On Chekhov and the Silent Collapse and Rebirth of Drama

When Peter Szondi, writing in the nervous mid-century quiet of postwar European thought, turned his attention to theory — not of literature broadly, but of drama specifically — he did not treat it as one might an ancient genre or art form. He treated it instead like a living structure with organs and internal laws, whose very shape arose from metaphysical and historical conditions. Drama is not a relic for Szondi. It is very much alive and the form of drama, in Szondi’s account, is not merely what happens onstage; it is what is possible to say, to resolve, to mean when time and agency still operate with some unity. That possibility, as he shows with patient and fatal insight, begins to collapse by the end of the 19th century. And in the soft rubble of that collapse stands Anton Chekhov.

And in the soft rubble of that collapse stands Anton Chekhov.

In The Theory of the Modern Drama, Szondi devotes particular attention to Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a play he treats with the kind of respect usually reserved for works of diagnosis rather than demonstration. In Three Sisters, action is not so much eliminated as evaporated. What remains is a space thick with inwardness, repetition, memory and temporal drift. Characters speak not to alter the world but to circle the contours of their condition. Their conflicts are not resolved, and — perhaps more unsettling — they are not decisively escalated either. Instead, a fire burns offstage, love dies quietly in a corner, and Moscow remains a dream whose very mention becomes a kind of tragic refrain. What Chekhov dramatizes, Szondi says, is not conflict, but the impossibility of conflict – and therefore of resolution - in a world where volition has grown vague and time offers no horizon of redemption.

Amazingly, Chekhov inserts a clue as to what he is doing in Three Sisters and perhaps these lines gave Szondi the flash of insight he needed for his theory:

KULYGIN:  The Romans were healthy because they knew how to work and knew how to rest….Their life went on within definite forms…[sic] What loses its form comes to an end – and the same in our everyday life.[1]

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Szondi’s diagnosis — haunting and precise — became clearer to me as I recalled my own direct encounter with Chekhov, years ago seeing The Cherry Orchard in London. My experience of the play then was that it was hauntingly beautiful, even though the play is laced with failure, departure, loss.  I didn’t put much thought into why that was the case, but now Szondi has illuminated that.

The Cherry Orchard, written later than Three Sisters, embodies Szondi’s insights with subtlety yet with great force. He does not discuss The Cherry Orchard in the early chapters of Theory of the Modern Drama, but it would be difficult to imagine a more vivid illustration of Szondi’s idea that modern drama becomes impossible not through rebellion, but through silence, delay, and the aestheticization of loss.

Indeed, one of the most telling features of The Cherry Orchard is what does not occur on stage. The central event — the sale of the family estate — happens offstage. So, too, do the negotiations, the legal handovers, and even the orchard’s destruction (symbolized by the sound of axes). The characters do not act upon their world; they await it. They speak to one another but not with the force of tragic speech — which in classical drama always carries weight, consequence, and clarity. Rather, Chekhov’s characters murmur, digress, contradict, and repeat themselves. The dialogue circles, then stalls, then resumes, like the thoughts of someone unable to sleep.

What Szondi detects in Three Sisters — the replacement of plot with mood, of conflict with atmosphere — appears even more distilled in The Cherry Orchard. But where one might expect a descent into bleakness or cynicism, Chekhov offers something stranger, and in some ways more disarming: a play that is poignant and unresolved, but also luminous. There is no catharsis, but there is beauty. There is no justice, but there is time. The final moments — the empty house, the sound of the axe, and the forgotten servant left behind who dies in front of us — do not moralize. They simply linger, like the last light in a room no one inhabits anymore.

Here, I think, is where Chekhov meets Szondi’s project most completely. Szondi is not lamenting the death of the older dramatic form; he is tracing the inner transformation of its conditions. When a form loses the metaphysical order on which it was built — the coherent self, the knowable world, the meaningful act — it cannot be preserved by style alone. And Chekhov does not try to preserve it. He lets the form dissolve — not with violence, but with grace. He accepts that in modernity, events may still occur, but they no longer add up. Time passes, but no longer builds. People speak, but their words no longer create reality.

That The Cherry Orchard is beautiful in spite of — or perhaps because of — this quiet dismantling is part of its enduring power. The beauty is not decorative; it is existential. The play does not instruct, resolve, or even explain. It witnesses.[2] And in doing so, it offers a kind of truthfulness about transience and its very human reality that classical drama, bound to structure and consequence, could not contain.

We are still early in Szondi’s book, and the argument is not yet complete. Strindberg will arrive, along with Brecht and others who meet the crisis with fragmentation or ideological reconstruction. But Chekhov stands apart. He does not reconstruct the ruins — he walks through them. And as Szondi implies, this wandering is not a failure of form but its final act of sincerity. The cherry orchard is lost, but the drama has not lied about it — and that, perhaps, is its highest achievement.

[1] Chekhov, “Three Sisters,” Act I.

[2]  I am grateful for my Southern Baptist heritage, where the word witness was routinely used as an action verb that a subject performs. We witness to others about Christ, about our relationship to Him, and about their need to have a relationship with Him as well. Today, the word witness seems to be used only in the sense of what a passive observer sees another actor doing—as in a court of law. We witness events and are then perhaps called upon to testify about them. I prefer the older, richer, and less exclusively juridical sense in which a speaker witnesses—even as an observer still witnesses events.