the context of the whole Confessions. To isolate the paradoxes about

time from the rest of this great work of art runs the risk of distorting what Augustine had

in mind in the work as a whole.”10 To be sure, religious literature such as the Bible had

also relied on narrative, but the difference is that Augustine’s work concerns itself with

the process of lived time, not only using time as a structuring device, but also actively

questioning what it means to the human mind. In modern terminology Augustine’s work

could be termed meta-temporal literature, and its lasting influence must be explained in

part by this aspect of the text. It is a striking, early example of the powerful way artistic

narrative can account for time, particularly when the narrative turns to actively question

the very thing that helps to organize it.

Texts such as the Bible or The Confessions offer important alternatives to the

mechanistic model of time, alternatives which still exert influence because of their ability

to investigate time as a meaningful experience, and not just as an abstract, quantitative

10
Roland J. Teske, Paradoxes of Time in Saint Augustine (Milan: Marquette Univ. Press, 1996) 3.
 26

system. Philosophy of time since Augustine, especially after Descartes, continued the

project of exploring temporality by focusing on the perceiving mind, although

Augustine’s format of combining religious treatise with personal memoir would not be

the genre most philosophers would write in. The culmination of this philosophical move

inside the experiencing mind is Kant, who put time at the basis of all thinking and argued

that human knowledge is essentially time-bound.11 This ultimate move from the

perceived to the perceiver in thought on time was called into question by philosophers

after Kant, but the philosophical line of inquiry nevertheless continued to investigate the

perceiving mind as one source (if not the source) for an explanation of temporality.

Yet philosophy, like science, has primarily concerned itself with generalizations

about time, simply because systems – whether scientific or philosophic – tend towards

the general over the specific. But because of time’s unique nature as a thing immediately

knowable only through personal, non-sensory experience, the specific must be addressed.

Religious/mythological and philosophical texts offer important alternatives to the

scientific definition of time in that they focus on the meaning of time, and not just the

behavior of its mechanical representation. There is, however, another mode of

conceptualizing time that can account for the specific very well, one that shares its roots

with the religious and philosophic traditions. As Augustine (and, to a lesser extent, the

Bible) made clear, art generally and literature specifically provides especially fertile

terrain for investigating the experiential nature and meaning of time, and this is

11
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) puts forward twelve categories of thought that are divided in
groups of three, each of which stems from one of the four ways Kant claims humans conceptualize time:
the quantitative, qualitative, relational, and modal. The essential argument is that all categories of our
cognitive thinking arise from the four ways in which we structure time experience. See Sherover (ed.) 109-
121 and 143-156 for a discussion of and excerpts from Kant’s key writings on time.
 27

particularly true of Modernist literature, which actively turned its attention to the problem

of time, both in terms of thematics and as a representational problem.

Literature and Temporality

Scientific analysis might tell us what the world is, and philosophy has had much

to say on how the human mind conceptualizes the world in general terms, but individual

experience and the sharing of that experience can best be addressed by a different sphere

of human inquiry: art. Art has as many definitions as it has practitioners, but one

function of art is to help us understand the human experience, regardless of how our

definitions of that experience differ. And since time is experience, art is particularly

well-suited to treat it. Along with space, time, as a basic category of human experience,

is, therefore, a basic category of artistic inquiry. Space is the primary focus of the visual

arts, whereas music is an art form in time. Literature, however, always deals with both.

Literature’s medium is verbal; through words it generates worlds that can be lived

in, not only by characters or consciousnesses that inhabit those worlds, but by readers as

well. Time and space are not separable in inhabitable worlds. It is not a question of time

or space, or even time and space, but rather time in space. The inhabitable worlds of

literature are not, however, all of the same type. At a basic level they divide between

worlds where time is ongoing and progressing, and worlds where time is, in a sense,

frozen. Gary Saul Morson writes:

Novels are especially good at expressing one approach to the world, lyrics
another. Novels show very well how personalities develop over time and in
interaction with other people and with social conditions. We turn to lyrics…to
 28

understand those times when, standing outside the flux of daily experience, we
need to grasp the essence of a moment, a mood, or existence taken as a whole.12

To elaborate on Morson, lyric time is best at fleshing out the moment, at presenting a

“now” in which there might be reference to a past and future, but in which there is no real

movement from one to the next. Novelistic time, on the other hand, is best at showing

the process of life in time, a time that advances and where a future does become a past.

Morson’s description of generic capacities for presenting time, while not uncontested13, is

nevertheless characteristic of the binary view of literary time.

Time in literature, especially in the novel (and to a lesser extent in the lyric), is

well documented and extensively studied, and Ronald Schleifer was probably right when

he said that “insofar as we see time as an aesthetic problem for George Eliot or Austen or

Dickens, we do so because we have been tutored by literary Modernism.”14 Modern

literature is often characterized by its move towards the thematic exploration of the

structuring devices and generic conventions within which the writer creates. Interest in

time is just one example of this self-consciousness of the material from which the work is

created, but it is a prevalent one. No doubt influenced by concurrent scientific

developments in the definition of time, Modern writers no longer treated time in the

classic, Newtonian sense, where “time is ‘objective,’ self-same, and simply a surrounding

12
Gary Saul Morson, “Prosaics Evolving,” The Slavic and East European Journal 41.1 (Spring 1997) 61-
62.
13
Morson’s view of literary time is that of a prose specialist’s. For a contrasting perspective, Sharon
Cameron’s Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1979) is invaluable. Mitchell sees as a generic feature of all lyrics (although one exaggerated in Emily
Dickinson’s poetry) the “lyric compression of temporality,” which is the lyric’s “propensity to interiorize as
ambiguity or outright contradiction those conflicts that other mimetic forms conspicuously exteriorize and
then allocate to discrete characters who enact them in the manifest pull of opposite points of view.” [23]
Lyrics do not stand outside the flux of experience, in other words, but rather interrogate and enact the ways
in which the world (including the experience of time in the world) arises within one consciousness.
14
Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) 68.
 29

‘ether’ to events.”15 As Daniel Bell notes, “the problem of time (in Bergson, Proust, and

Joyce) was the primary aesthetic problem of [the twentieth] century,”16 and this was

particularly true in the first half of the century, as Bell’s examples indicate. In addition to

Proust and Joyce, novelists such as Woolf and Nabokov approached time not only as a

theme of their works but also as a discursive or representational problem, a feature that is

well documented in scholarship about the period. Literature before Modernism had

certainly dealt with the problem of time, but never in such a self-conscious way.

The abundance of literary works in the twentieth century that dealt thematically

and organizationally with the nature of time is paralleled by the appearance of theoretical

works that investigate time’s literary representation, and probably no one’s work in this

area has been more influential than Mikhail Bakhtin’s. Bakhtin, in reference to

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, coined the very useful term “literary artistic chronotope,”

which he defined as:

the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are

artistically expressed in literature...[where] spatial and temporal indicators are
fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens,
takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and
responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.17

The spatio-temporal qualities of a literary world (what Bakhtin calls its

“chronotope”) are the categories that make that world what it is. A chronotope is implied

in any use of language for Bakhtin, simply because language never exists in a void. It

always speaks from a time and place (and quite often to a time and place). As Jay Ladin

notes, “For Bakhtin, any linguistic representation (even at the level of individual words

15
Schleifer 6.
16
Cited in Schleifer 68.
17
M. M. Bakthin. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,”
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakthin
(Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981) 84. All further page citations will be given in the text.
 30

and syllables) has chronotopic implications, presumably because we cannot represent

either image or action without implying a consciousness, and we cannot imply a

consciousness without implying (at least vaguely) a spatial and temporal context.”18

Literature, because it is a verbal art, is no different. On the contrary, because literature

actively represents consciousnesses in the form of characters (and narrators), chronotopes

are the very organizing principles of fictional worlds. And because of literature’s

carefully crafted nature, chronotopes in literature, especially those that predate the realist

novel, can occur individually, in concentrated and singular forms, the way they never do

in real life.

A text’s chronotope is different from the time and space of the reader, but the

reader can move into the world of the text precisely because some type of spatio-temporal

categories are at work. Bakhtin puts it this way:

Before us are two events – the event that is narrated in the work and the event of
narration itself (we ourselves participate in the latter, as listeners or readers); these
events take place in different times (which are marked by different durations as
well) and in different places.19

This exchange between literary art and life – an event Bakhtin calls a “special creative

chronotope,”20 is possible because both art and life, through language, share these

categories of time and space. An inhabitable world, either real or imagined, obeys

temporal and spatial rules characteristic of that world. A fictional world might have

spatial qualities that are very different from what we find in the real world, but the

fictional world will still be composed of something. Similarly, time may behave very

differently in an imaginary world. Such a world might even be called “timeless,”

18
Jay Ladin, “Fleshing Out the Chronotope” in Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin (New York: G. K. Hall
& Co., 1999) 213.
19
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 255.
20
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 254. Italics are Bakhtin’s.
 31

meaning completely without markers of increments of time, without beginnings or ends.

But the possibility for movement in such a world and the world’s very endurance indicate

that some notion of time persists. Readers can move into the imaginary world of a

literary text – into a “creative chronotope,” in Bakhtin’s terminology – because basic

categories of time and space are at work. By examining the spatio-temporal possibilities

at work within a fictional world, then, we can better understand – indeed, better define –

the range of possibilities of experiencing our own world.

Literary time and space are expressive elements of a text for Bakhtin. Indeed,

they are the matrices of genre formation, and describing their “intrinsic generic

significance” is a central part of Bakhtin’s project, which historically traces the forms of

narration that lead to the development of his most favored form, the European realist

novel. According to Bakhtin, literary genres are not merely templates. Rather, each

conveys a distinct sense of experience for which the form is adapted, and Bakhtin

discusses the various chronotopes in explicitly human terms. What becomes clear in his

discussion, however, is that time and space are not equal in defining genre. Bakhtin

stresses the “connectedness” of time and space in his notion of the chronotope, but he

never wholly conflates the two. Time is dominant, at least in determining generic

distinctions in literature.21 Literary genres might share similar spatial appearances, but

temporal characteristics (how time progresses, the effects of time on characters, etc.)

21
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 85. Bakhtin consciously builds on Kant, putting time as the primary
category from which all consciousness is structured. See Bakhtin’s own footnote (footnote 2, page 85).
 32

distinguish them. Bakhtin’s taxonomy fails to account for all possible chronotopic types

and combinations,22 but it does offer some useful general types.

The chronotope of the Greek romance, for instance, involves time’s passing

without a change in character identity, that is, it focuses on what is perceived to remain

constant in an identity over time. The chronotope of the “adventure novel in everyday

life,” on the other hand, is a view of time that concentrates on the transformative

moments of a life, seeing time as a sequence of major turns that cause an individual to

become something other than what he was. The “idyllic” chronotope is a model of time

largely tied to nature, where change is cyclical and where life and death alternate in an

endless circle.

The most important chronotope for Bakhtin, however, is that found in the realist

novel. This chronotope, unlabeled by Bakhtin but called by others the chronotope of

“real historical time,”23 is the most open of all novelistic temporal forms, and therefore

most resembles time in process. This type of temporality is tied for Bakhtin to the

polyphonic novel, in which multiple autonomous consciousnesses (and, by implication,

multiple chronotopes, which are in effect ways in which consciousnesses view the world)

are present within the text, addressing one another and responding in kind. Time, like the

character-consciousnesses associated with it, is not predetermined and fixed, but is

instead a process of contingency. “Heterochrony” (raznovremennost’) is Bakhtin’s term

for this open depiction of time, in which things (and characters) are in a state of

becoming, and in which “contemporaneity – both in nature and in human life – is

22
The chronotope is a recurring idea for Bakhtin, but the primary text in which he begins to elucidate the
concept is the one cited throughout (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Dialogic
Imagination). See Ladin’s article for a work that attempts to carry forward what Bakhtin left unfinished.
23
Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Standford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1990) 410-413.
 33

revealed as an essential multitemporality: as remnants or relics of various stages and

formations of the past and as rudiments of stages in the more or less distant future.”24

Gary Saul Morson, building on Bakhtin, has termed this depiction of time an exercise in

“prosaics,” contrasting that term with the more familiar poetics.25 Prosaic time is open

and ongoing, and might seem lawless or patternless (much like real life, at least as it is

experienced in the unfolding present). Poetic time, on the other hand, is the more

traditional temporality that the term poetics espouses: it is a closed model where

moments in time, like other elements of the text, are a patterned and progressive system,

a meaningful configuration that always culminates.

Poetic and prosaic times are radically different ways of seeing and experiencing

the world, and various forms of literature manage to account for both of them. If time is

directly apprehendable only through the experience of it, and literature is particularly

strong at representing experiential time, then generic distinctions can in part account for

the various ways time can be experienced. This, at least, was Bakhtin’s basic claim.

Bakhtin, however, was primarily interested in the chronotopes of prose generally and the

realist novel specifically. The novel’s ability to present an ongoing sense of time – a sort

of continuously unfolding present26 that accounts for the multiple possibilities at each

24
M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical
Typology of the Novel),” trans. Vern W. McGee, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986) 28. Bakhtin cites Goethe as his
primary example of novelistic heterochrony.
25
Morson comments on Bakhtinian “prosaics” in a number of works, but the most relevant here is
Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994). Morson expands on
Bakhtin by introducing the concept of “sideshadowing,” a device he finds – in different forms – in the
novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Sideshadowing is to prosaics what foreshadowing is to poetics. The
latter is a typical device of a closed system, where a predetermined future will cast its shadow back on the
present. The former, by contrast, is much more oriented to the indeterminacy of the present. Shadows are
cast from the “side,” showing a number of alternative outcomes, only one of which will ultimately occur.
26
To be sure, most novels are written in the past tense, but the sense of immediacy that the narration creates
overcomes that. As Kate Hamburger in The Logic of Literature puts it, “The grammatical past tense form
 34

stage of development – is, in Bakhtin’s view, literature’s greatest contribution to an

understanding of the nature of time. The focus of this dissertation, however, is dramatic

time, and Bakhtin’s comments on drama are illuminating in their general lack of concern

with drama’s potentials for adding to an understanding of the complexities of the

experience of time.

Bakhtin, whose classifications of models of literary time have been so influential,

relegates drama to a decidedly low position in his hierarchy of genres. Along with the

epic and lyric, drama, whose roots are oral and performative rather than written and

virtual, is placed under the unfavorable rubric of “poetic” genres, which strive towards a

unitary (rather than more “polyphonic”) language.27 Working from an Aristotelian

approach to drama (which, as will be discussed in the next section, is part of the

problem), Bakhtin writes:

The whole concept of a dramatic action, as that which resolves all dialogic
oppositions, is purely monologic. A true multiplicity of levels would destroy
drama, because dramatic action, relying as it does upon the unity of the world,
could not link those levels together or resolve them. In drama, it is impossible to
combine several integral fields of vision in a unity that encompasses and stands
above them all, because the structure of drama offers no support for such a
unity.28

In the only form of drama that Bakhtin recognizes, characters may be represented by

different actors (and, therefore, may ostensibly have different voices), but the overarching

unity of the work places them all in one underlying unity of thought and, by implication,

loses its function of informing us about the past-ness of the facts reported” (Indiana: Indiana Univ. Press,
1973) 70-71.
27
Robert Cunliffe points out an important similarity in this respect between Bakhtin and Derrida, both of
whom privilege writing over speaking. For Bakhtin, the novel becomes the prestige genre precisely
because it does not trace its roots to oral traditions. See Robert Cunliffe, “Bakhtin and Derrida: Drama and
the Phoneyness of the Phonè,” Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, eds. Carol Adlam, Rachel
Falconer, Vitalii Makhlin and Alastair Renfrew (Sheffield Academic Press: 1997) 347-365.
28
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1984) 18.
 35

one unity of time. In an approach that privileges complexity, drama – at least as Bakhtin

sees it – fares poorly. But while Aristotelian drama is certainly the dominant form, it is

not the only form possible, as Modernist developments make clear. An examination of

the underlying assumptions of Aristotelian drama about time, as well as the dramatic

approaches that challenge those assumptions, will reveal the way certain types of drama

can account for the complexities of time, and in a way unparalleled by any other literary

genre.

The Limits of Aristotelian Drama and “Plotted” Time

The most influential commentary on dramatic time is also one of the oldest.

Aristotle’s Poetics, which championed tragedy over epic verse, is an indispensable work

of criticism on drama, despite the formal and thematic changes that have taken place in

drama since its writing over 2,300 years ago. Aristotle concentrates on six constituents of

drama: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. From these he chooses plot

as the most important to the playwright’s craft, and he famously defines plot as

something with a beginning, middle, and end. Plot is privileged because drama’s focus –

as Aristotle sees it – is the depiction of action, a representation of ordered incidents that

show a shift from a state of happiness to despair (as is the case with tragedy), or from

despair to happiness (as with comedy). Characters are necessary in Aristotle’s view only

as agents to carry out the actions; character is the product of action, and not the other way

around. Characters, then, as well as any portrayal of their individual experiences

(including temporality), are subject to the exigencies of action-oriented plot.

 36

Aristotle frequently compares a well-crafted piece of drama to a living organism,

privileging an organic structure within which every part of the work contributes to the

whole. Living organisms are of “reasonable size,”29 he claims at one point, and dramatic

plots should be as well. Aristotle cites drama’s temporal brevity as one of its advantages:

“This form of imitation achieves its ends in shorter compass, and what is more compact

gives more pleasure than what is extended over a long period.”30 In Chapter Five of the

Poetics he writes, “Tragedy tries as far as possible to keep within a single revolution of

the sun, or only slightly exceed it.”31 This qualified generalization would be developed

into a firm rule of dramatic unity by later European dramatists, beginning in the

Renaissance. Aristotle’s interest in this “unity of time,” however, was tied to his more

prevailing interest in an organic plot that would limit its scope to the depiction of one

primary action. Such an action would generally cover only a day’s duration, and any

“unity of time” in Aristotle’s criticism is more a result of plot unity than a cause of it.

Dramatic time, in other words, is important only in its relation to plot-driven action, and

not as an experience which itself might structure things.

Aristotle places drama at the top of his qualitative taxonomy of genres, citing

drama’s “temporal compactness” as the primary reason it surpasses epic poetry. But

while the novel in Bakhtin’s sense of the term may not have come into its own yet, the

privileging of the written over the oral/performative text that guides Bakhtin’s work is

also firmly in place for Aristotle. As a visual genre drama appeals to “meaner minds,”

and in this sense it is a vulgar art for Aristotle, making it inferior to epic. But in Chapter

29
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. T. S. Dorsch, in Classical Literary Criticism (London: Penguin Classics, 1965)
42.
30
Aristotle, Poetics 75.
31
Aristotle, Poetics 38.
 37

26 of the Poetics Aristotle claims that drama can fulfill its special function through

reading alone, and that no staging is necessary. Plot, then, the chief focus of Aristotle’s

work, is really only “story” – the narration of the important events of the play.

As Bakhtin (along with his commentators) makes clear, different types of plots

can account for time in very different ways, and poetics and prosaics are useful ways of

dichotomizing the ways various genres of approach time. Drama, however, is not

necessarily one or the other, although most of it historically does belong to the “poetic”

type. The strict unity of time as interpreted by Italian Renaissance dramaturges began to

be broken in European drama almost as soon as it was formulated, but the subjugation of

dramatic time to plot-driven action was something that would hold sway right up to (and

during) the twentieth century. But there is such a thing as “prosaic” drama, and Anton

Chekhov is an early example. The formal Russian dramatic tradition, which began as a

secular, independent form only in the eighteenth century, was indebted largely to French

Neo-Classic models of drama that adhered to the Renaissance interpretation of the unity

of time. Russian drama quickly moved away from the strict model of time, as well, but

plot-centered poetics also continued to hold firm there, as Romantic and Realist dramatic

texts attest.

Plots have “beginnings, middles, and ends,” but time as it is actually experienced

does not. As Gary Saul Morson puts it, “Real time is an ongoing process without

anything resembling literary closure.”32 Chekhov’s plays, although they do have ends,

are loosely structured, thematically erratic, and are constantly noted for their lack of

traditional plot development. Instead, Chekhovian “plot” is an accumulation of tiny

developments, less “dramatic” but probably more like real life as it is experienced. By
32
Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom 8.
 38

contrast, Ibsen, a contemporary of Chekhov’s and equally important in the development

of drama at the turn of the century, is much more of a “poetic” playwright. His plays are

tightly structured, thematically organic, and distinguished by major plot actions.

Chekhov’s plays are better termed “prosaic” in such a binary model of classification, but

if temporality itself is the focus of classification, then a third term might be appropriate.

As long as plays are read just as other literary genres are read, then a discussion of

plot technique will suffice, although as Bakhtin’s taxonomy indicates, the potentials of

different dramatic forms can go unheeded. But as Jackson Barry notes, “The fact is that

story is itself an art work of sorts (short narrative) needing its own structures. In other

words, to say that the structure of a play is a story is merely to abstract from the play

another more stripped-down kind of literary work, a work that relates in unembroidered

form the main incidents.”33 In ancient Greece, where the plots of drama were easily

identifiable and extractable as stories with previous existences (mainly mythological),

Aristotle’s claim about the primacy of plot and the temporal advantages of drama might

have held very well. But whether drama is adapted from another source or originally

conceived (as became increasingly common with the subsequent development of Western

drama), if performance is viewed as an inherent part of the art form, then the

“embroidered” whole must have its own structure, with the element of time an important

part of that structure.

Drama is a genre whose elements are time and space. Through performance,

drama is a spatial text involved in the actual process of real time unfolding, and this

unique aspect of the genre deserves attention. Of course any act of reading takes place in

33
Jackson G. Barry, Dramatic Structure: The Shaping of Experience (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1970) 167.
 39

real time for the reader, and the interplay between fictional and real temporalities is a

subject that has been extensively examined in twentieth-century literary criticism.34

There are two ways in which dramatic time is different from all other types of literary

time, however, and both of these differences stem from dramatic literature’s inherent

connection to theatrical staging. First, through performance the dramatic text itself (and

not just the reader) is involved in at least two models of time: the time that is represented

in the play, and the real time in which the performance is staged. Second, a performance

is an ongoing representation of time that cannot be stopped or set aside by the reader the

way a purely literary text can. Time’s advance, in other words, is persistent in drama the

way it does not have to be in other literary genres. Drama, then, might be better

described in a discussion of the literary representation of time not only in terms of

“poetics” or “prosaics,” but also “dramatics,” and this is particularly true of plays that

actively turn their attention – both thematically and as an organizing principle – to the

temporal element that is unique to drama. Dramatic works that exploit this “doubling” of

time (i.e., fictional and real time), where different ways of perceiving and experiencing

time intersect in an ongoing and uninterrupted (scene changes and intermission

notwithstanding) way, can account for the complexities of experiential time in a way

unlike any other type of literature.

34
See A. A. Mendelow, Time and the Novel (Deventer, Holland: Peter Nevill, 1952); and Hans Meyerhoff,
Time in Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1955). These two seminal works focus not only on
the representation of time (primarily in prose), but also examine the interplay (if any) between fictional
time and the real time of reading.
 40

Drama: The Literary Text in Real Space-Time

Drama is a genre that carries with it the demand for embodiment. This happens

in a very straightforward way in a performance of a dramatic text, when actors on a stage

literally embody characters and play their parts out over time. This performative aspect

of a dramatic text is one feature that clearly distinguishes it from other literary genres.

Earl Miner, writing on the generic distinctions of drama, notes:

The players know that we know we have entered the theater expecting them to act
roles of those they are not, and no lie is involved. But offering as real, being
given as real, what is known not to be real, is a powerful estrangement. It is a
cognitive, potentially pleasurable violation of the real by the fictional.35

Suspension of disbelief is certainly not an activity unique to drama, but Miner’s point is

that a dramatic performance is a physical embodiment of a fictional world, and therein

lies the difference.

Thornton Wilder made a similar observation: “A play visibly represents pure

existing, while a novel is a past reported in the present, what one mind, claiming to

omniscience, asserts to have existed.”36 Wilder fails to account for novels with multiple

narrators and present-tense narration, instead treating the dominant mode of novelistic

presentation as the only one available. Yet his notion of “pure existing” holds in spite of

the omission. Dramatic characters, even when their words and actions are mediated

through a narrator character, will always ultimately speak for themselves simply by being

physically present. There are no “inside” positions in drama, and no first-person plays.

Unlike other literary worlds, the dramatic world exists as an actual substantiation.

Of course, dramatic characters, like their novelistic counterparts, are at first creations of

35
Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1990) 40.
36
Thornton Wilder, “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” The Intent of the Artist, ed. Augusto Centeno
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941) 89.
 41

the writer, and in some forms of self-conscious modern drama – Blok’s The Fairground

Booth37 is an early example in the Russian tradition – characters remind the audience of

that fact. But the physical presence of performance is art imitating life in a way other

literary genres do not approach. Indeed, it is not just imitation, but rather the seeming

reality of life that the performative aspect of drama allows for. In Realism, which was

developed in the West and still tends to be favored here, this is particularly obvious. But

even in ancient forms of highly ritualized theater such as Greek masked drama or

Japanese kabuki, or in modern, experimental forms of theater that stress the theatricality

of the work, the physical instantiation of performance is a textual chronotope assembled

in real space and real time.

Fiction joins with reality through dramatic enactment, and whether the

performance shows more of a commitment to the illusion of reality or to the

acknowledgement of artifice, the physicality of drama nonetheless makes it an art form

that does not rely wholly on the imagination of the reader. Representation is often so

closely aligned with reality in Western drama that iconicity in the theatre appears,

according to Kier Elam, in its most extreme form, where elements of the performance

(props, scenery, even people) are not just “like” the things they represent, but actually are

those things, a phenomenon Kier, drawing on the work of semiotician Charles Pierce,

calls “iconic identity.”38 It is not, however, only elements of dramatic space that can be

“iconically identical” to what they represent. The spatiotemporal world of a dramatic text

37
Blok’s 1906 Symbolist play is filled with instances of “baring the device” by which the fictionality of the
play is pointed out: characters cry out that the blood they bleed is cranberry juice; the scenery is ripped
apart; and – most notable for the purposes here – the “author” is a character who appears on stage and
informs the audience that the other characters are not following his script, and he is, therefore, not
responsible for the work. Blok’s play seems initially to stress the performative aspect of the work,
suggesting that actors are beyond the control of the playwright, but of course these scenes are all scripted
by Blok, himself. See Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, Volume 4 (Moscow: Pravda, 1971) 5-18.
38
Kier Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980) 22-23.
 42

– the chronotope, in Bakhtin’s terminology – is realized not only through spatial

representation, but also through temporal representation. Real time is used to represent

the fictional time of the text.

A performed text is different from a read text. How meaning is constructed from

any text is a heavily debated issue in literary and cultural studies, but the role of the

reader in constructing meaning is one aspect that is addressed by theorists and critics

from nearly all approaches.39 In literary analysis the work of Wolfgang Iser on the role

of the reader has been very influential, largely because of the middle-of-the-road

approach he takes in seeing meaning as a convergence in “virtual” textual space between

the poles of written text and reader.40 Readers may have individual responses, but those

responses are largely guided, according to Iser, by the “sets of instructions” that a text

implies. Texts, in other words, ask leading questions. Readers, who fill in gaps in the

text and modify their own interpretations in the process, are implied from the outset. This

exchange between text and reader occurs through the special “insider” position that

readers assume within literary texts, a position Iser calls a “wandering viewpoint.” From

this viewpoint, the textual world is no longer viewed as an object:

We always stand outside the given object, whereas we are situated inside the
literary text. The relations between text and reader is therefore quite different
from that between object and observer: instead of a subject-object relationship,

39
The notable exception being, of course, Russian Formalism and its American counterpart, New Criticism.
This formal approach is best summed up in the words of the New Critics W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe
Beardsley, who dismiss considerations of the reader as “a confusion between the poem and its results.”
Such an approach has largely fallen out of favor since the 1950s. See their essay “The Affective Fallacy,”
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2001) 1387-1403.
40
Iser most clearly maps out this general model in “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,”
in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974)
125-145.
 43

there is a moving viewpoint which travels along inside that which it has to
apprehend. This mode of grasping an object is unique to literature.41

Iser’s concepts of the wandering viewpoint and the insider position offer an instructive

framework for explaining how a text is in part realized by the reader who enters the world

of that text.42

But like most literary criticism, Iser’s model for reading is also instructive in its

inability to account for a performed dramatic text, even though drama is generally

grouped with literature. In a performance, it is not the spectator but the actors who

initially enter the world of the text and fill in the “gaps.” The role of reader is at first

appropriated by the actors (as well as the director and anyone else who guides the

performance), and by enacting their own reading of the play they limit the potentials of

meaning available to the spectator. A dramatic performance, in other words, is a

mediated literary text. The spectator does not act as the only or even the primary

activator of the literary textual potentials, and this limitation on the part of the spectator

moves the performance much closer in the direction of real life experience. Of course,

the spectator who is familiar with the literary text of the play (or, alternatively, with other

productions of the same play) may also find, paradoxically, that this limitation that is

imposed through performance actually expands the meaning available to her, since

another interpretative layer is added to what her previous knowledge and experience of

41
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1978) 109.
42
The insights of Iser’s “virtual text” are particularly evident when compared with Bakhtin’s “creative
chronotope.” Iser’s model of reading stresses that interpretation is neither text- nor reader-controlled (i.e.,
neither objective nor subjective), but instead a place between the two, where texts ask leading questions but
readers control the response. The result of the dynamic interaction between these poles in the virtual text.
Bakhtin, whose work tends to privilege the text and/or author over the reader, is more interested in the
spatio-temporal categories that the two poles share and that make the interchange possible in the first place.
See Wolfgang Iser, Ínteraction between Text and Reader,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism, eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001) 1673-1682.
 44

the text has been. Each production taps into another possibility afforded by the text, and,

by the very nature of theater, no performance is definitive. But while spectators may

know that the live action is fictional and based on a preexisting literary work, the very

physicality of the theatrical text precludes any truly insider position. Performed drama by

definition presents the text as an object outside the reader-spectator, and, as will be

shown, this has important implications for the presentation of time. But if analysis is

only at the level of the literary text (as it clearly is for the majority of literary critics), then

whether the performative aspect matters at all must be addressed.

The connection of drama with performance is central to the genre, yet it is

certainly not the only – or even primary – way dramatic texts are encountered. Plays are

read at least as often as they are performed, and the ubiquity of the purely literary

encounter with drama raises some important questions about what kind of art from it is

and what aspects of the text literary critics are responsible for. Western theatrical theory

before the twentieth century was dominated by an orientation towards the purely literary

treatment of drama. This orientation was most obviously a result of Aristotle, whose

approach to drama as literature was adopted when literary theorizing was revived in the

Renaissance. Presentation elements of drama during and after the Renaissance were

largely viewed as adjuncts to the fundamental mission of delivering the author’s words.

There developed, then, a tradition of staging performances “by the book”: first, dramatic

texts themselves tended to be very specific about setting the time and place; and second,

the historical conventions of staging for the various subgenres of drama (Greek tragedy,

Shakespearean historical drama, nineteenth-century naturalism, etc.), conventions which

arose from the cultural traditions with which the plays were associated, were generally
 45

followed. In other words, a play carried with it specific staging practices that, even if not

explicitly described by the playwright, were still inextricably associated with the written

(or memorized) text. The theoretical orientation towards the literary treatment of drama

was also probably due in part to the limitations on documenting the theatrical

performance for future reference; the only analyzable text immediately available to the

scholar (aside from personal memory) was the written one. Drama, then, has often been

read just as other literary texts are read.

