Unclean Tragedians and Leprous Playwrights

"Нечистые трагики и прокажённые драматурги" ("Unclean Tragedians and Leprous Playwrights") appeared in the comic weekly "Будильник" ("The Alarm Clock") in January 1884, in its recurring column "The Budilnik Home Theater," over the pseudonym "My Brother’s Brother" – one of the many signatures of the Antosha Chekhonte years. It is not a story but a whole theatrical program compressed into three pages: a title, a mock subtitle ("Many acts, and still more scenes"), a cast list, an epilogue printed at the front instead of a prologue, and six acts that the piece runs through two at a time because the reader is impatient.

The target is Moscow’s spectacle theater, and specifically the impresario Mikhail Lentovsky and the melodramas manufactured for him. Real people appear under their own names as characters or as stage furniture: Lentovsky himself, who arrives in a trunk dressed in a playbill; the playwright Tarnovsky, who writes at a blood-covered desk with a skull for a head and dips his pen in lava; the actor Pisarev, handed the villain’s part before the villain exists; the comic Svobodin, the machinist Waltz swallowing red-hot coals offstage, the architect Shekhtel designing the cannon, the dancer Hansen cutting entrechats at the least appropriate moment. Chekhov had made the same joke a few weeks earlier in "Кавардак в Риме" ("Chaos in Rome"), and the two pieces should be read together.

What gives the parody its bite is that the melodrama’s own characters know they are in one. The young count demands to know what connection he has with the plot; Burl blames every misfortune on an unseen "Octopus"; the general explains that since he is the villain he must not resemble a human being in any particular, and eats raw meat to prove it; a man shot dead observes that the author who kills also raises up. The machinery is the subject, and the audience is in the cast list too – "The Public, a lady agreeable in every respect; eats whatever is served," a lift from the "lady agreeable in all respects" of "Dead Souls," and the sharpest line in the piece.

A textual note: the text was originally scraped in a broken state, split into the dramatis-personae list plus four fragments registered as separate plays (the piece’s own "Act One,Act Two," and so on), with an unrelated story concatenated onto the tail of one of them. It has been re-fetched in full and consolidated here as the single work it always was.