Five Plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard

"Many would argue that Chekhov’s play The Seagull is not a crime story because the main character shoots himself (we are told in the last scene). Well, my theory is that Chekhov did not understand what really happened there. Konstantin had absolutely no motive for suicide, hence he was murdered. By one of the other characters. So this is a classical hermetic whodunit. I wrote a play (again) called “ The Real) Seagull where I investigate what could have happened there. Once, when I was speaking at the philology faculty of Moscow University, a professor asked me how dared I mock the great Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. (That was before I mocked Dostoyevsky, wrote my version of Hamlet and committed other similar sacrilegies. Chekhov was my first blood). I said that a work of classics is alive only as long as it encourages readers to challenge it and to argue with it. If not, it’s just history of literature. Respected but boring. Like the Illiad ."

"I used to spend my summer holidays in Sweden in the middle of the woods with a lake and my grandfather—who died before I was born—had a collection of Russian novels in lots of different languages. He was multilingual. One summer, when I was 14 or 15 and bored out of my mind, I picked up a book by the 19th century author Turgenev and I fell in love with Russia. I fell in love with Russian music, architecture, history and literature . I was very lucky that I went to a school that had a Russian teacher. When I was 15 or 16, I found Chekhov for the first time. The Cherry Orchard captures—more than any book that I’ve ever read—this period of transition where the world is changing. Half of the characters are in complete denial. Lopakhin is the great merchant whose fortunes have transformed him from the lowest of the low to being able to buy the places where his family used to be indentured. And yet—despite that sense of change and the denial and these beautiful themes—what Chekhov didn’t know when he wrote it is that Russia’s glorious opening to the future was about to implode with war and then revolution. It has these hopes and fears and misgivings and the end point is that it all ended in disaster. It was a great moment in Russian history . So, as a kind of period piece that captures Russia in the late 19th, early 20th century, it’s the most poignant text I’ve ever read. “You learn much more about Russia before the revolution by reading The Cherry Orchard than you will by studying the tsar and his land reforms or other decisions made in St Petersburg by the leadership.” False dawns have been persistent in Russian history. There’s another one in the 1920s when art and literature and music explode, and then Stalin represses it. It comes again after the great sacrifice of the Second World War and with Khrushchev taking over after Stalin. There’s a process of liberalisation that is, again, kneecapped. And, in a way, in the early 1990s again, when Russians started to arrive in London. Oligarchs kept our property market afloat here by buying football clubs and buying mansions. We have failed to understand Russia in the modern age too. We have a cartoon-like view of what we think Putin is really like and what Russia’s interests and designs are. The Cherry Orchard doesn’t just capture a period of Russian history but captures the Russian soul, which is a big thing in Russian literature : the ‘dushá.’ I picked it because it was a hugely formative text in my life. That text turned me into a Russianist. It turned me into someone who wanted to study Russian at university and now, with the things I work on, I read Russian every day. I have a great deal to thank Chekhov for. Yes. In fact, I didn’t do history at ‘A’ Level. I loved history but you need to be able to read other languages to be able to read other sources. Otherwise you’re stuck with English spies in World War II. I picked English literature instead because I realised, even as a teenager, that you need to understand how to read texts. Sometimes historians can make the mistake, when reading something, that because it’s old it’s truthful. All this talk about fake news annoys me. Fake news is as old as the written word. People sometimes spread fake news because they’re mistaken, sometimes it’s for propaganda, or sometimes it’s to intentionally mislead. But there is no such thing as objective truth— everyone is trying to write things how they see the world or events. As historians, we do the best we can to detach ourselves from biases. Sometimes we don’t. That process of learning how to read is very important. Literature is a way through to history and understanding the past. It asks different kinds of questions. I think you learn much more about Russia before the revolution by reading The Cherry Orchard than you will by studying the tsar and his land reforms or other decisions made in St Petersburg by the leadership. I think that’s important for historians—to not always be thinking about some guy at the top and power."