By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, however, a

new theoretical emphasis on the theatricality of drama was developing, one that would

move beyond the ken of literary studies. This was particularly evident in Russia, where

Modernist playwrights such as Sologub, Blok, and Evreinov were writing, along with

their dramatic works, essays on the preeminence of performance, and where the

competing styles and theories of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold in theatrical direction were

being formulated.43 Meyerhold’s system of Biomechanics and his emphasis on the non-

textual and anti-Realist forms of theatre proved especially influential on later key

performance theorists outside Russia, including Antonin Artaud, with his Theater of

Cruelty, and Bertolt Brecht, with his Epic Theatre. A systematized vocabulary for the

analysis of dramatic performance was ultimately developed in the field of Semiotics, first

by the Prague School44 and then elsewhere. The visual signs of performance, including

theatre space, scenery, lighting, and costumes, as well as styles of acting, became just as

43
For a good overview of this trend in Russian drama at the turn of the century, see Michael Aucouturier,
“Theatricality as a Category of Early Twentieth-Century Russian Culture,” in Theater and Literature in
Russia 1900-1930, eds. Lars Kleberg and Nils Ake Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International,
1984) 9-21; and Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the
Greeks to the Present, (Ithica: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994) 212-328.
44
See Michael L. Quinn, The Semiotic Stage: Prague School Theater Theory (New York: Peter Lang,
1995).
 46

much a part of the theoretical analysis as the script that guides the performance. The

move away from literary text-centered analyses resulted, then, in a new field of dramatic

study, one that not only recognizes the performance side of drama but focuses

specifically on it.

And yet the purely literary treatment of drama persists. Even in the twentieth

century and after, there are scholars (and even playwrights) who have continued to read

drama in a way independent of any connection to the theatre. Charles Lamb, a noted

Shakespearean scholar active at the beginning of the twentieth century, preferred the read

text over the performed one, terming reading a “fine abstraction” that employs the

“greater and better part of our imagination.”45 Luigi Pirandello, in his 1918 essay

“Theatre and Literature” (“Teatro e letteratura”), similarly considered the written text the

completed artistic form, while the “scenic translation” of it on stage was for him a

reduction of that fullness: “So many actors, so many translations, more or less faithful,

more or less fortunate, but like any translation, always and necessarily inferior to the

original.”46 But even when reading is not privileged in such a straightforward way, there

is still a tendency in literary studies to treat a play as something separate from any

theatrical incarnation. For all the developments in performance theory, drama is still

regarded as a literary form.

There are, of course, plays that have only been read as literature – and, therefore,

are arguably better suited to a purely literary analysis – because of the absence of any

tradition of staging them. Among Russian plays this phenomenon is perhaps best

45
Cited in Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990) 97.
46
Luigi Pirandello, “Theatre and Literature,” trans. Herbert Goldstone, The Creative Vision: Modern
European Writers on their Art, eds. H. M. Block and Herman Salinger (New York: Grove Press, 1960)
127.
 47

illustrated by the dramatic works of A. S. Pushkin, the writer many Russians consider to

be the most representative of their literary heritage. Drama is represented in Pushkin’s

oeuvre by two primary works: Boris Godunov (1825), his Shakespearean historical

drama; and The Little Tragedies (1830), a group of four short plays, each of which

compactly explores a human shortcoming. Although ranked among Pushkin’s finest

works, these plays have no real theatrical history. Boris Godunov, a sprawling work

whose epic-sized cast and constant scene changes make it unstageable in the eyes of

many dramaturges, exists as a theatrical piece primarily in the operatic adaptation by

Mussorgsky. The Little Tragedies suffer from the opposite limitation; their extreme

brevity limits their professional stagings.47 In light of the “untheatrical” nature of these

plays, one might legitimately ask how they differ from other strictly literary works, and

whether it matters that they are written in a recognizably dramatic form.

A play that does have a strong tradition of performance is generally discussed by

dramatic theorists and critics in the twentieth century (and after) with an eye towards the

viability of the text as live theater, and a history of notable stagings that the play has

undergone is often included. Prominent among writers of these types of plays in the

Russian tradition is, of course, Chekhov, whose works are discussed at least as often by

scholars of the theater as they are by scholars of literature. But even with plays such as

Chekhov’s that do have a well known performance history, at the level of reading the

same questions asked about Pushkin’s plays obtain. Does the performative aspect of the

47
As with Boris Godunov, each of the four Little Tragedies also exists in operatic adaptation. The
Covetous Knight was adapted by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Mozart and Salieri by Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov, The Stone Guest by Cesar Cui, and A Feast in Time of Plague by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The
basic premise of Mozart and Salieri has also gained a popular theatre audience through Peter Shaffer’s play
Amadeus, which builds on Pushkin. And of course Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which predates Pushkin, uses
the same source story that Pushkin uses in The Stone Guest.
 48

text matter in a literary analysis? Does the very form of the work and the connection

with live theater that the form implies affect the reading?

For the purposes of this study, which focuses on the presentation of temporality in

dramatic space, the answer is yes. To separate the concept of theatre from the dramatic

text is to discard a defining element of that text. Even at the level of reading there is a

presupposed embodiment, an awareness of a potentially physical aspect of the text that is

realized in real time. Dramatic texts have not always been read this way, of course, but

there is good reason to. Why this is so has been addressed by Benjamin Bennett:

I am concerned with the problem represented by the existence of a literary type,

namely “drama,” which cannot be defined as a literary type without reference to
the concrete extraliterary institution of the theater. For there is nothing whatever
that is rhetorically or formally unique about a dramatic text; there is no
characteristic or set of characteristics, or complex of “family resemblances,” by
which we would recognize a dramatic text as something different from a narrative
text, if we did not know about the institution of theater, if the theater, as an
institution, were not already there to be “meant” as the text’s vehicle. Otherwise a
character’s name, followed by a colon and some clearly fictional words, would be
an entirely transparent shorthand for the sentence , “X said . . .,” and we would
immediately understand that the general literary type is narrative. The association
of literature with the theater, or of the theater with literature, is by no means
logically or aesthetically necessary.48

Simply by calling a work a drama, by structuring it in dramatic form, a playwright

associates his text with the “vehicle” of theatre. Similarly, the cultural institution of

theatre influences any reading of drama, giving it a definite spatial and temporal quality

that obtains even when the “reading” involves no actual production of the play. For

readers unaware of the theater (if such readers could exist), there is little reason to read

drama differently from other narrative works of literature. But for actual readers – and

writers – of drama, the institution of theater does affect the text. Chekhov, in a letter to

48
Benjamin Bennett, Theater as Problem: Modern Drama and its Place in Literature (Ithica: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1990) 2. Italics are Bennett’s.
 49

publisher and friend Alexei Suvorin, writes, “You divide plays into those meant to be

played and those meant to be read…I think if a play meant to be read is acted by good

actors, it becomes one meant to be played.”49 Bennett and Chekhov basically make the

same point: Every play is “stageable,” regardless of whether it has ever been successfully

staged, or whether it ever will be. It is enough that it could be, that we can – indeed, that

we unavoidably do – read it with an awareness of this realizable potential.

Drama, at least as it is conceived of in this work, is a genre that exists in the

productive interstice between literature and performance. Just as no staging of a play is

independent of the literary text, similarly no reading is ever independent of association

with the theatre. Time and space, then, are drama’s elements even as a read text. Because

of the unfolding present-tenseness of drama (what Thornton Wilder called “pure

existing”), because of the physical representation in real time that is implied by drama’s

cultural connections to the theater, the construction of dramatic time is categorically

different than it is in other literary forms. Novels may be better than lyrics for showing

the experience of being in time, to recapitulate Morson, and prosaic novels may be better

that poetic ones for depicting the openness of time as it is actually experienced. But to

directly juxtapose – and even test – a fictional conceptualization of the experience of time

against the reality of time’s ongoing and advancing flow, drama is unparalleled.

The “Dramatics” of Temporality and Meta-Temporal Drama

Dramatic time is a complex combination of intersecting time schemes. When

speaking of time in drama, it becomes necessary to specify which type of time is being

49
Simon Karlinsky, ed. Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1976) 287-288
 50

discussed. Literary theorists have long made a general distinction between the time of

the event of narration (that is, the time of the reader) and the time of the narrated event

(what Bakhtin calls the internal chronotope of the text). In a purely literary text, the

reader is the only element involved in these two time schemes (time of narration and time

of narrated event), but in drama the text itself is meant to be “realized” through live

performance, and therefore the text, too, becomes involved in the duality of times.

Concerning the fictional or “narrated” time that is represented in drama, a

distinction can be made (as it can with all types of literature, though not necessarily all

literary works) between the fabula (story) and the syuzhet (plot), the Formalist terms for

the chronological progression of the story (the basic story) and the way it is actually

presented through the playwright’s artistic arrangement and ordering of the events (the

plot).50 Building on the Formalists, Lubomír Doležel, a member of the Prague School,

has isolated three types of time within the text: the story time (fabula in Formalist

terminology), which is the actual succession of narrated events, the chronology that is

often deformed by literary structuring; the time of the text representation, which is the

physical time of the sequence of signs forming the text of the narrative work (the text as

it progresses, similar to syuzhet in Formalist terminology); and the time of the story-

telling act, which is the narrator’s or narrative frame’s temporal position and duration

(and should not be confused with authorial time, which is outside of the fictional

world).51 Doležel’s distinctions seem best fitted to purely literary works, especially prose

works, which often have a narrative voice that is somehow removed from the world of

50
This distinction can be found in Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965) 61-97.
51
See Lubomir Doležel, “A Scheme of Narrative Time,” Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions,
edited by Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976) 209-212.
 51

the characters. Yet many works of drama also have a chorus or a narrator that seems to

guide the work and comment on it. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, for instance,

introduces a chorus figure called “Time” that prefaces Act IV by informing the audience

that sixteen years have passed since the previous act. The ensuing action and dialogue,

however, would tell the audience the same thing, and ultimately Time’s monologue

seems intended to draw attention to the “time of the story-telling act” (in Doležel’s

terminology) that takes place through theatrical performance. As this chorus figures

states, “it is in my pow’r/ To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour/ To plant and

o’erwhelm custom.”52

Many twentieth-century dramatic works are constructed precisely around this

power of the dramatic text to “overthrow law” and “overwhelm custom.” Such works

often focus on the difference between underlying chronology and performed order,

presenting flashbacks and replays of the same or overlapping stretches of fictional time

(Absurdist works in particular exploit this possibility, as will be shown in Chapter Three).

And while the majority of dramatic works do not overtly reorder their events, a

distinction can still be made be made between what is seen on stage and what is invoked

by character dialogue as part of the fictional story. For example, memories of events in

characters’ lives that occurred before the actual starting point of play can be recounted

throughout and can affect the ongoing creation of characters’ identities (Chekhov’s works

are largely based on this type of presentation). In this regard any narrative, real or

fictional, creates a sense of time that “overthrows” strict sequential representation.

Manfred Pfister, addressing this life-like tendency of characters (and playwrights)

to reveal the temporal trajectory of a play through presented action and relayed memories
52
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991) 159. [IV I 7-9]
 52

and expectations, all of which must be integrated into a chronological whole, has

identified three types of fictional time in drama: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary fictional time is the time actually depicted (or is meant to be actually depicted)

on stage. It is the “here and now” that is frequently pointed to, the actual temporal plane

that is unfolding. Secondary fictional time also begins with the first enacted moment and

finishes with the final enacted one, but additionally includes any “hidden time” omitted

from the staged action, such as time lapses between or even within acts. Finally, tertiary

time covers the entire time span presupposed by a play, reaching back to any related

background events and extending to either the end of the text or the point in time

mentioned in the text that is furthest in the future.53

The real time of performance that a dramatic text is oriented within, however,

places certain constrains on fictional time, and indications of fictional time within the text

are bound to be compared to the real time they are realized in. The time of performance

(the length of time it takes to perform the work) is, therefore, another type of dramatic

time.54 Performance duration is rarely (if ever) noted in the text, but a playwright aware

of his medium will nevertheless write with performance time in mind. The majority of

dramatic texts involve a compression of fictional time into the actual clock-time of

performance, meaning more time is portrayed than actually passes. Incongruities

53
Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988) 283-
284.
54
If a specific performance (rather than the more abstract concept of performance in general, which is what
I am engaging in this literary study) is analyzed, other time schemes of performance also come into play.
Elam, for instance, offers a further time dimension which he calls “historical time,” i.e., the historical
context and time of the real world in which the spectator is located in relation to the dramatic world: “a
more or less definite then transformed into a fictional now.” See Elam 117-18. Barry also comments on
the relation of the specific time in which the performance is staged to the fictional time: “A play as a
theatrical experience begins with the specific time of its performance. The ancient Greek ‘curtain time’
was dawn. For an audience of Shakespeare’s day, the play occupied part of an afternoon…Our own
experience of a given drama is partly influenced by the knowledge that it will occur after supper and in the
conventional dramatic period of between two and three hours, and an experienced playgoer will sense
roughly what can be done within the given time.” Barry 14.
 53

between fictional time portrayed and the real clock-time of the performance are not

necessarily problematic. On the contrary, such incongruities can indicate the experiential

“feeling” of time – the way it seems to move faster (or slower), for instance, depending

on the circumstances. The union of chronologically distant events in a compressed time

scheme – something Shakespeare frequently does – can also indicate the way a sense of

time is an ongoing phenomenon, one that can unite distant events in a stream of

experience. The dramatic “illusion” of fictional time, then, can illustrate in real time the

ways we often experience time as opposed to the ways we conceptualize and measure it.

And yet, any fictional way of accounting for time will not fully correspond to the

reader/viewer’s experience of time, and a tension between these various time schemes

persists. However spontaneous and open the fictional time scheme of a play might seem,

the real, experienced time of which it is a part will always reveal its limitations.

There are, however, plays that address the very limitations of fully accounting for

time. Because of the interplay between the fictional and performance time frames in a

dramatic work, plays that actively examine and critique the temporal devices at work

within their fictional time simultaneously question the ways real time is conceptualized

and accounted for. Such plays can be termed “meta-temporal” drama, and their

appearance has generally been associated with certain forms of twentieth-century modern

and post-modern drama, especially Theater of the Absurd (as Chapter Three will discuss).

As the next chapter will make clear, however, Anton Chekhov was a precursor to

Modernism, and perhaps his greatest innovation lies in making the time(s) of drama the

subject of drama.
 54

Chapter Two

Three Sisters and the Mistake of Counting:

Chekhov and Dramatic Temporality

Time is the longest distance between two places.

-Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Overview

The inclusion of Chekhov into the realm of Modernism – and specifically into the

vanguard of twentieth-century thinkers on time – is one that demands some elaboration.

Against the background of the late nineteenth-century well-made play Chekhov’s drama

is revolutionary, while in comparison with the Modernist experimental theater that

dominated the early twentieth century his plays seem much more traditional. Chekhov’s

drama is regarded by many scholars, therefore, as something of a threshold phenomenon.

On the one hand he dispenses with the forms of the well-made play, avoiding traditional

plot and intrigue to the point of being accused of writing plays in which nothing happens.

But at the same time his dramatic works fit in with what Brecht famously called

“dramatic theatre,” a type of poetic realism that is “constrained” by its desire to show a
 55

realistic “slice of life” limited to the perspective of the individual characters within the

play.1

The qualified alignment of Chekhov with tradition is certainly understandable

given the types of drama developing in his own time and in the immediately following

period. Symbolist drama, influential in Chekhov’s day, was the primary alternative to

Realism, and many critics, seeing the awkward fit of Chekhov with straightforward

Realism, have attempted to read elements of Symbolism into Chekhov’s plays. Futurist

and Constructivist drama, influential in Russia largely through Meyerhold’s productions,

take hold in the period after Chekhov’s death, and their concerns are generally seen as

sufficiently removed from Chekhov’s drama to limit readings that would link Chekhov to

them. Absurdist and Epic drama are extensions of these Modernist reactions against

Realism. Relative to these radical breaks with Realism, Chekhov does seem Realistic, if

“poetically” so.

1
No other twentieth-century writer has dually influenced the theatre both as dramatist and theorist as much
as Bertolt Brecht, and his episches Drama, or epic theatre, has come to be viewed as the ultimate counter to
the Western tradition of realistic theatre that predates it. Brecht himself first sets up this binary opposition
in the notes to his 1930 opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (see Brecht on Theatre, trans. John
Willett (London: Methuen, 1964) 33-42), where he includes a table that elaborates the distinctions between
“dramatic form” and “epic form.” According to the table, dramatic theatre focuses on plot and feeling, it
develops linearly and unalterably with its eye on the finish, and it places the spectators within the thick of
things. Epic theatre, on the other hand, focuses on narrative and reason, is alterable and able to alter,
involves jumps and montages, and places the spectators firmly outside the action in order to make them
confront something. A key concept in Brecht’s epic theatre is Verfremdungsprinzip (the principle of
estrangement or alienation), a term which he may have borrowed from Victor Shklovsky. According to
this principle, epic theatre should not trick spectators into believing that what they see is real, but instead
should foreground the unnaturalness and constructed quality of what is shown. One key difference
between Brecht’s dramatic theory and Russian Formalist theory, however, is the requirement Brecht places
on epic drama of engaging the social world outside the text. As Marvin Carlson notes in his Theories of the
Theatre, “another possible distinction (between dramatic and epic) would be ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’
theatre, since Brecht’s essay insists that the new epic theatre be viewed in political terms” (383). But while
Brecht’s theatre and theory may rightly be seen as the fountainhead of avant-garde political drama, they
were certainly not the first anti-realistic developments in the Western dramatic tradition. Brecht, himself,
was very aware of (and likely influenced by) the dramatic experiments and innovations of Meyerhold and
the Russian theater milieu at the turn of the century. See, for instance, Katherine Bliss Eaton’s The Theater
of Meyerhold and Brecht (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), especially Chapter One: “Brecht’s Contact
with the Theater of Meyerhold.”
 56

But Chekhov’s legacy is multifaceted, and there is good reason to read him as

more than a “threshold” playwright, balanced on the border between nineteenth- and

twentieth-century dramatic styles. If special concern for temporality in part defines the

early twentieth-century modern aesthetic, then Chekhov’s works strongly prefigure that

concern, and they can be viewed as early literary examples of the preoccupation with

time that was prevalent in so many disciplines at the turn of the century. Specifically,

Three Sisters (1901), his penultimate play, can be read as a seminal meta-theatrical text, a

work that engages time not only as a structuring element, which is true of all literature,

but also as a central thematic focus. The experience of time’s passage – something on

which drama as a genre is predicated – becomes the very thing the play is about.

Three Sisters is more than just a reverie on the nature of time, however. It is a

work that “lays bare” the device of its own temporal structuring.2 Chekhov’s move away

from a plot-centered, Aristotelian conception of drama resulted in a work that does not

seamlessly unify its characters in an over-arching unity of fictional time. Instead,

Chekhov uses the way characters themselves regard time as an important aspect of their

characterization. By foregrounding the ways different characters conceive of time, he

demonstrates the extent to which characters’ (and, by implication, reader/viewers’)

conceptions of time affect the ways their lives are construed. Moreover, by exposing the

significance of the temporality that characters engage to structure their own lives,

Chekhov draws attention both to the way he, as a playwright, temporally structures the

2
A phrase borrowed, of course, from Victor Shklovsky, “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristam Shandy,”
in his Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990). Shklovsky’s
famous phrase (147) grows out of his larger concern with art as a way to overcome automatized perception
of objects. Interestingly, Shklovsky himself saw the artistic process as moving from mere spatialization of
images to an apprehension of them in their “temporal continuity” (see “Art as Device,” Theory of Prose
12). Chekhov, by focusing specifically on the temporal, might be said then to “enstrange” the very process
of “enstrangement.”
 57

fictional dramatic space he creates and to the effect of that temporal structuring on

theatrical experience. Temporal frameworks, then, are called into question even as they

are employed. To be sure, the claim that Three Sisters is a play about time is nothing

new, for the sisters – as well as their numerous trenchant critics – comment on it

abundantly. But while much criticism on Three Sisters has discussed time in terms of its

significance to both the theme and structure of the work, there has never been a study of

the way Chekhov’s penultimate play explores the question of time as it relates to the

dramatic genre. This aspect of Chekhov’s work will be shown to reflect and refract the

broader fin-de-siecle debate on the nature of time, for what is striking about Three Sisters

is not only that it turns its attention to time, but that is does so in an intellectually critical

way consistent with much of the discourse on time that was taking place at the turn of the

century and after. It is in this sense that Chekhov can be regarded as a Modernist.

This chapter begins with an overview of Chekhov’s place in Russian dramatic

history and then moves to a discussion of his use of time, focusing first on the question of

how Chekhov makes compelling drama, which is an inherently present-tense art form,

out of characters who reside largely in the past. Both limitations and the ultimate benefits

of this approach are examined. The discussion will then focus specifically on Three

Sisters, Chekhov’s most thorough investigation of the question of time, and on the body

of criticism that has taken up the topic of time in regards to this play. To provide a

background to this discussion, the early philosophy of Henri Bergson, one of the

preeminent Modernist thinkers on time, will be introduced, and Three Sisters will be

shown to illustrate Bergson’s ideas on time. As we will see, characters’ worldviews are

largely determined by their conception of time within the play, and Chekhov’s authorial
 58

project not only demonstrates this but also depicts the consequences of these various

conceptions. The play will be read as a statement on the inevitable plurality of time, as a

display of the multiplicity of ways time can be conceptualized and as an admission of the

impossibility of accounting for all ways. From a discussion of time within the fictional

world of Three Sisters, this chapter moves to a discussion of Chekhov’s use of time as a

structuring device for the play and of the artistic consequences that result from his

authorial choices. Finally, Three Sisters will be defined as a meta-temporal play, a play

that draws attention to the way the art work, itself (which, as a dramatic work, plays out

over time) accounts for the plurality of time that is such a large part of both theme and

form.

Chekhovian Drama and the Turn of the Century

It is easy – and in many ways correct – to regard Chekhov as a threshold

playwright. In terms of chronology, his major dramatic works were written around the

milestone of the turn of a century, a convenient (if arbitrary) date not only for dividing

centuries, but also literary movements (in this case Realism from Modernism, the latter a

term in Russian culture which included such movements as Symbolism, Acmeism, and

Futurism). Flanked by two centuries and two major movements, Chekhov wrote four

masterpieces that have secured for him a reputation as one of the most important

dramatists of modern times: The Seagull (1896); Uncle Vanya (1899), a reworked

version of the earlier play The Wood Demon (1888-89); Three Sisters (1901); and The

Cherry Orchard (1903).

 59

But it is not just chronology that calls for the situating of Chekhov in the interstice

between eras. Stylistically the dramatic tradition that precedes Chekhov’s works – both

in Russia and in Europe as a whole – is very different from the developments that occur

during and immediately after his short career as a playwright. Realism was the major

force of Russian culture in the second half of the nineteenth century, dominating

literature, painting, and the theater, where its primary focus was an exploration of

specifically Russian histories and milieus. Few writers concentrated exclusively or

predominately on drama, but one writer who did in this period was Aleksandr Ostrovsky,

who wrote nearly 50 plays and single-handedly created a sizeable repertoire of Russian

works. Ostrovsky’s plays are numerous enough to cover a variety of dramatic genres, but

he is primarily known as an astute chronicler of the Moscow merchant class of his own

time. He also wrote historical drama, as did Aleksei Tolstoy, who excelled at the form.

Depictions of the Russian peasantry, some of them harshly naturalistic, also flourished,

especially in the dramatic works of Lev Tolstoy and Aleksei Pisemsky. This naturalist

strain of drama culminated with the early works of Chekhov’s contemporary Maxim

Gorky.

To be sure, Realism was not the only force in theater at the time. While most

important new Russian plays were of this type, Russian theaters continued to play a large

number of works from European traditions, mostly French. Indeed, fully half of the

repertoire at the Alexandrinsky and Maly Theaters (the Imperial Theaters in St.

Petersburg and Moscow, respectively) was foreign or adapted from foreign sources.

These works were mainly older classics or the works of popular escapist entertainment,
 60

especially light comedies.3 Chekhov himself wrote a number of short vaudevilles,

including The Bear and The Proposal. What nearly all of the works being played in this

period – whether domestic or foreign, whether new or old, whether serious or comic –

have in common, however, is their adherence to plot-dictated construction.

As discussed in the preceding chapter, an Aristotelian approach to drama favors

clear plot presentation and development built around specific action, an approach that has

long been the norm in Western theater. In later nineteenth-century works this approach

was taken to its extreme in what became the most popular form of drama in France and –

because of France’s cultural influence – Europe as a whole. The pièce bien faite, or

“well-made play,” with its careful construction of a plot based on preparation, exposition,

and denouement, was the reigning theatrical form. Originating with the French

playwright Eugène Scribe (1791-1861), the term found its fullest elucidation in the

critical writings of Francisque Sarcey (1827-1899), the leading French theater critic of

the second half of the nineteenth century. Clarity and logic of structure were the qualities

of drama Sarcey most admired, and the keystone of dramatic structure was, for him, the

scène à faire (the obligatory scene), a term he invented that became a central concept of

play construction. Through careful arrangement of anticipation and fulfillment, an author

of a “well-made play” presents a conflict which the audience then expects to be resolved

in an “obligatory” scene. Such a scene may have any number of outcomes, but its

occurrence is certain. This tight, action-driven structure was originally viewed as a

3
According to Cynthia Marsh, between the years 1862 and 1881, 1,227 plays are recorded in the repertoire
of the two Imperial theaters. Of these, 607 were translations or adaptations of foreign plays. Of the
remaining 620 Russian plays, some 500 were popular vaudeville pieces or works by forgotten dramatists.
Of the 120 remaining plays, 30 were Russian classics from a former era (Gogol’s The Inspector General
being the most often performed Russian classic), 49 were Ostrovsky’s works (either his own or
collaborations), and the remaining 51 were by various Realist playwrights. See Cynthia Marsh, “Realism
in the Russian Theater, 1850-1882,” A History of Russian Theater, eds. Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999) 161-162.
 61

corrective to the more loose construction of French Romantic drama, in which characters

spoke much but did little. The popularity, however, of the “well-made play,” both in

France and elsewhere, as well as the important playwrights associated with the form, lent

its practitioners and champions an authority in the late nineteenth century which is

difficult to overestimate.4 Ibsen adhered firmly to the form. In Russia it was also

popular, both in staged foreign works (which were predominately “well-made plays”) and

in Russian works – primarily in the comedies of Ostrovsky, but also in Realist dramas

which borrowed the form. Under this influence, even plays which were more

complicated formally, such as historical drama (which had to follow a known factual

story, the basic outlines of which were difficult to alter), still tended to orient themselves

towards the tenets of the plot-driven form.

Against this backdrop, the revolution in Russian theater at the turn of the century

could not have been more pronounced. The first few decades of the twentieth century

Russia became the locus for ground-breaking experimentation in drama. This spirit of

experimentation manifested itself in production as well, and to account properly for the

remarkable state of artistic productivity in Russian drama during this time, it is necessary

to look not only at plays and their authors, but also at productions – and producers – of

these plays.

The rich state of Russian theater in this period is in part explained by the larger

literary and cultural ferment that resulted in so many great works of art generally.

Russian poetry saw its renaissance precisely in this period, and some of the most

4
Indeed, that authority is difficult to overestimate even today. Sarcey championed the well-made plays of
Scribe, but also saw similar practices in Augier and Dumas, and he applied the terminology to the classics,
as well. For a discussion of the form and its origins, see Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A
Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithica: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993) 215-218
and 282-284.
 62

important Silver Age poets, including Blok, Kuzmin, Hippius, and Tsvetaeva, were also

some of this period’s most interesting – and non-traditional – playwrights. Nikolai

Evreinov’s plays (and his own productions of them) self-consciously explored the

“theatricality” of drama. And Revolutionary theater, the hallmarks of which were

agitprop and direct address to the audience, was proving to be an important art form

under the pen of Mayakovsky.

The Russian systems and schools of acting that were developing at that time have

become worldwide institutions, and the names attached to them – Stanislavsky and

Meyerhold – have become the stuff of legend. These directors in particular were largely

responsible for the monumental shift in Russian theater towards new forms. Their

willingness to rethink older, more traditional works as well as produce new Symbolist

and Futurist plays gained for them a newly perceived role in artistic creation: directors –

and not just playwrights – could now “script” the trajectory of artistic development in the

theater.5 Stanislavksy and Meyerhold each developed his own approach to stage

5
The rise of the director as theatrical artist was possible in Russia only after 1882, when the Imperial
Monopoly in the two capitals was lifted. Under the monopoly, all theaters in St. Petersburg and Moscow
were under Imperial control, and the Alexandrinsky and the Maly Theater, the principal dramatic theaters
in these two cities, were supervised by a governor who was directly appointed by the tsar. The Moscow
Art Theater, which became the preeminent Russian theater in the twentieth century, was a private venture
founded in June of 1897 by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stanislavsky
and his theater group are most famous for his “Method” approach to acting, but in fact the principal counter
to this – Meyerhold and his non-illusionistic theater – also originated with this group. Meyerhold was part
of the original company assembled by Stanislavsky, and although he left the group in 1903, he was still
associated with it for some time after, most notably in 1905 when he began the studio-theater where
experimental drama was developed, an enterprise that would continue its associations with the Moscow Art
Theater until after the Revolution. Ultimately Meyerhold’s own artistic vision led him to other theaters and
a new, highly stylized approach of performance called constructivism. But he never completely cut ties
with Stanislavsky, and his critical writings maintain a distinction between Stanislavksy, whose vision he
always saw as close to his own, and the cumulative style of the Moscow Art Theater, a style also greatly
influenced by Nemirovich-Danchenko. The polarity between Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, however, did
become more pronounced in the 1920s, especially after 1927, when Stanislavksy relaunched a new
“Soviet” Moscow Art Theater. Stanislavsky’s intent, in the words of Jean Benedetti, was “to contrast a
theater of the revolution, which showed people’s experience of events, with a ‘revolutionary’ theater
(constructivism), concerned with formal experiments, in which the actor was reduced to a mere cipher, a
feature of ‘style.’” (274) Between these two poles of dramatic approach lie a number of other important
 63

direction, with Stanislavsky favoring an illusionistic style of theatrical presentation called

“living through” (переживление), in which an actor draws on her own personal

experience to embody the role as completely as possible, whereas Meyerhold came to

favor an anti-illusionistic or conventional theater (so called because of its tendency to

draw attention to the conventions of performance), in which an actor does not embody

her character but rather engages in “representation” (представление).6

It is, of course, Stanislavsky’s approach that has come to be closely associated

with Chekhov’s drama.7 The Seagull was the play chosen to open the Moscow Art

Theater, and Stanislavsky’s production was an unprecedented success, both for himself

and for Chekhov, whose reputation had suffered after the sharply negative reception of

the premier of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1896.

Chekhov subsequently wrote Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard specifically for the

Moscow Art Theater, and despite the well-documented disagreements8 between

Stanislavsky the director and Chekhov the playwright over the artistic direction of the

directors, including Vakhtangov (who was also a Moscow Art Theater actor for a time), Komissarzhevsky,
Tairov, and Evreinov. See Jean Benedetti’s “Stansilavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre 1898-1938” and
Spencer Golub’s “The Silver Age, 1905-1917,” both in A History of Russian Literature, eds. Robert Leach
and Victor Borovsky (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999).
6
The terms originated with Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, but critical work on this period have elucidated –
and polarized – the terms far more radically than the originators did. For a discussion of the terms, their
origins, and how they apply to Chekhov, see Herta Schmid, “Čechov’s Drama and Stanislavskij’s and
Mejerchol’d’s Theories of Theater” Theater and Literature in Russia 1900-1930, eds. Lars Kleberg and
Nils Ake Nillson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984) 23.
7
Meyerhold did, in fact, stage three of Chekhov’s early satirical one-acts, or vaudevilles, in 1935, but he
never produced the major plays once he was an established director. Stanislavksy never staged the
vaudevilles. See Schmid 23-24.
8
Chekhov’s greatest complaint was Stanislavsky’s interpretation of the plays as serious dramas, even
melodramas, neglecting the comic elements that Chekhov insisted were present. For an overview of the
often contentious collaboration, see Michael Heim, “Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theater,” Chekhov’s
Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1981)
133-143.
 64

performances, the plays nonetheless tend to be read the way they were initially staged by

Stanislavsky – as works of life-like Realism.9

But if this was Realism, it was certainly different from the plays that had

previously come under that rubric.10 Formally Chekhov’s major plays seem to eschew

the conventions of the “well-made play.” Indeed, they are a clear departure from this

formula. The plots of the plays are difficult to recount, primarily because there are no

obvious turning points or climaxes. In all four of the plays, the important characters are

all present on stage from the first act, meaning that no outside force is introduced that

will alter the course of the action (something that nearly always happens in “well-made

plays”). Moreover, there is little “action” to be seen. F. L. Lucus, commenting on this

characteristic of the plays, writes:

For Chekhov, the scène à faire becomes often the scène à ne pas faire…Most
tragedies are about terrible things happening; but often in Chekhov the tragedy
lies rather in the things that fail to happen – the dreams that die still-born. Most
tragedies are about things that matter terribly; but here the tragedy is rather that
nothing seems to matter at all.11

Lucus perhaps incorrectly reads as tragedies plays that Chekhov himself – perhaps

perplexingly – designates as comedies,12 but the point he makes is nonetheless valid.

Chekhov’s plays are full of unrealized actions: Kostya can win neither Nina’s love nor

9
It is worth remembering that Stanislavsky did not only produce realistic theater. A large number of the
plays staged at the Moscow Art Theater under Stanislavky’s direction were Symbolist plays. Chekhov
himself strongly encouraged Stanislavsky to produce the works of Maeterlinck, and the resulting
production of “The Blue Bird” in 1908 was so celebrated that it stayed in the repertoire of the Moscow Art
Theater for decades. Benedetti 270.
10
Except, perhaps, the plays of Turgenev, whose dramatic characters (especially those in A Month in the
Country) have been read as forebears to Chekhov’s, but who are nonetheless part of much more traditional
plots. See, for instance, Maurice Valency, The Breaking String: The Plays of Anton Chekhov (New York:
Schocken Books, 1983) 41-47.
11
F. L. Lucus, The Drama of Chekhov, Synge, Yeats and Pirandello (London: Cassell, 1963) 93.
12
The scholarly debate on the genre of Chekhov’s plays (comedy vs. tragedy) shows no signs of abating.
This is due in large part to the tension between Chekhov’s own classification of The Seagull and The
Cherry Orchard as comedies and the common interpretation (begun by Stanislavsky) of the content as
tragic. Lucus’ comments are about Chekhov’s plays in general, but they are contained in a section that
discusses Three Sisters, a play Chekhov calls, generically, a “drama.”
 65

his mother’s; Uncle Vanya never changes his life, but goes on supporting his brother-in-

law as he always has; the Prozorov sisters never go to Moscow; and Gayev and

Ranevskaya cannot save their orchard.

Of course, to say that nothing really happens in Chekhov’s plays is something of a

cliché, and an incorrect one at that. As David Magarshack’s Chekhov the Dramatist13

makes abundantly clear, plenty of dramatic things do happen in Chekhovian drama.

Chekhov’s innovation in his “plays of indirect action,” as Magarshack terms them, is how

these things are presented to the audience and the import they assume. As Magarshack

notes, traditionally dramatic events and actions at times occur, but they generally happen

offstage and are relayed to the audience through dialogue. The dialogue, however, is

rarely centered around those actions, or, more specifically, around the mere reporting of

those actions. Instead, Chekhov creates an emotion-laden language that by virtue of its

very “indirectness” evokes the inner feelings and documents the changes that occur.

Characters talk less about what has actually happened than about what has never

happened, about what may never happen, and about how nothing consequential ever

really happens or is likely to happen. External action does occur, in other words, but it is

the internal emotional and psychological states of the characters – their mental reactions

– that often constitute a Chekhovian plot. As Harvey Pitcher, discussing the changes that

Chekhov made in developing The Wood Demon into Uncle Vanya (and thereby into what

is more generally recognized as a “Chekhov” play), writes:

The essential difference in characterization, I believe, is this: that in the later play
Chekhov is not so concerned with the kind of people his characters are, but is
focusing his attention directly on their emotional preoccupations. The individual
qualities are still there, but they have become more blurred and peripheral; they
are no longer at the centre of Chekhov’s vision. What the characters are feeling
13
David Magarshack, Chekhov the Dramatist (London: John Lehmann, 1952). See especially 159-173.
 66

becomes the focus of attention. And whereas it is natural for an audience to adopt
a detached and critical attitude towards individual qualities, such a response
seems far less appropriate in the case of feelings or emotions. In contrast
therefore to the general tradition of Western drama, an audience is under no
obligation to pass judgement on the characters as individuals, but is rather being
invited to respond on an emotional level to the feelings that the characters
experience. This constitutes for me the single most important element in an
understanding of “The Chekhov play.”14

Pitcher regards character emotion as the organizing principle of Chekhov’s drama, and

his view is corroborated (although generally less explicitly articulated) by much of the

scholarship on the plays. The emphasis for Chekhov is not on action, but rather on

reaction.

Chekhov’s focus on the internal state of his characters and his prevailing mistrust

of event-centered dramatics clearly distinguish him from the playwrights that precede

him in what is termed the Realist period of drama in Russia. The emphasis on juxtaposed

individual emotions has occasionally earned him the label “impressionist,” a somewhat

equivocal term used to describe more loosely structured and subjective works that still

portray life “as it is,” but focus more on means than ends and create an underlying mood

that the audience feels along with the characters.15 More recently, Chekhov’s dramatic

approach has been interpreted as an extension of another branch of Realism – that

practiced by Russian Realist novelists. Michel Aucouturier, for instance, calls the

collaboration of Chekhov and Stanislavsky a “belated transposition to the stage of the

14
Harvey Pitcher,“The Chekhov Play,” Chekhov: New Perspectives, eds. Rene and Nonna D. Wellek
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1984) 77-78. Italics are Pitcher’s.
15
Maurice Valency, writing about Three Sisters in his The Breaking String: The Plays of Anton Chekhov
(New York: Schocken Books, 1983), rather vaguely calls the play “the flower of impressionism in the
drama” (219). H. Peter Stowell’s earlier work Literary Impressionism, James and Chekhov (Athens: The
University of Georgia Press, 1980) also places Chekhov under the label, but Stowell elucidates his use of
the term “impressionism,” and it is from his definition that I explain the term as applied to Chekhov. See
especially 150-166.
 67

poetics of Russian realism” and notes that the medium of theater is perhaps the most

appropriate place for the artistic movement to manifest itself:

In this striving towards “life itself,” the dramatist (and the director) can go further
that the novelist: reproducing life “in the flesh,” i.e. in the medium of life itself,
the theater appears as a privileged field for the ultimate execution of the aesthetics
of realism. It represents the extreme limit of mimesis, which according to realism
is the very purpose of art.16

Dramatic events and dialogue are foreign to the Chekhovian ethos, and when his

characters do engage in “dramatic” behavior, their display of histrionics is inevitably

undermined by the unresponsiveness of other characters. As Gary Saul Morson writes, at

times the characters “act as if they lived in a world of melodrama and romantic fiction,

but they are brought into a prosaic world where their poses are revealed as such.”17

Morson cites Chekhov’s drama as an example of “prosaics,” Morson’s term for the

literary approach also favored by Tolstoy that discredits the ultimate meaningfulness of

seemingly important and easily identifiable actions in the course of life. Chekhov, then,

though not in line formally with other Realist dramatists, has been read not only as a

counter to that movement but also at its apogee, as more true to Realism’s tenets than any

of its preceding playwrights. According to this view, after him there was nowhere else

for Realism to go, and this explains in part the radically divergent directions theater took

in the period after his death.

There is at least one other taxonomic designation for Chekhov’s work that

deserves mentioning: pre-Absurdist. There have been a small number of insightful

readings that retrospectively see in Chekhov’s work aspects of Absurdist theater, usually

16
Michael Aucouturier, “Theatricality as a Category of Early Twentieth-Century Russian Culture,” Theater
and Literature in Russia 1900-1930, eds. Lars Kleberg and Nils Ake Nillson (Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell International, 1984) 10.
17
Gary Saul Morson, “Sonya’s Wisdom,” A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian
Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1995) 60.
 68

in connection with the disjointedness that characterizes so many of the conversations and

the lack of traditional plot developments in the plays. Martin Esslin, in his canonical

work The Theater of the Absurd, first noted the similarities between Chekhov and certain

Absurdists’ style, especially that of Arthur Adamov.18 It is to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting

for Godot, however, that subsequent critics have seen the strongest parallels with

Chekhov’s drama. Richard Gilman, comparing Three Sisters with Waiting for Godot,

writes:

Whatever the differences in their work of utterance, gesture, and mise en scène,
the geniuses of Chekhov and Beckett share some common grounds and intentions:
they will not make theater as they have seen it being made; they will present new
relationships and not new tales; they will use the stage for the creation of
consciousness and not for its reflection; and they will offer neither solutions nor
prescriptions, not even heightened emotion, but mercilessly stripped artifacts of
the imagination that will present our deepest “story.”19

J. Oates Smith (a.k.a. Joyce Carol Oates) has placed Chekhov beyond most Absurdists,

calling all of his major plays more complex and iconoclastic in their entire disregard of

the climax, something many Absurdist pieces, including the works of Ionesco, still retain.

Like Gilman, Oates sees Beckett as Chekhov’s primary compatriot, and notes, “In this

existential drama a strange, dissipated action, or the memory of vague desire for action,

has replaced the older, more vital ritualistic concerns of the stage; the existential drama of

Chekhov and the absurdist drama remain true to their subject – life – by refusing to be

reduced to a single emotion or idea.”20

The period placement for Chekhov the dramatist, then, is a complicated question,

but whether he should ultimately be regarded as an ultra-Realist or Impressionist or even

18
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Anchor Books, 1961) 67-68.
19
Richard Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974) 123.
20
Smith, J. Oates, “Chekhov and the ‘Theater of the Absurd.” Bucknell Review, 14, no. 3 (1966), pp. 44-
58. Citation from 57-8.
 69

an Absurdist (before there was such a school), there is nonetheless a consensus that

Chekhov’s focus is on the complex and multivalent internal state of his characters rather

than on external, traditionally “dramatic” behavior or events. But as will be shown, this

widely recognized orientation towards the internal can also place Chekhov under the

heading of one other movement, that of Modernism, more specifically, the strain of

Modernism that explores time. For as many Modernists believed (Bergson in particular,

as we will see), there is nothing of time but the experience of it, an experience that is

inherently internal and feeling-centered, and plots that are oriented towards internal

experience can present and account for time in a manner more consistent with the way

time is actually encountered. This is precisely what Chekhov’s drama does, and nowhere

is this more evident than in Three Sisters, a play in which time is explored not only

thematically, but also formally. Before a discussion of that play is undertaken, however,

it is necessary to examine the implications of creating reaction-based plots out of

characters’ temporal experiences. Many of Chekhov’s characters privilege the past (or, at

times, the future) and feel disconnected from the present. But as the next section will

discuss, drama’s present-tense orientation poses special challenges to reaction-based plots

that are not connected to present-tense characters.

Chekhov and Dramatic Present Tense

Chekhov’s innovation of privileging inner experience over outer action as a

replacement for plot has significant meaning for dramatic structuring and, most important

for the purposes here, the engagement with temporality. All of Chekov’s major plays

have a large number of characters with sizeable roles and developed worldviews, and
 70

what is striking amidst this generous peopling of the stage is the amount of dissatisfaction

with life in the present. Characters in Chekhov’s plays tend to find meaning in what they

do not have. A golden age of contentment is generally something already lost in the past

(or perhaps realizable only in the distant future), whereas the present is something merely

to be endured. Certainly memory is a constant theme in all of Chekhov’s works,21 both

prose and drama, but what is striking about his use of it, especially in the dramatic works,

is the consistency and abundance of a largely negative attitude towards the present that

memory highlights. Memory, in other words, reminds characters not only of the past, but

also of the worsened world in which they now live. This view of the present is a

hallmark of Chekhov’s work, a feature that has led him to be called, in Lev Shestov’s

famous formulation, the “poet of hopelessness.”22 Shestov coined the phrase in his essay

“Creation from the Void” («Творчество из ничего»), a work that primarily examines

Chekhov’s prose but also discusses The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, and while Shestov’s

claims about the underlying spirit of dark resignation in Chekhov’s work have not gone

unchallenged, Shestov’s observations – indeed, the very title of his essay – deserve

careful consideration, especially as they relate to drama. After all, how does an author

create a successful work out of characters who seem not to live in the present, but rather

to endure it, in a genre which by its very nature is oriented towards present-tense

enactment?

The examples of such characters in Chekhov’s four major plays are copious. In

The Seagull, Arkadina privileges the past when she was a younger actress and lover,

while her son, Treplyov, moves from wishing for future glories as a writer (glories which

21
For an excellent discussion of the role of memory in Chekhov’s work (primarily the prose), see Daria A.
Kirjanov, Chekhov and the Poetics of Memory (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).
22
Lev Shestov, Chekhov and Other Essays (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966) 4.
 71

might somehow win his mother’s approval) to a longing for the past, when Nina

Zarechnaya loved him. And Nina herself, who dreams of a future life as an actress at the

beginning of the play, returns briefly at the end, abandoned and exhausted, to say that

what really matters is learning to endure things. The title character of Uncle Vanya talks

constantly of his earlier potential to become something, a potential squandered by

supporting his academic brother-in-law Serebryakov, something he nonetheless decides

to continue doing at the end of the play. Astrov mourns the lost forests of the past in the

countryside and keeps old maps around. Serebryakov complains about being old and is

convinced his younger wife, Elena, is angry at him for aging. And Sonya, whose love for

Astrov is unreciprocated, at the end of the play pronounces the need to simply endure the

present life and its sufferings. Three Sisters is about Olga, Masha, and Irina’s impossible

longing to return to the Moscow of their youth. Their brother, Andrei, also reminisces

about the past and the plans he had, plans which have gone unrealized. While the

Prozorovs are consumed by an irretrievable past, Tuzenbakh and Vershinin, the two

suitors of sorts in the sisters’ household, philosophize only about the distant future and

what it might look like. This play, too, ends with a plaintive pronouncement of the need

to endure the present, delivered by Olga. The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s final play, is

about a sister and brother, Ranyevskaya and Gayev, who, upon returning to their beloved

family estate, are so attached to the memories and customs of how things were that they

cannot adjust to the economic demands of the present and therefore lose the estate and its

orchard. Lopakhin, a descendent of the family’s former serfs, is the new owner at the end

of the play, but he, too, is caught between his desire to reclaim the past through
 72

ownership of the estate as it was and to reinvent the future (and himself) by cutting down

the orchard and dividing it into summer dachas.

If life is what happens when you are making other plans (or remembering old

ones, as so many of these characters are), then Chekhovian drama really is life-like in a

way few dramatic works are. But while endless deferral of meaning is certainly a

mainstay of characters’ worldviews and dialogues in Chekhov’s plays (a feature which

could arguably put Chekhov among the ranks of Post-Modernists), the genre in which

these characters exist is not a form which easily allows the sustained transference of

meaning to tenses outside the present. “Russians like to reminisce, but do not like to

live,” a young Egorushka observes in Chekhov’s novella The Steppe. But it is precisely

their present-tense living which matters most in dramatic form. Chekhov draws on this

tension between the time-orientation of his characters and of his form in his dramatic

works.

There is, to be sure, a certain temporal tension that obtains in any dramatic work,

inasmuch as preexisting, fixed form and present-tense enactment are potentially

conflicting presentations of time. As Jackson G. Barry writes:

Drama is an image of man’s life in time in which the patterns structures represent
our view of time as fixed, as capable of being viewed as pattern – whereas the
improvisational quality corresponds to our sense of time as the eternally changing,
eternally present “becoming.” There has been, and probably always will be, some
conflict between these views, and plays will seem to have more or less of an
improvisational nature as their author sees life in time as spontaneous interchange
or a fixed and recurring pattern.23

Barry cites Chekhov’s plays, with their nontraditional, “plotless” structure, as an example

of the more open, improvisational depiction of time as it actually unfolds. The irony is

23
Jackson G. Barry, Dramatic Structure: The Shaping of Experience (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1970) 81.
 73

that Chekhov’s more open form, based on character feeling rather than action, allows for

characters who do not feel at ease with the temporal “becoming” that surrounds them, but

who instead choose to privilege the past or the future, since these tenses are “finished”

(the past since it is already lived, the future since it can be imagined as one wishes) in a

way the present is not.

There persists, then, in what we might call Chekhov’s open temporal form the

presence of more obviously patterned temporal models, but they are invoked by the

characters rather than enforced by the dramatic form, which keeps its focus on the open

present of theatrical performance. This distinction can account for why the plays are still

successful dramatic works, despite all their talk of the past. Tension is a necessary

component of dramatic composition, but the tension that Chekhov creates is grounded

largely in a reconfigured duality of temporal models at work. Instead of a tension created

out of present-tense enactment within a plot-driven and therefore obviously patterned

model of time, Chekhov favors a reverse approach: tension created out of the desire of

characters in a seemingly open and non-plot-driven model of time to live their life in a

plot-based, patterned way. Because Chekhov’s “tension” is so different from that of most

drama, it is often unrecognized, or more precisely, it is often misclassified. As discussed

earlier, nearly all critics agree about the importance of the internal, feeling-centered state

of the characters in Chekhov’s plays. “Mood” is a word often used to characterize the

focus and the effect of the plays. But as H. Peter Stowell writes, “Chekhov’s vaunted

moods are often the product of his temporal patterns. And those patterns, so complex, so

varied, so steeped in the conflicting fragments of individual temporality, emerge to form

 74

a vague sense of time, a gestalt.”24 That gestalt is a non-unified whole, one created from

the tension of competing ways of conceptualizing time. And it is precisely this

recognition of difference, foregrounded by the characters themselves, that makes

Chekhov’s works so true to the complex experience of time.

That underlying temporal gestalt can have implications beyond the fictional

“mood” of the plays, however. As a genre whose medium is time, drama is a particularly

productive art form in which to explore the complex meaning of time, both in the life that

the art form seeks to represent and in the art form itself. Chekhov’s orientation towards

the internal state of his characters results in plays that are all largely centered around the

experience of time’s passing. But if, as Shestov claims, Uncle Vanya is the last

“rebellious” work of Chekhov,25 the last work in which a character (Vanya) will actively

rail against the injustices of present-tense life, and Sonya’s final words at the end of that

play represent the final acceptance by Chekhov of an anti-climactic and deferred

approach to life for his characters, then Three Sisters, the next play, is the work which

most fully examines the implications of that approach to temporality, not only in terms of

theme, but also more self-consciously, in terms of dramatic form.

The Theme of Time in Three Sisters

The passage of time, as has been noted, is a central theme of all of Chekhov’s

major dramatic works, but it is probably not an overstatement to say that in Three Sisters

24
H. Peter Stowell, Literary Impressionism, James and Chekhov (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980)
157.
25
Shestov 48-49.
 75

it is the central theme, a claim amply supported by scholarship.26 The play begins with a

discussion by Olga of the date and the weather (it is the Masha’s name day, the fifth of

May, and the weather is warm and sunny) and of other events that have happened and

other conditions that have marked this date previously (the death of the sisters’ father one

year earlier, on a cold and snowy day), and Olga’s words are punctuated by the striking

of the clock (which was also striking when their father died, as she remarks). From the

very outset, then, two distinct temporalities are introduced: cyclical time, evidenced by

returning seasons and annual celebrated events; and linear time, marked by events

designating time’s inexorable drive forward, the loss of loved ones and differences in the

look and feel of the days and hours that bear the same numerical designations. The terms

in which time is measured suggest repetition, as Olga indicates, but the actual passage of

time argues for the unrepeatable nature of life and the impossibility of true return.

It is also Olga’s words that end the play, but now she discusses the meaning of

life and of change, of the hope for a better future and of the need to persevere despite the

possibility that she and her sisters will be forgotten and supplanted by subsequent

generations. Measuring life and its meaning by time’s forward advance is a constant

preoccupation in dialogues in this household, and the sisters’ longing to return to

Moscow emerges as the principal leitmotif of the work, the unfulfilled – and unfulfillable

26
Nearly every piece of scholarship about the play discusses the role of time in some way, but there also
exists a growing body of critical works devoted primarily or exclusively to the topic. Notable among these
are: W. G. Jones, “Chekhov’s Undercurrent of Time,” Modern Language Review, 64 (1969), pp. 111-21; J.
D. Goodliffe, “Time in Chekhov’s Plays,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 7 (1971), pp. 32-41; William
Babula, “Three Sisters, Time, and the Audience,” Modern Drama, XVIII: No. 5 (Dec. 1975), pp. 365-68; L
Purdon, “Time and Space in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters,” Publications of the Arkansas Philological
Association, 2, no. 2 (1976) pp. 47-53; C. J. G. Turner, “Time in Chekhov’s Tri Sestry,” Canadian Slavonic
Papers, Vol. XXVIII: No. 1 (March 1986) 64-79; Richard Gilman, Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into
Eternity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995). Gilman’s superb book is not devoted exclusively to Three
Sisters, but the chapter on it (entitled “Three Sisters, or I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On,” pp. 141-196) is
primarily a reading of the role of time in the play (and, as the title of the chapter indicates, the connections
between Chekhov and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot).
 76

– desire that structures their lives. It is not, however, the Moscow that exists at the time

of the play that the sisters want to reach. Rather, it is a Moscow situated in a point in

time that is irretrievable, except in memory. It is a glorious past that is already lost and,

to a lesser extant, a distant future that is not yet attainable, a place that exists in memory

and perhaps in hope. The city itself remains always out of reach of the present because it

has come to emblematize a temporal – rather than spatial – category. The present that the

sisters must endure remains forever between these poles of past and future, static in its

median position yet marked by changes – especially numeric advances in days and years

– that nonetheless indicate time’s progression.

Like so many Chekhovian characters, the Prozorov sisters of the play’s title find

that life is passing them by, but what is exceptional about this work is just how much time

passes, both in the sense of elapsed fictional time over the course of the play and in the

sisters’ preoccupation with measuring time. Three Sisters is unique among Chekhov’s

dramatic works in the large span of time that passes from the beginning to the end of the

depicted action (what Manfred Pfister calls secondary fictional time), and it is, therefore,

not surprising that the passage of time is central to the work. Both Uncle Vanya and The

Cherry Orchard cover a relatively short span of time (a few successive days in late

summer and early autumn in both cases), and the first three acts of The Seagull are also

set over a few successive days, while the last act is set two years later. Three Sisters,

however, is much more spread out over time and involves a decidedly more complicated

temporal framework. Each act is separated from the previous by a gap of unseen time,

although just how much time passes between each act is never made explicit. This

uncertainty has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, but the most exhaustive
 77

examination of the question has been carried out by C. J. G. Turner, who concludes from

a number of textual clues that some twenty-one months separate Act I from Act II and

about eighteen months separate Act II from Act III, while Act IV likely follows Act III

by a year and two or three months. 27 The total secondary fictional time, then, would be

about four and a half years. With such a relatively large span of time, there are, of

course, a number of important changes in the Prozorov world, including the addition of

Natasha as a sister-in-law, the births of her two children, Olga’s moving out and

assuming the role of headmistress at the school, Irina’s engagement to Tuzenbakh, the

adulterous love affair that develops and eventually must end between Masha and

Vershinin, the departure of the regiment from the town at the end of the play, and

Tuzenbakh’s reported death in a duel. These events are insistent reminders of change

that takes place over time, but they are also contrasted with what never seems to change

for the household: the unfulfilled desire to return to Moscow. The changes are hardly

acknowledged, however, inasmuch as they have no real effect on these characters, who,

in their forward-streaming model of time, remain disengaged from the world around

them.

It is not, however, just the amount of time that passes over the course of the play

that is exceptional. Also important is the multiplicity of ways the characters express their

awareness of time’s passing. There is constant talk of the past in the household – indeed,

the sisters seem to surround themselves exclusively with people who can recreate the

past. Chebutykin, the army doctor, has known the siblings since their childhood in

Moscow. He represents for them a real ambassador from the past, the man who best

27
For an overview of other conclusions about the play’s chronology, as well as the basis for Turner’s own
model, see his “Time in Tri Sestry” 65-67.
 78

remembers a lost time and the places and people (especially their mother) from that time.

Vershinin’s acceptance into the house is similarly guaranteed by his memories of

Moscow, of the sisters’ father, and of the sisters themselves when they were girls. The

past is of central interest to the sisters, but also important to them is how the past is

formed, especially that the present will become the past in the future. Vershinin and

Tuzenbakh, the suitors in this house, attempt to cement their places here by musing in

Act I on this very process:

Вершинин. Да. Забудут. Такова уж судьба наша, ничего не поделаешь. То,

что кажется нам серьезным, значительным, очень важным, - придет время, -
будет забыто или будет казаться неважным.
Пауза.
И интересно, мы теперь совсем не можем знать, что, собственно, будет
считаться высоким, важным и что жалким, смешным. Разве открытие
Коперника или, положим, Колумба не казалось в первое время ненужным,
смешным, а какой-нибудь пустой вздор, написанный чудаком, не казался
истиной? И может статься, что наша тепершняя жизнь, с которой мы так
миримся, будет со временем казаться странной, неудобной, неумной,
недостаточно чистой, быть может, даже грешной...

Тузенбах. Кто знает? А быть может, нашу жизнь назовут высокой и

вспомнят о ней с уважением. Теперь нет пыток, нет казней, нашествий, но
вместе с тем сколько страданий!

Vershinin. Yes. They will forget. That’s our fate, nothing can be done about it.
There will come a time when all that seems to us serious, significant, of great
consequence will be forgotten, or will seem inconsequential.
Pause.
It’s a curious thing, we can not tell what will be considered lofty, important, and
what will be paltry, trivial. Didn’t the discoveries of Copernicus, or say,
Columbus seem at the time pointless, trivial, while some idle nonsense written by
an eccentric seemed to have the ring of truth? And it may be that our way of life,
with which we’ve made our peace, will seem in time strange, awkward, foolish,
not pure enough, perhaps, even reprehensible…
 79

Tuzenbakh. Who knows. Perhaps they will say our way of life is lofty and they
will look back on it with admiration. Torture, capital punishment, invasions are a
thing of the past, but all the same there’s so much suffering.28

Although Vershinin’s view is more pessimistic than Tuzenbakh’s, both men talk about

time in a way that is essentially acceptable for the sisters, and not only in Act I. Act II is

filled with these men’s philosophizing about life, and there, too, they discuss it in terms

of time’s forward movement, much like Olga’s closing lines mentioned above.

The characters’ awareness of the passing of time is evident, but what is even more

remarkable about Three Sisters is how that awareness extends to the moments and

minutiae of everyday life. There is a glaring abundance of direct references to time, from

clock-time references (J. D. Goodliffe counts eleven instances of characters directly

asking the time or looking at a clock, seven of which come in the final act29) to circadian,

seasonal, and calendar markers. W. Gareth Jones has counted “well over three

hundred”30 references to time in the play, a clear indication of how sensitive Chekhov’s

characters are to measurements of time. There are also countless less obvious examples

of temporal symbolism, something C. J. G. Turner has commented on:

Words with the root -star- (old) recur in widely varying contexts (13 occurrences
Act I, 4 in Act II, 10 in Act III, and 7 in Act IV), while Chebutykin’s first speech
concerns a remedy for baldness. The generational extremes are present on the
stage in the form of Natasha’s babies on the one hand and of Ferapont and Anfisa
on the other. The stage symbolism includes Chebutykin’s attempt to destroy time
in the form a porcelain clock (Act III) and Fedotik’s attempt to freeze it by taking
photographs (Acts I and IV).31

28
A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978) 12: 128-129. All
subsequent citations will appear in the text. Translations are taken from Anton Chekhov, Chekhov’s Major
Plays, trans. Karl Kramer (Lanham: University Press of America, 1997).
29
The closest rival among Chekhov’s plays is Cherry Orchard, which has a total of seven over the entire
four acts. The Seagull has five, and Uncle Vanya has only two. See Goodliffe 33.
30
W. Gareth Jones, “Chekhov’s Undercurrent of Time,” The Modern Language Review Vol. 64 (1969) 11.
31
Turner, “Time in Chekhov’s Tri sestry” 64.
 80

Some of Turner’s examples are purely visual, and it worth pointing out that drama is a

particularly powerful art form in which to explore the effects of time’s passage because

of its visual component. Three Sisters not only tells about but also shows the effects of

time, something William Babula has pointed out:

For two acts the audience sees Tusenbach in his army uniform. In Act III we are
forced to adjust to a physical change on the stage. Tusenbach has resigned his
commission and is now out of uniform and in a fashionable civilian suit – which
unfortunately makes him even uglier in Irina’s eyes. For three acts Kuligin has
sported a moustache, but in Act IV, following the lead of the headmaster of his
school, he has shaved it off – making himself uglier in his wife’s eyes. Now in
Act IV it is Natasha who can tell one of the sisters, “My dear, that sash does not
suit you at all . . . . It’s in bad taste” (IV, p. 187). The situation of the opening act
is reversed; so much has changed right before our eyes. Thus in all of these
instances dramatic images of change impinge upon our collective
consciousnesses. We are an audience experiencing the very effects of time.32

To Turner’s and Babula’s lists might be added a host of other elements in the play

that are indicative of the past or of the process of change that leads things from the

present to become part of the future’s past. The three sisters’ life situations seem

symbolic of the tenses of time: Olga, the eldest, is the past, a school teacher and spinster

who has missed her chance at love; Masha, the unhappily married sister who has an affair

with Vershinin, is the present; and Irina, the youngest and uninitiated in love, is the

future. It is clear that Fedotik still thinks of Irina as a young girl at the beginning of the

play, judging by the crayons and penknife that he gives her as gifts. However, as she

makes clear by her reaction to the gifts, which she views as inappropriate for her years,

her own advancement from youth to maturity is well under way. Indeed, it is Irina who

most often speaks of Moscow, and her plaintive cries to return there end both the second

and third acts. The future she imagines in Moscow is really a displaced past, and she

32
Babula 368. Babula’s citation of the play is from Constance Garnett, trans., Four Great Plays by
Chekhov (New York, 1968).
 81

acknowledges briefly the impossibility of reaching it both in Act III and in Act IV after

she has agreed to marry Tuzenbakh, whom she does not love. His death in the duel

changes her plans, of course, and by the end of the play she can only comment on the

advance of years, the change of seasons, the coming snow, and her need to endure the

present by immersing herself in work. She will be in the same situation as Olga, that of a

single teacher in a boarding school. Also telling of the inevitability that the young

become old are the gifts presented to Masha on her name day in Act I, most notably the

samovar from Chebutykin, a gift appropriate for a silver-wedding anniversary.33 People

and things seem to speak of time’s passing throughout this play. The past tense – or the

process of the present becoming the past – is seen in everything, since that is where the

Prozorov sisters’ sympathies (and Chekhov’s focus) lie. Space, in other words, becomes

in many ways emblematic of time, and nowhere is this more obvious than with the

evocations of Moscow, which accomplish a complete transformation from to the spatial

to the temporal category.

