Plays · 1878

Untitled Play (Bezottsovshchina / "Platonov")

Name: Chekhov Entire
Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Безотцовщина (Платонов)

Headnote

The manuscript survives without a title. Chekhov wrote it around 1878, while still a schoolboy in Taganrog or a first-year medical student newly arrived in Moscow — he was eighteen, perhaps nineteen. He never published it, never staged it, and never mentioned it in his letters; it surfaced only in 1920, found among family papers in a Moscow bank vault, missing its opening leaves along with its title page. Editors have supplied working titles ever since — Bezottsovshchina (Fatherlessness, or, more loosely, Without Patrimony), A Play Without a Title, and, in the West, simply Platonov after its central figure — but none of them is Chekhov’s own, and this edition follows the Soviet Academy text (Полное собрание сочинений и писем в тридцати томах, vol. 11, 1986) in treating the piece as what it is: an unnamed first attempt at full-length drama by a young writer who had not yet found the economy that would define him.

The scale alone marks it as juvenilia in the most literal sense: at roughly four times the length of a normal play, it would run six or seven hours uncut, and no company has ever staged it whole. What it contains, though, is unmistakably the hand that would go on to write Ivanov and The Seagull — visible here in embryo, undisciplined, but startlingly confident for a teenager. Mikhail Platonov, a failed idealist reduced to village schoolmastering, is the first sketch of the type Chekhov would return to for the rest of his life: the articulate, self-aware man who diagnoses his own uselessness with total clarity and does nothing to cure it. Around him Chekhov assembles a full provincial ecosystem — the widowed General’s wife Anna Petrovna, presiding over her half-ruined estate with a gambler’s chess-table wit; her stepson Sergei Voinitsev, newly and improbably married; his wife Sofya, who once loved Platonov as a student and finds him again, aged, diminished, and still magnetic; Platonov’s own devoted, overmatched wife Sasha; her father the garrulous Colonel Triletsky and her brother the wisecracking young doctor Nikolai; the moneylender Vengerovich and his circle; and a chorus of landowners, merchants, and servants who fill out a summer of croquet, chess, drink, and slowly accumulating catastrophe. Nearly every later Chekhov obsession is already staked out: the mortgaged estate, the marriage nobody quite chose, the affair conducted in full view of people too bored or too polite to stop it, money owed and never paid, guns kept in drawers.

What the play does not yet have is restraint. Its dialogue runs long where the mature Chekhov would cut to a gesture; its ironies are stated where he would later leave them to precipitate on their own; Platonov’s charm and cruelty are laid out at a length no producible play could sustain. Read as a finished work it strains; read as the workshop where a nineteen-year-old taught himself to hear how people actually talk past one another — the interruptions, the running private jokes, the way a scene changes subject before anyone has finished a sentence — it is invaluable, and often very funny. The comic engine-room of the play, the doctor Nikolai Triletsky, already has the deadpan, appetite-driven patter of the early Antosha Chekhonte sketches Chekhov was selling to the humor magazines in these same years; Platonov’s set-pieces of self-mockery already have the double edge of the mature tragicomedies. The play was never meant to be read as apprentice work by its author — he simply put it away — but it is the clearest surviving record of how Chekhov’s world first assembled itself, all its later furniture already in the room.

This translation follows the surviving text exactly as the standard edition prints it, including the editorial matter that precedes and follows the play itself in its most widely circulated online source (the lib.ru transcription), preserved here as the transmission history of an untitled, once-lost manuscript rather than smoothed away. Footnoted phrases in French and Latin — the small change of educated provincial speech in the 1870s — are rendered inline with their original-language source flagged, following this edition’s practice for embedded foreign material.

Show the original alongside the translation Mark as read

Lib.ru/Classics: Chekhov Anton Pavlovich. Bezottsovshchina

Lib.ru/Классика: Чехов Антон Павлович. Безотцовщина

Chekhov Anton Pavlovich

Чехов Антон Павлович

Bezottsovshchina

Безотцовщина

Lib.ru/Classics:

Lib.ru/Классика:

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Untitled Play (Bezottsovshchina / "Platonov")

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