On Chekov and Translating: Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersberg’s Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya is a play that drives literary critics crazy: there is no main character, there is little plot and many of the monologues make little sense. The play centers on the aged Professor Serebriakov (who isn’t the main character) and his relatives, who spend their time on the Professor’s country estate having rather complicated relations with each other and going through a “midlife crisis.” A realistically bittersweet portrayal of regrets about opportunities missed and lives wasted, it is also a play about the search to create a new life, one that will exist a hundred or two hundred years from now, when people will know how to be happy. And the fact that nothing happens except reminiscences, conversations, and attempts to find too late the happiness that slipped through one’s fingers – that is Chekov’s way of making his point. As the play goes on, the audience too feels the dull reality of the characters, and understands the madness of their desires. It is poignant – and yet heartbreaking – to watch the madness of people who have missed their chances or who (like Sonya, suffering from unrequited love) see their chances slip through their fingers and their dreams break.

The audience, however, seemed to find the Maly Drama Theatre’s performance of this “tragicomic masterpiece,” as it has been called, funnier that it was intended to be. A tragicomedy is something between a comedy (which means not that it’s supposed to be funny, but that everything will end “happily”) and a tragedy (where everything does not end “happily,” such as in the story of Oedipus). In short, it is a play whose ending is neither “happy” nor tragic, and that is not intended to be funny. There is nothing inherently amusing about Uncle Vanya trying to make up for the opportunity he missed years ago by courting Elena, for example, or in Sonya’s sometimes unreasoned actions due to love. Yet the audience laughed.

Perhaps the audience’s misinterpretation of the play was due in part to the overtitles; Russian being my first language, I was lucky enough to be able to understand the play in the original, however, I occasionally followed the translation - enough to realize both its inexactness and the difficulty of translating this play. A viewer will obviously not have time to ponder the nuances of a particular word or phrase as the play is going on, yet I found the overtitles inexact to the extent that they were misleading. Phrases were left out, the song sung by Doctor Astrov was completely different than the text in the overtitles…and the significance of some key phrases was lost. The Professor’s phrase about the necessity of “doing the deed,” for example, was not a sexual reference, but an ironic statement by somebody who has spent his life reading and writing to the hardworking people around him that they have been doing nothing and that they must start doing work; Elena’s response to Uncle Vanya’s vows of love, translated as “Your love…it makes me numb,” suggests in the original that Elena could be becoming blunt, numb, or stupid, and the emphasis seems to be on the idea that his vows of love make her unresponsive, blunt, withdrawn – she simply does not care, and his vows do not move her. These nuances are difficult to convey in a written translation, and even more so in overtitles, but I found myself disappointed that a greater attempt was not made to capture the essence of Chekov’s meaning.

In the end, however, the words were no more powerful than the lack of them. The agony, anguish and despair of the characters (so brilliantly portrayed by this troupe of actors) and the tense moments of silence (possibly the director Lev Dodin’s addition) were as full of feeling as the powerful speeches, and required no translation to convey the pain of people who are searching for a way to make the world happy one day, even though their dreams of happiness were thwarted and their hopes melted into mist.

By: Ana Klimchyskaya
UMSSC Member

Uncle Vanya

A performance of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by the Maly Theater of St. Petersburg

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

As I was walking into the Power Center, I saw my housemate Ilya, a UM graduate student who is originally from Estonia and speaks Russian fluently, buying a ticket at the box office. Ilya wised me on to the fact that the Maly Theater of St. Petersburg is considered to be the premier interpreter of Chekhov in the world. I had an idea that they were famous, but I didn't know that they were that famous.

So, it was with expectations raised sky-high that I walked into the auditorium. (Incidentally, when I had picked up my tickets from the Mendelssohn Theater box office, the nice people at the desk had handed me a leaflet that said that, at the request of the Maly Theater, the production was supposed to begin exactly at the listed time and that everyone should be in their seats accordingly. I had been so intimidated by this injunction that I made sure to take my seat before the hour of 8:00 pm struck -- but the play, strangely, did seem to start at Michigan time after all. In any case...)

The first thing to notice about this production was that the production was much longer than I expected. Uncle Vanya is a very short play -- on the printed page, that is. I expected it to be over very quickly, but the Maly Theater had found out, it seemed, a way to wring duration out of Chekhov's habitual brevity of style.

In psychobabble-speak, one could describe Uncle Vanya, perhaps, as a play about mid-life crises. At the age of forty-seven, Vanya wakes up to the reality that he has been a failure and that none of the dreams he had as a youth have come to fruition. The melancholy note of the play derives from Vanya's realization that he had dedicated his life to selflessly serving a man (the self-important and narcissistic professor Serebryakov) who feels nothing but callous disregard for him. Vanya is a tragicomic figure -- we both laugh at him and feel pity and terror at his fate, knowing in our hearts that Vanya's destiny is, after all, a common human condition that could well befall ourselves, too, in one way or the other.

It is this sense of tragicomedy that is very difficult to pull off successfully, and in doing which the Maly Theater succeeded quite well. The tragicomedy demands quicksilver transitions of mood, as the play seems constantly to turn on a dime between sly humor and high tragedy. Avoiding the twin pitfalls of the banality of cheap laughter and the mushiness of shallow sentimentalism, the Maly Theater production guided the audience with a firm hand through these mood swings almost like a matador leads the bull this way and that with nothing but minute movements of the cape, so that the audience kept snickering and guffawing at one moment and falling into a stunned and awe-struck silence at the end. And at the amazing conclusion of the play -- Sonya's heroic attempt to wrest dignity and meaning out of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that flesh is heir to, her impassioned, piercing and repeated cry of "Mi otdokhnyom" ("We will rest"), I had tears flowing down my cheeks.

Vladimir Nabokov (whom I always find very insightful on the topic of Russian literature) had this to say about his fellow country-man Chekhov, which describes chartacters like Astrov and Vanya in the play to a "t":

"[...]It is not quite exact to say that Chekhov dealt in charming and ineffectual people. It is a little more true to say that his men and women are charming because they are ineffectual.

"But what really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the type of the Russian intellectual, the Russian idealist, a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad [...] Chekhov's intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes—in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people—all through Chekhov's stories ..."

I find Nabokov's emphasis in this passage on the Russian-ness of Chekhov interesting, in the light of how the Maly Theater succeeded in transcending the language barrier (the surtitles helped, of course, but they are never the whole thing) in communicating the essence of the play to a largely non-Russian-speaking audience.

"Beat the Donkey" with Cyro Baptista

A performance by Beat the Donkey (Cyro Baptista and other musicians)

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

A few years ago I had the opportunity to listen to David Barsamian interview University of Colorado ethnomusicology professor John Galm about Brazilian popular music. In that interview, Professor Galm said something that I was reminded of by Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey's performance this past Saturday. Galm remarked in the interview that Brazilian popular music, in particular the music of the carnival, rests on a tremendous inventiveness. Since musical instruments can be expensive and often beyond the reach of common people, the masses in Brazil often simply improvise, Galm said, making music out of whatever is at hand. This has given rise, Galm said, to a quite wide variety of quite unorthodox and wildly inventive instruments, some of them even improvised from domestic utensils or appliances such as pots and pans, shelves or wooden crates. It is a matter of making a virtue out of necessity, so to speak.

In its performance, Beat the Donkey led by Cyro Baptista seemed to have taken this Brazilian tradition into a flight of whimsy that seemed to make the show part vaudeville, part a world music pageant, and part a fanciful caper. Over there in the [art]seen blog, Krithika has already done an excellent job of describing the concert, and so I won't give you a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I will be somewhat impressionistic and simply share my general thoughts about the concert.

Cyro Baptista reminded me somewhat of the great Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Tom Zé, well-known for creating music with the sounds of blenders, floor polishers, radios, typewriters and vacuum cleaners during the 1970s. Zé (and to a lesser extent, Zé's fellow artists in the Brazilian "Tropicalia" movement, too) were harkening back to the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade's influential "Cannibalist Manifesto" of 1928, a key text of Brazilian modernism, in which Andrade had compared the postcolonial re-appropriation, in places such as Brazil, of European/North American cultural symbols, to "cannibalism". The idea is that we postcolonials cannibalize (literally consume) western cultural artifacts, and in doing so we create something new out of them, very different from their originally intended use. The appearance, at one point in Beat the Donkey's performance, of a giant Coca-Cola crate (used as a percussion instrument) is a gesture, i think, towards this "cultural re-appropriation."

After the performance, I had a very lively and interesting discussion with a friend over coffee at Panera's. She said -- and I think she is correct -- that a concert like this can all too easily become kitschy, an exercise in mere showmanship and crowd-pleasing -- and in pandering, with its profligate and over-stumulative excess -- to us, the perpetually attention-deficient denizens of the cyberculture era, who are likely to lap up such pageantry and consume with goggle-eyed ecstasy, the globetrotting bricolage of world-music samples seemingly thrown together in a randomly jumbled, decontextualized, fashion. But I think that Cyro Baptista is well aware of this, and, with more than a hint of self-parody, he is putting on this performance in what is actually an ironic way. Very postmodern, in fact. He is, I think, while not denying the cacophony and kitschiness of modern existence, challenging its meaninglessness and actually humanizing it by performing it with fellow musicians with such joy and intensity.

In fact, something that Cyro Baptista says in one of his interviews is very revealing, I think, of how he envisages this kind of performance as, in a small way, an act of resistance:

Interviewer: Music brings together people in harmony…

Cyro Baptista: Yes. When I started to get together ‘Beat the Donkey’ I had this idea and I call this percussionist and I say, ‘I want to have music and dancers all together and do this….’ And he says, ‘Man. Why do we need ten people to do that? Me and you, we can do this with machines…’ In a time like we are passing now we need to do things together …… to see if we can transform the energy…. I wake up now and I see this stupid man who wants to have a stupid war and I think ‘What the f*ck…Why?’ This guy is wasting his time…I barely have time to do things during the day like composing, doing this and that, taking care of the kids, and how does this guy have time during the day to make a war? Does he not have anything else to do?