Of course, space stands in for time in the sisters’ world so consistently because

the reverse happens, as well: time is repeatedly treated in spatial terms. Indeed, time in

Three Sisters takes on a spatial role – it emerges as a character with physical attributes.

And when the implications of this approach are examined carefully, the question that

always arises from the text, that of why the sisters cannot get to Moscow, is answered:

the Prozorov sisters are caught in a faulty philosophical construct of time that ultimately

affects space. Richard Gilman writes that “the condition which Three Sisters portrays is

that of living within time, of being caught in it, resident in it, experiencing it as

chronology or duration not only in its most superficial or apprehensible manifestations

33
See Jones 117.
 82

but more deeply as a place, a habitation.”34 Three Sisters does portray an attempt of

characters to live within time. But what Chekhov shows is that linear time and duration

are not the same; that time, at least as the sisters conceive of it, is something that cannot

be lived in. Time is not space – it is not inhabitable the way space is. And attempts to

construct life around the confusion of these categories have tragic consequences.

Bergson and Time

The confusion of time with space was a topic of interest at the turn of the century

in disciplines outside drama – and outside Russia. Paris in the early twentieth century

was a matrix for Modern thought, a place where some of the most important artists – both

literary and visual – were working. Interest in time was one of the more prominent

concerns of many of these artists, particularly the literary ones, and, as discussed in the

Introduction, the roots of this interest were as varied as the results. One name, however,

is inextricably linked to the Modernist exploration of time: Henri Bergson.

Bergson, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927, was not, strictly

speaking, a literary artist or literary philosopher.35 But his philosophy became something

of a cultural phenomenon and, to borrow Tynianov’s terminology, a literary fact of the

first decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with the publication of his doctoral

thesis Time and Free Will in 1889, Bergson mounted a sustained attack on the atomistic

view of time and the mechanistic view of life, replacing outside analysis with inside

34
Richard Gilman, Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995) 148.
35
Bergson, whose style is noted for its limpidity and accessibility, wrote serious philosophical works. Two
of his books, however, are departures from the straightforward form of philosophical treatise. The first is
Le rire (Laughter), a minor work from 1900 that seeks to explain the nature of the comic, both in art and in
life. The second is Bergson’s final work, La Pensée et le mouvant: Essais et conferences (translated as The
Creative Mind), a 1934 autobiographical work in which Bergson traces the history of philosophy and his
own intellectual development and views.
 83

intuition. Awarded a Chair at the Collège de France in 1900, he was a brilliant speaker

whose lectures became social events for intellectuals in Paris.36 His scholarly works,

which used biology and psychology to inform his non-mechanistic philosophy, were

translated across Europe, in America, and in Russia. It was Bergson’s approach to the

question of time in particular that had an influence on literature. His influence on Proust

(whose cousin he married) is well documented.37 Among scholars there has been a

renewed interest in him as an influential cultural figure and philosopher, particularly

within the Modern Period.38 Bergson’s reputation as a thinker on time was eventually

eclipsed by the Einsteinian revolution in physics,39 which largely moved the task of

defining time into the province of science. But as Richard Lehan writes, “It was Bergson

who created a systematic, rigorous philosophy that gave foundation to basic modernistic

trends, and it was Bergson who cleared the modernistic landscape of a materialistic

underbrush that would have choked modernism off at the outset…If the moderns did not

have Bergson, they would have had to invent him.”40

Anton Chekhov may have done just that. It is not known whether Chekhov knew

Bergson’s work, since there is no direction mention of Bergson in any of Chekhov’s

36
Zinaida Hippius, who lived in Paris from 1906 to 1908, attended Bergson’s lectures and noted in her
diary that they were “always overcrowded.” Quoted in Hilary Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism:
1900-1930 (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999) 117.
37
Donald R. Maxwell’s recent book, The Abacus and the Rainbow: Bergson, Proust, and the Digital-
Analogic Opposition (New York: P. Lang, 1999), is invaluable not only for its scholarship but also for its
review of the extensive literature comparing the two thinkers.
38
Recent full-length books that examine Bergson’s influence on European Modernism include: Mary Ann
Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1996); Mark
Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1993); and Anthony E. Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment (Cambidge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).
39
Bergson’s 1921 work Durée et simultanéité à propos de la théorie d'Einstein (translated in English as
Duration and Simultaneity) is an attempt to reconcile his intuitive approach to time with the prevailing
scientific notion of relativity, which Bergson had originally opposed.
40
Cited in Hilary L. Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999)
xvi.
 84

writings. However, as Hilary L. Fink shows in her book Bergson and Russian

Modernsim: 1900-1930, Bergson’s philosophy, Russian translations of which did not

appear until after Chekhov’s death, had an influence on other Russian writers at work

during Chekhov’s final years, including Bely and Hippius.41 Like some of the earliest

writers discussed by Fink, Chekhov may have encountered Bergson’s works in the

original French, which he learned well during his second trip to France in 1897-98.42

Chekhov’s three sojourns in that country43 would have put him in contact with many of

the same intellectual concerns that were of interest to Bergson (if not with Bergson’s

ideas themselves). Whether or not he actually read Bergson, Chekhov’s relation to time

in his work, particularly Three Sisters, suggests that his own thoughts on time coincided

in many key ways with ideas formulated by Bergson and taken up by the Modernists.44

Indeed, Bergson’s philosophical work provides a useful way to conceptualize Chekhov’s

41
Bergson’s Le rire (Laughter) was his first work translated into Russian, appearing in 1900, but
L’Evolution créatice (Creative Evolution), written in 1907 and translated into Russian in 1909, was the first
work to be translated that contains his writings on time. See Fink xiv and 142.
42
During this trip, from September 1897 to May 1898, Chekhov spent the majority of his time in Nice but
was also in Paris. Chekhov’s letters from this time, some of which are written in French, make references
primarily to two public figures in France: Maupassant, whom Chekhov read in the original and admired;
and Alfred Dreyfus, whose case Chekhov followed closely in both the French and Russian newspapers. On
a side note, one of Chekhov’s friendly companions at this time was Maxim Kovalevsky, a biology
professor who lectured at the Sorbonne (and would likely have been familiar with Bergson’s works, if not
with their author). For an overview of this period and a sampling of the letters in English, see Donald
Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997) 436-455.
43
The first was in 1891; the third (and final) was from December 1900 to January 1901. Chekhov finished
Three Sisters in Nice during this third trip. See Rayfield 521.
44
I am unaware of any scholarly work before this that has linked Bergson’s thought directly with
Chekhov’s drama, although a possible overlap between the two in more general terms has been suggested
(briefly) before. Andrei Bely, in a 1911 essay titled “Chekhov” (see Arabeski: knigi statei (Moscow, 1911)
395-408)), noted Chekhov’s use of poetic memory in Chekhov’s prose and saw a correspondence with both
the Symbolists and with Bergson and his notion of duration based on memory, which, as laid out in Matter
and Memory, acts as a bridge between spirit and matter. An English drama critic, writing about The Cherry
Orchard in 1914, said this of Chekhov’s work: “His drama stands with the philosophy of Bergson, with the
whole movement of the scattered Arts Theatres of Europe, as a revolt against the determinate philosophy
that weakened even the drama of Ibsen, and the promise of as noble a dramatic rhythm as the world has
known.” See “Storm Jameson on Chekhov as Anti-Determinist” in Emeljanow, Victor, ed. Chekhov: The
Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
 85

exploration in Three Sisters of the nature of time and the problem with confusing it with

space.

Creative Evolution (1907) is perhaps Bergson’s best-known work. It deals with

the nature of time as it relates to the question of freedom and of the development of

humanity. In this work Bergson develops his notion of the élan vital, the internal and

undeterminable life force that drives human progress and that ultimately places intuition

ahead of reason and unpredictable development over determinism. But Bergson raised

the topic of time initially – and more extensively – in his first major work, Essai sur les

données immédiates de la conscience (first published in 1889 and translated in English as

Time and Free Will45). Bergson’s discussion of the nature of time in this early work

corresponds in a number of important ways to Chekhov’s examination of time in Three

Sisters. In Time and Free Will Bergson maps out the difference between the qualitative

human experience of time and the quantitative representation of it that clocks provide.

Bergson’s ultimate conclusion in this work was the reinstating of free will as a

characteristic of the inner self, a conclusion he would return to in all of his later works.

Bergson based the freedom of the inner self on his claim that the inner self experiences

time not as a sequence of homogeneous, discrete moments, the order of which

determinists might analyze and reconstruct, but rather as a heterogeneous combination of

interpenetrating states that succeed one another in our consciousness in a sort of flow that

is unique to each person and, therefore, impossible to reconstruct or predict. Free acts are

possible, says Bergson, but only when they are an expression of this fundamental inner

self.

45
Authorized translation by F. L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover, 2001). All citations are from this edition and
will hereafter be given in the text.
 86

The catch, however, is that most of the time humans do not act as free selves.

Most of our acts in life are results of habits, and rightly so, since most of the time we

have everything to gain by habitual acts that are called forth not so much by our feelings,

which are constantly changing, but by the unchanging images with which these feelings

are bound up (167-8). Associationists and determinists can predict many of these daily

acts because we learn to respond in the same way when certain images appear, regardless

of inner feelings and experiences of the moment.

Habit – along with the social utility that demands it – also helps to explain the

way time is regarded. Bergson called his notion of time as experienced by the inner self

durée, or “duration,” and he consistently distinguished this inner duration from the

numerical abstraction of measured time that clocks and calendars provide. The reason he

is so insistent about the difference between subjective time, which is what we actually

experience, and objective time, which is what we collectively agree on for convenience’s

sake, is that the durational flow of time experienced by the inner self cannot be

quantified. The idea of number – of quantification – implies a multiplicity of identical

but discrete units. Bergson calls this “discrete homogeneity.” To actually picture

number requires a laying out of homogeneous units, each distinct from one another, since

otherwise they would merge into a single unit. The counted things might be identical,

continues Bergson, but differ at least by the separate positions they hold in space. This is

often confused, according to Bergson, because symbols of quantity, i.e., numbers, replace

the spatial image of multiplicity in conventional expression. Symbolic numbers, rather

than the actual visualization of quantity, is one reason we sometimes do not see the

inherent spatialization implied by numbers. The other, Bergson claims, is the fact that
 87

counting must occur in time. But to imagine quantity requires the intuition of space.

Each counted thing must remain when we pass to the following thing, if nowhere else

than in a spatial image, so that it can be added to the others. Counted things are localized

in space (79). Bergson’s basic point is that time as we experience it is not quantifiable

because it is not atomistic, i.e., it is not composed of discrete, homogeneous divisions.

Experiences flow one into the other without division. Time “endures,” to use Bergson’s

terminology, and memory is what allows for its flow.

Even within an atomistic conception of time, memory informs us that the present

moment was preceded by other moments that came before and will be succeeded by

subsequent moments. Bergson’s claim is that where we draw the divisions between those

moments is arbitrary and has nothing to do with actual human experience. The role that

memory can play in the quantitative approach to time is very different from its role in

Bergson’s qualitative approach. In Bergson’s model, memory enriches and informs, both

in terms of the past to the present and the present to the past. It allows both to speak to

each other and also to reshape each other. If time does not pass but rather accumulates

within the experience of a person, if it endures, as Bergson insists, then memory is the

means by which the past lives on in the present. Past experience can inform the present,

but similarly the present can inform the past, as new experience added to the old can

cause us to reinterpret what came before. The past is accessible, and it therefore still

holds potential to mean new things. It is never completed and thus also never really past.

But if memory enriches in Bergson’s model of time, it impoverishes in the quantitative

approach. The atomistic model of time, “spatialized” time according to Bergson, means

that a past moment is essentially a past place that has been left behind. Just as a person
 88

cannot be in two places at the same time, similarly he or she cannot concurrently be in

two moments of divided time. In a spatialized conception of time, then, memory is a

reminder of loss – and not gain.

But what does all this have to do with Chekhov’s play? Hans Meyerhoff, in his

book Time in Literature, writes that “the literary treatment of time…has always been

‘Bergsonian’ in the sense of analyzing time as an immediate datum of consciousness and

as it enters into human lives and actions rather than into mechanics or physics.”46 But the

startling thing about Three Sisters is that the sisters are characters who try not to treat

time as a subjective, lived, enduring experience. Rather, they seem interested in it

primarily as an objective, mechanistic system, and they lead their lives in a way that is

emblematic of this view of time. Like space, time is something inherently measurable

and frequently measured in the play. Temporal dimensions are treated spatially.

Quantification is of central interest, and any discussion of time in the play should take

into account this peculiarly quantitative treatment of time. Ultimately, the sisters’

immobility and sense of loss has everything to do with the fact that they are living out the

wrong construct of time.

Spatialized Time and the Prozorov World

Numeric representation of time in Three Sisters is everywhere, and it is obvious

from the very start. Olga’s much-cited opening line begins a pattern of marking events in

time, plotting them in the collective past the sisters share: “Отец умер ровно год тому

назад, как раз в этот день, пятого мая, в твои именины, Ирина.” (“Father died

exactly a year ago this day, May the fifth, your name day, Irina.”) [12: 119] There are,
46
Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1955) 10.
 89

in this one line, three ways of fixing that day within a counting system: by day and

month, by numerical distance from the present day, and also by religious designation.

The entire first act is filled with similar lines that sequentially plot time. Olga begins

talking of Moscow and Mays there, twice repeating the number of years that have passed

since the family left Moscow: “Отец получил бригаду и выехал из Москвы

одиннадцать лет назад, и, я помню, в начале мая, вот в эту пору в Москве уже все в

цвету, тепло, все залито солнцем. Одиннадцать лет прошло, как будто выехали

вчера.” (“Father was assigned a brigade and we all left Moscow eleven years ago. I

remember vividly how at the beginning of May everything is in bloom in Moscow, it’s

warm, everything is bathed in sunlight. Eleven years have passed, but I remember it all

as if we’d left there only yesterday.”) [12: 119] The number is repeated again by Irina

when Vershinin asks how long ago they moved from Moscow. The number eleven is

important to Olga, but so is May – another sequential representation of time. But it is not

just these particular quantifiers that hold value. It is, rather, the act of counting, of which

May and eleven are a part. The number of years that have passed (eleven) is repeated

three times, and that number (three) is just as significant as the eleven. Each utterance of

a quantity is something which itself can be counted, indicating the significance of

repetition and recognition within the household’s sequential memory.

As part of this fascination with plotting time by means of numbers and cycles, age

emerges as a major topic of conversation, and elapsed time is given precedence over what

has transpired within a character. By stating his or her age, a character becomes fixed (or

refixed) within the temporal framework to which the household subscribes. By stating

another’s age, a character fixes that person within this numerical system. Age is life in
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quantified terms, and in the Prozorov house numbers tell the story. When talking of

Irina’s name day, Olga states that her own age is twenty-eight. When talk turns to

Vershinin, his age is of primary interest, and Tuzenbakh gives it as forty, perhaps forty-

five. Vershinin, himself, later gives it as forty-two. Irina announces that she is twenty

years old when Chebutykin gives her a gift for her name day. He later justifies giving her

the expensive samovar (a gift with number connections of its own, as mentioned above)

by stating his own age, nearly sixty, and saying that the sisters are all he has. Tuzenbakh,

in declaring his love for Irina, reminds her that she is twenty and then says of himself that

he is nearly thirty.

If we contrast the topic of age in this opening act with the opening acts of

Chekhov’s other plays, a difference is immediately clear. No other play has its characters

citing age this frequently. The Cherry Orchard, a play similar to Three Sisters in its

treatment of the themes of memory and time, has only one character, Gayev, who cites

his age in the first act. The number, fifty-one, he calls “strange,” an adjective that

indicates a comparative discomfort with age.47 In The Seagull there are only two

instances of dialogue about age in the opening act. The first is Kostya’s conversation

with Sorin about Kostya’s own age and how it affects his mother. Arkadina, Kostya’s

mother, would prefer to be younger than her forty-three years, but with Kostya now

twenty-five she can no longer pretend to be thirty-two in his presence. The point here of

course is that Arkadina is not interested in her actual age, but instead is trying to hide it.

It is something she herself would never admit to, a point underscored by her resentment

47
The only other thing that is dated definitively in the opening of Cherry Orchard is the bookcase, which
Gayev, in a ridiculous speech he later regrets, insists was built 100 years ago. There are a number of
conversations about things that happened to people at different ages, but, besides Gayev, no one mentions
anyone’s age at the present.
 91

at Shamrayev’s recognizing her from the 1873 Poltava Fair and asking her about other

actors from it, to which she replies, “Вы всё спрашиваете про каких-то допотопных.

Откуда я знаю!” (“You’re always asking about these antediluvians. How should I

know!”) [13: 12] Arkadina has no interest in hearing or speaking numbers which would

place her among those “antediluvians,” but is instead preoccupied with countering signs

of the passage of time at any cost (including the sacrifice of her son). Similarly, when

Polina, Shamrayev’s wife, asks the doctor Dorn whether he finds the young Nina

attractive, he responds that he his fifty-five, an answer that, he thinks, will make the

question irrelevant. But Polina persists, claiming that age is not a firm marker, that he

still seems young and attractive, and that a man is not necessarily old at that age.

Age in The Seagull is something to be eluded or to resist. It is treated as

unspeakable or irrelevant in the lives of these characters, although its actual effects might

still obtain. The point, of course, is the difference in attitude towards age between

characters in The Seagull and Three Sisters. For the Prozorov household, age carries

meaning to the degree it is invoked. It is a mantra of sorts, one that supports the sisters in

their attempts to measure time and, by extension, the space around them. The only

parallel to this in Chekhov’s other plays comes in Uncle Vanya. In that play, only one

character, Vanya, declares his age so persistently, something he does in every act but the

third. He, like the Prozorovs and their hangers-on, as will be shown, confuses time with

space, measuring the estate he runs by the years he has spent sacrificing himself to it

(twenty-five, he repeats again and again) and the age he has reached (forty-seven). But

Vanya is a singular example in that eponymous play. The sisters are three, and – unlike

Vanya – they are surrounded by supporters.

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Nearly everyone stages her age in the opening act of Three Sisters, but this is a

house of longtime family and friends (Vershinin being the only exception), and one thing

they must already know about each other is age. It is not merely information they are

after, and Chekhov, never a writer to waste words, is certainly not resorting to

unsophisticated exposition in his penultimate play. Age is invoked so frequently in this

household because it underscores how these characters relate to the world (and to each

other) and in particular how they interpret time. References to time create a linguistic

bond and a sign of place in the intimate Prozorov world; separate lives can be plotted on

the same timeline. Tuzenbach’s mention of Irina’s age is an indication of alignment with

this worldview. It is, in a way, a declaration of love, of a willingness to join her world

completely. It comes as no surprise that he follows this mention of age with the more

recognizable word “love” and the promise of “years and years” together. Similarly, the

earlier interest Irina showed in Vershinin’s age might be seen as an interest in him as a

potential close member of this household. Curiosity about age is almost a guarantee of

acceptance, regardless of the answer (and, indeed, a Prozorov sister does fall in love with

Vershinin, although that sister is Masha, and not Irina). It therefore is of great import that

despite the numerous comments about Natasha in act one, despite her appearance near the

end of the first act, no one, herself included, mentions her age. She is an unquantified

presence in a household where counting is what counts.

But it is not just current age that interests the Prozorovs (and has no connection to

Natasha). Other forms of quantification arise with similar frequency. The opening act of

Three Sisters is conspicuously full of numbers. Olga has taught at the girls’ school four

years. Chebutykin has not drunk for two years. Vershinin has two girls and is on his
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second marriage. Tuzenbakh imagines a utopia in which everyone will work, a condition

that will come about in twenty-five or thirty years. Vershinin imagines a utopian future,

as well, but his is even farther in the future, in two to three hundred years, since in this

household a comparatively better model not only involves a different type of utopia, but

one temporally more distanced. Solyony considers the conundrum of his ability to lift

sixty pounds with one hand but two hundred with two (and indicates, by his exasperation

with this puzzle, a discomfort with numbers and, therefore, his own displacement here

and the unlikelihood of his winning Irina’s love). Masha remembers a time in Moscow

when thirty or forty officers would come to a name day party. Vershinin tells us that the

railway station is twenty versts away, something not bad, just “strange.” Kulygin gives

Irina as a gift a book he has written which covers fifty years’ history of the local school,

and Irina tells him that this is the second time he has given this gift. Masha married

Kulygin when she was eighteen, as Irina notes. Andrey speaks three languages, and, as

Chekhov’s title indicates, has three sisters. Kulygin remarks at the end of act one that

there are thirteen people sitting around the table, a number that, according to superstition,

means that someone is in love. Natasha is uncomfortable with the remark, and she

blushes and runs out when Chebutykin remarks that she looks embarrassed. Any mention

of the love between her and Andrey might have caused her embarrassment, but that it

came with a reference to numbers only highlights her sense of displacement here.

The hours and minutes of the day provide yet one more way of counting, and the

mentions of clock time within this play are remarkable in number. The twelve strokes of

the clock that come soon after the rise of the curtain are, according to Chekhov’s stage

directions, uninterrupted by dialogue and create one of the pauses. Chekhov was a
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playwright keenly aware of the vehicle of theater for his dramas, of play as performance,

and his instructions here regarding those twelve strokes reveal the emphasis on measured

time in the play. The sisters are silent for those twelve strokes – a long time for actors to

remain silent on a stage, particularly at the beginning of a play. That pause indicates the

nature of time here. It is inherently quantifiable, a number worthy of silent attention. To

speak might mean to miss a stroke of the clock, to miscount time. Olga states the time

aloud only when the clock has ceased striking. Sure of the time, of its measurement, she

can then utter the number reverentially. Once the time has passed, it can be marked.

Olga is not alone. There are eleven instances of characters’ directly asking the

time or looking at a clock, seven of which come in the final act,48 when all of the soldiers

are leaving town. There is a countdown to the sad departure, and it is no wonder the

sisters think of time passing as loss. There is, however, one person largely unconcerned

with the quantification of time, and this notable exception again is Natasha. Her complete

disregard for measured time is as evident at the end of the play as it is in the first act. At

the end of Act I she arrives late to the name-day party, and the meal has been served

without her. Life has been reduced to mere measurement here, and Natasha’s disregard

of time must be worse for the sisters than her poor fashion choices or coarse manners.

But just as no one speaks Natasha’s age, not one of these characters so obsessed with

time mentions her tardy arrival.

It is not just current age or clock time, however, that interests the Prozorovs.

Measured time is just one instance of an urge to count, and there are constant mentions of

how many, how far, and how long in the play. Things are quantified with such frequency

that it seems the sisters might be trying to counter their stasis with a sense of motion
48
Goodliffe 33.
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through numbers. There is a problem, however, with numeric representation of motion.

Bergson points this out in Time and Free Will when he discusses the faulty reasoning

behind Zeno’s paradoxes, classic conundrums that claim a runner may never reach his

goal, and Achilles may never overtake the tortoise, if space is the only variable. As Zeno

made clear, the spatial interval that separates two points is infinitely divisible. But time,

on which actions are based, is not. Time as we experience it is not infinitely divisible; it

endures. It is therefore possible for the runner to reach his goal, and for Achilles to catch

up with the tortoise. It might also be possible for the Prozorov sisters to reach Moscow,

if they were not so intent on measuring the distance to it. In Act II, when Irina speaks of

their plans to move to Moscow, she counts the time in months: “Мы переезжаем туда в

июне, а до июня осталось еще... февраль, март, апрель, май... почти полгода!” (We

shall move there in June, but until June there is still… February, March, April, May…

nearly half a year.”) [12: 145] Later in the same act, after learning a version of the card

game “patience” from Fedotik, she remarks that the cards are coming out in her favor and

interprets this as a providential (and notably numerical) sign that they will go to Moscow.

Fedotik, however, laughingly points out that she has made a mistake with the numbers,

that the eight has to go on the two of spades, and therefore they will not go. And indeed,

as long as time is treated in quantitative – and therefore spatial – terms, the sisters are not

likely to reach Moscow.

The Prozorovs’ view of time – and, by extension, of their lives and the world

around them – as meaningful only insofar as it is countable means that the time period

they feel most comfortable with is the past. The past, after all, can be divided and

quantified in a way that the present cannot, simply because the past is finished. The past
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has meaning not only because the sisters know what happened, but also because they can

say exactly when it happened. Past events are most easily fixed on their timeline.

But if the past is the privileged time, the domain in which the three sisters situate

happiness, what happens to them in the present-tense space around them? Memories of

the past dominate the present dialogue in this household. Memory of course is what

gives time its flow. There would be no time at all – no interpenetration of states that

endure, in Bergson’s terminology – if we did not remember. Memory allows the past to

reach the present, to inform it and enrich it. The problem, however, is that the sisters’

conception of time – their insistence on its numerical aspect – reduces memories to mere

reminders of the distance between the past and the present. Memories do not enrich here,

they impoverish. The Prozorov sisters long for the past, but quantified time means the

past is finished. It cannot be lived in. Even memories are quantified and situated along

the continuum of sequential time. Their constant quantification stands in the way of the

successful integration of past, present, and future that gives life its freedom and

wholeness.

Natasha is the misfit in this household. Because Natasha is not concerned with

numbers or quantitative time, the way the rest of this house is, she can live in and be

happy in the present. And because space is something that can only belong to the

present, she ultimately controls the space. Her son’s illness serves as a pretext in Act II

for her to cancel the carolers’ visit and send the gathered guests away, and to suggest that

Irina move out of her own bedroom and into Olga’s, so the sick child can have the sunny,

dry room. Her insistence in Act III (which is set in the bedroom that Olga now shares

with Irina) that Olga should be made head-mistress at the school where she teaches is
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calculated on the fact that Olga must then live at the school. The argument between Olga

and Natasha over Anfisa in this act is especially telling of their differing temporalities,

and it is present-tense Natasha who prevails. Anfisa, taking a rest during the late night

efforts of the household to help the victims of the town fire, suddenly realizes she is

resting and, scared of the consequences in a household now run by Natasha, begs Olga

not to let her go. She is over 81, as she points out to Olga, surely knowing that the

number will appeal to Olga’s sensibilities. Olga of course would never think of letting

the old nanny go, and she tells Anfisa to sit and rest. But when Natasha finds Anfisa

sitting, she screams at the woman and insists that they get rid of her. Olga sees in this old

woman a reservoir of the past, and that is a sufficient role for the Prozorov way of

thinking. Anfisa has been with the family thirty years, something Olga is quick to point

out, and that number is quantitative proof of belonging in this household. The problem,

of course, is that the nature of the household – its ruling temporality – is changing. Such

inaction on the part of Anfisa cannot be tolerated by Natasha’s present-tense orientation,

as her tirade makes clear. Natasha is notably interrupted, by a resounding of the alarm,

followed by a comment by Olga about having aged ten years this night. But Natasha is

undaunted by these interruptions, and she picks up her tirade right where she was cut off.

By Act IV Olga has, indeed, become the headmistress at the school, and Anfisa has gone

to live with her there. Gradually the house belongs only to Natasha. In Act IV she even

talks of moving Andrey to Irina’s room (which was, of course, Olga’s former room) once

Irina marries Tuzenbakh and leaves. For Natasha, time is not loss, because the present is

all that matters. Quantity applies only to space, and she amasses. The house is hers.
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But such a usurping of space was inevitable, for inhabitable space can only truly

belong to the present. If time takes on the characteristics of space in the sisters’ world,

then space can in turn stand in for time. Points in space, like points in time, can literally

disappear from their world, existing only in their memory. In Act I Irina, in one of many

lines about the desire to return to Moscow, mentions the possibility of selling the house.

And indeed, what kind of connection can these siblings have to a domestic space that

cannot be located in the past they privilege? By the end of the play Masha refuses

altogether to go into the house. It has become foreign space to these sisters, space that

can no longer reflect their values (except in memory). But the question remains, what

space can? Certainly not Masha’s own home she shares with her husband, Kulygin, for

she rarely goes there. Irina, after the loss of Tuzenbakh (a man she never claimed to

love), mentions finding a teaching position for herself someplace. And Olga will carry

on her duties as head-mistress. There is space to live out a loveless marriage and to

work, but there is no room for romantic love or life beyond toil in these spaces, and there

cannot be. These values are tied to happiness, a state belonging only to the past for the

sisters, and in their conception of time the past is irretrievably lost.

What results is space that cannot offer place. Even their future is put into past-

tense terms. It is seen as the past of an even more distant future. Early on Vershinin, in

another exchange with Tuzenbakh, says this of the future: “Участвовать в этой жизни

мы не будем, ну, страдаем, мы тровим ее – и в этом одном цель нашего бытия и,

если хотите, наше счастье.” (“We, of course, will not take part in it, but we are living

for it now, working for it, even suffering for it, we are creating it – and in this alone is

the purpose of our existence, and, if you like, our happiness.”) [12: 146] This worldview
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privileges the future as a utopia that will be attained, but within the Prozorov world these

words speak of the past. As Olga says near the end of the play:

Пройдет время, и мы уйдем навеки, нас забудут, забудут наши лица, голоса
и сколько нас было, но страдания наши перейдут в радость для тех, кто
будет жить после нас, счастье и мир настанут на земле, и помянут добрым
словом и благословят тех, кто живет теперь.

Time will pass, and we shall be gone forever. We will be forgotten, our faces, our
voices, how many of us there were, it will all be forgotten. But our sufferings will
be transformed into joy for those who come after us. Happiness and peace on
earth will come, and people will remember us with a kind word and bless those
who are living now. [12: 187-188]

It is commonly accepted that Chekhov’s sympathies lie with the sisters, who are

ennobled through their appreciation of things past and their willingness to endure in spite

of loss. Indeed, they are the obvious counter to Natasha’s philistinism, and they represent

the power of the human will to persevere – to choose to persevere – in a world that is in

many ways inhospitable. The sisters demonstrate the importance of memory, and

certainly memory holds a privileged place in Chekhov’s oeuvre and his thinking. But

Olga’s final lines of the play, “Если бы знать, если бы знать” (“If only we could know,

if only we could know!”) [12: 188], suggest the ambiguity that obtains in so much of

Chekhov’s work. Chekhov’s own description of great art was that it answers nothing but

formulates the questions perfectly,49 and here he has undoubtedly succeeded as a great

artist by his own criteria. Which is better? The present-tense Natasha who has no past

and no memories, who will cut down the old trees in the garden and in their place plant

49
Chekhov’s definition comes in a letter to Suvorin dated October 27, 1888: “You are right to demand that
an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the
questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author. There’s not a single
question answered in Anna Karenina or Eugene Onegin, but they are still fully satisfying works because the
questions they raise are all formulated correctly. It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions
correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference.” See
Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, edited and annotated by Simon
Karlinksy, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999) 117.
 100

annuals that will die and leave no trace? She, after all, has the estate and the children. Or

are the sisters better? Women who are tied to the past and to memory of the past, who

save old servants but have no young children, and who lose the estate? For despite the

importance Chekhov places on memory, the sisters’ application of it, along with their

accompanying model of time, is impossible to view in a purely positive light.

If there is a message within the fictional world of Chekhov’s play, it is that time is

not space. Time cannot be returned to the way space can, and a quantified – and

therefore spatial – treatment of time will leave us longing for a place we cannot reach and

can deprive us of a potentially meaningful present. But because time endures within us,

we do not have to lose the past irrevocably. The sisters’ unattainable desire to go to

Moscow resulted from their confusion of time and space. It was a time they longed for,

and not a place. And in that sense, though they failed to realize it, they reached Moscow

every time they remembered it.

Three Sisters and Theatrical Time

Chekhov’s Three Sisters is a work that does not examine the meaning of time as

much as the meaning of temporalities. Since experienced time differs radically from

measured time, since it is something without physical properties itself, it is best regarded

as a plurality that can be known only through individual conceptions of it. Chekhov’s

realization of the subjectivity of experiential time leads him to define characters in large

part by the way they conceptualize time. Chekhov’s play reveals the consequences of

those conceptions and of loyalties to temporalities inside and outside the present moment.

But Chekhov’s investigation of the structuring and conceptualization of time is not

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limited to the lives of his fictional characters. The play is itself an exercise in temporal

structuring, and peculiarities of the play’s time scheme(s) demonstrate an awareness of

this on Chekhov’s part. As has been shown, the thematics of Three Sisters is in many

ways built around the conflict between the way the sisters’ measure time and the

experience of time itself, which might better be represented by a Bergsonian model of

enduring flow. And as a play that is so concerned with the passage of time and the

implications that various relationships to time have on characters’ lives, Three Sisters

also draws attention to the way the way it engages time within a work of art that itself

occurs in time. There is a doubling effect that occurs when a work of art is “about” the

very medium from which it is created. Of course, not every playwright who thematically

focuses on the passage of time will actively exploit this doubling; indeed, it is Chekhov’s

realization of this potential to both thematize and enact temporalities within the text that

makes Three Sisters such an interesting play and Chekhov such a watershed – and

Modernist – playwright.

Chekhov extends what has thus far been described as his thematic focus on

conflicting models of time also to the formal and theatrical aspects of the play. Atomistic

time – time as a chain of discrete, and therefore spatialized, moments – is, as we have

seen, the model of time to which the fictional Prozorov family subscribes. It also

accounts for formal peculiarities of Three Sisters. At the basic compositional level the

play is divided into four acts. That is not particularly striking, considering that all of

Chekhov’s major plays are four acts long. As discussed earlier, what is different about

this play is that all of the acts are separated from one another by appreciable amounts of

time, something unique in Chekhov’s dramaturgy. The acts are discrete units, separated
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from each other not just by the curtains that fall but also by the months and years that fall

between those curtains. These are separate acts, not continuous action.

There are more indications of divisibility than just the four acts’ temporal

disconnectedness, however. The frequent allusions to clock time in the play have been

discussed earlier as indicative of the reigning conception of time as constituted by

discrete moments within this household, and this is true not only on a thematic level, but

also in terms of performance. As mentioned before, the twelve strokes of the clock that

come soon after the rise of the curtain are, according to Chekhov’s stage directions,

uninterrupted by dialogue. Here measured time itself is a player on the stage, and the

duration of the clock’s striking is meant to be experienced by the audience as well as the

characters. Time of action on stage and spectators’ time coincide here. There is a similar

pause for the strokes of a clock in the final act when Chebutykin, just after a conversation

with Masha about her dead mother, says, “У меня часы старинные, с боем...” (“My

watch is antique, it strikes…) [12: 177], then winds his watch and lets it strike the hours.

Only after does he start speaking about the departing regiments. It is, of course, not only

the watch that is outdated. The Prozorov view of time (a view Chebutykin is still aligned

with, even as he talks of having to leave) is also outdated now, since Natasha is in

control. But the tempo of the play still belongs to the Prozorovs, as this pause to listen to

a clock, which mirrors Olga’s pause in the first act, indicates. None of the other

numerous references to clock time is given quite as much emphasis (through silent

listening to the strokes) as the first and last, but each acts as a pause of sorts, a structural

indication of time’s segmented passing for both characters and audience.

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Chekhov breaks up the flow of his play by more overt methods than mere citation

of the hours and minutes, however. The held silence during the twelve strokes at the

beginning of Act I is quickly followed by the first of the marked pauses in the play,

pauses where nothing happens (not even a stroke of the clock). The text of Three Sisters

contains 66 marked pauses (a place where Chekhov literally marks the break with the

insertion of the word “pause”), more than in any other of Chekhov’s plays. (Its closest

rival is Uncle Vanya, which has 44.50) These pauses emphasize the discontinuous nature

of time for the household. Time – or at least the action by which time’s progression is

gauged – stops. This is particularly evident in Act III, when a pause occurs after

Chebutykin drops the clock that belonged to the sisters’ mother. Pauses also seem to be

used to emphasize something a character has said or to serve as a moment of reflection,

and they often occur after something from the past has been evoked, as is the case with

the marked pause after Olga remembers the clock striking on the day her father died. S.

D. Balukhatyi has described Chekhov’s overall use of them in this way:

In a particularly varied and expansive way pauses are developed as signs of inner

emotional experiences of the character, as a device of “retention” of these feelings

for the spectator, as a form of communication to the spectator of a seemingly

direct sensation of the “functioning” emotions in the play.51

Of course, with so many pauses there are exceptions to this general pattern. Sometimes

they seem to mark an abrupt change in theme, as Balukhatyi has pointed out elsewhere.52

50
See A. Stender-Petersen, “Zur Technik der Pause bei Čechov,” Anton Čechov 1860-1960 (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1960) 206.
51
S. D. Balukhatyi, Chekhov – dramaturg.(Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1936) 281-282.
Translation is my own; quotation marks are Balukhatyi’s.
52
Balukhatyi, S. D. Problemy dramaturgicheskogo analiza. Chekhov (Leningrad: Akademia, 1927) 46,
80-81, and 97.
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A. Stender-Peterson also views their function this way, claiming the pauses work as

indications of “paragraphs” within Chekhov’s thematic structure.53 But regardless of

how individual marked pauses work (and because of their frequency and varying

contexts, they no doubt work in most of the ways critics have indicated54), as a whole

they replicate theatrically the stop-and-go view of time that the Prozorov household

espouses.

Chekhov’s written-in pauses are explicit textual indications of breaks, and the

discontinuity of much of the dialogue in Three Sisters results in yet another indication of

the atomistic nature of the Prozorov world. Character dialogue in the plays often takes on

a desultory quality, and certainly one of the reasons the work seem so non-traditional is

not just that action does not move towards clear ends, but that dialogue similarly fails in

places to follow a clear line of development. A particularly good example of this can be

found in Act II:

Наташа (Соленому). Грудные дети прекрасно понимают. «Здравствуй,

говорю, Бобик. Здравствуй, милый!» Он взглянул на меня как-то особенно.
Вы думаете, во мне говорит только мать, но нет, нет, уверяю вас! Это
необыкновенный ребенок!

Соленый. Если бы этот ребенок был мой, то я изжарил бы его нa

сковородке и съел бы. (Идет со стаканом в гостиную и садится в угол.)

Наташа (закрыв лицо руками). Грубый, невоспитанный человек!

Маша. Счастлив тот, кто не замечает, лето теперь или зима. Мне кажется,
если бы я была в Москве, то относилась бы равнодушно к погоде...

Вершинин. На днях я читал дневник одного французского министра,

писанный в тюрьме. Министр был осужден за Панаму. С каким упоением,

53
Stender-Petersen 189.
54
For other, more recent interpretations of the pauses, see: L. M. Borisova, “Pauzy i antipauzy v
dramaturgii A. P. Chekhova,” Russkaia rech’: nauchno-populiarnyi zhurnal, 2001:1 (Jan./Feb.), pp. 11-18;
N. A. Nilsson, “Intonation and Rhythm in Čechov’s Plays” in T. Eekman (ed.), Anton Čechov 1860-1960
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), pp. 168-180.
 105

восторгом упоминает он о птицах, которых видит в тюремном окне и

которых не замечал раньше, когда был министром. Теперь, конечно, когда
он выпущен но свободу, он уже по-прежнему не замечает птиц. Так же и вы
не будете замечать Москвы, когда будете жить в ней. Счастья у нас нет и не
бывает, мы только желаем его.

Тузенбах (берет со стола коробку). Где же конфетки?

Natasha (to Solyony). Little babies understand wonderfully well. “Good

morning, Bobik,” I said. “Good morning, sweetheart.” He looked at me in a
special way. You think I’m just a mother talking, but I assure you that’s not so at
all! He’s an extraordinary baby.

Solyony. If that child where mine, I’d fry him in a pan and eat him. (Goes into
the living room with a glass and sits down in the corner).

Natasha (covering her face with her hands). You rude, ill-mannered man!

Masha. Happy he who doesn’t notice whether it’s summer now or winter. If I
were in Moscow, I think I wouldn’t care what the weather was like…

Vershinin. The other day I was reading the diary of a French minister. He wrote
it while in prison. He had been convicted in the Panama affair. With what
rapture, what joy he refers to the birds which he could see from his prison window
and which he never noticed when he was a minister. Now that he’s been set free,
of course, he once again doesn’t notice the birds. In the same way you won’t
notice Moscow when you are living there. Happiness is not for us, it’s not in our
nature, we can only wish for it.

Tuzenbakh (takes a box from the table). Where’s the candy? [12:148-149]

Segments of dialogue such as this are like series of starts and stops, where a topic is

presented and perhaps developed by a second speaker, but then quickly dropped for

another, unconnected topic. Solyony’s rejoinder to Natasha is completely unmotivated

(there is no indication that the baby is misbehaving), but it, at least, is connected to the

same topic (that of the baby). Masha’s comments do not allude to the bizarre exchange

that has just taken place. She talks, instead, of the weather and of Moscow. Vershinin’s

comments seem to take off in yet another direction (and another timeframe), although
 106

they do eventually tie in with Masha’s. Tuzenbakh then poses a completely unrelated

question.

The dramatic effect is inevitably one of a jerky pace, where characters seem

disconnected and where their ideas accumulate but do not necessarily cohere. Richard

Gilman, who, among others, has read Chekhov as a precursor to the Absurdists precisely

because of this characteristic of Three Sisters, has this to say about the accumulation –

rather than development – of textual details:

All of these discontinuities and elisions, and even more their presence in larger
units of dialogue, are designed as a continual disruption of any smooth flow of
conversation, of shapely narrative or thematic progress, and one function of this is
to replace a conventional logic of dramatic construction – the portrait of action –
with a composition more in accord with time’s nature as our condition. Time has
no logic, no reasons or rationale; it doesn’t proceed smoothly, it doesn’t proceed
at all but simply is. And it doesn’t have a plot.55

Gilman reads these non sequiturs as a formal manifestation of the view of temporality as

an amalgam of undetermined moments that he sees as the condition the play seeks to

represent. But while time may not have a plot, the sisters’ conception of it is exceedingly

plotted, and any felt breaks in development are more likely a manifestation of their

incorrect view of time – and therefore of the world – as discrete moments than of time

itself. Time as experienced does cohere, and one moment joins with everything that has

come before, not strictly linearly but in multiple directions simultaneously. That is

Bergson’s point, but it is also Chekhov’s. For despite the multitude and variety of

discontinuities within Three Sisters, Chekhov’s play does cohere, and the ideas and

observations that his characters so often throw out but fail to connect nevertheless take on

meaning from our perspective outside of the fictional world. Solyony’s egregious

behavior, Masha’s longing for Moscow, and Tuzenbakh’s concern for refreshments are
55
Gilman, Chekhov’s Plays 158.
 107

all repeated in various ways throughout the play, both before and after this particular

scene. They are, in other words, parts of larger patterns that emerge over the course of

the work. For all of the stops and starts in the structure of this play, the reader/viewer is

reminded of the way things do connect.

This integration of discrete parts into an ongoing whole also bridges the structural

separations of the play. Chekhov’s marked pauses draw attention to the discrete view of

time that the sisters espouse, but the pauses do not separate the play into unrelated parts.

Their seemingly random appearance (motivated by different things at different times, as

critics have attested, and never entirely predictable), give them an arbitrary feel not

unlike the various ways of counting time that pervade the play. The flow of life on stage

continues through these pauses, just as the flow of time overcomes its numerical

representation. The pauses, then, indicate the feeling of life for the characters, a feeling

of slowness and disconnectedness that informs the play’s advancing but does not replace

it. Pauses are not stops, at least from the audience’s perspective, for the performance

continues, even if dialogue does not.

Similarly, the temporal breaks that occur between acts, when the performance

actually does stop, insist on the continual flow of time into which discrete moments are

absorbed. As mentioned above, Three Sisters is unique among Chekhov’s plays for the

length of time its action spans. But it is also unique in that Chekhov does not specify the

exact amount of time that passes. Turner’s estimation of four and a half years is

convincing, but it is not incontrovertible, only because neither Chekhov in his stage

directions nor Chekhov’s characters in their speech ever tell us precisely how much time

has passed. It becomes clear from certain clues over the course of each act that changes
 108

have occurred in the household and that many months must have passed between each

act, but the time elapsed is never explicitly designated. On the contrary, as William

Babula points out, initially each successive act appears to pick up where the last left off,

and it is only after a few moments that the lapse in chronological time is made evident.56

Act II, for instance, has the same setting as Act I (the Prozorovs’ drawing room), and

Natasha is on stage at the end of the former and the beginning of the latter. The time is

now evening, but it becomes clear to the audience that it must not be the same day as the

previous act, because Natasha is in a dressing gown in the house (indicating that she now

lives there). And indeed, much has changed over the course of the “hidden time”

between the acts: Andrey and Natasha have married, they have a child, and Natasha now

runs the house. Similar changes take place between the other acts, and these changes,

which also indicate that large lapses of time have passed, are revealed only over the

course of the action. Temporally disconnected scenes are pulled together into an ongoing

fictional – and theatrical – experience.

There is at least one other way that Chekhov gives the initial illusion of continuity

to discrete scenes, and that is the time of day at which each act set. Act I occurs in the

early afternoon, as evidenced by the clock’s striking twelve in the opening speech; Act II

takes place at eight in the evening according to Chekhov’s scene description; Act III

begins at 2 a.m., when the family is up because of the fire raging in the town; finally, Act

IV, set at midday, brings the play back to where it began. Chekhov is very specific about

the time of day of each act, despite the lack of clarity about the time that has passed

between the acts. There results a circadian circularity to the progression, a uniting of

chronologically disconnected scenes into the familiar pattern of a day. This structural
56
Babula 366-7.
 109

decision on Chekhov’s part reinforces the inevitable process of temporal connection, of

joining up separate scenes into an ongoing experience. It also draws attention to the way

several timeframes can be integrated simultaneously into that experience.

Structurally, then, Three Sisters reinforces the ultimate connectedness of human

experience, something that is always comprised of disparate pieces that are joined by the

person who experiences them, if by nothing else. The play enacts experiential time (even

if the characters in the play do not), eliciting in the audience an integration of separate

parts into a productive whole. Chekhov’s message is not that time has no plot, but rather

that time as it is experienced is a non-teleological plot in its own right, and that to

understand time we must understand the ways we plot it – and the ways our experience of

it inevitably surpass those efforts. The artistic choices Chekhov makes to represent time

in the play are revealed as just that – as choices, as ways of conceptualizing and uniting

and attempting to account for the experience of time’s flow, but never fully representing

the plurality of the experience. Like the choices of his characters, Chekhov’s own

choices have limitations and consequences. A present-tense orientation with important

action is absent, and the character who most fully represents present-tense living is the

recognizable malefactor in the play. But the immediate present is nonetheless part of the

temporal reality, and those who fail to engage it in the play – namely, the sisters – lose

their home. The endless “eventlessness” that Chekhov’s characters complain of is

replicated in the larger dramatic framework they are in, where nothing seems to happen,

where characters are revealed more than developed. And yet things do happen, and

important changes do occur, as the careful reader/observer will notice. By virtue of the

passage of time things never stay the same, for events move forward in time. Indeed, as
 110

any second reading or viewing of Chekhov’s play illustrates, repetition is never

replication. Perhaps Chekhov’s greatest achievement in Three Sisters is his insistence on

the limited perspective of any conceptualization of time. No picture is the whole picture,

and no representation – of time or even of Chekhov’s play – the final word. This mistrust

of categorical thinking is fundamental to Chekhov’s dramatics, and, as the next chapter

will show, it had a profound influence on the development of a revolutionary type of

twentieth-century drama.
 111

Chapter Three

Always Never the Same:

Time in the Absurdist Theater of Vvedensky and Havel

The theatre is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never
by exactly duplicated.
-Antonin Artaud1

Overview

Who are Chekhov’s dramatic descendants? As discussed briefly in Chapter Two,

a number of insightful scholars have seen in Chekhov’s drama incipient elements of the

Theater of the Absurd, and it is on that type of drama that this chapter will focus. While

scholars have noted a shared set of concerns and techniques between Chekhov and the

(mostly) French Absurdists (Beckett in particular), there has been little sustained analysis

of the similarities and possible signs of direct influence. Even more surprisingly, the

parallels between Chekhov and other Slavic Absurdist playwrights have gone largely

unexamined. This chapter will begin with an overview of Absurdist drama, surveying its

characteristics and creators from the well-known French Absurd of the mid-twentieth

century, but focusing ultimately on two of its Slavic adherents: Alexander Vvedensky

and Václav Havel. By looking closely at works of these writers from the Russian and
1
Antonin Artaud, “An End to Masterpieces,” Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on
Drama and Theatre 1850-1990, ed. George W. Brandt (New York: Oxford, 1998) 196.
 112

Czech traditions, respectively, this chapter will show that many of Chekhov’s thematic

concerns and structuring techniques in Three Sisters, especially in connection with time’s

experience and the abstract representations we use to account for that experience, were

indeed taken up and developed by later Absurdists. Specifically, Ёлка у Ивановых

(Christmas at the Ivanovs), by Vvedensky, and Vernisáž (Unveiling), from the Vaněk

trilogy by Havel, will be discussed as works to which the term meta-temporal drama

applies very well.

Absurdist Drama: Definitions, Temporalities

In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus coined the term “the

Absurd” as a description of the plight of modern humanity, which, for Camus, finds itself

in a world devoid of meaning and is, therefore, faced with the act of suicide as a logical

(but obviously problematic) response. Beyond the reach of metaphysics of any variety,

the modern intellect inevitably must grapple with the revealed disunity of life, both in the

world and in the individual. Camus, in a passage that seems to invoke the plight of

Chekhov’s Prozorov sisters as much as that of the Existential philosopher, puts it this

way:

A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on
the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and of light, man feels
an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the
memories of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between
man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of Absurdity.2

Camus does draw on some specific literary examples to demonstrate the varied

manifestations of and responses to the Absurd. Notable among his examples is another

2
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1955) 6.
 113

writer from the Russian tradition, Dostoevsky.3 The works of Franz Kafka and

Shakespeare’s Hamlet are also used to illustrate the Absurd. But as the title of the essay

suggests, it is from the ancient myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned to forever roll a rock

to the top of a mountain only to see it fall back down to the bottom under its own weight,

that Camus finds his principal example of Absurdity. This punishment, a constantly

repeating act of futile and hopeless labor by a man conscious of his situation, exemplifies

for Camus both the senselessness of life and, surprisingly, the meaningful tenacity of the

human spirit.

There is an obvious relation between the myth that Camus examines, his

conclusions from his examination, and the strangely repetitive yet deeply profound plays

of the Absurdists. Indeed, perhaps because he himself was a playwright, the Absurd

seemed to be reflected in – and to reflect – the theatrical developments of Camus’ milieu.

As George Wellwarth writes:

Briefly stated, Camus’ “philosophy of the absurd” says that human existence is
unintelligible. Man lives in the world but understands neither it nor his own
function in it. He is a displaced alien in what must ultimately appear an
incomprehensible void to him. Man functions in this wilderness by anesthetizing
himself to reality with various specious, artificial beliefs; by immersing himself in
a comforting routine that gives him the illusion of having some significance; and
by deluding himself into believing he is not alone. It is the self-appointed task of
the avant-garde dramatists to debunk these beliefs and to shock people into a
realization of the absurdity of their position.4

3
Demons (or The Possessed, as it is referred to in The Myth of Sisyhpus) and The Brothers Karamazov are
the works by Dostoevsky which are of particular interest to Camus. The former novel’s character Kirilov is
the mouthpiece for what Camus identifies as the Absurd in that work, while Ivan Karamazov is
representative of the Absurd in the latter novel. Camus reads the latter novel as a response to the former,
and he notes that the affirmation of a future life in the character of Alyosha Karamazov (and not, notably,
the specifically Christian component) is what moves The Brothers Karamazov from being an Absurdist
work (which does not provide a reply to the questions it poses) to an Existential one (which does). See
Camus 104-112. Camus adapted and directed The Possessed as a dramatic work in 1959.
4
George Wellwarth, The Theater of Protest and Paradox (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964) 54.
 114

Absurdist playwrights are often accused of writing “nonsense” plays that bear no relation

to reality or normal human thought, but the strange and shocking nature of their works, in

terms of both their content and structure, is not without serious intellectual

considerations.

It was Martin Esslin who elaborated the Absurd as a descriptive literary (as

opposed to philosophical) term in his seminal work Theatre of the Absurd (1961).

Esslin’s definition refers to a distinctly twentieth-century style of anti-realistic drama that

was centered in Paris during and after World War II, when, because of their connections

to (or impotence in the face of) the war’s atrocities, movements such as faith in progress,

nationalism, and various totalitarian ideologies could no longer viably stand in as a

substitute for the decline of religious faith. This perceived loss of meaning in the modern

world was mirrored artistically by plays which seemed to reflect that meaninglessness,

both in their structure and content.

Interestingly, Camus is not one of the French playwrights that Esslin considers

Absurdist. Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, and Genet are the playwrights to whom Esslin

devotes full chapters in his book. All four were centered in Paris and wrote in French,

but Genet alone was French by birth (Beckett was Irish, Adamov was Armenian-Russian,

and Ionesco was Romanian). These were certainly not the only notable playwrights to

deal with themes of meaninglessness and the absurdity of the human condition, in Paris

or elsewhere, and, interestingly enough, none of them thought of himself as a member of

a “school” or “movement” per se (Adamov, in fact, rejected the notion altogether, just as

he later rejected his earlier works and changed course to a more realistic and rational

dramaturgy). Nonetheless, these writers can be grouped together because of their

 115

rejection of conventional theatrical and linguistic practices in terms of both theme and

structure. Existentialist writers such as Camus and Sartre were also authors of plays that

considered the senselessness of life, but the difference, as Esslin notes, between

Existentialists and Absurdists is that the latter extend this existential probing to include

the structure and language of their plays:

They [the Existentialists] present their sense of the irrationality of the human
condition in the form of highly lucid and logically constructed reasoning, while
the Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the
human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open
abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. While Sartre and Camus
express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a
step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the
form in which these are expressed. In some senses, the theatre of Sartre and
Camus is less adequate as an expression of the philosophy of Sartre and Camus –
in artistic, as distinct from philosophic, terms – than the Theatre of the Absurd. 5

Although the Absurd has come to be applied to a number of different literary

genres, the term has, since its inception, been primarily associated with drama. As Esslin

points out:

The Theatre of the Absurd represents trends that have been apparent in the more
esoteric kinds of literature since the nineteen-twenties (Joyce, Surrealism, Kafka)
or in painting since the first decade of this century (Cubism, abstract
painting)…But the theatre could not put these innovations before its wider public
until these trends had had time to filter into a wider consciousness. And…the
theatre can make its own very original contribution to this new type of art.6

In Esslin’s view, drama served as the culmination of this view of existence as an

absurdity, but in many ways it also served as its beginnings. The mimeplay of antiquity,

with the requisite clown who cannot understand the simplest logic, is one of the earliest

antecedents of the Absurd. Court jesters also displayed a lack of reason and a free

association of words and ideas, both in their original functions as spontaneous morons in

5
Esslin xix-xx.
6
Esslin xii.
 116

the Middle Ages and in their scripted incarnations in later theater, including that of

Shakespeare. Commedia dell’ arte, with its simpletons and their constant entanglements

in semantic freeplay and misunderstandings, was a remarkably popular and enduring

form of drama that had a profound influence on later harlequinades, music hall shows,

and vaudeville. While it may be overreaching to say that there is a direct link between

these earlier forms and Absurdist drama, the affinities are certainly clear.7

Certain twentieth-century artistic movements did have a direct influence upon

Absurdist playwrights, however. Surrealism, Dadaism, and Expressionism all played a

key role in the development of Absurdist theater, or at least the Paris-centered strain of it

that Esslin and others document.8 Theatrical experiments within these earlier movements

often parodied the banality of language, offering shocking visual components as an

alternative source of communication, one based more on emotion than logic. Through

what one commentator has called a “system of rebellion through paradox,” these earlier

works hinted at the ultimate futility of human thought and reason.9 In ways both

philosophic and dramatic these earlier works served as a springboard for the works of

7
Esslin discusses these earlier dramatic forms with an eye towards the writings of Hermann Reich, a
German scholar who argued that there were direct developmental links between the forms. Esslin himself
never makes the claim that Absurdist theater is a conscious continuation of these forms, but he does note
the parallels. See Esslin 231-238.
8
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) of 1896, a work that parodies Shakespeare’s Macbeth and flouts
the conventions of Western theater with its illogical, meandering plot and bizarre use of language
(including obscenities), is generally regarded as the foundation text for the theatrical experiments that
resulted in the Absurd in Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire’s plays continued this attack on conventional theater
in the early part of the century. Jarry (and, to a lesser extent, Apollinaire) had a profound influence on
Dada (the initially German-based response to the horrors of World War I) and Surrealism (the French-
based continuation of Dada’s irreverent and purposefully shocking art, officially founded by Andre Breton
in 1924). Theatrical experiments in both of these movements (and, to a lesser extent, in Expressionism,
primarily in the theatrical works of Oskar Kokoschka and Yvan Goll) were observed and expanded upon by
the Absurdists. See Esslin 255-274. See also Deborah B. Gaensbauer, Eugene Ionesco Revisited (New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1996) 51-58.
9
Wellwarth 10. Wellwarth is referring specifically to the dramatic philosophy of Alfred Jarry.
 117

Ionesco, Beckett, and the early Adamov, writers who would take this rebellion to its most

poetic and unsettling conclusions.

In terms of theory, the proscriptive writings of Antonin Artaud were also

influential in the development of the Absurd. Artaud, whose own theatrical

experiments10 were largely overshadowed by his theoretical writings, formulated a

definition of theater that frees performance from subordination to the text and

foregrounds the visceral – and often barbaric – nature of human creativity. Formulated

primarily in the group of essays collected in 1938 under the title The Theater and Its

Double (Le théâtre et son double), Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” (théâtre de la cruauté)

actively displays the disparity between feeling and language, between primal urges and

constrictive social taboos and institutions, that modern society experiences. Words are

part of the theatrical experience for Artaud, but since language is bound up with the

empty positivist assumptions that distract us from the cruelty of existence, words cannot

be primary in his vision of theater. Spectacle which arouses and disturbs the audience is

central to Artaud’s theory. As Marvin Carlson writes:

The basis [of the Theater of Cruelty] is the turbulent force of the creative power
itself, an irrational impulsion whose permanent law is evil. The dark creative
principle exposed by the theatre suggests Schopenhauer’s dark and cruel Will, or
perhaps more directly Nietzsche’s spirit of Dionysus; but the spectator in Artaud’s
theatre, entrapped in being, is not offered the mystic release Schopenhauer
suggested, nor does Artaud posit an Apollonian counterforce arising in art. The
theatre’s only true task is to reveal the heart of darkness of life itself.11

10
Artaud was a Surrealist poet and playwright, an actor, and a director, most notably of the plays by
himself and by Roger Vitrac. Both Vitrac and Artaud were eventually officially expelled from the
Surrealist movement by Breton, who rejected them on the basis that theater was too commercial for
Surrealism’s goals. Together they then formed the Alfred Jarry Theater, a predecessor to Artaud’s later
Theater of Cruelty. See Esslin 275-6.
11
Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre (Ithica: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993) 394-395.
 118

That “true task” can be realized only through experimentally shocking theater that

directly addresses an audience, often by placing performances among spectators and by

dispensing with the fourth wall.12 In breaking down these barriers, Artaud’s theater

implicates its viewers in the celebration of dark spectacles, which they co-create and

enjoy. Artaud rejects the basic assumptions of Realist theater, which might entertain an

audience but will never directly challenge its removed complacency. He was not the first

to question Realist conventions and themes, but his absolute rejection of them and his

insistence that cosmic darkness pervades life make him the most immediate forerunner to

the Absurdists. In Esslin’s description, “Artaud, who was befriended by Adamov in his

period of mental illness, forms the bridge between the pioneers and today’s Theatre of the

Absurd.”13

There are, then, clear antecedents to the Absurdists, both theoretical and artistic,

but why theater would be the art form that best serves this trend of thought is something

that must be considered. Why is theater the culmination of this trend? What is it about

theater that lends itself so well to Absurdist tendencies? Certainly the co-operative nature

of theater is a major factor in the development of the Absurd in drama. The congregation

of an audience and the actual, voiced communication that occurs during a more

traditional play, both among actors embodying characters and between them and the

audience, foreground the social aspect of the art form and the ways a society creates

meaning and reacts to its creations. Absurdist plays, however, subvert the notion of

drama as clear artistic communication in a collective setting. Since there is no ultimate

12
Artaud prescribes these staging techniques in his First Manifesto, under the section entitled “The Stage –
The Auditorium.” See Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty, First and Second Manifestos,” trans.
Mary Caroline Richares, in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Eric Bentley, (New York: Penguin, 1968)
61-62.
13
Esslin 280.
 119

and all-encompassing meaning to the universe in Absurdist thought, language, which is

bound up with claims of stable and inherent meaning, is a suspect medium. Drama is an

attractive choice of genre for the Absurdists because drama’s ties to the theater make it

the one literary genre that is not only literary. The essence of theater is visual, and while

language is a basic constituent of the theatrical text, is not the only medium of

expression. Moreover, the discord that can arise in a performed play between what is

spoken and what is presented, between what is heard and what is seen, is central to the

artistic goals of the Absurdists.

Language is the most basic example of a socially constructed system of referents

that can be critiqued through theatrical performances, but it is certainly not the only one.

Another basic system of ordering and classifying the human experience is the convention

of time keeping, and it is not surprising, therefore, that so many of the Absurdists turn

their attention to time. Indeed, since dramatic texts are played out in time in the theater,

concepts of time can be examined and tested against the experience of time’s flow that is

central to a performance. Here, too, there is inevitably a discord between what is

presupposed by social convention and what is felt, even in a collective setting. It comes

as no surprise, then, that Adamov, Ionesco, and Beckett all made temporal constructs a

central focus of their very first plays. While this is not the place for close readings of

those plays, an overview of them makes clear the importance of a critique of time to

Absurdist thought and theater.

The Parody (La Parodie), Adamov’s first play (written in 1947 and first

performed, in Paris, in 1952), shows, in the author’s own words, “the loneliness of man,
 120

the absence of communication.”14 The play is a series of short scenes that show two men,

one very active and one very passive, who are both infatuated with the same mindless

woman. She cannot tell the rivals apart, and instead carries on with two other men, a

journalist whom she loves and who mistreats her, and the journalist’s editor, who

becomes a manager of a restaurant, a director of a firm, and other persons of authority

throughout the play. The miscommunication and emptiness that define the relations of

the characters also extends to the concept of time, which is constantly evoked in the play

but never given. Characters keep asking the time but are never answered, and a clock

without hands is a recurring feature of each scene. Temporality is for Adamov one more

type of psychological state to be projected on the stage, a confused and alienated system

that cannot communicate meaningfully.

Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano ( La Cantatrice Chauve), his first play15 (written in

1949, first performed in 1950), similarly foregrounds the meaninglessness of measured

time. The inspiration for the play came, according to Ionesco, from a grammar he used to

learn English. Like the grammar, the play is filled with senseless platitudes exchanged

between Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their guests, Mr. and Mrs. Martin. Throughout the play

the “English clock” strikes “English strokes,” but like the dialogue that emanates from

the characters, these strokes, while recognizable as such, do not correspond to any

meaningful reality. Instead, the clock strikes apparently at will, sometimes with more

than twelve strokes, and occasionally many times in succession, with short pauses

between each series of strokes. Ionesco characterizes the strokes as “nervous” in one

place, and in another he notes that the clock does not strike (a seemingly unnecessary

14
Quoted in Esslin 52.
15
Or, more accurately, his first “anti-play,” since that is what he titles it.
 121

direction).16 Near the end of the play two characters seem to sense the randomness of

measured time at the Smiths and impose their own order on it. A fire chief who has

stopped by remarks, “Since you don’t have the time here, I must tell you that in exactly

three-quarters of an hour and sixteen minutes, I’m having a fire at the other end of the

city. Consequently, I must hurry.”17 How he knows the exact time of a future fire is

unclear, but his interest in precise time-telling contrasts sharply with the Smiths (or at

least their clock). Before the fire chief leaves Mrs. Martin says that, thanks to him, they

have passed “a truly Cartesian quarter of an hour.”18 Since that is the approximate length

of time the fire chief has, indeed, been on stage, the line is most easily read as a meta-

dramatic one that highlights the absurdly disjunct nature of clock time within the fictional

world of the play. But the line also draws attention to the experience of time, which can

never be “Cartesian” the way a working clock can. Ionesco’s final stage directions

indicate that the play is to begin again, with the two couples switching the roles of guests

and hosts. With the same lines being spoken by different actors, there is no guarantee

that the duration of time that the fire chief is on stage the second time around will be

identical to the first. Of course, that would be true even if the same actors were speaking

the same lines. And even if the elapsed time comes close to being the same, the advance

of time means that although the dialogue recurs, nothing truly repeats. Like the

observations that are passed back and forth, the mechanical measurement of time is an

empty exercise, an abstraction devoid of significance.

16
Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Soprano and Other Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press,
1999) 11 and 39.
17
Ionesco 37.
18
Ionesco 37.
 122

In each of their first plays, Adamov and Ionesco illustrate an interest in exploring

the nature and meaning of time. Ionesco’s interest extends to an examination of time not

only in the fictional world of his characters, but also in the theater itself, and, by

extension, in the world. In this he has much in common with Chekhov. But the

Absurdist who most prominently takes up meta-temporal drama as a guiding principle of

his work is Beckett. And the play that illustrates this most clearly is his first play,19

Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot).

Written in 1948-49 (and first performed in 1953), Waiting for Godot is probably

the most famous (and certainly the most performed) of all French Absurdist works. The

story of the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, needs no recounting, not only because of

its popularity, but also because the work simply does not lend itself to narrative

restatement. As Martin Esslin notes:

Waiting for Godot does not tell a story; it explores a static situation.
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” On a country road,
by a tree, two old tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting. That is the opening
situation at the beginning of Act I. At the end of Act I, they are informed that Mr.
Godot, with whom they believe they have an appointment, cannot come, but that
he will surely come tomorrow. Act II repeats precisely the same pattern. The
same boy arrives and delivers the same message. Act I ends:
ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s go.
(They do not move.)
Act II ends with the same lines of dialogue, but spoken by the same characters in
reversed order.
The sequence of events and the dialogue in each act are different. Each
time the two tramps encounter another pair of characters, Pozzo and Lucky,
master and slave, under differing circumstances; in each act Vladimir and
Estragon attempt suicide and fail, for differing reasons; but these variations
merely serve to emphasize the essential sameness of the situation – plus ça
change, plus c’est la même chose.20

19
Technically Eleutheria was Beckett’s first play, since it was written in 1947. But Beckett deemed the
work a failure and never attempted to publish it or have it performed. It appeared in print for the first time
in 1995, in an English translation.
20
Esslin 13-14.
 123

There are parallels between Waiting for Godot and Three Sisters, which similarly avoids

traditional dramatic plotting. Nothing ever changes for the characters of either play: the

tramps never meet Godot, and the sisters never get to Moscow. But time passes in both

plays, and because of the advance of time and the accompanying accumulation of

experience, nothing is ever quite the same.

Indeed, there is a shared interest between Waiting for Godot and Three Sisters in

the investigation of this state of waiting and the experience of temporal passage in

contradistinction to the arbitrariness of abstract measured time. Esslin, again

commenting on Beckett’s play, writes:

The subject of the play is not Godot, but waiting, the act of waiting as an essential
and characteristic aspect of the human condition. Throughout our lives we always
wait for something, and Godot simply represents the objective of our waiting – an
event, a thing, a person, death. Moreover, it is in the act of waiting that we
experience the flow of time in its purest, most evident form. If we are active, we
tend to forget the passage of time, we pass the time, but if we are merely
passively waiting, we are confronted with the action of time itself.21

Like Chekhov, Beckett uses the act of waiting on the part of his characters and his

audience to challenge the ways we classify and conceptualize temporal experience.

Beckett’s mistrust of ordered time is also overtly pronounced, both in terms of his

structure (which is repetitive but not a true repetition when time’s advance is considered),

and in terms of his characters’ dialogue. The uncertainty of seasons, days, and times is

announced by all the characters in various places. Pozzo’s last speech in the play perhaps

best articulates the suspicion of a pre-existing series of events and their corresponding

chronology, a suspicion upon which the entire play is constructed:

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable!
When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one
21
Esslin 17.
 124

day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall
die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?22

Our system of ordering time, then, like language, itself, is for Beckett – and many of the

Absurdists – a convention, a placating system of order that disguises the inherently

unshared and irreducible sense of time that each individual possesses.

The persistent effort of Absurdist playwrights to reveal the constructed and

essentially meaningless nature of plotted time indicates a special relationship with

Chekhov, a shared interest in probing into the depths of experience that lies beneath an

arbitrarily imposed abstract order. The French Absurdists were not the only inheritors of

this particular interest in highlighting the radical disjunction between measured and

experiential time, however. As the next section will show, there are other Absurdist

descendents of Chekhov, closer in space and time to their theatrical source.

Russian Absurdism and Time: The Oberiu and Vvedensky

Absurdism as a named movement within art – and especially within drama –

came about mid-20th Century with the confluence of talented playwrights (such as

Beckett) writing in a similar style and of scholars (such as Esslin) who treated the

playwrights’ works as a serious artistic and intellectual phenomenon. But hallmarks of

Absurdist drama had certainly appeared earlier than the mid-20th Century, not only in

drama, and not only in France. In Russia, the group that somewhat anachronistically23

22
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, translated by the author (New York: Grove Press, 1982) 103.
23
George Gibian is largely responsible for discovering and introducing these formerly lost works of
Russian literature to the West in his 1971 book, Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd: A Literary
Discovery (Ithica: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), and it is he who called them, quite correctly, “Absurdist,” a
term that had been coined after these works’ creation but before their dissemination. All citations from
Gibian’s book will be from the updated edition: The Man with the Black Coat: Russia’s Literature of the
Absurd, ed. and trans. George Gibian (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1987).
 125

has been termed “Absurdist” developed in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) at the end of

the 1920’s.

Called the “Oberiu” (“Обэриу,” a slightly expanded acronym24 for

“Объединение реального искусства,” or “Association for Real Art”), this group arose

through attempts to unify elements of the late Leningrad avant-garde by Daniil Kharms25

and Alexander Vvedensky. The two had associated with a number of different literary

and artistic movements, but by 1926 had assembled around them a group of their own,

dedicated to their own view of art and to their own style of integrating artistic forms.

Besides Kharms and Vvedensky, the group’s other principal members were Nikolai

Zabolotsky, Nikolai Oleinikov, Igor’ Bakhterev, Boris Levin, and Konstantin Vaginov.

Previously known by a number of names,26 the group chose “Oberiu” in 1927 when they

began affiliating with the Leningrad House of the Press. In 1928, the group gave its first

performance there, but previous evening performances had been held at the Union of

Poets, in the Institute for Art History, in student dormitories, and even in military

barracks. The Oberiu’s “performances” were iconoclastic events that included readings

of poetry, plays, short pieces of performance art, musical numbers, pretend lectures,

acrobatics and magic tricks.27 Spectacle was central to the group’s aesthetic, and their

written works, which went largely unpublished, accordingly attempted to attract attention

with their nonsensical situations and shocking images. In their manifesto, written

24
The “и” and “у” are thought to have been inserted to give the name a more original sound. See Gibian
10.
25
“Kharms” was an invented name, possibly suggested by a combination of the English words “charms”
and “harm.” His real surname was Yuvachov.
26
Left Flank, Radiks, and Academy of Left Classicists were some of the names the group adopted before
settling on Oberiu. See Gibian 10. “Oberiu” notably contained no reference to “leftism,” a term that was
becoming increasingly dangerous in the Soviet Union.
27
A program for one of their performances from 1928 includes such curious items as “objects and figures,”
performed by Kharms, and “self-observation over a wall,” performed by Vvedensky. “Forks and verses”
and eucalic prose are also featured. See Gibian 21.
 126

primarily by Kharms and Zabolotsky in 1928, the Oberiu describe the social role of their

artistic movement this way:

Oberiu now comes forward as a new section of leftist revolutionary art. Oberiu
does not concern itself with only the subject matter and the high points of artistic
work; it seeks an organically new concept of life and approach to things. Oberiu
penetrates into the center of the word, of dramatic action, and of the film frame.28

The proclaimed revolutionary spirit of their work, aimed at penetrating into the center of

words and forms, including drama, to reveal the “truth” of the material of literature and

life (hence the “real” in the group’s name), carries on much of the avant-garde

experimentation that dominated Russian artistic circles in the early part of the 20th

Century. The Oberiu also anticipates the work of the French Absurdists, who, as we have

seen, had remarkably similar concerns. Out of touch with its political surroundings, the

Oberiu seemed oblivious to the forced institutionalization of literature (and specifically

Socialist Realist literature) by the Soviet state, which by this point looked unfavorably on

“revolutionary” literature that did not “concern itself with only the subject matter,”

namely that of depicting the state in a positive light. By 1930 the group was scared into

inactivity, and in 193129 both Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested.

Oberiu marks the end of Russian Modernism, the last breath of a period whose

beginnings are generally traced only to the first decades of the 20th Century. As the

28
Gibian 246.
29
The last Oberiu evening took place in April 1930 at a Leningrad University dormitory. Both Vvedensky
and Kharms spent part of 1932 in exile in Kursk. The two continued their collaborative friendship after
their return to Leningrad, but never with the same intensity as their Oberiu days. In 1936 Vvedensky
married and moved to Kharkov. Although apart, Vvedensky and Kharms continued to write in ways that
reflected their mutual artistic principles. Sadly, their lives also continued to follow similar patterns. Both
writers were arrested again in the late summer of 1941. Kharkov was being evacuated before the arrival of
the Germans, and Vvedensky was taken away on a prison train under charges of “counterrevolutionary”
activity. The official date of his death is Dec. 20, 1941, although the details of the death (and the veracity
of the date) are unverifiable. Kharms died of starvation in prison in February of 1942, the first winter of
the Leningrad blockade. See Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, Laughter in the Void: An Introduction to the
Writings of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedenskii (Vienna: Weiner Slawistischer Almanach, 1982) 23-
24.
 127

preceding chapter showed, aspects of Chekhov’s drama made their way into Modernism.

Alexander Vvedensky, like Chekhov before him, realized the potential of drama for

exploring and critiquing our conceptions of time even while engaging them to structure

the temporal experience. In this way the two writers, who can be seen as situated at

opposite ends of Russian Modernism, must be viewed as artistic familiars, despite the

stylistic differences that seem to separate them (not to mention the considerable number

of years). Scholars have previously suggested a connection between Chekhov and the

Oberiu,30 but as this section will make clear, Vvedensky can be seen as a direct

descendent of Chekhov, as a writer who also created meta-temporal drama.

As will be shown, Vvedensky’s persistent interest in critiquing representations of

time is a major aspect of his dramaturgy, one that closely aligns him with Chekhov. This

aspect of his work also connected him, in a more direct sense, with other avant-garde

artistic groups of the first decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most important

association of this type was with a minor Futurist group of poets led by Alexander

Tufanov, since it was at a meeting of this group that Vvedensky and Kharms first met.31

Members of Tufanov’s group identified themselves as “zaumniki,” poets who moved

away from the referential meaning of language to focus on its phonetic and rhythmic

30
See Ellen Chances, “Chekhov and Kharms: Story/Antistory,” Russian Language Journal 36.123-24
(1982): 181-192; and Tomas Venclova, “Chekhov as a Representative of ‘Real Art,” trans. Diana Senechal,
in Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Louis Jackson, eds. Elizabeth
Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1995) 181-190. Chances
focuses on the connections between Kharms and Chekhov, arguing that Kharms’ works are in many ways a
logical conclusion stylistically to elements of Chekhov’s writing (primarily his prose), which also contains,
though in lesser degree, things like non-sequiturs of speech, seemingly superfluous details, repetitions,
stories about children from a child’s point of view, zero endings, and a seemingly hopeless tone. Venclova
specifically examines “Сапоги в смятку” (literally “Soft-boiled Boots,” an idiom roughly meaning “Pure
Nonsense”), a handwritten booklet by Chekhov from 1886 that retains – and magnifies – much of the
parodic, experimental style of Antosha Chekhonte (Chekhov’s earlier penname) and seems, according to
Venclova, to have much in common with Oberiu writings (by both Kharms and Vvedensky), at the level of
devices, but also structure and function.
31
Nakhimovsky 10.
 128

elements.32 Although the association of Kharms and Vvedensky with this group was

short-lived, primarily because the two claimed to reject the principles of transrational

poetry,33 Vvedensky was present at an October 1925 meeting at which Tufanov read a

manifesto that, according to Kharms’ detailed notes on the evening, urged a “non-spatial

understanding of time” (непространственное восприятие времени).34 Whether from

this source or another, the concept stayed with Vvedensky, who, according to Mikhail

Meilakh, the principal editor of Vvedensky’s works in Russian, made an exploration of

time “the basic concern of his poetry.”35 The same concern also manifests itself in his

drama.

Where one draws the line between poetry and drama in Vvedensky’s oeuvre is not

always entirely clear. Much of his work is recognizable, if highly experimental, lyric.

But many of his “poems” were written as performance pieces and have clearly marked

voices that address one another. And while these works do not have lists of dramatis

personae or indications of setting, as one would expect of a play, some do have partial

stage directions. However, Vvedensky occasionally undermines these indications that the

works are dramatic in a number of ways. For instance, the stage directions at times veer

off into authorial observations that are clearly meant to be read (perhaps aloud, although

it unclear by whom) as “primary” text and not merely as guidance for performers. Minin

32
The Russian term is “заумники,” from “заумь” (literally a neologism meaning “beyond the mind” or
“beyond reason,” and often translated as “transsense” or “transrational”), a term which originated with the
Cubo-Futurists around 1913. It is primarily associated with the theoretical and creative works of Aleksei
Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov.
33
The Oberiu Manifesto rejects the notion of transrational poetry in no uncertain terms: “No school is more
hostile to us that zaum’. We, people who are real and concrete to the marrow of our bones, are the first
enemies of those who castrate the word and make it into a powerless and senseless mongrel. In our work
we broaden the meaning of the object and of the word, but we do not destroy it in any way. The concrete
object, once its literary and everyday skin is peeled away, becomes a property of art.” See Gibian 247-248.
34
See the foreword, written by Mikhail Meilakh, to Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Polnoe sobranie proizvedenii v
dvukh tomakh, Vol. 1, (Moscow: Gilei, 1993) 18.
35
Ibid. 18 (Meilakh’s phrase is “основная проблема его поэзии”).
 129

and Pozharskii (Минин и Пожарский) is a work of this type. Loosely centered around

the historical figures of the butcher Minin and Prince Pozharsky, who together led the

Muscovites against the occupying Poles in the early seventeenth century, the short work

includes dozens of characters (the eponymous two are barely present in the work) who

appear briefly and introduce new topics of conversation. But it is not only the content

that is desultory in Minin and Pozharskii. One of the earliest works of Vvedensky (it was

written in 1926), it showcases his interest from the very beginning in the exploration of

generic boundaries. Besides creative stage directions, the work also contains songs that

are included within the actual text (rather than the stage directions) but not assigned to

any character. “A Song While the Porridge Cooks” is just one of several examples of

these songs that seem to originate from the author (and not from a character within the

play).

God May Be All Around (Кругом возможно Бог), a work from 1931 about the

wanderings of a character named Fomin after his beheading, continues this mixing of

genres with its inserted lyrics and stage directions that take on a narrative life of their

own. Further complicating the question of genre, these semi-autonomous stage directions

are sometimes written in rhyme and meter, as the following passage shows:

Царь.
Он плох.
Скажите как его имя.
Пойду затоплю камин
И выпью с друзьями своими.
Воображаемая девушка (исчезая).
Его фамилия Фомин.
Царь.
Ах какой ужас. Это в последний раз.
Палач убегает.
Фомин лежал без движенья
На красных свинцовых досках.
 130

Казалось ему, наслажденье

Сидит на усов волосках.
Потрoгаю, думает, волос,
Иль глаз я себе почешу,
А то закричу во весь голос
Или пойду подышу.
Но чем дорогой Фомин,
Чем ты будешь кричать,
Что ты сможешь чесать,
Нету тебя Фомин,
Умер ты, понимаешь?

Tsar: He’s sick./ Tell me his name./ I’ll go and light the fireplace/ and have a
drink with my friends.
Imaginary girl (disappearing): His last name is Fomin.
Tsar: Oh what a terrible thing./ This is the last time.
The executioner runs away./ Fomin lay without movement/ on red lead boards./ It
seemed to him pleasure/ sits on little moustache hairs./ I’ll touch, he thinks, a
hair/ or I’ll scratch my eye,/ Otherwise I’ll yell out at the top of my voice/ or I’ll
go breathe a bit./ But with what dear Fomin,/ what will you scream with,/ what
can you scratch,/ There is no you Fomin,/You died, understand?36

The italicized sections in the passage at first appear to be normal stage directions (and in

fact, the first instance of italicization in the quoted passage can only be read as such),

indicating characters’ entrances and exits and suggesting Fomin’s inner thoughts for the

benefit of an actor playing him. But these inner thoughts take on a life (not to mention a

rhyme scheme and meter) of their own and assume a first-person voice within the “stage

directions.” Even more unconventional is the narrative response to these thoughts, a

response which reclaims the first-person voice from Fomin and authoritatively reminds

him that he is dead and can therefore do none of the things that he is thinking of doing. A

bit later in the work Vvedensky inserts a lyric entitled “Conversation of the Hours”

(Беседа часов), in which each hour of the day speaks to the next. Like the songs in

Minin and Pozharskii, the lyric is not assigned to any specified voice or voices (even that

of the “stage directions”), and seems therefore to be an embedded pure lyric within the
36
Vvedenskii, Vol. 1, 131-132. All translations of Vvedensky’s work are my own.
 131

larger frame of a lyric dialogue. Nonetheless, the short poem registers with Fomin, who

says immediately after the embedded lyric that he will poison the hours and then urges

them to accept “medicine” from his spoon (139-140). The work ends with another

extended passage of lyric “stage directions” that conclude with these four evocative lines:

Горит бессмыслицы звезда,

Она одна без дна.
Вбегает мертвый господин
И молча удаляет время.

The star of nonsense shines/ It is alone without a bottom/

The dead gentleman runs in/ and silently removes time.37

A thematically important image (that of the dead gentleman, probably Fomin, silently

removing time) comes in final stage directions that are not necessarily meant to be

enacted (time is not a character in the work and is not symbolically represented by any

named object). As with so many of Vvedensky’s works, the highly experimental nature

of God May Be All Around makes it difficult to assign it to a traditional genre.38 Despite

the partial dramatic structuring, it cannot be classified as true drama. Vvedensky

constantly undermines the dramatic elements with lyric intrusions into them, and

ultimately the work’s structure insists that words – and not embodied speakers of them –

are primary.

What is clear is that, regardless of genre, God May Be All Around, like so much of

Vvedensky’s work, exhibits a strong interest in exploring the ways time is depicted.

Even in the brief citations listed above, there are obvious indications of this interest:

37
Ibid. 152.
38
“Lyric dialogue” is probably the most descriptive term I use to discuss Vvedensky’s works of this type,
but Anatolii Aleksandrov has suggested that Velimir Khlebnikov’s term “сверхповeсть” or “заповесть”
(Khlebnikov used both) be used. Khlebnikov coined the term, the roots of which mean “beyond a story,” to
describe the composite genre of his own texts. See Anatolii Aleksandrov, “Oberiu: Predvaritel’nye
zametki,” Československá rusistika, XIII, No. 5 (1968) 296-303.
 132

shifting tenses in the lyric stage directions, a character who continues to live and

experience time posthumously, and time and its units as personified characters.

Vvedensky’s interest in time’s representation is expressed in many of his works, and the

performative elements that he so often introduces intentionally blur the distinction

between dramaturgy and literature, making time the medium of his lyrics in a way that is

more typical of drama.

Only one work by Vvedensky can unequivocally be called a play: Christmas at

the Ivanovs (Ёлка у Ивановых). Written in Kharkov in 1938, the work is in many ways

the culmination of Vvedensky’s contributions to Oberiu, even though the group had

already disbanded. There are a number of indications that the work is fully dramatic.

First, Vvedensky prefaces Christmas at the Ivanovs with a list of dramatis personae

(straightforwardly titled “действующие лица”), which gives the exact, if

unconventional, age of each of the children of this family (they range in age from one to

82). He also indicates here that the play includes other supporting characters who are not

inventoried (these include maids, cooks, soldiers, etc.). At the end of the list, he indicates

the time in which the work is set: the action takes place in the 1890s. Moreover,

Vvedensky divides the work into four acts, each of which is further divided into scenes

(Act I contains the first through third scenes; Act II contains the fourth through sixth; Act

III the seventh and eighth; and Act IV the ninth – and final – scene). Each scene begins

with stage directions that set that scene, and each scene ends with the dramatic

convention of stating the end (e.g. “конец первой картины,” or “end of the first scene”).

All of these textual indications that the work is dramatic are unique in Vvedensky’s

oeuvre. Moreover, in no instance do the intra-scene stage directions take on a life of their
 133

own as they do in earlier works. That is not to say that they are all purely functional.

Occasionally they do include authorial asides that are bizarre in nature. A good example

of this is a stage direction within the third scene, Act I:

Соня Острова (бывшая девочка 32 лет) лежит как поваленный

железнодорожный столб. Слышит ли она, что говорит ей мать? Нет где
ж ей. Она совершенно мертва. Она убита.
Дверь открывается нараспашку. Входит Пузырев-отец. За ним Федор. За
ним лесорубы. Они вносят елку. Видят гроб, и все снимают шапки. Кроме
елки, у которой нет шапки и которая в этом ничего не понимает.

Sonia Ostrova (a former girl of 32 years) lies like an overturned railroad post.
Does she hear what her mother says to her? No way for her to. She is completely
dead. She has been killed.
The door opens wide. In comes Puzyrev, the father. Behind him Fedor. Behind
him the woodcutters. They carry in a Christmas tree. They see the coffin, and all
remove their caps. Except for the Christmas tree, which does not have a cap and
which understands nothing about it at all. 39

Vvedensky’s commentaries on Sonia’s dead body and the unthinking tree add nothing

that can be directly translated into the theatrical text. At the same time, they and the

other examples of bizarre supplementary material within the notes are not unrelated to the

action at hand, and in no instance do these “stage directions” take on the voice of a

character or aggressively interrogate the actions or desires of a character, as was, for

example, the case with God May Be All Around. There is no direct dialogue, in other

words, between the voice of the notes and the characters on stage. Instead, there is only

direction and clarification (though admittedly of an occasionally unusual type). It is

worth noting, as well, that the stage directions are always in prose, even though

characters do at times speak in verse (most notably in the eighth scene, in Act III).

The most telling indication that the work is a play is Vvedensky’s labeling it as

one, something he does at the end with the words “Конец девятой картины, а вместе

39
Vvedenskii, Vol. 2, 54. Unless otherwise noted, all further citations to Vvedensky’s works, creative or
otherwise, are from this volume and will be given in the text.
 134

с ней и действия, а вместе с ним и всей пьесы” (“End of the ninth scene, and with it

the action, and together with it the whole play”). [67] Vvedensky here straightforwardly

marks the end of action (and indeed, there is an appreciable amount of performed action

in this work) as well as the end of the play.

Of course, this overt labeling of the play as such could be seen as another example

of the blurring by Vvedensky of generic distinctions if other textual indications did not

corroborate the genre designation. Vvedensky’s work is, after all, filled with undermined

names of things. The family members, for example, all have different last names, and

none of the last names, not even that of the parents, is “Ivanov,” despite the title’s

indication otherwise (the parents’ last name is “Puzyrev,” a name that derives from

“Bubble” and is much more unusual name than the very common “Ivanov”). Similarly,

the genre of the piece is in some ways more complicated and unusual than the name

Vvedensky gives it. Even here Vvedensky seems, in places, to question the very

assumption of drama as a genre that is meant to be theatrically enacted in real time,

writing stage directions which cannot be realized in performance but instead push the

play ever so slightly back in the direction of a read (and not necessarily performed) text.

But as shown, there are many clear signals, even beyond the final designation, that

ultimately this is a play, in contradistinction to previous works by Vvedensky. The

elements of the work that do not lend themselves to theatrical enactment may indicate a

lingering difficulty on Vvedensky’s part to commit a work wholly to the medium of time

that drama implies. Enacted time is a challenging project for him because of his belief,

which will be discussed later in connection to the play, that the real nature of time is

essentially unknown.
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As a play, Christmas at the Ivanovs does, indeed, focus its attention on the

experience of time and the ways that experience is abstracted by conventional

representation. For all its unusual events, the play centers on the anticipation of

something that will come in the future. That something is the Christmas tree, and with it

the family’s holiday celebration. Act I is set on the night before Christmas, and Scene I

begins with Petia Petrov, the youngest, asking whether there will be a celebration and

wondering if he might not die before the celebration occurs. Petia does not die before

Christmas, but his sister, Sonia, is beheaded by the nurse after she promises to lift her

skirt and show her “everything” at the celebration, an “everything” that she says is better

than the nurse’s because it is smaller. The murder could very well be reason to cancel the

party, but neither it nor the various digressions into other stories ultimately overtake the

central dramatic concern of the approaching holiday. It is not only Petia who is

concerned about Christmas. In Scene II Fedor, the nurse’s fiancé and a woodcutter, is

cutting down a tree for the family that same night, and he and the woodcutters sing about

Christmas. Animals in the forest then recite verse about time’s passing. Scene III of Act

I is filled with dialogue between the bereaved parents about the need to carry on with the

holiday and have a beautiful tree “in spite of everything” (“Несмотря ни на что”). [53]

Act II begins in the middle of the night and, like the first act, it is punctuated with talk of

the approaching holiday amidst the strange events that are depicted. The nurse, who has

been arrested, is brought to the police station, where she confesses to the officers, and

then to an insane asylum, where the doctor and attendant, who themselves are clearly

insane (the doctor shoots the attendant, thinking he is a rug), pronounce her sane. The

doctor then orders a Christmas tree for himself. Fedor, the nurse’s fiancé, visits a servant
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of the family, with whom he is having an affair. The two talk of the approaching holiday.

He decides he is bored with her, and she then tells him that the nurse has killed Sonia,

which prompts him to become a teacher of Latin. Act III is set the next morning

(Christmas morning). The children and the family dog, Vera, talk about the death of

Sonia, about age, and then about the tree they will see that evening. Scene VIII is set in a

courtroom and begins with the death of two judges, who die, proclaiming that they do so,

“Not having made it to Christmas” (“Не дождавшись Рождества”). [62] The nurse is

then brought in to the court, where a case about two men named Kozlov and Oslov (Mr.

Goat and Mr. Ass) is being discussed in verse by multiple judges, who eventually drop

their discussion to sentence the nurse, without a trial, to hang for the murder. In the final

act, the family begins their Christmas day celebration around the tree, but each of them

dies, and the play ends. In every strange scene, then, there is some reminder that the

family members – and the audience – are waiting for a main event.

What becomes clear by the end of the play is that the main event for which we all

wait is not a tree or any other diversion, but rather death. Petia hints at this in his very

first line, as does the verse-reciting giraffe in the forest, who says, in separate lines

spoken as part of the animals’ poem, “Часы идут/ Звезды блещут/ Реки текут/ Где

наша смерть?” (“The hours pass/ Stars shine/ Rivers flow/ Where is our death?”) [52] In

the final scene, the tree is decorated and the children are finally let in to see it, but the

living – and hence the waiting – continues. Volodia suddenly shoots himself in the head,

the other children spontaneously die one by one, and finally the parents drop dead, as

well. Like so much in the play, the tree is just one more diversion. It holds our attention
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for a while, but it, too, must give way to the true end. That end comes, both for the

characters and for the play, itself, with their death.

Death as the true end is a subject that Vvedensky has written about elsewhere, and

a look at these writings can help clarify the role of death and its connection to time in

Christmas at the Ivanovs. Among Vvedensky’s extant works is a grey notebook, filled

with an unfinished creative piece (similar in structure to those lyric works discussed

above) and reflections on the ideas behind this and others of his works. Vvedensky wrote

in the notebook in 1932-33, just after his exile and incarceration in Kursk (and five years

before Christmas at the Ivanovs), and the theme of death, as well as the teleological

structuring of time that stems for a knowledge of it, is central to his reflections. In one

place he writes about his state of mind when the possibility of being hanged loomed over

him:

Я понял, я почувствовал остановку. И что-то по-настоящему наконец

наступившее. По-настоящему совершившееся, это смерть. Все остальное
не есть совершившееся. Оно не есть даже совершающееся.

I understood, I sensed the stopping place, and the something that has finally
arrived for real. Death is a thing that can truly be said to have taken place.
Everything else is not something that has taken place, nor even something that is
taking place. [80]

Vvedensky fleshes out this personal discovery in dramatic form, but like Chekhov before

him and Beckett after, he must compose a play around “the everything else that has

neither taken place nor is taking place,” to paraphrase his own words. The apprehension

and experience of lived time, in other words, must be his focus.

Vvedensky continues in his notebook (and, as will see, in his play) to explore the

apprehension of time, especially his own apprehension of it during his year of being

imprisoned and forced to wait, although to what end he was unsure. He begins with the
 138

premise that the more carefully we attempt to observe and understand time, the more

incomprehensible it becomes:

Все что я здесь пытаюсь написать о времени, является, строго говоря,

неверным. Причин этому две. 1) Всякий человек, который хоть сколько-
нибудь не понял время, а только не понявший хотя бы немного понял его,
должен перестать понимать и все существующее. 2) Наша человеческая
логика и наш язык не соответствуют времени ни в каком, ни в
элементарном, ни в сложном его понимании. Наша логика и наш язык
скользят по поверхности времени.
Тем не менее, может быть что-нибудь можно попробовать и написать
если и не о времени, не по поводу непонимании времени, то хотя бы
попробовать установить те некоторые положения нашего поверхностного
ощущения времени...

