Michael Chekhov, Part 2

[“Michael Chekhov, Part 2” picks up right where “Part 1” left off, with the young actor (now 30) at the start of preparing one of his most significant performances at the world-renowned Moscow Art Theater: the role of Khlestakov in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky himself. 

[Coming up in this installment will be Chekhov’s most iconic production, the 1924 staging of Hamlet, in which he played the title role.  This part of my profile continues through the actor-director-teacher’s last years in Russia (now the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union) and his move to Germany, where he’s reunited briefly with his first wife, Olga Konstantinovna, and his daughter, Ada Tschechowa.

[For those readers who have just come upon “Michael Chekhov,” I strongly recommend that you go back to 2 November and read Part 1 first.  There are a lot of Russian words, names of Chekhov acquaintances and colleagues, and other material that I introduced in the beginning of this profile that will recur in Parts 2 and 3.  You will want to be familiar with them in order to follow what comes next.]

In 1921, Michael Chekhov also gave what would become one of his signature performances, Khlestakov in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky; the production opened on 8 October.  The Moscow Art Theater staging of The Inspector General was a break-through performance for Chekhov.  When he’d been with the Suvorin school, he’d seen well-known actor Boris Glagolin (1879-1948) do the part in 1909 and went away thinking, “Glagolin played Khlestakov not like everyone else.”  This experience had been revelatory to him and he affirmed:

When I subsequently came to play this part, I recognized in myself Glagolin’s influence.  When Stanislavsky produced The Government Inspector [a variant of the play’s English title], he led me in a direction which had something in common with the impression that Glagolin had made on me as Khlestakov.

“The unusual freedom and originality of his creativity in this role astonished me,” Chekhov explained.  According to the editors of the English edition of The Path of the Actor, his audience in 1921 seemed to feel that same sense of “playing Khlestakov not like everyone else.”

Though Stanislavsky staged the production, Chekhov, as was his practice, designed his own make-up, for instance.  Drawing on his father’s memorable caricatures when Chekhov was a boy, the actor made Khlestakov a clownish-looking fop.  Each character’s make-up would be immensely important to Chekhov’s character development, as were the costumes and even the hand props.

In the “Afterword” to Path, editor Bella Merlin wrote:

Chekhov’s imaginative link to a character lies not only in the images that emerge in his head or the sensations that are conjured up by sound, but also in the actual props and costumes: he is one hundred per cent psycho-physical!  As he describes his boyhood in Life and Encounters:

I collected clothes from the whole house: father’s jackets, nanny’s skirts and coats, gentlemen’s and ladies’ hats, umbrellas, galoshes—everything I could find, and started to improvise without any pre-conceived plan or aim.

In another quotation from the same source, Mel Gordon reports: “I took the first piece of clothing I came across, put it on and felt: who I am.  The improvisations were serious or comic, depending on the costume. 

This memory exactly describes one of the exercises that was later part of the Michael Chekhov actor-training program.  (I have a description of my own of the exercise in my post “Creative Dramatics: Games,” 12 September 2009, under the heading “Instant Character.”) 

MAT theatergoers were “stunned by Chekhov’s ability to wed the sick and pathological with the flippant,” Mel Gordon recounts.  “On opening night, a shocked Vakhtanghov whispers to Stanislavsky, ‘Can this be the same man we see in our Studio every morning?’”  Vasilii Toporkov (1899-1970), a fellow MAT actor of Chekhov’s, reported that viewers who came to see the play “time after time” were “amazed” at Chekohov’s “unexpected improvisations, with the subtle nuances he gave to the typical traits of Gogol’s hero.”

(This production, as directed by Chekhov, came to New York City as Revisor, its Russian title, in February and March 1935 with Chekhov reprising his role as the impostor on Broadway in repertory with six other MAT plays.  It was Chekhov’s U.S. début; the Moscow Art Players’ rep toured to Philadelphia and Boston in April.)

In 1914, while at the First Studio, Chekhov met fellow student and Olga Knipper-Chekhova’s niece, Olga Konstantinovna Knipper, the daughter of his aunt’s elder brother, Konstsantin Leonardovich.  They married in April that same year and had one daughter, Olga Mikhailovna, born in September 1916.  (It was she who later took the name Ada Tschechowa and had a career in German films.)  Three years later, Olga Konstantinovna divorced Mikhail but kept his name; she eventually emigrated with her daughter to Berlin in 1920, where she had a successful career in the German cinema.

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 pretty much came and went as far as Chekhov was concerned; in his art, he was never particularly political like his contemporaries Meyerhold (1874-1940), Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), or Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), among other prominent theater artists.  He largely ignored the new regime and simply pursued his theatrical work, but nevertheless was attacked by the Bolsheviks for joining the Russian Anthroposophical Society in 1919.

On the other hand, Chekhov was suffering a series of emotional blows at the same time.  By 1919, his favorite teacher, Sulerzhitsky, had died; his wife had divorced him and taken their daughter to live in Germany; his cousin Volodya (Vladimir Ivanovich, 1894-1917), the son of Ivan Pavlovich Chekhov, committed suicide with Mikhail’s pistol; and his mother died of tuberculosis.  By the spring of 1918, he’d become acutely paranoiac and began suffering hallucinations.  All of 28, Chekhov was spiraling into a depression with suicidal thoughts.  He required psychiatry and hypnosis, and he turned to Eastern philosophy for comfort. 

In spring 1919, looking for solace, Chekhov started reading books on Hindu philosophy and yoga.  He reached out to Anthroposophy for help in sorting out his confused feelings and thoughts.  Chekhov’s encounter with the ideas of Steiner was happenstance.  He recounts that he was passing by a bookstore and spotted Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and its Attainment (first published in German as Wie Erlangt Man Erkenntnisse der Höheren Welten?) 

The Russian translation of Steiner’s book was published for the first time in 1911 with a different title; it was first published under the title which Chekhov used in 1918, suggesting that he didn’t read Steiner’s book before that year.  (One source puts the year at 1922, but if Chekhov joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1919, this would be too late.)

Chekhov said that Steiner’s name didn’t mean anything to him, even though Stanislavsky, his teacher at the time, had made passing mention of the Austrian founder of Anthroposophy one time in discussing Steiner’s theories on speech.  Chekhov had known nothing else about Steiner, but he bought the book, with some skepticism, read it, and put it aside. 

The young actor had had some familiarity with Theosophy, out of which Steiner derived Anthroposophy, from his yoga studies and he knew some members of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 in New York City by Helena Blavatsky (1831-91), a Russian occultist, philosopher, and author.  In his quest for religious and philosophical meaning for his life and his art, he read a great deal of theosophical literature.

I’m not going to delve deeply into either Blavatsky’s Theosophy or Steiner’s Anthroposophy; both are discussed in “Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist,” my profile of Steiner on ROT.  I’ll observe that Theosophy, from the Greek for ‘divine wisdom,’ stresses mysticism and esotericism, which is a philosophical doctrine that can only be understood by or is meant for a select few who have special knowledge or interest.  The Theosophical Society promotes the notion that the nature of God and the world can be understood through direct knowledge, philosophical speculation, or a physical process and emphasizes the study of Asian philosophies and theologies, especially those of India.  It was this last tenet, what he labeled “its extreme orientalism,” that put Chekhov off. 

He remembered Steiner’s book and reread it.  “This time it was the tone that the author used when speaking about the processes and Beings of the spiritual world which made a particular impression on me,” the actor wrote. 

There were no ‘secrets’, ‘mysticism’, or the desire to impress in his descriptions of that world.  The author’s simple, lucid, scientific style made the facts that he presented simple and lucid too.  Whatever was beyond the reach of sense perception was made accessible to reason. 

Chekhov embarked on a close reading of as many of Steiner’s books as he could obtain.  He found in “spiritual science,” as the esotericist labeled it, “answers to the questions that preoccupied me at the time.”  In 1921, with the guidance of Andrei Bely (1880-1934), a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic, in a stage adaptation of whose symbolist novel Petersburg Chekhov appeared at the Second Moscow Art Theater in 1925, the actor started to study Anthroposophy in earnest.

Anthroposophy, a name formed from the Greek anthropos, meaning ‘man,’ and sophia, meaning ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning,’ means ‘human knowledge.’  Steiner said the term should be understood to mean “awareness of one’s humanity.”  The religio-philosophical system Steiner founded focuses on the spiritual aspect of life and human nature and his new society was aimed at founding “new methods of spiritual research on a scientific basis.”  Steiner saw Anthroposophy as “the inwardly strengthened and practiced state of consciousness, by which man can experience himself as citizen of a spiritual world.”  He later capsulized this concept as “my consciousness of being Man.”

A fundamental tenet of Anthroposophy is the application of the methodology of science to the study and analysis of the spiritual life of humans.  Steiner was attempting to synthesize the arts, science, and spirituality.  As a result, when Chekhov developed his own acting technique in response to Stanislavsky’s System, it had a spiritual or metaphysical—even mystical component to compliment the historical, emotional, and psychological work Stanislavskian actors practiced. 

In January and February 1919, Chekhov wrote a pair of articles for the journal Gorn (Горн – The Bugle; sources also say the publication was Hearth or Work), an organ of Proletkult, an experimental Soviet artistic institution from 1917 to 1920, called “On Stanislavsky’s System” [the English translation of the title varies; “О системе Станиславского” – O sistemye Stanislavskogo] although he was explicitly forbidden by Stanislavsky to do so.  (The master himself had not even published his principles yet.  An Actor Prepares, the abridged English version of Stanislavsky’s first book on his actor-training system, appeared in the U.S. in 1933; An Actor’s Work on Himself [Работа актёра над собой – Rabota aktyora nad soboi], the first Russian edition, was released in 1938.  In 2008, a new English translation of the entire work was published as An Actor’s Work.) 

Chekhov also taught at the Proletcult Theatre, the theatrical branch of the Soviet cultural organization, and that spring, he opened the Mikhail Chekhov Studio in Moscow.  Chekhov remained director of his own studio until 1922, when he left to devote himself to the work at the MAT. 

In this first experience of teaching acting, Chekhov largely taught the Stanislavsky System; it would be the last time he’d base his teaching on his old master’s theories and practices.  His studies of Anthroposophy had already begun to influence his theories of acting and he would discover more applications, particularly Steiner’s ideas on speech, movement, gesture, and Eurythmy, which would guide Chekhov further away from the Stanislavsky principles he’d originally learned at the First Studio.

Vakhtangov, head of the First Studio, died in May 1922, succeeded by Boris Sushkevich.  Chekhov had traveled to Stuttgart, Germany, to hear Steiner lecture on Eurythmy (sometimes spelled ‘Eurhythmy’), “the science of visible speech” which makes perceptible what Steiner asserted were the internal expressions and gestures of language and music, generated when the spiritual world penetrates the soul.  This concept found its way into Chekhov’s workshops.  Chekhov returned to the Soviet Union that winter.

In October 1923, Chekhov began rehearsals for his now-famous expressionistic Hamlet in which he played the title role under the co-direction of Vladimir Tatarinov (1879-1966), Valentin Smyshlyaev (1891-1936), and Aleksandr Cheban (1886-1954).  Chekhov demanded “a new technique for acting” for this Hamlet, aiming for a “spiritual logic.”  On the first day of rehearsals, Chekhov said to the First Studio actors, “I can only say if the System of K. S. Stanislavsky is high school, then these exercises are university.”

By spring 1924, the theater artist’s mental and physical state had improved markedly.  According to U.S. theater critic Oliver Sayler (1887-1958), Chekhov had weathered the crisis and come out the other side “dignified, mature and ambitious.”   The MAT was reorganized and the First Studio became the Second Moscow Art Theater with Chekhov as its artistic director.  

The production of Hamlet, Chekhov’s maiden outing as MAT 2’s artistic director, opened after over a year of work at MAT 2 on 20 November 1924.  Gordon, who also taught at the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio in New York City, labels MAT 2’s Hamlet, which would arguably become Chekhov’s most famous and iconic production, as ”mystical,” and asserts:

Set in an “invisible world” of absolutes, many spectators perceive it as a parable about Mikhail Chekhov himself in the world of Soviet society.

Alma H. