Adapting Chekhovian mood.

It has become a cliche in Chekhov scholarship that Chekhov is hard to adapt to the screen. His prose is too structured and precise, his plays too symbolic, elusive and uneventful. Most film adaptations of Chekhov in Russia have been reproached for their lack of fidelity to the original and for

their failure to capture the Chekhovian mood. Recently, fidelity's status as the primary criterion for judging film adaptations has been challenged. But in Russia, which traditionally likes to portray itself as the "most reading nation," and in which literature has always held the highest rank in the hierarchy of arts, fidelity to literary source has always been the main focus of criticism. As well-known Russian film scholar M. Turovskaya wrote, in Russia, "traditionally film is judged according to the degree of its correspondence to the original ... the second traditional criterion is the expert evaluation of literary scholars, who define whether this is 'Gogol' or 'not Gogol' (Chekhov, Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, etc.)" (Turovskaya ob ekranizatsii 27) (1). But what if there was no original text? What if there were an original play but only parts of it were used in a screenplay? Suppose that there were also motifs and quotations from various other works, that all dialogues consisted of phrases written by the author of the original, though gathered from a variety of different texts, including letters and notebooks, but together never comprised any complete piece? Yet, the spirit of the authors' original works is faithfully preserved.

Nikita Mikhalkov's film Unfinished Play for Mechanical Piano (or An Unfinished Piece for a Piano Player) was produced at Mosfilm Studio in 1977, and gained recognition not only in the Soviet Union, but also abroad. It won a Golden Seashell award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 1977, and a Golden Plaque at the International Film Festival in Chicago in 1978. (2) The film is set in a picturesque Russian countryside at the end of the 19th century and depicts one day in the life of a local gentleman visiting the estate of a general's widow, Anna. It has a subheading "based on Chekhov's works" or, to give a more accurate translation, "based on motifs from Chekhov's works." Unfinished Play for Mechanical Piano was the first film adaptation in the Soviet Union that dared not to follow Chekhov's text(s) word for word. However, even the most uncompromising defenders of Chekhov's legacy did not remonstrate against such a "barbaric" handling of the classical author. The unanimous perception of this film by viewers and critics was very favorable to say the least, despite a general suspicion of adaptation. In fact the film was considered to be indisputably "Chekhovian" in mood, tone and style. In an interview, director of the film Nikita Mikhalkov admitted: "In general I think that one should retain only the reigning spirit of the literary source, the sole and inimitable world created by the author" (Mikhalkov 98). It was a revolutionary attempt by Mikhalkov and his team to create their own personal interpretation of Chekhov's world rather than a screen version of a particular text. In this article I will discuss the innovative approach to cinematic adaptation of Chekhov taken by the filmmakers who explicitly set out to respect the spirit of their literary source and achieved true fidelity

to the Chekhovian mood while adapting a non-existing original text.

Besides the artistic challenges of adapting a literary work to the screen, Soviet filmmakers had to face serious ideological constraints. In the Soviet Union, classical literature could be part of intellectual or artistic discourse as long as it served communist ideological purposes. Life before the Bolshevik revolution in Russia should be portrayed as gloomy, hopeless, and unbearable. Thus, only those works of pre-revolutionary Russian writers that had the potential to be read as satirical representations of upper class decadence or as naturalistic depictions of the sufferings of the poor were welcomed for publication, stage, screen and school programs. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the great short story writer and an innovative dramatist, was primarily accepted for publication, study and adaptation in the Soviet Union as the author of humorous stories depicting the absurdity of life in tsarist Russia. His plays were produced in Soviet theaters in accordance with the principles of interpretation established by Stanislavsky: directors would emphasize the realistic representation of the idle, worthless depressing existence of the privileged classes, an existence that was doomed to be swept away by the next generation. Stanislavsky, for example, ignored the comic aspect of Chekhov's plays, which provoked the author's deep dissatisfaction. In spite of their verbatim fidelity to Chekhov's scripts, Chekhov's texts were subjected to common Soviet adaptation practice, and in the process they were alienated from their original spirit and from the author's intentions. Chekhov, who proclaimed his artistic program as "the most absolute freedom imaginable--freedom from violence and lies no matter what form [they] ... take" (qtd. in Gilman 4), was sometimes even labeled as a precursor of the Bolshevik revolution. However, none of his five major plays--Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard--had an explicit political agenda nor was any of them intended as a farce or a tragedy. Instead Chekhov created a new kind of drama, with which theater directors struggled throughout the 20th century; they found it very difficult to attain "a fine balance between the humane, ironic comedy that Chekhov insisted was his intent in the plays and the realization of their innate pathos, rising on occasions to levels of tragic intensity, reflecting the frustration his characters experience" (Manvell 93-94). Such a multifaceted writer as Chekhov was reduced by Soviet criticism to a mere protester against social injustice, and his works were limited only to a certain ideological or moralistic message. Yet, none of his works were banned in Soviet times, and in general he was canonized as a "critical realist" author, whose writings illustrated the decay and moral degradation of the old world.