Everything that I here am trying to write about time is, strictly speaking,
incorrect. There are two reasons for this. 1) Every person who ever in some way
has not understood time - and only one who has not understood it has understood
it even a little – must cease to understand everything else that exists, as well. 2)
Our human logic and our language do not correspond to time in any way, neither
in an elementary nor in a complex understanding of it. Our logic and our
language slide along the surface of time.
Nonetheless, it is possible that there is something that can be attempted
and can be written, if not about time or about the incomprehension of time, then at
an attempt to lay out those certain conditions of our superficial sensation of
time… [79]

Our language and categories of thought that we use for understanding time are

insufficient, according to Vvedensky, but they should nevertheless be examined, since

only by examining our conception of time can we hope to understand anything else. In a

section he titles “Simple Things” (Простые вещи), Vvedensky turns his attention to the

conventions of measured time:

Человек говорит: завтра, сегодня, вечер, четверг, месяц, год, в течение

недели. Мы считаем часы в дне. Мы указываем на их прибавление. Раньше
мы видели только половину суток, теперь заметили движение внутри целых
суток. Но когда наступают следующие, то счет часов мы начинаем сначала.
Правда, зато к числу суток прибавляем единицу. Но проходит 30 или 31
суток. И количество переходит в качество, оно перестает расти. Меняется
название месяца. Правда, с годами мы поступаем как бы честно. Но
сложение времени отличается от всякого другого сложения. . .Названия
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минут, секунд, часов, дней, недель и месяцев отвлекают нас даже от нашего
поверхностного понимания времени. Все эти названия аналогичны либо
предметам, либо понятиям и исчислениям пространства. Поэтому прожитая
неделя лежит перед нами как убитый олень. Это было бы так, если бы
время только помогало счету пространства, если бы это была двойная
бухгалтерия. Если бы время было зеркальным изображением предметов.
На самом деле предметы это слабое зеркальное изображение времени.
Предметов нет. На, поди и возьми. Если с часов стереть цифры, если
забыть ложные названия, то уже может быть время захочет показать нам
свое тихое туловище, себя во весь рост.

A man says, “Tomorrow, today, evening, Thursday, a month, a year, in the course
of a week.” We count the hours in a day. We point to their increase. Earlier we
saw only half of a 24-hour period; now we have noticed the movement within an
entire 24-hour period. But when the next one arrives, we start the calculation of
the hours from the beginning. True, for all that we do add one to the number of
the day. But 30 or 31 days pass, and the quantity becomes a quality; it stops
growing. The name of the month changes. True, we deal honestly in a way with
years. But the adding up of time differs from every other type of adding up…The
denotation of minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks and months distract us even
from our superficial understanding of time. All of these denotations are
analogous either with objects or with conceptions and enumerations of space.
Therefore a week we have lived through lies before us like a killed deer. This
would be so if time only served for the measurement of space, if this were double
bookkeeping, if time was a mirror image of objects. In fact objects are a pale
mirror image of time. There are no objects. Go ahead and try to pick them up. If
you erase the figures from a clock, if you forget the false denotations, then
perhaps time will want to show us its quiet body, itself in all its stature. [80]

Vvedenksy reveals a deep mistrust of the sequential temporality that dominates in any

discussion of time. Even more interesting, his views of time parallel closely those of

Bergson (and Chekhov, as the last chapter showed), particularly in his claim that the

representations of time that we rely upon better describe spatial characteristics than

temporal ones. Time’s true nature (its “quiet body” – a term that fails to free itself of

spatial connotations) will only begin to reveal itself when we rid ourselves of faulty

terminology and focus instead on the experience of it as an incomplete – and

uncompletable – process, one that is never finished, though it may cease.

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Drama can test our abstract representations of time by enacting them in the real

time of performance, and drama is, therefore, a particularly appropriate genre choice for

Vvedensky. This may explain, in part, why so many of his lyrics have a dramatic

component to them. It certainly goes a long way toward explaining the organization of

Christmas at the Ivanovs. Thematically the work focuses on the process of waiting, of

anticipating an end. In this sense the play’s underlying dramatic contour is similar to

Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and there are intertextual references that encourage an

association with Chekhov generally and Three Sisters specifically. The decade

Vvedensky gives as the time setting of his play (the 1890s), for instance, seems to

consciously invoke Chekhov, since all of Chekhov’s plays are also set around this time.

That Vvedensky focuses his play on a bourgeois family and their extended household

only encourages that association. The secondary characters in Christmas at the Ivanovs

include a doctor and a (future) teacher of Latin; all of Chekhov’s plays feature a doctor,

and Three Sisters has Kulygin as a Latin teacher. Volodia’s suicide by gunshot at the end

of Christmas at the Ivanovs also seems to be an allusion to Chekhov. In The Seagull,

Kostia, the young son (he is in his young twenties, approximately the same age as

Volodia) shoots himself at the end of the play. Three Sisters also features a shooting at

the end: Tuzenbakh is killed by Soliony in a duel. But perhaps the most important

similarity between these two works is that Christmas at the Ivanovs also investigates the

ways that waiting is structured and performed. Numerical representation is also

employed in Vvedensky’s play to conceptualize this waiting, and here it is also shown to

be a misleading representation, but one that conflicts primarily with an audience’s (as

opposed to characters’) experience.

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Like Three Sisters, Christmas at the Ivanovs is a play that makes constant

reference to measured time, though in a much stranger and intentionally more shocking

way. Every scene begins with a display of the fictional clock time of the scene, and

nearly every scene ends with one as well. The time is displayed in all of these instances

on a clock that hangs to the left of a door, even though the scenes are set in a variety of

locations, indoor and outdoor. For instance, Scene I takes place in the home of the

family, where the door and the clock do not seem out of place, whereas the next scene

takes place in a forest with woodcutters. Yet according to Vvedensky’s stage directions,

the same clock indicates the time in Scene II as in Scene I (and, indeed, in all of the

scenes, including the insane asylum and the maid’s room). The door to the left of which

the clock hangs has no reported purpose in any of the scenes (no one enters or exits

through it), yet it is always present, perhaps suggesting the perception of time as a spatial

property that, like characters on the stage, enters from the future and exits into the past.

The clock time for each scene is as follows: Scene I, in which Sonia is killed,

begins at nine in the evening and ends at midnight. Scene II covers the same time, but

shows the forest scene, where Fedor is cutting the tree. Scene III, set back at the family’s

home with the grieving parents, begins at two in the morning and ends at three. Scene

IV, which takes place in the police station, begins at midnight (right where Scenes I and

II left off and before the beginning of Scene III) and ends at four in the morning. Scene

V, set in the insane asylum, begins at four in the morning and ends at six. Scene VI, set

in the servant’s room, begins at five in the morning and also ends at six. Scene VII, set

around the family’s table, begins at eight in the morning and ends at nine. Scene VIII

covers the exact same span of time, and takes place in the courtroom. The final scene,
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which is the only scene in Act IV, begins at six in the evening, with a stage direction

from the author that tells us that a few hours have passed between the third and fourth

acts. This scene ends at seven. The shortest span of fictional time, then, that is shown to

have passed in one scene is one hour (Scenes III, VI, VII, VIII and IX), and the longest is

four hours (Scene IV).

Vvedensky never specifies whether the clock should be visible throughout each

scene, nor whether the time on the clock is seen to advance as each scene progresses. He

only indicates that by the end of each scene the clock is again to show the time, and in

each case the amount of fictional time that has passed is implausibly great for the short

amount of time the scene would take to perform. No unseen events that might account

for “hidden time” are suggested by the text, and there are no obvious thematic reasons for

compressing time (as is often the case – on a very grand scale – with Shakespeare, for

example, who covers long days and even large historical periods within a scene). The

uninterrupted events of each scene, or the primary fictional time, cannot logically take up

as much time as the clock shows (none of the scenes could take longer than five minutes

to perform), and that is clearly Vvedensky’s point. There is a disparity between what is

felt to be a brief scene, in terms of both real clock time and fictional time, and what is

shown on the clock at the end of each scene. If the clock is not seen to advance, as

Vvedensky’s lack of specification on this detail would suggest, but rather jumps from one

time to the next, it would underscore the inevitably discrete units of measured time. How

the clock and, more importantly, the lives the clock coordinates get from one temporal

point to the next is an unseen (and, in this model of time, inexplicable) process. In any

case the jumps in hours draw attention to the arbitrary feel of clock time, which,
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unnoticed (and here probably unnoticeable within the scene), imposes its own extraneous

structure on the characters’ and the viewers’ experience. Increasing the “speed” of time’s

passing to the point of improbability draws attention to the dramatic convention of

temporal structuring, but it also reveals the essentially constructed and conventional

nature of clock time in general.

Vvedensky’s chronological organization of the scenes extends this feeling of

arbitrariness. Scenes I and II cover the same span of time, yet Scene I is nearly double

the page length (and, hence, performance time) of Scene II. Since Scene II is a replay of

the same fictional span of time as depicted in Scene I, Vvedensky seems to be drawing

attention to the ways time is felt versus the ways it is classified. More happens in Scene

I, both literally and in terms of dramatic importance (this is the scene were Sonia is

killed), than in Scene II, which is primarily lyric and pastoral (trees are felled and animals

recite verse). If Scene I feels longer, that is because experientially it is longer, regardless

of what the clock says. Scene III covers just one hour, while Scene IV covers four hours,

one of which is the same hour covered in Scene III. These two scenes are about the same

page length (and performance time), and since the “longer” scene directly follows the

“shorter” one, the disjunction between what the clock insists on and what the characters –

and audience – feel is again heightened. Here Vvedensky seems to imply that one hour

of a parent’s grief at discovering their dead daughter is experientially equal to an entire

night passed in a police station, where a murderer is nothing extraordinary. This pattern

of replaying spans of fictional time is repeated throughout the play. Indeed, every scene

depicts a span of time that is, either partially or wholly, depicted in an adjoining scene.

The ever-present clock reminds the audience of this, yet the actions on stage, which
 144

bizarrely jump from location to location and subject to subject, indicate that these spans

of time are experientially different. Each scene may depict a span of time that is

presented, at least in part, elsewhere, but since it is never the same experience, it is never

the same “time,” either. The only exception to this is the final scene, which occurs nine

hours after the previous scene ends. Since the final scene marks the end of time, both for

the family and for the play, Vvedensky allows it to stand alone, separate from the rest and

untested against their presentations of its timed boundaries. As indicated above, true

ends are privileged within Vvedensky’s thought, and this ending, therefore, is separated

from all that comes before. It is not time so much as an end of time.

Then there are the ages of the “children,” as touched on earlier. These are given

by Vvedensky not only in the initial list of dramatis personae, but are also repeated in

parentheses within the play each time a “child” is listed as a speaker. The children’s age

range is as follows: Petia Perov is a one-year-old boy; Nina Serova is an eight-year-old

girl; Varia Petrova is a 17-year-old girl; Volodia Komarov is a 25-year-old boy; Sonia

Ostrova, up until her murder, is a 32-year-old girl; Misha Pestrov is a 76-year-old boy;

and Dunia Shustrova is an 82-year-old girl. Vvedensky reminds the reader of the

disjuncture between age and identity again and again, just as the viewer would be

reminded of it visually. The shock of the opening scene, in which “children” who range

in age from an infant to an octogenarian bathe together and are tended by a nurse, is

repeated right through the end of the play, when, in the final scene, these “children”

discuss the differences, as actual children are wont to do, between the ways girls and

boys go to the bathroom. Vvedensky’s insistence that age, as a numerical measure of

time, is an often repeated but in many ways useless identification works both ways, since
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it is not only a matter of people who are adults (according to their age) acting like

children. Young children here sometimes act like adults, as well. This happens most

often with Petia, the one-year-old, who not only speaks, but, like a character out of a

Chekhov play, occasionally takes on a tone of despondent resignation when speaking

about life and its passing. In fact, Chekhov’s Three Sisters has Irina, Masha, and Ol’ga

all speaking these types of lines in the final act, and so does Vvedensky’s play, when

Petia, in the ninth (and final) scene, says to the nanny (who is telling tall tales and

teaching the children to do it as well), “Как скучно жить, что бы вы там ни говорили.”

(“How dreary it is to live, no matter what you say there.”) [65] A bit later in the scene

Petia comforts his mother, who is still grieving over Sonia’s death, with, “Ничего,

ничего мама. Жизнь пройдет быстро. Скоро все умрем.” (“Never mind, never mind

mother. Life will pass quickly. Soon we will all die.”) [66] The major difference

between these lines and those of Chekhov’s characters is that Petia’s forecast is actually

realized, the only event which, for Vvedensky, allows the play to end.

The representation of time leading up to that end seems to follow its own rule, but

in one important aspect it follows a very recognizable – and theatrically familiar –

convention: that of the unity of time. The play begins at nine in the evening on Christmas

Eve, and it ends at seven in the evening on Christmas Day, meaning the action is

contained within one revolution of the sun. This is discernibly the only Aristotelian unity

that is observed. The play, while beginning and ending in the family home, has a variety

of settings (a forest, an insane asylum), and there is a clear absence of unity of action.

Indeed, the play is built on digressions, both linguistic and thematic. There is, for

example, the ten quatrains of nonsense verse about Kozlov and Oslov in the courthouse,
 146

or the practically unutterable sound the mother makes in the last scene when she speaks

of her sadness at the death of her daughter: “Аоуеия БГРТ” (“Aoueiia BGRT”).40 [66]

There are the cooks in the first scene who, off to the side, are cutting up chicken in the

bathroom where the children are bathing. There are the woodcutters in the forest with

Fedor, men who can sing but suddenly – and unexplainably – fall dumb when Fedor

begins talking to them. There is the strangely mature tone of conversation between the

family dog, Vera, and the one-year-old Petia in the seventh scene. And of course there

are the deaths of the family members, first a murder, motivated only by a child’s puerile

humor, and then the finale, when the entire family inexplicably drops dead. This is a play

that does not end, but rather stops. To blatantly frame this anti-plot in the confines of the

unity of time is to undermine that unity’s claim to organize events into a meaningful

whole.

One of the claims that the Oberiu made in its manifesto was that plot-centered

plays are not truly theatrical, and that the visual quality of the theater allows for more

interesting connections and lines of development than Aristotelian drama does. Speaking

of the parts that might not seem to make an immediately recognizable, “poetic” (in the

Aristotelian sense) whole, the Oberiu Manifesto proclaims:

Until now, all these elements have been subordinated to the dramatic plot
– to the play. A play has been a story, told through characters, about some kind of
event. On the stage, all have worked to explain the meaning and course of that
event more clearly, more intelligibly, and to relate it more closely to life.
That is not at all what the theater is. If an actor who represents a minister
begins to move around on the stage on all fours and howls like a wolf, or an actor
who represents a Russian peasant suddenly delivers a long speech in Latin – that
will be theater, that will interest the spectator, even if it takes place without any
relation to a dramatic plot. Such an action will be a separate item; a series of such

40
Here again one is reminded of Three Sisters, in particular the “Тара-ра-бумбия” (“Tara-ra-bumbia”) that
Chebutykin repeats whenever communication becomes painfully difficult for him and those around him.
 147

items organized by the director will make up a theatrical performance, which will
have its plot line and its scenic meaning.
This will be the plot only the theater can give.41

The fidelity that Vvedensky shows to the artistic manifesto of his group is refreshing,

given the tendency of Modernist artistic groups in Russia to pen such manifestos and then

largely ignore them.42 But it is not just the group’s proclaimed principles of art that

influence the construction of Vvedensky’s play. In twentieth-century Russian drama, the

obvious fountainhead for plays that are devoid of traditional plot is Chekhov. Oberiu

drama is much more sensationalistic and intentionally strange than Chekhov’s, but the

underlying dramatic principles are remarkably similar. As the previous chapter made

clear, Chekhov’s “un-plotted” drama allowed him, particularly in Three Sisters, to engage

time as a structuring device, both for his characters’ lives and for the play in which they

are a part.

There are many parallels between Three Sisters and Christmas at the Ivanovs, and

yet ultimately these works have very different concerns and conclusions. Vvedensky

seems to allude in places to Three Sisters, and time is of central interest to both plays.

But while Chekhov suggests that time can be integrated into a meaningful experience –

and a meaningful life – if only we recognize the conventions of time keeping as

conventions, Vvedensky focuses more on the mysterious and alienating nature of time

41
Gibian 252-253. The 1928 manifesto alludes to Kharms’ play Elizabeth Bam as an exemplar of its
notion of drama. Vvedesnky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs would not be written for another decade.
42
Russian Modernist movements had a particular fondness for manifestos that (often provocatively)
outlined their artistic aims. Probably the most famous of all of these manifestos is A Slap in the Face of
Public Taste, written in 1912 by David Burliuk, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Vladimir Mayakovsky for their
Futurist group “Hylaea.” The manifesto demands that Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy be thrown
overboard from the Ship of Modernity, and it goes on to attack some of the group’s own contemporaries.
As Vladimir Markov points out, “Both points were purely tactical and did not express the real ideas of the
writers. Most of them were far from actually rejecting Pushkin, and they were on good terms with some of
the attacked contemporaries.” See Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1968) 45-57.
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that looms behind these conventions. This is evident in so many of the details discussed

above, but perhaps it is most obvious in the overall temporal structure of the play, which

arranges scenes in a series of overlaps and replays of hours that underscore the

unrepeatable, unshared nature of time, and then presents this series in the convention of

the unity of time. Three Sisters, it should be recalled, also seems to organize its story

according to the unity of time: Act I begins at midday, Act II at 8 p.m., Act III at 2 a.m.,

and Act IV again at midday. Chekhov, however, unites scenes from different years into

this dramatic structure of one day (and of one year, since the seasons come full circle in

his play, as well), and he seems to insist that integration of disparate parts into an

experiential whole is possible, despite our tendency to fragment life and plot it

numerically.

Vvedensky is less sanguine. There is no meaningful whole and no meaningful

representation of it within his play. There are, instead, conventions and the awareness of

conventions. Time is not the conventions that represent it; it is an unknowable and

therefore inexplicable process that is in any case temporary. The thing that action builds

towards is simply death, and that is the only meaningful event that ultimately exists.

Lives stop (by force or spontaneously), and so do plays. His characters, like his

audience, are trapped in an absurd structure that must be interrogated, but whose ultimate

end cannot be overcome. This outlook was no doubt shaped by Vvedensky’s own

precarious situation in Stalinist Russia, and yet it has applications beyond his own

immediate circumstances. It is not, after all, an entirely pessimistic outlook. To recall

Vvedensky’s writings from the grey notebook, we may never fully understand the nature

of time, but since it is the basis of our life experience (and our dramatic one), we should
 149

explore it as deeply as we can, even if our exploration only amounts in loss of long-held

but ultimately false beliefs. Like life itself, the play must end, but Vvedensky writes it

anyway.

Czech Absurdism and Time: Vaclav Havel

Absurdist drama had a limited immediate impact in Russia, in part because the

Oberiu staged their own works in small, private gatherings that ceased by 1930, and

because none of the works were actually published until fairly recently.43 In the 1960s,

however, a second life was becoming possible for these works, initially not in their own

native country, but rather by way of Poland and Czechoslovakia, where an interest in

Absurdist theater (in various instantiations, from a number of writers and countries) was

strong among some theatrical groups and dramatic scholars. As part of this interest,

Oberiu works were tracked down, and some were translated and published in Czech

journals.44 At the same time, Václav Havel, arguably the most important (and certainly

the most well-known) Czech playwright, was beginning to write, first his Absurdist

works and later his more mainstream political plays. Havel is quick to list his influences:

Beckett and Ionesco. But Havel’s self-conscious treatment of time and memory and their

connections to space in certain of his plays suggest that Chekhov’s dramatic interests

43
Kharms’ Elizaveta Bam was staged privately by the group in 1928. The first production in Russia of
Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs, which was written long after the Oberiu’s disbanding, came only in
1990, at the St. Petersburg State Dramatic Theater “Refuge of the Comedian” («Приют комедианта»),
under the direction of Iurii Tomoshevskii (the production won first prize that year at the St. Petersburg
Festival of Theaters and Studios). Typewritten copies of the writers’ works, the vast majority of which
were never published in their own lives, did circulate in samizdat in Leningrad throughout the Soviet
period. But the first published editions appeared only in 1974, in the original Russian but issued by a
German press. For a publication history, see Nakhimovsky 170.
44
See Gibian 4. It was in Prague that Gibian himself came across Oberiu works, and his own subsequent
book on the group greatly furthered the interest that theater people in Czechoslovakia and Poland had
revived.
 150

reverberated not only in Russian Absurdism, which was just beginning to come to light

thanks in part to Czech interest, but also in the Czech variant itself.

In fact, Chekhov had a profound influence on Czech drama as a whole at the end

of the 1950s, when there occurred in Prague a recrudescence of artistic innovation in

drama. The Czechs had produced some strikingly innovative and influential dramatists in

their short period of independence between the two world wars. Perhaps most notable

among these dramatists was Karel Čapek, whose modernist works were the inspiration

for much of the science fiction that emerged in Europe and America in the twentieth

century.45 But World War II and the rise of Communism – and with it, Socialist Realism

– stifled the development of Czech drama, and it was only after the death of Stalin in

1953 and the subsequent relaxing of political control of the arts that new notable drama,

unconstrained by dogmatism, again reemerged.46 The prominent Czech playwrights of

this period, including František Hrubín, Milan Kundera, and Josef Topol, wrote plays that

have subsequently been termed “poetic” or “lyric” drama, in much the same way these

terms are often applied to Chekhov. These plays neither deliver an obvious message nor

primarily depict reality, but instead are filled with multiple suggestive meanings and

symbolic overtones, creating a mood as much as a plot and allowing for expressions of

disillusionment and frustration.47 As Paul I. Trensky notes, the beginnings of Czech

“poetic” theater were closely related to a cult of Chekhov that had been inspired by

45
Čapek’s most popular – and influential – plays were The Insect Play (Ze života hmyza, literally “From
the Life of an Insect”) and R.U.R. (the letters stand for Rozuma Universalní Roboti, or Reason’s Universal
Robots), both written in 1921. The latter is where the term “robot” was first used, a term Čapek coined
with his brother, Josef, to designate the human-like automatons who are the workers in his futuristic play
(“robota” means “drudgery” in Czech).
46
For a history of developments leading up to this period, see Paul I. Trensky, Czech Drama Since World
War II (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978) 3-11.
47
See Trensky 29-49. The Czech plays Trensky sees as most distinctly Chekhovian, according to his own
criteria, are Hrubín’s A Sunday in August (1958) and Topol’s Their Day (1959).
 151

Western (primarily British and American) adaptations of his works and style and by new

stagings of Chekhov’s plays (among them Three Sisters, in 1965) at the Prague National

Theater, under the direction of Otomar Krejča.48

Havel has never mentioned Chekhov as a direct influence on his work, but the

dramatists whom he does name as his artistic forebears, Beckett and Ionesco,49 have

themselves been read as descendents of Chekhov. And while there are no direct

references to Chekhov in Havel’s plays, as there are with Vvedensky’s Christmas at the

Ivanovs, Havel nevertheless realizes, like Chekhov (and Vvedensky) before him, the

special potential of drama for examining time and investigating our conceptualizations –

both actual and dramatic – of it. Just as these earlier playwrights did, Havel, too, writes

his own particular type of meta-temporal drama.

Havel began his association with theater in Prague in 1960 at the Theater on the

Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí), first as a stage hand and then as a dramaturge and

resident playwright. From the start he was inspired by Western avant-garde theater, and

his earliest plays show a clear influence of the French Absurdist drama that he so

admired.50 His first full-length play, The Garden Party (Zahradní slavnost), written in

1963, marks the definitive beginning of the Czech variant of Absurdist drama. Like

Beckett and Ionesco before him, Havel focuses his play on the instability of identities and

48
Trensky 27.
49
In Letters to Olga, gathered correspondences from Havel to his wife during his political imprisonment,
Havel writes that when he discovered Beckett and Ionesco, “I was tremendously excited, inspired and
drawn to them, or rather I found them extremely close to my own temperament and sensibility, and it was
they who stimulated me to try to communicate everything I wanted to say through drama.” See Vaclav
Havel, Letters to Olga: June 1979 – September 1982, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1988), 14 November 1981, 248.
50
Havel, like most of his contemporaries, was initially familiar with French Absurdist drama only through
the scripts of the plays and through studies about them. For political reasons these plays, including
Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, began being staged in Prague only in the
period from 1965 to 1967, more than a decade after their appearance in the West (and a number of years
after Havel himself began writing plays). See Trensky 96-98.
 152

categories, including time. In this play he foregrounds the convention of temporal

passage in drama by initially having a great deal of time elapse without there being

commensurate action. The opening scene of the play shows Mr. and Mrs. Pludek51 and

their son Hugo at home, conversing about the future, in this case Hugo’s professional

future. The scene begins with Mrs. Pludek asking the time, something she does a total of

eight times in this short first scene. She is excessively curious about the time because she

and Mr. Pludek are awaiting the arrival of Kalabis, a former schoolmate and colleague of

Mr. Pludek’s who now works as a deputy (naměstek) in the mysterious but obviously

powerful bureaucracy. Echoes of The Bald Soprano and Waiting for Godot are apparent

from the start. Mr. Pludek’s answers to his wife’s inquiries about the time indicate that

time advances at a quick and unpredictable pace within this world. His first answer is

twelve, but each subsequent time she asks, an impossibly large amount of time has

apparently passed, even though just a few lines of dialogue have been spoken in between.

Five fictional hours pass within less than five pages of text, and finally a telegram arrives

announcing that Kalabis will be unable to make it, since he must attend a garden party for

the liquidation office.

Unlike Beckett’s tramps, Hugo will not continue to wait for the man who can give

him answers about his future, but instead will go to the garden party and become a

controlling player within the verbal games of the bureaucracy. He meets both

inaugurators and liquidators, and a semantic battle ensues over which office is in control,

who will liquidate whom, who will inaugurate such liquidations, and who will liquidate

the liquidating office. Hugo wins the latter honor of making nothing out of the

instrument that makes nothing out of other things. Beckett-like details emerge again at
51
In the original Czech she is Pludková, the feminine form of the surname.
 153

the end of the play: Hugo returns home but is not recognized by his parents; telegrams

from the unseen Kalabis (whom Hugo never meets) continue to arrive, congratulating the

parents on each new position that Hugo attains in the semantic wars and promising a

future visit. Temporal conventions are initially of interest to Havel in this play, but his

focus on them in the first scene gives way to other concerns.

Later plays by Havel continue to exhibit Absurdist techniques, and some also

feature time as one – but not necessarily the primary – category of mental and dramatic

organization that must be interrogated. Mountain Hotel (Horský hotel), for example,

written in 1976, is another, later example of Havel’s Absurdist drama that draws attention

to, among other things, clock time and characters’ responses to it. Thirteen characters at

a remote hotel gradually lose their individual identities, taking on one another’s

backgrounds, intrigues, and previous lines of dialogue. Throughout the play a train is

occasionally heard in the distance, and each time its whistle blows, all characters on stage

pause and then look at their watches, perhaps turning to personal time-keeping

instruments to remind them of their own identities. For Havel, however, such

instruments can no more speak individually than the characters themselves can.

Mountain Hotel is a rare late example in Havel’s oeuvre of a purely Absurdist

work. After the Prague Spring of 1968 and the subsequent Soviet invasion, Havel’s plays

become more overtly political – and politicized, since his work was officially banned in

1969.52 His marginalization by the state in the 1970s, due to his outspoken criticism of

the Communist regime (as often through essays as through dramatic works) and then his

52
Only Havel’s first three plays were staged in his native Czechoslovakia. After 1969, all of his plays
received their premieres abroad (most often in Vienna). In the U.S. during this time Havel was known
primarily in New York, where he had won two Obie Awards: one in 1968 for The Memorandum, and one
in 1970 for The Increased Difficulty of Concentration.
 154

founding and acting as a spokesperson for Charter 77 (the first human rights movement in

Czechoslovakia, named for the year of its founding), was accompanied by house arrests

and a trial and prison sentence, which was initially deferred. By 1979, the regime’s

patience had run out, and Havel was put in prison. He was released for medical reasons

only in 1983. There would be other, briefer imprisonments before 1989, when, as a

leader of the Civic Forum opposition movement, a political party that had developed out

of Charter 77, he was elected to the office of President of the newly free Czechoslovakia.

When a country’s most famous playwright is also its most important political figure,

critical reception of his plays is inevitably colored by the political context in which the

texts and their author are situated. Of course, Václav Havel is a special case, since his

trajectory in politics has taken him through so many different roles, most recently that of

retired President of the Czech Republic. With all of these highly visible political roles, it

is no wonder that Havel is now largely viewed as a politician who happened to write

plays, and not the other way around.

Even among scholars of literature and drama, Havel’s political contexts and

thought are invoked as tools for discussing the artistic texts, and for good reason. As

discussed above, Havel’s ealiest plays, including The Garden Party and The

Memorandum, draw heavily on Absurdist theater, but all of his plays, especially those

written after 1968, seem to invite very specific political readings. This is particularly true

of the “Vaněk” plays, a trilogy of one-acts that are among Havel’s most well known and

beloved works, since they are drawn from episodes from the writer’s own biography.

According to Stanislaw Baranczak:

[Havel’s] plays fall into two different categories, one stemming from the tradition
of political theater, the other suggesting some superficial affinities with the
 155

Theater of the Absurd. The first category is represented by more or less realistic
works such as the series of three one-act “Vaněk” plays, inaugurated in 1975 by
the famed Audience. Largo Desolato (written in 1984) also belongs here. In
plays of this sort, realism takes a deep whiff of grotesque exaggeration, but there
is no doubt, particularly in the Vaněk trilogy, that the action takes place in
Husák’s Czechoslovakia and that the characters’ behavior is motivated by
circumstances of that time and that place.53

The “Vaněk” plays, Audience, Unveiling, and Protest (a remarkably similar Audience,

Vernisáž, and Protest in the original Czech), have a much more traditional narrative plot

than many of Havel’s other works, and while the trilogy, especially the first two of the

three plays, clearly draws on Absurdist theater by foregrounding the repetitiveness,

miscommunication, and semantic emptiness that obtain in the depicted social

interactions, it is not so much modern man’s condition that seems to be the problem as

much as one modern Czech man’s political condition. That man, Vaněk, is a fictional

doppelganger for Havel himself, or at least Havel as he was from 1975 to 1978, the years

in which the plays were written.54 Like Havel at that time, Vaněk has been in prison and

has now found work in a brewery. Audience in fact is a depiction of a conversation

53
Stanislaw Baranczak, “All the President’s Men,” in Critical Essays on Václav Havel, eds. Marketa
Goetz-Stankiewicz and Phyllis Carey (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999) 49.
54
Havel himself writes about the genesis of the first play in the trilogy in an essay: “The inspiration [for
Audience] came from personal experience – my employment in a brewery the year before – and the play
was intended, as may be evident, primarily for the entertainment of my friends. Indeed, it is little more
than a dialogue between the so-called ‘dissident’ writer Vaněk (who works in a brewery) and his superior,
the brewmaster. Though the latter is invented, obviously many of my own experiences – and not only
those from the brewery – went into his making.” A bit later in the same essay Havel clarifies the extent to
which Vaněk is himself: “If I am to make some marginal comments on the whole Vaněk series, it might,
above all, be appropriate to emphasize that Vaněk is not Havel. Of course, I have transferred into this
character certain of my own experiences, and I have done so more distinctly than is usual among writers.
Undoubtedly, I have also implanted in him a number of my personal traits or, more precisely, presented a
number of perspectives from which I see myself in various situations. But all of this does not mean that
Vaněk is intended as a self-portrait. A real person and a dramatic character are entirely different things.
The dramatic character is more or less always a fiction, an invention, a trick, an abbreviation consisting
only of a limited number of utterances, and subordinated to the concrete ‘world of the play’ and its
meaning. . .Vaněk is not so much a concrete person as something of a ‘dramatic principle’: he does not
usually do or say much, but his mere existence, his presence on stage, and his being what he is make his
environment expose itself one way or another.” See Václav Havel, “Light on a Landscape,” trans. Milan
Pomichalek and Anna Mozga, in The Vaněk Plays: Four Authors, One Character, ed. Marketa Goetz-
Stankiewicz (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 1987) 237-239.
 156

between Vaněk and his foreman at the brewery. Vaněk’s friends that are invoked in the

plays are real people with whom Havel actually was close, including Pavel Kohout,

another important playwright. The most salient autobiographical feature about the

trilogy, however, and the one that most clearly shows Havel’s affinities with the

mirroring games of the theater of the Absurd, is that Vaněk is a dissident playwright who

writes autobiographical one-act plays. In Protest, the final play, Staněk, a writer on

whom Vaněk calls (and, parenthetically, a fictional character who has no real

counterpart), mentions to Vaněk that he has read his one act play that is set in the brewery

in a samizdat copy. That play is, of course, Audience, the first play of the trilogy, which

is set in a brewery and did, indeed, circulate in samizdat copies when it was written in

1975. Such is the world of meta-theater, where Havel writes plays about a character who

ostensibly writes the plays that Havel writes. Given the intentional conflation of

authorial persona with fictional text that Havel engages in, it is no wonder that so many

critical readings of these plays address the real political world to which these plays

inevitably refer.

Yet none of Havel’s plays, even the ones written after 1968, are only political

pieces, and the uncertainties he depicts have relevance beyond the borders of political art.

The legitimacy of non-political critical approaches to his work is best addressed by Havel

himself, who has said, “Were my plays regarded solely as a description of a particular

social or political system, I would feel I had failed as an author; were, on the other hand,

they regarded simply as a portrayal of humankind or of the world, I would feel I had

succeeded.”55 So much critical focus has been on the political aspects of his work,

however, that the elements of Havel’s plays that identify them as drama, that is, as a
55
Quoted in Jan Vladislav, ed., Václav Havel: Living in Truth (London: Faber & Faber, 1986) xvii.
 157

fictional and repeatable art form, are often overlooked. Specifically, his exploration and

critique of temporal models is one prominent element of his drama that deserves

attention, and it is to this characteristic that the remaining section of this chapter will now

turn.

Like other Absurdist playwrights before him, Havel writes plays that show,

among other things, an awareness of the experience of time, not only as a theme, but also

as a representational problem in drama. As discussed earlier, Havel’s “Vaněk” trilogy is

an example of meta-theater in which the world portrayed is both real and fictional and

highly contemplative of this double position. In terms of time a similar parallel might be

drawn. A number of Havel’s dramatic works can be termed meta-temporal plays, since

they foreground the interplay between the fictional time they represent and the real time

in which they occur in a performance. The middle play in the “Vaněk” trilogy, Unveiling

is precisely this type of work.

Unveiling opens with the arrival of Bedřich56 to the newly decorated apartment of

Věra and Michal. The three will pass the evening together, enjoying what the owners of

the apartment pretentiously refer to as a “vernisáž” – an unveiling or private showing of

their apartment and, of course, their life. When the curtain opens the view is of an

apartment filled with various antiques, which Havel describes in detail in his stage

directions. The first few minutes of dialogue are concentrated on these antiques that the

couple has accumulated to fill their apartment: an art-nouveau marquee, a Chinese vase, a

limestone baroque angel, an inlaid chest, an old folk painting on glass, a Russian icon,

old hand-mortars and grinders, a Turkish scimitar, a wooden Gothic Madonna, Persian

rugs, an old bear rug, a kitchen done in the old peasant style (complete with a wooden
56
Havel refers to the Vaněk character by the first name of Bedřich in this play.
 158

wheel from a farm cart hung on the wall), and an entire baroque confessional box from a

church. Michal and Věra recount their collaborative decorating decisions and their

searches for these objects to their obliging guest, claiming that the look they together

have given the apartment is evidence of the success of their relationship.

What becomes obvious, however, is that none of the items have any personal

meaning for the couple. There is no real historical significance in these antiquities – no

sense of memory or time to them. This is true of all of these antiques, but it is especially

apparent with the religious artifacts. For this well-traveled and well-off couple, who

seem to prosper under the political regime that has previously imprisoned their friend and

guest, these displaced relics can have no religious connotations. When Bedřich with

great surprise notices the confessional box, for example, and asks what it is and where

they got it, Michal remarks that he had heard that a church was being liquidated, so he

offered three hundred to the sexton (kostelník) for it. Bedřich wonders at the small sum

and asks them what they will do with the confessional box, which, for him at least, is

something that is not normally sold (especially for such a small price) and does not

belong in an apartment. Michal’s answer is simply that it is a fanastic object that gives

them great joy. The history of the piece and the troubling circumstances under which

they acquired it is of no interest. Another case in point is the wooden Gothic Madonna,

which was chosen because it, unlike most of the figures the couple looked at, perfectly

fits into a niche in the wall. Bedřich asks if the niche could not have been enlarged, to

which Michal replies that that is just what he did not want to do, since “it occurs to me

that it has the perfect dimensions just as it is” (“zdá se mi, že jedině takhle to má správné
 159

dimenze”).57 The niche could have been enlarged, but Bedřich misses the point: it is the

preexisting measurement of space that these things occupy that is of central importance to

this couple, not the personal connections they may feel to their surroundings.

For Michal and Věra the look and ordering of things affects their experience of

the world. Form is linked to content; indeed, form is content, and this notion extends to

everything. After insisting that Bedřich and his absent wife must do something about

their place (and, by extension, their relationship), the couple expound their view of life

and its spatial properties this way:

VĚRA: Víš, my si s Michalem myslíme, že člověk žije, jak bydlí. Když máš to,
čemu my říkáme kvartýr s ksichtem, dostává tvůj život najednou – at’ chseš nebo
ne – taky určitý ksicht – tak nějak novou dimenzi – jiný rytmus, jiný obsah, jiný
řád – že to je tak, Michale?
MICHAL: Skutečně, Bedřichu! Tak jako by nemělo být člověku jedno, co jí,
nemělo by mu být ani jedno, čím jí a z čeho jí, čím se utírá, do čeho se strojí,
v čem se myje, v čem spí. A jakmile se pustíš do jednoho, za chvilku zjistíš, že se
musíš dát i do něčěho dalšího, a to ti zase ukáže ještě něco dalšího, a tak vzniká
celý takový řetěz věcí – a když se po té cestě vydáš, co jiného to znamená, než že
svůj život povyšuješ tak nějak na jakousi vyšší kulturní rovinu a že tím defakto
povyšuješ sám sebe k nějaké vyšší vnitřní harmonii – a tím nakonec i své vztahy
k lidem!

VĚRA: You know, Michal and I think that a person lives the way a person dwells.
When you have what we call an apartment with a look, right away your life
obtains – whether you want it or not – a certain look, too – so in some way a new
dimension – a different rhythm, a different content, a different order – isn’t that
so, Michal?
MICHAL: Really, Bedřich! A person really shouldn’t be indifferent to what he
eats, he shouldn’t be indifferent to what he eats on, to what he dries himself with,
what he wears, what he takes a bath in, what he sleeps on. And as soon as you
start in on one thing, in a short time you’ll find that you have to tackle something
else, too, and then still something else is revealed to you, and so a whole sort of
chain of things arises – and if you head down that road, what else can it mean but
that you’re raising your life somehow to a kind of higher level of culture and that
in doing so you’re raising yourself to a kind of higher inner harmony – and
thereby eventually even your relationships with people! [236]

57
Václav Havel, Hry: Soubor her z let 1963-1988 (Prague: Lidové noviny, 1992) 235. This and all
subsequent translations are my own. Subsequent citations will refer to this edition and will appear in the
text.
 160

On the surface these words sound wise – take care of the little things, and through a chain

reaction the big things will take care of themselves. But in effect the little things that

Michal and Věra care so much about and return to again and again throughout the play

literally have no meaning at all. It is their organization and arrangement that is of

primary importance – and the incantation-like repetition of naming them. The antiques

are the first, but not singular example.

There are other meaningless things with which this couple surround themselves

(and about which they speak again and again). While the apartment’s decorations

provide a backdrop of things that should speak of the past (but do not), the objects with

which this couple actually busy themselves are all strikingly modern, brought back by

Michal from his trips to Switzerland (a Western place that produces things that seem

genuinely futuristic). These objects include: an electric almond peeler; a dish called

“groombles” that Věra prepares by seasoning it with another import, “woodpeat” (both

are called in the original by these nonsensical, English-sounding words); and new records

that Michal promises to play on his new stereo set (but never does, as if the sound of the

future is permanently deferred). The future is as non-signifying as the past here, and the

country from which the future is imported, Switzerland, is a place about which Michal

can tell his guest nothing of substance. It is not just things, then, that are brought together

and arranged. Rather, entire temporal categories, the past and the future, are laid out and

invoked over and over through forced conversation. There are no memories tied to any

of these things (indeed, there is apparently no memory on Michal and Věra’s part that

these things have already been mentioned numerous times) and no hopes or expectations,
 161

either. The past and future, like the objects that represent them, are all form and no

meaningful content.

One “object” that would seem to join these two temporal planes together is the

couple’s son, Pét’a. An obvious symbol of the family’s past and future, the boy is

discussed (much like other objects in the apartment) but never actually shown. The

couple claim to have had their life transformed by the little things the child has taught

them – but the only concrete thing they can remember when Bedřich asks for specifics is

the boy’s question of whether a toad can drown. Personal and meaningful engagement

with and interest in a living, present-tense child is also apparently impossible for these

two.

Havel echoes their disengaged relation to the present with an illogical and

seemingly random structuring of the play’s fictional time. On the mantel above the

fireplace in this apartment is an antique rococo clock, and its period-piece ringing

punctuates the action on stage. In the one-act play, which takes less than a half hour to

perform, the clock rings a total of six times. This clock never actually tells the time – it

rings out at obviously random times, including three rings in the course of about three

normal minutes. The ringing, which is simply a song and never countable strokes,

startles Bedřich, who is the obvious outsider in this world. It is not, however, just the

clock’s random song that marks the temporal disconnect of this world. Havel also

employs marked pauses (indicated with the word “pauza” in the script), and he is even

more profligate with them than Chekhov. In the four acts of Three Sisters Chekhov uses

66 pauses, more than in any other of his plays. In Unveiling, a one-act play, Havel

indicates 31 pauses. The excessive segmentation of form is tied to the non-teleological

 162

development of content. There is no real progression in the play – no dramatic

development in the Aristotelian sense. Instead, there is repetition. Time and again Věra

and Michal move the conversation away from their own boastings about the look of their

life towards an interrogation of Bedřich and his absent wife’s own life, only to defer

actually telling Bedřich what specifically is wrong with his life. Specifics are, of course,

a problem to elucidate in this world. The dialogue goes as follows:

VĚRA: Já vím, nerad o tom mluvíš. Ale pochop, my jsme s Michalem moc a
moc v poslední době o vás dvou mluvili, mos jsme na vás mysleli – a opravdu
nám neni jedno, jak žijete!
MICHAL: My to s tebou, Bedřichu, myslíme dobře –
VĚRA: Jsi náš nejlepší přítel – máme tě moc rádí – a ani nevíš, jak hrozně
bychom ti přali, a by se ti to všechno už konečně nějak rozmotalo!
BEDŘICH: Co aby se mi rozmotalo?
VĚRA: Nechme toho. Nemám zapálit v krbu?
BEDŘICH: Kvůli mně nemusíš –
MICHAL: Tak pustím nějakou hudbu, ne?
VĚRA: Michal totiž přivezl ze Švajcu spoustu nových desek –
BEDŘICH: Až později, jo?

VĚRA: You don’t like to talk about it, I know. But you know Michal and I have
been talking about the two of you a lot lately, we’ve been thinking about you a lot
– and we really care about how you two live!
MICHAL: We’re only trying to help, Bedřich!
VĚRA: You’re our best friend – we like you a lot – you have no idea how happy
we’d be for you if your situation finally got resolved somehow!
BEDŘICH: What situation?
VĚRA: Let’s just drop it. Shouldn’t I light the fire?
BEDŘICH: Not on my account-
MICHAL: So I’ll put on some music, all right?
VĚRA: Michal just brought a ton of new records from Switzerland-
BEDŘICH: Maybe later, ok?

This exchange occurs, in almost exact repetition, six times in this one-act play, and each

time is interrupted, usually after Bedřich’s deferring line of “Maybe later,” by the ringing

of the clock. Circularity and the resulting deferral of meaning are the mainstays of this

play. As mentioned, Michal offers to put music on but never does. The promised display
 163

of conjugal love between Věra and Michal is (thankfully) never given, but instead is

indefinitely deferred by Věra’s request that Michal, who is kissing and caressing her, wait

a bit. Pét’a, their son, is never introduced, although his question about frogs is recounted

several times. Bedřich is never given a chance to answer the multitude of questions

posed him. And Věra and Michal never elucidate what precisely is wrong with Bedřich

and his life, although over and over they repeat their advice that he visit the sauna (as

they do) and that his wife model herself after Věra. In the end, however, Bedřich is never

even allowed to leave, but instead stays and the cycle begins again. There are no exits,

no answers, and no display of actual meaning in this “unveiling.” There is, instead, a

circularity of words and, it would seem, of time.

Havel has a recurring interest in the nature of language and the semantic

emptiness that so much conversation displays, and this is evident in the circularity of

Unveiling. His critique of language has been linked by Paul Trensky to a larger critique

of an important tradition of Western thought – the obsession of thinking in categories that

prevent us from facing ultimate realities, including the reality of the self. As Trensky

notes, language becomes both a means and an end to the avoidance of deeper truths in

Havel’s plays:

In the traditional theater the role of language was largely secondary. It served
merely as a vehicle for expressing the ideas and emotions of the characters, for
the elaboration of the theme and conflict, and as a necessary link between the
stage and the audience. In a theater which accredits to characters no inner life,
however, words cannot be used just as projections to the outer world. Language
not only ceases to enhance character development, but the opposite becomes the
fact, and characters are made the vehicle of language. Words form people by
filling their inner void until human speech stops functioning as a means of
communication and becomes a form of social behavior.58

58
Paul I. Trensky, “Havel’s The Garden Party Revisited,” Critical Essays on Václav Havel, ed. Marketa
Goetz-Stankiewicz and Phyllis Carey (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999) 161.
 164

Trenksy’s observations on language in Havel also hold true for Havel’s critique of the

category of time.

In fact, Havel takes his presentation of measured time as a depersonalizing and

empty form one step further than he does with his presentation of language in Unveiling.

The words that characters speak may not communicate meaningful content (this is true

even of Bedřich, although his outsider position is reinforced by his admirable reticence),

but they are still intelligible, at least in syntactic and lexical form. The organization of

time within the play, on the other hand, is completely unintelligible. In Havel’s earlier

plays, such as The Garden Party, clock time is presented as strangely fast but still

recognizable as a structuring system. Here, however, the empty form of plotted time is

signified by the random ringing of the clock, which never attempts to communicate a

distinguishable number. Beyond Bedřich’s startled jumps, no one actually acknowledges

the clock, and even Bedřich is no longer startled by the fourth ringing. This couple, so

attuned to the look and form of things around them (as they themselves say a number of

times), seem oblivious to the disordered temporality that prevails in their apartment. This

is only reinforced by the dialogue, which circles back to the same topics, often in the

same exact wording, as if there were no memory at all of conversations that occurred just

a few moments earlier. It is not just the content, then, but the very form of temporal

order that is at stake here. Like the objects that this couple has amassed, the randomly

fragmented spans of time are discrete objects that fail to cohere into a meaningful whole.

The political implications of this “absurd” time scheme are important. Time is

essentially a private experience, and any social regulation of time, whether through

clocks or calendars, is an infringement to some degree upon the consciousness’s freely

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individual conceptualization and organization of the temporal experience. In Havel’s

plays, however, this regulation is even more fraught with issues of freedom of

consciousness. It is not only social utility and the “greater good” of public interactions

that enforce the timing of one’s experience; it is also a repressive socio-political state,

one which determines work shifts and prison sentences (something that is especially

obvious in the first play of the trilogy, Audience, when the single temporal marker for the

work shift, the morning tea break, has not yet occurred but might come later – and never

does). The senselessness of time within the apartment of Unveiling, revealed both in the

clock’s random song and in the abundance of forced pauses, reflects the senselessness of

the entire spatio-temporal order outside that apartment. Space, although compromised,

might still reflect an order that its inhabitants insist upon in private and hold up as a

model to their guest. The absurd contours of time, however, indicate the absence of any

rational and overarching system, public or private. Both the hosts and the guest are

caught in a model of time that they cannot personalize or advance, and the hosts’

insistence on the superiority of the look of their life is undermined not only by their

vulgar superficiality, but also by their inability to move beyond the inane replay of the

present moment’s concerns. Given Bedřich’s background as a dissident writer (not to

mention Havel’s), the circularity of dialogue on stage can resemble an interrogation, one

that is humorous in its banality but nevertheless illustrative of the ways political power

can entrap consciousnesses. Havel focuses on power relations more explicitly in the

other plays in the trilogy, but here too there is an entrapment of Bedřich (and the

audience) in a present that is beyond his control.

 166

Yet Unveiling is more than a moment of protest. It is not just a critique of time in

this fictional world that Havel pursues, or even of time in the categorical world of human

thought and political context – it is also an active investigation of time in the theater. In

Havel’s own words, his plays present “a dismemberment of the dramatic character,

suspension of time and absence of a coherent story on which an identity of a character

could assert itself. Time loses its human dimension, comes to a halt or runs around in a

circle.”59 This loss of the human dimension that Havel points out is inevitable in a play

such as Unveiling where there is no sequence of time or accretion of meaningful

experience for the characters. Havel’s repetitions seem to indicate an absence of memory

and of temporal progression, but the circles that he creates, if they are recognized as such,

both deny time’s advance and insist upon it for their repetition to be realized. In this way

Havel draws attention to the interplay between fiction and audience, denying the “human

dimension” of time on stage while depending upon it in his audience. Indeed, the

sections of dialogue that repeat again and again, with their posed questions and deferred

answers, are representative of the theatrical process itself, where the entire work is

repeated in cycles of performance. Vaněk’s “až později” (“maybe later”) is an imperative

of sorts, a signal to both his hosts and to the audience that deferral itself is the present-

tense “event” that matters here. The illusion of temporal circularity is mandated by a

controlling literary text, and time presented on stage must repeat itself with every

performance. Most importantly, there are no ends and no final curtains for a play,

although there are for individual productions of it.

59
Cited in Peter Majer, “Time, Identity and Being: The World of Václav Havel,” Twentieth-Century
European Drama, ed. Brian Docherty (London: Macmillan, 1994) 178.
 167

The paradox of Havel’s repetitions, then, both in terms of his play Unveiling and

in theater as a whole, is that time that means something does progress, that changes are

inevitable, and that temporal circles that only repeat themselves are an absurd form that

can contain only absurd content. Time cannot truly circle, in other words. There are

differences in Havel’s repetitive dialogue, subtle but present: an added word or two, a

different point of interruption. Similarly, there will be variations in different actors’

interpretations and the same actor’s presentations of any character. Because of time’s

advance there is no real repetition, either from scene to scene or from performance to

performance. Each enactment will be different, and even if nothing seems to change, the

elapse of time means that the seemingly unbroken cycle is simply nonexistent for the

observer who accounts for time’s progression and allows meaningful experience to

accrue. Havel’s Bedřich ultimately escapes this circularity, not within the play itself, but

in the larger context of the trilogy, which sees him in the final installment at a different

home and with a different interlocutor. It is Havel’s audience, however, who, occupying

an actual outsider’s position similar to that of the fictional Bedřich’s, ultimately has the

most to gain. To circle back to a concern raised earlier about critical reception of Havel:

knowing the historical and political context of a work helps us understand its creation and

conventions; but to understand a work’s potential for continued meaningful reception

beyond that context, time’s ongoing-ness, both in life and in art, should not be

overlooked.

Havel, then, like Vvedensky before him, recognizes the difference between

external measures of time and the internal integrity of its flow, and this difference applies

both to the lives of people and dramatic works. As Absurdists, both Vvedensky and
 168

Havel question the stability and significance of any unifying model of time beyond the

individual’s, but Havel takes things a step further. Whereas Vvedensky’s drama

highlights the arbitrariness of very visible quantified measurements and the

meaninglessness of lived events in the face of death, Havel dispenses altogether with

these gauges of time’s advance. Instead, he focuses on responses to the seeming absence

of any intelligible external measures within the work. Nonetheless, he too insists that

meaningful temporal experience can obtain – at least for his audience members. Indeed,

both playwrights intentionally test their fictional worlds against the ongoing process of

time that performance implies, and both draw attention to the ways their models – not to

mention those of their characters – fall short. These plays are more unsettling than

Chekhov’s, but their engagement with dramatic temporalities is recognizably

Chekhovian.
 169

Conclusion

What (When) Is Meta-Temporal Drama?

What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a
beginning. The end is where we start from.
-T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Post-view

The aim of this dissertation has been to show the centrality of time to the dramatic

text and the existence in the Slavic tradition of plays that actively explore the

conceptualizations and meanings of time, not only in the lives of their characters, but also

in the performative genre to which these plays belong. Chekhov’s Three Sisters,

Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs, and Havel’s Unveiling are the three primary

works discussed, and although these plays take different approaches to the depiction of

the temporal process, all three focus on the question of time’s representation, both

thematically and in the ways they are structured. These meta-temporal dramatic works

critique the constructs of temporality that they engage by creating a tension between the

experience of time and models used to represent it. Quantified time, the convention of

compressing large time spans into short scenes, and the cyclical representation of time are
 170

just some of the models that these playwrights set against the ongoing experience of

theatrical time that drama presupposes.

To be sure, many plays in one way or another examine the meaning of time and

its passage, and the mere presence of a clock or the mention of time in a play is not

enough to qualify a work as meta-temporal drama. Shakespeare’s As You Like It, for

instance, is a play in which time is a very important theme. Characters in this play often

speak about the advance of time, and the Forest of Arden, where love becomes possible

for Rosalind and Orlando, is a place noticeably without clocks, a place where time’s –

and love’s – progression can only be measured by natural phenomena and individual

experience. Shakespeare, who wrote more than three centuries before Chekhov,

recognizes the difference between experiential time and the quantified representation of

it. Shakespeare, however, does not structure his entire play around this difference. His

play alludes to the competing time schemes that it and its characters engage, but As You

Like It does not enact the tensions that it invokes.

Meta-temporal drama does enact those tensions. Three Sisters features characters

who structure their very lives around abstract measurements of time, and the thematic

focus of the work is the negative effect that such structuring has on life. Indeed,

Chekhov’s foregrounding of that theme is unlike what any playwright before him does.

His characters invoke quantified time to an unprecedented extent. More important,

however, is that Chekhov structures his play according to that abstraction of clock time

that his characters cite with such frequency. The play’s structural organization enacts its

theme, but the ongoing experience of time, which, in Bergsonian terms, endures rather

than divides into disconnected parts, allows an audience to integrate the discrete
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structural units, even if the characters on stage cannot. It is form, then, as much as theme

that makes Chekhov’s drama so unconventional – and so Modern.

This innovative aspect of Chekhov’s dramaturgy is strangely absent from so many

of the playwrights who are commonly viewed as his dramatic heirs in the Slavic tradition.

For instance, Mikhail Bulgakov, arguably the most important twentieth-century Russian

playwright after Chekhov, is not a writer of meta-temporal dramas. There are of course

other reasons for linking Bulgakov with Chekhov. Both wrote their plays for

Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater, and that theater’s staging in 1926 of Days of

the Turbins, Bulgakov’s first play, was an “event” for the theater on par with its opening

production of The Seagull.1 It is not just biographical similarities that link the two,

however. Like Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs, Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins

also alludes to Chekhov and his plays. A depiction of a family (two brothers and a sister,

as well an “extended” family of relatives and friends) in Ukraine during the Civil War

period of 1917-1918, Bulgakov’s play is also interested in the separate world that a

household creates for itself. The Turbins are opposed to the revolution and fight on the

White side of the war, and their household, much like the household of Chekhov’s

Prozorov sisters, is a place where memory of the past (here a cultural past that the

1
According to Lesley Milne, “This production was a turning point in the history of the Moscow Art
Theatre, in whose annals it came to be known as ‘the second Seagull.’ Chekhov’s Seagull had in 1898
inaugurated the Art Theatre’s success and ensured its survival. Bulgakov’s Turbins in 1926 saved the
theatre from a post-revolutionary crisis that was two-fold in nature. The first problem was the theatre’s
repertoire, which included as yet no plays dealing with contemporary events. . .But Bulgakov’s play not
only filled a gap in the repertoire, becoming the pivot around which the theatre turned to face the new age.
During rehearsals it unexpectedly became the bridge across the theatre’s ‘generation gap.’ The legendary
founder-members of the Art Theatre – Kachalov, Moskvin, Knipper-Chekhova – were all in their fifties by
1925 and a transfusion of young blood into the theatre’s main company was urgently needed. The Days of
the Turbins was the play that established, overnight, the reputation of the ‘youngsters,’ the Moscow Art
Theatre’s ‘second generation’ – Khmelov, Sokolova, Yanshin. They in turn became legends, and the origin
of this legend was The Days of the Turbins.” See Lesley Milne, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) 106-107.
 172

revolution threatens) is of great importance. There are other textual similarities between

Days of the Turbins and Three Sisters, something about which Lesley Milne has written:

The mise-en-scène of Act I bears a distinct resemblance to Act I of The Three

Sisters: a laid table, a gathering of family and friends, a domestic ceremonial
occasion, an enthusiastic, boyish young officer with a guitar. . .The play in all its
variants had been ironically aware of the Chekhovian genealogy of its characters:
Lariosik from the second redaction onwards appears bearing the Collected Works
of Chekhov, and right from the start, from the first redaction, it has been his
‘cream curtains’ speech, concluding with the last words of Uncle Vanya, ‘We
shall rest’, that had cued in the finale, the Chekhovian dying fall immediately
wrenched into a new direction by the sound of guns. . .The disjunction was a
poignant one; the MAT’s ‘naturalistic’ sets enhanced it; the MAT audience
responded to it; every performance was sold out.2

As Milne points out, it is not just the text of Days of the Turbins that alludes to Chekhov;

the Moscow Art Theater’s staging of the play, especially the sets, were also meant to

invoke Chekhov and his plays for the audience. Yet in spite of the similarities between

Three Sisters and Days of the Turbins, the latter, unlike the former, cannot be called

meta-temporal drama. Bulgakov’s play is a plot-centered work, one that even includes a

scène à faire (an obligatory scene) in which the villain, the sister’s husband and a

political traitor, is brought back on stage and humiliated. The tight structure of the work

never calls into question its temporal design, which conflates a complicated historical

period of multiple regime changes into a relatively simple story. It is historical

developments – and not their temporal abstractions – with which the characters are at

odds. The fictional time of the play is a construct that is never questioned.

As Bulgakov’s play makes clear, plot-centered drama certainly did not disappear

after Chekhov. On the contrary, many playwrights who used strikingly innovative

themes in their work chose to develop them around a traditional outline of plot (and,

consequently, through a more conventional depiction of time) that Chekhov had moved
2
Milne 112-113.
 173

away from. This was evident throughout the West (Eugene O’Neil and Tennessee

Williams are obvious examples in this country), but it was particularly true in the Soviet

period of Russian drama, where formal innovation was officially discouraged beginning

in the late 1920s. The subsequent reigning school of Socialist Realism further stifled

innovation.

As elaborated in Chapter Three, Chekhov’s innovative dramatic form, in which

the investigation of time becomes a plot in its own right, is taken up and developed by the

Absurdists. Vvedensky, an anachronistic Absurdist of the 1930s, uses the uneventfulness

of ongoing time, which for him can be experienced differently by different

consciousnesses (as long as they are alive), as the basis of his “plot.” Havel’s play,

which comes decades later, is constructed around the unrepeatability of ongoing time,

which, when abstractly segmented into repetitive scenes is difficult to gauge

meaningfully, but whose advance is nonetheless constant. Ultimately Three Sisters,

Christmas at the Ivanovs, and Unveiling are meta-temporal works not only because they

include an abundance of references to seemingly incompatible (and, in the case of the

latter two, incomprehensible) ways of conceptualizing time, but because these works are

constructed around these incompatibilities. It is in this sense that the plays are meta-

temporal.

These three playwrights and works examined in this study highlight Chekhov’s

seminal role in the development of this type of play and reveal important connections,

previously overlooked in the scholarship, between Chekhov and the Slavic Absurdists (as

opposed to the French Absurdists, with whom Chekhov is often linked). In many ways

the Absurdists offer a strangely logical conclusion to Chekhov’s dramatic interest in

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exploring time as both construct and constructor. Vvedensky and Havel are two

understudied playwrights in the Slavic tradition whose works show a clear affinity with

Chekhov’s in this regard.

There are other playwrights who belong to this tradition. As Chapter Three

suggested, the French Absurdists also wrote meta-temporal dramas, and Brechtian

Theater is yet another example of a twentieth-century dramatic movement that explores

the intersection between fictional and theatrical timeframes, between the trajectories of

our lives and the models we use to represent them. Sarah Bryant-Bertail, writing on

Brecht and his Epic Theater, notes:

As always in theater, spatio-temporality is the means through which ideology is

codified, but epic theater relentlessly exposes the volatility of these codes: one
space-time construct may encode ideological systems that are antithetical to each
other. Epic theater thus draws our attention to the contradictions within and
among these ideologies rather than trying to reconcile them by submerging them
under one seamless aesthetic affect.3

The competing ideologies to which Brecht draws our attention are most often political in

nature, but the temporal (and spatial) models he uses to structure and present these

ideologies are similarly implicated as contradictory ways of representation, and in this he

is similar to the Absurdists. After the Absurdists and Brecht, there is a proliferation of

plays and performances that seek to engage the temporal contradictions that obtain in

drama, both among characters and between them and their audience.

Why Not Meta-Temporal Film?

On a final note, it is worth asking how productive as a genre meta-temporal drama

can be beyond the twentieth century, for if the twentieth century marks its beginnings,

3
Saray Bryant-Bertail, Space and Time in Epic Theater: The Brechtian Legacy (Rochester: Camden House,
2000) 7.
 175

this period also in many ways has been seen as its (and all of drama’s) demise. Since

film seems to have eclipsed drama as the performative art form of choice, both for artists

and for audiences, the continuing viability of drama in the twenty-first century is

something that many critics and scholars have questioned. It can be argued that a film

version of Three Sisters accomplishes the same things – in a more accessible way – that a

stage version does. There are, after all, obvious similarities between drama and film.

Both generally rely on a literary text that guides the performance: the script in the case of

drama, and the screenplay (either original or adapted from another work) in the case of

film. Both are a physical enactment – a spatial realization in time – of that text. Films,

which are enacted only once but can be replayed indefinitely, have obvious economic

advantages.

And yet, despite the similarities, there is a fundamental difference between the

ways these two art forms can depict time. Film, which captures events as they occur in

time, can be replayed again and again and will always remain the same. Film can also be

stopped by the viewer – it can be paused in much the same way that a reader can pause

the advance of a novel by putting it down. Time in a staged dramatic work, however, is

an enactment that is unrepeatable and uninterruptible. No performance of a play will be

identical to a previous performance, even if the cast and staging are identical. The text

itself (and not just the audience’s response to it) changes with each performance,

replicating the very temporal process that the literary text seeks to capture. Performances

are generally not stopped for individuals; it is the performance that signals the end, and

not the spectator.

 176

The ongoing and unrepeatable nature of time, then, dictates the ongoing and

unrepeatable nature of drama in a way that is unmatched by any other genre, including

film. And while playwrights have always written with this in mind, it was only in the

twentieth century that they began to seriously investigate and critique this generic

peculiarity. As we continue to discover, the real time of dramatic performance not only

reveals the limitations of the fictional time schemes it portrays, it trumps them. There are

of course many reasons why drama continues to be an important art form, and perhaps

the unique engagement with time that drama allows is not the most obvious one. But as

long as there is an interest in time and its relation to art and to life, drama will continue to

respond to this interest.

 177

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