A Month in the Country. Ivan Turgenev

. .” He added an intriguing comment about A Month in the Country specifically: “In its original version I set myself quite a complicated psychological task in this comedy, but the censorship of the time, having forced me to throw out the husband and turn his wife into a widow, completely distorted my intention.” In the 1869 version, which became canonical, he resurrected the husband, but did not restore the cuts that had been demanded by the censors.

      Though Turgenev had advised against it, A Month in the Country was finally performed in 1872, but the production drew little attention. Then, in January 1879, Maria Savina, a young actress at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, the imperial theater in Petersburg, decided to stage it again in a benefit performance, with herself in the role of Vera. It was a tremendous success. Turgenev visited Petersburg a month later, eventually persuaded himself to attend a performance, where he received a standing ovation, and promptly fell in love with Savina. He was over sixty; she was twenty-five. This was the last love of his life, expressed mainly in the letters he wrote to her while still in Russia and then from Paris, where he died in 1883. “Rakitin is me,” he confessed in one of them. “I always portray myself as the unsuccessful lover . . .”

      A Month in the Country permanently entered the Russian repertory after the production at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. In 1909 Stanislavsky staged the play at the Moscow Art Theatre, with himself as Rakitin and Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s widow, as Natalya Petrovna. His work on the production was of great importance in the development of his “method.” He wanted the stage to be almost bare and the acting to be minimal, almost without gestures, an “inner delineation of character” by means of intonation. The Irish playwright Brian Friel echoed Stanislavsky in a note on his 1992 adaptation of the play: “Turgenev fashioned a new kind of dramatic situation and a new kind of dramatic character where for the first time psychological and poetic elements created a theater of moods where the action resides in internal emotion and secret turmoil and not in external events.” This understanding bears out Turgenev’s comment about the “complicated psychological task” he set himself in the play. A Month in the Country is often called “Chekhovian.” In fact, Turgenev’s theater not only preceded Chekhov’s by some forty years, but differs from it in important ways. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly Stanislavsky’s earlier work with Chekhov that led to this landmark production of Turgenev’s play.

      Turgenev was one of the “men of the Forties,” as they came to be known. At the age of nineteen he twice saw Alexander Pushkin from a distance, not long before the poet was killed in a duel. His collection of stories, A Hunter’s Notes, was praised by Nikolai Gogol. But his contemporaries were the liberal intellectuals who emerged during the last years of the repressive reign of Nicholas I, largely in response to its repression. From 1838 to 1841, Turgenev studied classics and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he made friends with a group of “Russian Hegelians,” among them Mikhail Bakunin, later the chief exponent of Anarchism, who was the model for the hero of his first novel, Rudin. In Russia and then in their “self-exile” abroad he made the acquaintance of Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky, two of the most forceful social critics of their time, opponents of the Russian autarchy and above all of serfdom. When his mother died in 1850, Turgenev returned to Russia to arrange the affairs of the estate at Spasskoe. One of his first acts was to free the household serfs; he also enabled the peasants to buy their freedom at rates very advantageous for them. This was more than a decade before the new emperor, Alexander II, known as the “tsar-liberator,” signed the proclamation that finally put an end to serfdom. The stories collected in A Hunter’s Notes were, among other things, a sharply critical portrayal of the conditions of serfdom and the life of the landed gentry. The book’s publication in 1852 cost Turgenev a month in prison and a year in “exile” on his estate. He was not allowed to travel abroad again until 1856.

      Two figures came to typify the intellectuals of mid-nineteenth-century Russia: the superfluous man, and the nihilist. Both terms were coined by Turgenev, the first in his novella of 1850, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, and the second in his novel Fathers and Sons, published in 1862. While Turgenev shared the liberalism of his intellectual contemporaries, who often found themselves “superfluous” in the Russia of Nicholas I, he came to detest the revolutionary and utopian extremism that was embodied by the nihilists, the so-called “new men” of the Sixties, whose first spokesman was the thinker and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky’s thesis, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, which he defended at the university in 1855, the same year that A Month in the Country was published, propounded a purely utilitarian notion of art. Turgenev found his writing physically repulsive; Tolstoy said that it “stinks of bedbugs.” A later aristocrat, Vladimir Nabokov, gave us the most pitiless and at the same time moving portrait of Chernyshevsky in the fourth chapter of his novel The Gift.

      In expanding the sketch of “Two Sisters” into A Month in the Country, Turgenev made two important additions to the cast: Mikhail Rakitin and Dr. Shpigelsky. They are the two major speechmakers of the play, and their speeches suffered most from the censors’ cuts. In the original version of the last act, Rakitin, who is paying the price for his superfluousness, continued his long speech to the student Belyaev, describing the slavery and humiliation of love, by advising the young man to seize his chance with women, not to lose time, not to worry about fine feelings, because a woman’s love is like a spring freshet, rushing with water one day, and dried up the next. The censors considered the passage morally inadmissible. Shpigelsky’s speech to Lizaveta Bogdanovna in the fourth act suffered even more. His description of his kowtowing to the gentry was a more detailed and pointed caricature of their gullibility and his own duplicity, and in describing his childhood, he confessed that he was illegitimate, the son of a poor girl, had gone about barefoot and hungry, and nursed an undying hatred of the “benefactor” (one of his mother’s noble “friends”) who had sent him to Moscow and the university to get him out of the way. That was all removed. As for Belyaev, in the original cast list Turgenev described him as a student in the department of political studies at the university. The censors left only the word “student.”

      The fact that the first version of A Month in the Country was entitled The Student suggests that Belyaev was to be the central character of the play. And in a sense he is. But not in the way that Soviet criticism thought. In the Soviet view, the play is built on the conflict between the decadent gentry (Natalya Petrovna, Rakitin, Anna Pavlovna, Bolshintsov) and the new forces, embodied by Belyaev and Vera, with Islaev and Shpigelsky somewhere between the two, the one partly justified by his hard work, the other by his poor origins and class consciousness. Belyaev asks to borrow a magazine from Rakitin, probably an intellectual journal not unlike The Contemporary, in which Turgenev published his own work. When Rakitin asks him if he reads poetry or stories, Belyaev says he prefers the critical articles, suggesting the practical turn of mind of the “new men.” The social and political situation of Russia at the time is certainly implicit in the play, as is Turgenev’s hope for a renewal brought about by fresh young people like Belyaev. But if Rakitin is a superfluous man, Belyaev is hardly a nihilist. His freshness is something other than the promise of social change, something more universally human.

      What the Soviet interpretation left out was the question of love. And yet love, the force of love, love in all its permutations, is everywhere in the play, like the wind that Natalya Petrovna suddenly lets into the drawing room in Act One:

       NATALYA: Hello, wind. (She laughs) As if he’s been waiting for a chance to burst in . . . (Looking around) See how he’s taken over the whole room . . . There’s no driving him out now . . .

      Belyaev is in some sense the personification of that wind, a local Eros with his homemade bow and arrow. He is a breath of fresh air, of youth, freedom, disruption, in what Stanislavsky called the “hothouse” life of the old country estate. But he is an unwitting and unwilling Eros. His importance lies less in his own character than in the effect he has on the others. The result of his sudden intrusion is a comedy of the unexpected at every turn and in every tone, a constant balancing of absurdity and true feeling, concealment and confession. The play keeps the lightness and quickness of the older French comedies, their repartee and their soliloquies, but transformed by a realism that was new to the stage. Maintaining that balance was the “complex psychological