The period from the 1930's to the 1960's saw numerous film adaptations of Chekhov's short stories: I. Annensky's Man in a Shell (1939), The Wedding (1944), The Anna Cross (1954), S. Samsonov's The grasshopper (1955), M. Kheifit's Lady with a Pet Dog (1960) and In the Town of S (1966), K. Yudin's The Safety Match (1955), Y. Bazelyan's The House with an Attic (1960)--to name a few. Soviet film directors preferred to adapt Chekhov's short stories and vaudevilles. Chekhov's major plays, on the other hand, were mostly theater's prerogative: all of them took pride in being faithful to Chekhov's texts, which were cherished as part of the sacred heritage of Great Russian Classical Literature. In all of the Soviet screen adaptations, however, although plots, characters, and dialogues were carefully preserved, the spirit of the works, the interpretation of conflicts and plot collisions, and the rendition of characters were corrupted and distorted in accordance with the only possible reading of literary texts at that time: a politically correct reading.

After Stalin's death, during the so-called Thaw (1950s-60s) and Stagnation (1960s-70s), censorship was loosened up a bit, and 19th century classical Russian literature, which had already secured its presence and the right to exist within the Soviet artistic system, became the safest channel for expressing all kinds of dissident thoughts. As Evgenii Dobrenko writes in an article on Soviet film adaptations, Soviet film directors discovered first of all "the social-psychological depth of classics themselves," and later, classical literature came to be interpreted as a "screen palimpsest--a list of allusions and socio-historical fantasies, which were at odds with the official doctrine" (Dobrenko 46-47). Indeed it became much easier to get permission to adapt to film a work written by an already "ideologically approved" author. Classical literature, including Chekhov, started to serve as a protective umbrella for young directors who wished to express non-conformist contemporary concerns. Directors would thus often prefer to convey anti-establishment thoughts through an adaptation of already "permitted" work, rather than through an original screenplay by a contemporary author that might be subject to suspicion and censorship. As might be expected, that ideological "loophole" engendered a growing number of film adaptations not only of Chekhov's short stories, but his plays as well.

In the 1960's and 1970's, several films based on Chekhov's plays were produced: The Seagull by Yuli Karasik (1970), The Three Sisters by Samson Samsonov (1964) and Uncle Vania by Andrei Konchalovsky (Nikita Mikhalkov's brother, 1970). However, adapting a play to the screen was a more challenging task than the adaptation of short stories. As Linda Seger points out in her book on adaptation, novels or short stories are already art forms in themselves, while "the play is not an art form until it's gone through its magical transformation into theater" (Seger 34). Most Soviet film directors attempted to adapt plays to the screen by simply planting characters in a real life setting, but this was problematic, because plays are by nature created for an artificial space (the theater's stage). "Theater has no need for the realism of a film. In fact, realism can interrupt the action and destroy the magic" (Seger 38). Russian film critic M.Turovskaya suggested that film adaptations of Chekhov's plays by Karasik, Samsonov and Konchalovsky failed because directors treated the text of a play as a usual screenplay, and did not succeed in discovering "the right formula" for translating theatrical conventions into the conventions of the screen (Turovskaya, Kino 101). As a result, those film adaptations lacked what was unique in Chekhov's plays: the mood created when seemingly unrelated details, monologues, characters' remarks form a unifying atmosphere, the existential basis of human life. Instead they were full of artificial dialogues, agonizing pauses and inept realism. One of the most successful film adaptations of Uncle Vanya was Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1994), which deliberately preserved the theatricality of the play and was in essence a recorded theater production.

When The Unfinished Play for Mechanical Piano (3) came out in 1977, it was described as loosely based on Chekhov's early immature play Platonov. Indeed one could get such an immediate impression even from the cast, as all characters were drawn from that play. For example, Variety published a review praising the film for camera work and decor and predicting it would be a sure winner at summer festivals on the grounds of its literary and filmic qualities. The reviewer noted that Mechanical Piano was a screen adaptation of Chekhov's play Platonov that "had largely been disowned by the author and overlooked by even his ardent admirers" and had "some profound moments of truth, as the young Chekhov showed through the rather banal situations of bored people just talking and idling time away" (Variety 23). The name of the play was misspelled ("Platanov"), but the review contained a more significant mistake: it was not the young Chekhov, but the young screenwriters Nikita Mikhalkov and Aleksandr Adabashian who showed "the profound moments of truth."

Chekhov while still a student at medical school did indeed write an untitled play. He offered it to Malyi Theater in Moscow, but they turned it down. Chekhov put it away and never tried to revise, publish or offer it to any theater in his lifetime. It was discovered only 20 years after his death (in 1923), and later published under various titles, such as Without Fathers, Fatherlessness, Platonov or simply A Play without a Title. The play was exceedingly lengthy (it would have taken over 6 hours to produce), poorly structured, monotonous, repetitive, had over 20 characters and included all possible melodramatic situations: violence, murder, assassination attempts, blackmail, deceit, infidelity, betrayal, financial scams, eaves-dropping, miscommunication, suicide, etc. Richard Gilman in his book on Chekhov's plays called it "a small encyclopedia of melodramatic situations" and its prevailing spirit "highly un-Chekhovian" (Gilman 46-47). However, it could also be regarded as a workshop of ideas, devices, motifs and characters that would later appear in Chekhov's mature drama. One can trace the development of certain characters from Platonov into characters in Ivanov, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vania, and The Three Sisters. Some lines were used almost unchanged, certain intrigues elaborated, themes recycled.

The play written by young Chekhov is a melodrama about a very handsome, intelligent, disillusioned 27-year old man Mikhail Platonov. His father having left him without an estate, Platonov dropped out of university, became a teacher in a provincial school, and married a simple-hearted, kind, loving, but not very sophisticated young woman. He entertains himself by being a neurotic womanizer and earning the reputation of a local "enfant terrible." Platonov takes pleasure in being called a scoundrel and gladly plays the role of a petty demon in the uneventful life of Russian provincial society. Being indeed good-looking and very eloquent, he seduces women, destroys relationships, and abuses friendships. His outrageous behavior covers up his complete failure in life. His ambitions and intellectual potential are left unclaimed by society. A tragic discrepancy between reality and the promise of youth turns Platonov into a worthless, demoralized rascal. His popularity with women can be explained not only by his looks but also by the pseudo-romantic image he projects: suffering in the vulgar world, unappreciated by society, bright, and unwilling to conform to the coarse and boring life around him. The Russian public at the end of the 19th century gladly welcomed those belated Child Harold type characters whose look-alikes still populated Russian literature. Platonov is frustrated by his social and professional worthlessness, but does nothing to change his destiny. Such characters, known in literary criticism as "superfluous men," prefer self-destructive behavior to active involvement in social life. Platonov is too cowardly to commit suicide, too feeble to commit to one woman, too weak to start a new life.

All four major female characters in the play are in love with Platonov: Platonov's wife Sasha; his occasional mistress Anna, a general's widow; his childhood sweetheart Sofia; and the daughter of a neighboring landowner, Grekova. The play starts with the arrival of Sofia, who knew Platonov back in his student years when he was full of hopes, desires and ambitions. They had been in love, but she left for Petersburg never to come back. Five years later, she nevertheless returned as the wife of Platonov's friend Sergei Voinitsev. Platonov is intrigued and excited. He uses all his powers to seduce Sofia and make her believe that he is still in love with her. Sofia trusts him, leaves her husband and tries to convince Platonov to go away with her. But for Platonov, this is just another game: he flirts simultaneously with the young Grekova, makes promises to Anna, tries to reconcile with his wife and swears that he will never leave her. Eventually all his lies are revealed: Grekova files a lawsuit against Platonov who verbally abused her; Sasha attempts suicide; one of Anna's suitors tries to kill him. Finally, he is fatally shot by Sofia. In addition to the complex plot there are several sub-plots: a wealthy Jewish businessman trying to purchase the general's estate, two Russian merchants arranging the marriage of Anna to a rich landowner, so that she can repay her debts to them, etc. The play is teeming with various minor characters, such as the local brigand Osip, a young doctor, Platonov's friend and brother in law, who hates his profession, etc., etc. The play could probably be produced today as a TV serial or a soap opera, but it is difficult to imagine it being produced on stage.

However, there have been quite a few theater productions of Platonov. Throughout its theatrical life the play appeared under many different titles and underwent so many transformations that it was hard to believe that all those productions had the same literary source. In an article "The Importance of Being Earnest (or Funny) in Adapting Chekhov: The Case of 'Platonov,'" Clara Hollosi describes major adaptations of Platonov in Europe and the U.S. It was first translated and adapted by John Cournos as That Worthless Fellow Platonov (1930). Cournos omitted the first act, but otherwise the translation was more or less accurate. Most other noteworthy productions, though, were based on a different translation and adaptation by Basil Ashmore (1952) under the title Don Juan (in the Russian Manner). Ashmore not only ignored the first act, he changed the ending, reduced the number of characters, and deleted certain scenes. In addition to that, Ashmore distorted Chekhov's phrases, and added his own lines. Without the first act, which provided the background, the viewers encountered only unmotivated cruelty by the cynical womanizer Platonov in the atmosphere of the boring and empty existence of provincial dwellers. He became an obvious villain, the petty demon of a petty, vulgar, sluggish society. Alex Szoglyi (1960) translated and adapted the play under the title A Country Scandal. He also left out the first act, significantly reduced a number of dialogues and monologues, and made it into a comedy, even a farce. Yet, serious scholars and translators of Chekhov, such as D. Magarshack and R. Hingley, have always regarded Platonov as a profound play, and by no means a farce.

In Eastern Europe, as Hollosi observes, the approach to Chekhov's Platonov has been completely different. In the 1960's and 1970's in Hungary, for example, it was perceived as "a requiem for a lost generation." its stage productions, which have included the first act, emphasized the tragedy of young people in Eastern Europe, who were deprived of opportunities to live to their own desires. As previously noted, under the severe ideological censorship in Eastern Europe, as in the Soviet Union, classical literature provided the "safe texts" that directors could use for the expression of dissident concerns and opinions. Moreover, in those productions Platonov was transformed into a tragic hero, both victim and victimizer, cruel and ill fated, unable to apply his natural intellectual and human potential, useless and superfluous, and his crippled morality was obliquely blamed on the communist regime.

Thus, Platonov theater productions ranged from farce to political pamphlet. This was possible because the text of the play was vulnerable. The mature Chekhov never disavowed the play, and he had no plans to revisit, rework, or publish it. The very fact that it was published only after his death, without his blessing, raises a moral issue of violating the author's rights over his legacy. The way it was discovered, published and later produced on stage, Platonov had nothing to do with the mature Chekhov's vision of what a play should be. Chekhov could probably never have foreseen that some day his immature play would find its way to stage and screen. Had he known that, he might have either destroyed or thoroughly reworked it.

Hollosi concludes her article on theater productions of Platonov by saying that: "Only a few adaptations succeeded in achieving such a unique fusion of humor, lyricism, irony and tragedy as Nikita Mikhalkov's did" (Hollosi 49). However, firstly, Mikhalkov's was a film adaptation, not a theater production, and secondly, the film could hardly be considered an adaptation of an early Chekhov's play to the screen despite the opinion of most critics. The poorly structured, melodramatic and lengthy Platonov provided only the framework for the screenplay, inside which screenwriters Nikita Mikhalkov and Aleksandr Adabashian recreated the true world of the mature Chekhov. It was their first collaboration on a film script. In the years to come they successfully used the same method to adapt several other literary texts to film (Several Days in the Life of Oblomov, 1979, Five evenings, 1979, and The Dark Eyes 1987). The key to their success was, as Turovskaya called it "the struggle with the original" or "estrangement from it" (Turovskaya, Ob ekranizatsii Chekhova 36). Indeed it is more demanding and challenging to adapt an accomplished, integrated, well-organized original than to write a screenplay based on motifs.

Unlike the abovementioned translators and adaptors of the play Platonov to the theater who usually left out the first act (47 pages out of 172), Mikhalkov and Adabashian preserved practically the entire text of the first act, which comprises one third of the film script. Instead they deleted the remaining three acts and replaced them with their own story and new dialogues. The new text was a pastiche from Chekhov's lengthy original, including some phrases that Chekhov had edited out of the final version of the play. (See the drafts in Chekhov's complete works). The screenwriters also incorporated some characters, dialogues and situations from several of Chekhov's short stories and certain motifs from his later mature drama. In addition, after a careful study of Chekhov's archives, they employed phrases and images from his letters and notebooks. For example, Doctor Triletsky's passionate confession at dinner about his job and the hectic life of a country doctor who has to read and think only about cholera, is actually Chekhov's own: it is a direct quotation from his letter to a publisher A. Suvorin (August 15, 1892), in which Chekhov complained that unfortunately he had to combine a literary career with his medical practice (Chekhov, Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov 1: 322).

Thus, all additions to the first act of Platonov are actually Chekhovian. Even the mechanical piano, which gave the film its title but which could not be found in any of Chekhov's literary works, was borrowed from his notebooks. All Chekhov's mature plays include some kind of a major important symbol, an emblem, which ties the action together and plays a significant role in its culmination. It can be a dead seagull (The Seagull), a map of Africa on the wall (Uncle Vania), a cherry orchard (The Cherry Orchard), etc. Platonov lacked such a symbol, and Mikhalkov and Adabashian had to come up with one themselves. They chose a mechanical piano. Its appearance in the middle of the film counteracted the previously peaceful and joyful pastimes at the estate and the seemingly idyllic relationships between characters. Anna wants to surprise her guests and brings in the mechanical piano, which was a novelty in Russia. The surprise has an unexpected impact. The mechanical piano in the film is a metaphor for the empty, isolated, worthless existence of the characters. Its heartless recital creates a dramatic impression on virtually everybody and is followed by an abrupt change in the tempo and tone of the succeeding plot development. Scenes subsequent to the mechanical piano performance are entirely new, written by Mikhalkov and Adabashian, but they are constructed according to the logic and structure of Chekhov's later plays.

The screenwriters used lines written by Chekhov in the film dialogues, but in a few instances, they wrote dialogues of their own. For example, the insinuating exchange between Anna and Platonov, which consists only of interjections and exclamations; or the repetitive nonsensical remarks by Sasha's elderly father, who constantly falls asleep. But those inserted non-Chekhov dialogues were always carefully modeled on the ones really written by Chekhov, imitating their fragmentary and scrappy lines. Paul Schmidt, in the introduction to his new translation of Chekhov's plays, characterizes the dialogues in the major plays as "mutually incomprehensible pieces," in which "phrases are repeated and repeated until they become mere sound effect, lacking sense. The silences of missed opportunity, the nonsense phrase that suddenly seems laden with meaning, the jealousies and envies and despairs that drive people to drink instead of expressing their feelings--all are revealed in an increasingly fragmentary language" (Schmidt 3-4). The apparently frivolous attitude of the screenwriters to Chekhov's works and words was necessary to create a sort of post-modernist reincarnation of Chekhov's play. It was decomposed, restructured, altered and put back together as a puzzle, in which all the pieces are indeed parts of Chekhov's creative universe. The result is an entirely new play, which Chekhov had never written.

One of the main reasons why Mechanical Piano was considered to be an adaptation of Platonov was that Mikhalkov and Adabashian kept most of the cast of characters. However, they reduced the number of characters from Platonov by half, retaining 10 out of 20. As a result, certain subplots and scenes disappeared automatically. For example, three characters--Bugrov, Vengerovich and Petrin--were amalgamated into one: Petrin. After that transformation, Petrin became a completely different character with a new agenda. In general, the screenwriters kept only characters that later would become types in Chekhov's mature oeuvre: a wealthy obnoxious landowner (Shcherbuk), a romantic old-timer (Glagoliev), a useless pseudo-patriotic phrasemonger and idler (Sergei Voinitsev), a careless doctor, buffoon and loafer (Nikolai Triletsky) and a vain impudent servant (Jakov). The counterparts for the film's characters can easily be found in Chekhov's later plays and short stories. Doctor Triletsky will grow old to become Chebutykin in The Three Sisters; servant Jakov will find his "twin" in The Cherry Orchard, Platonov's wife Sasha will metamorphose into Sonia in Uncle Vanya. In some cases Mikhalkov and Adabashian preserved only the last name from the play. In Chekhov's play, the local landowner Shcherbuk was a minor supporting character, in the film, he was transformed into a petty tyrant with two unmarried daughters, proclaiming the snobbish conviction that only people of noble origin could produce cultural values. Shcherbuk's monologue on the danger of letting "dirty-faced" plebeians into higher society was borrowed from Chekhov's short story At the Estate. In the story, a young lawyer, a commoner by origin, is offended and discouraged by an obnoxious landowner. In the film, the role of the young lawyer is assigned to Petrin, a nouveau riche, who responds to Scherbuk's monologue that "by the way" he is one of those "dirty-faced commoners" himself; however, it is he who pays the general's bills and who in reality owns the estate and puts the food on their table. Petrin's remark resembles the monologue of Lopakhin from The Cherry Orchard, a self-made businessman, a son of a serf, who acquired the estate at the end of a play.

Mikhalkov and Adabashian significantly reworked the character of Platonov transforming him from a Russian Don Juan into a Russian Hamlet. Hamlet references existed in Chekhov's original play; it was one of the roles Platonov tried to play but failed. In the film, he is portrayed not as a scoundrel, deceptive womanizer and rascal, but as an honest man who suffocates in a hypocritical environment. He tells Anna that he does not intend to carry on an affair with her because he is married. He admits to Sofia that many years ago he loved her dearly and now is very disappointed in her choice of a husband, but does not suggest any further development of the old romance. The cinematic Platonov is a decent person, yet disappointed and disillusioned. Towards the end of the film he becomes bitter, stops pretending, and starts telling the unpleasant truth to everybody around him. But the main thrust of his criticism is directed at himself. Platonov's hysterical outburst at the end of the day is the film's climax. His repentant prayer amidst the endless Russian landscape has a universal and timeless message: "Now I know for sure: it's enough to betray just once, just once be unfaithful to what you believed in and what you loved, and you would never get rid of the succession of betrayals and lies. O merciful God! Save and protect me, give me strength and show me the way!" The cinematic Platonov blames himself for being weak and conforming to the life he hates. All those years he cherished memories of the past, of his love, of his youth. He was in love with a young girl, Sofia, who was also full of hopes and plans, but she grew into a narrow-minded beautiful idler, who continues to profess hypocritical values, living out of touch with reality and learning nothing. He feels betrayed, deceived and disappointed not only by his present trivial existence, but also by his love, his past, and his dreams.

In the middle of the night Platonov runs through the house, hysterically screaming, echoing Uncle Vania in his frustrations:

   I am 35 years old. Everything is ruined.
   I am a zero, a nobody. I am 35
   years old. Lermontov had already
   been dead for 8 years. Napoleon was
   a general. And I've done nothing in
   that damned life of yours. You've
   destroyed my life. It's because of you
   I am a nobody. Where is my true self?
   I am a good-for-nothing cripple!
   Where are my strength, my intellect,
   my talent? A wasted life!"

This sort of nervous breakdown is very typical of Chekhov's characters. Just compare it with Uncle Vanya's lines:

   You've destroyed my life! Thanks to
   you, I've never even had a life! ... My
   life is ruined! I am talented, smart,
   brave ... If I'd had a normal life, I
   could have been another Schopenhauer,
   an other Dostoevsky!"

But in the case of Uncle Vanva "you" refers to his brother-in-law, and Platonov accuses everybody around him including himself. Finally, Platonov tries to commit suicide as do several characters in Chekhov's major plays: Konstantin in The Seagull, Ivanov in Ivanov, Uncle Vanya in Uncle Vanya. He rushes towards a river and jumps off a steep bank into the water. However, the water is too shallow and the suicide attempt ends in a pathetic blunder, making Platonov a tragicomic figure just like Uncle Vanya.

Platonov's suicide attempt adds a new twist to the film. His unsophisticated but loyal and loving wife Sasha follows him into the water to console and comfort him, as if she had not heard Platonov's rude and pitiless words a moment earlier about how he hates her along with her borsch and canaries. She soothes him:

   I love you very much whatever you
   are. You are the world to me. I'm
   afraid of nothing, I can endure anything
   because no one in the world will
   ever love you as I do. Mishen'ka, you
   are tired. You will rest, and we will be
   happy again. And we'll live a long,
   long life and we'll be lucky, and we
   will see a new, bright and pure life
   and new wonderful people, who will
   understand us and forgive us. Only
   we must love. If we love, we'll live a
   long and happy life.

Sasha's monologue is a paraphrase of Sonia's words of consolation to Uncle Vanya in Uncle Vanya, but there is a new aspect to the film's version. Sonia talks about a wonderful life after death as a compensation for present sufferings:

   And when we're dead, we'll say that
   our lives were full of pain, that we
   wept and suffered, and God will have
   pity on us, and then, Uncle, dear
   Uncle Vanya, we'll see a brand-new
   life, all shining and beautiful, we'll be
   happy ... and we'll rest ... We'll
   hear the angels singing, we'll see the
   diamonds of heaven, and all our
   earthly woes will vanish in a flood of
   compassion that overwhelms the
   world!"

Sasha's sincere profession of unconditional love in the film turns out to be a salvation for Platonov in his present earthly days. He suddenly realizes that his unsophisticated, simple wife understands better than anybody else what life is about. Interestingly, Sasha is the only one who can't stand the mechanical piano performance: she faints. Her sincere and loving nature can't tolerate the artificial and fake performance of the machine. In Chekhov's original play it is Sasha who after being betrayed by Platonov attempts to commit suicide; in Mikhalkov's adaptation, Sasha saves Platonov from suicide by the power of her love. The scene is very touching but avoids affected pathos. Mikhalkov faithfully follows Chekhov's tradition of understatement and reticence. The viewers do not hear the rest of the conversation: the close-up is followed by a long shot and the evolving sound of an aria from Gaetano Donizetti's opera The Elixir of Love. Michail Platonov, the witty Hamlet and local Don Juan, wet and miserable, wrapped in a woman's shawl, is ushered out of the water by his wife.

In a recently published study, A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type, V. Ulea suggests an alternative definition of tragedy and comedy, different from the traditional Aristotelian one. She argues that it is not the plot that distinguishes comedy from tragedy, but instead, the character's potential and the resulting effect on the society or environment produced by the character's actions. In tragedy, the protagonist's failure leads to significant changes in society, for example, Romeo and Juliet, but in the case of Chekhov's plays, failure of a character even with a powerful potential does not produce any changes in the world. Ulea states that Chekhov's four major plays are comedies, "comedies of a new type." Chekhov would probably agree with that; he insisted on treating his plays as comedies, but did not succeed in persuading Stanislavsky of that. Mikhalkov's film Platonov is a perfect example of a truly Chekhovian comedy. A character with a strong potential, Mikhail Platonov (who possesses a much stronger potential than Chekhov's original character) opposes society but fails to induce any changes. "Everything will remain as it had been." These are the final words pronounced by Anna in the film. This statement is articulated or implied in many Chekhov plays. All Chekhov characters are unhappy with their lives and dream of a change. However, they are afraid of that change and never have the courage actually to pursue it. Chekhov always teased his readers luring them into anticipation of a tragedy, but surprised them at the end with an ironic author's smile, even in cases when characters die. Mikhalkov and Adabashian, indeed, created a screenplay for Mechanical Piano in complete accordance with Chekhov's vision: a play in which drama never unfolds into tragedy but instead produces a comic outcome with tragic overtones.

Life does not change for characters in Chekhov's plays, regardless of what they cry out in moments of psychological crisis. Nor does it change for the characters in Mechanical Piano. Yet, there is a gleam of hope for a better future in Mikhalkov's film. It is embodied in a character invented by the screenwriters, the young boy Petya. Being a casual guest at the general's estate, Petya is a silent observer of the action, he does not have any lines, but he is present in most scenes, though completely ignored by adults preoccupied with their own affairs. Nevertheless, he plays an important part in the film. His reactions to what he sees are genuine and sincere: he frowns watching people drink vodka, smiles at the rain drops dripping off an umbrella, accidentally turns a gramophone on full volume, and a blast of music ends an awkward pause. The final shot in the film shows him sleeping on a sofa in the rays of the rising sun, symbolizing the future, heartfelt and unpretentious.

In order to achieve the ambitious goal of retaining the subtle spirit of Chekhovian world, Mikhalkov not only wrote an original screenplay which was constructed according to the logic and mode of the mature Chekhov's plays, but imaginatively used the capabilities and advantages of cinema to emphasize major features of Chekhov's drama. Camera close-ups allow for facial expressions to enhance and deepen the dialogue, as in the awkward scene of Platonov's first meeting with Sofia. The opposite cinematic device was used when the director wanted to intensify the degree of hidden passions: during the painful and frank conversation between Anna and Platonov, the characters were filmed from behind in a hammock, so that nobody could see their faces. The camera captures human drama as it unfolds against the background of a beautiful landscape and lighting that constantly changes as the day goes by. This provides characters with real physical space and plays an intrinsic role in the progression of their emotional states, which are the primary basis for action in Chekhov's plays.

Mikhalkov and Adabashian were careful Chekhov readers. According to Chekhov himself: "Let everything on the stage be just as complex and at the same time just as simple as in life. People dine, merely dine, but at that moment their happiness is being made or their life is being smashed" (qtd. in Jackson 73). Following Chekhov's remark, Mikhalkov created the dinner scene, shot in dimmed, stylized lighting; a crucial scene in which everybody unmasks and unleashes suppressed emotions. The screenwriters included various ironic speech manifestations of human inner states, such as singing, quoting or a lisp, which are so typical of Chekhovian discourse. As has frequently been noted, Chekhov often employed "funny, nonsensical words, puns, malapropisms, literary quotations, speech mannerisms, distorted grammar, verbal incontinence, foreign words, obscure terminology, bombast, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-elevated and just plain inane discourse" (Adamantova and Willliamson 212). For example, Aleksandr Kaliagin, the popular actor and gifted improviser who played the role of Platonov, enhanced his performance with mocking dancing and singing and added a sarcastic lisp while telling the disguised story of his love. The periodical intrusion of random and ridiculous facts read from a local newspaper by Petrin, also added to the script by Mikhalkov and Adabashian, interrupted stumbled conversation or painful silence. Those quotations provided ironic and absurd commentaries on the action, particularly because Petrin's voice was always heard off screen, from unseen places: the bushes, a corner of the room, etc.

In the screenplay by Mikhalkov and Adabashian there are several obvious references to theater: acting in an amateur concert, putting on masks, looking through a spyglass, etc. The final scene, in which all the characters joyfully gather around Platonov and Sasha, is an important tribute to theater and to Chekhov as a revolutionary playwright. The dancing, cheering and hugging group of people, dressed half in nightgowns, half in suits, looks absurd in the middle of the open field at dawn. They remind one of actors who, having just finished a performance and partially changed out of their costumes, are celebrating the success of a play. That reference at the end of the film is intensified by camera work: the camera gradually zooms out, showing all the characters enclosed in a window frame of a house, resembling a theater stage with curtains. Mikhalkov's film renders homage to Chekhov's theater, which was successfully transposed onto a new medium-film. Simultaneously that final scene is an allusion to a key film text: Fellini's 8-1/2. The final sequence of scenes in Mechanical Piano echoes the final scene sequence in the Italian masterpiece: Guido's words to his wife, "But this confusion is me, not as I'd like to be, but as I am. I am not afraid anymore of telling the truth. Life is a celebration. Let's live it together ... Accept me for what I am, if you want me." These words are followed by a clowning procession of characters, and a final shot of a little boy (young Guido). Mikhalkov combined those allusions to emphasize his creative approach as a film director to adaptation of literary text and theater to cinema.

Though many critics consider Mechanical Piano an adaptation of Chekhov's play Platonov, it departs far enough from the original to be considered a completely independent work. Since the film's release in 1977, its screenplay has gained a life of its own. For example, the Moscow Tabakerka Theater recently produced a stage version of Mechanical Piano. The program notes state that the production is based on a play by Adabashian and Mikhalkov. Chekhov's legacy was not undermined, however, but on the contrary enhanced by the film's success. Thanks to the film, some brilliant aphorisms from Chekhov's notebooks, formerly known only to a narrow circle of Chekhov scholars have become popularized in the press, in philosophical and scholarly writings, and in everyday life conversations: for example, a phrase from Chekhov's notebook, articulated in the film by Platonov, "We [the Russians] have got European self-esteem, though our development is Asian" (Chekhov, Complete works 17: 87).

One of the central scenes in the film, which triggers a decisive conversation between Platonov and Sofia, is the episode in which Platonov tells the story of his love, betrayal and frustration, while claiming that he read this story somewhere but does not recall the author's name. Sofia understands the true significance of the story, gets upset and leaves. Her limited and naive husband Sergei mentions with an air of profound wisdom: "That is something in the taste of Uspensky or Leskov." (4) Mikhalkov's method too can be described as: "Something in the taste of Chekhov." It is unlikely that creators of the film were familiar with the ideas of intertexuality, transtexuality, paratexuality or hypertextuality, or the theories of post-modernism, or Foucault's idea of the anonymity of discourse; it is unlikely that they even had in mind the Russian Bakhtin's notion of cultural dialogism (Stam 64-68). The film was an intuitive and very brave attempt to overcome the traditional limitations on film adaptations of classical literature that breaks through canonical taboos and prejudices. Mechanical Piano opened doors to other Russian film directors in their quest to adapt Chekhov's world (Kira Muratova Chekhov's Motifs (2002), Sergei Soloviev About Love (2003) and others) and manifested the right of an artist to create a new contemporary cinematic Chekhovian meta-text.

Notes

(1) Here and throughout this paper, translation of quotations from Russian sources is mine.

(2) The English translation of dialogues used in this paper is based on the subtitles made for the most recent DVD release of the film by RUSICO company (2003).

(3) Henceforth referred to as Mechanical Piano.

(4) G. Uspensky and N. Leskov--popular writers at the end of the 19th century

Works Cited

Adamantova, Vera, and Rodney Williamson. "Chekhov's Irony and Satire and the Translator's Art: Visions and Versions of Personal Worlds." Chekhov Then and Now. The Reception of Chekhov in World culture. Ed. Douglas Clayton. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 211-224.

Chekhov, A.P. Complete Works. Vol. XVII. Moscow: Nauka, 1980.

--. Chekhov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. Vol. 1. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1960.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. "Rossia, kotoruiu my obreli. Russkaia klassika, stalinskoe kino i proshloe v ego revoliutsionnom razvitii." Vorposy Literatury 5 (2000): 45-65.

Hollosi, Clara. "The Importance of being earnest (or funny) in adapting Chekhov: the case of "Platonov." Chekhov Then and Now. The Reception of Chekhov in World culture. Ed. Douglas Clayton. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 40-49.

Jackson, Robert Louis, ed. Chekhov. A Collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Manvell, Roger. Theater and Film. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1979.

Mikhalkov, Nikita. "Neokonchennvi razgovor o slagaemykh stilia." Interview. Iskusstvo Kino 11 (1978): 86-100.

Seger, Linda. The Art of Adaptation. Turning, fact and fiction in to Film. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992.

Schmidt, Paul. Preface. The Plays of Anton Chekhov. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997.

Stam, Robert. "Beyond fidelity: the Dialogics of Adaptation." Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. Rutgers UP, 2000. 54-78.

Turovskaya, Maya. "Kino--Chekhov 77--Teatr." Iskusstvo Kino 1 (1978): 87-106.

--. "Ob ekranizatsii Chekhova." Kinovedcheskie Zapiski 5 (1990): 25-48.

Unfinished Play for Mechanical Piano. Dir. Nikita Mikhalkov. Mosfilm., 1977.

Variety 19 Jan.1977: 285: 23.

Works Consulted

Hingley, Ronald. A Life of Anton Chekhov. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Magarshack, David. Chekhov, a life. New York: Grove Press, 1953.

Ulea, V. A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type. Southern Illinois UP, 2002.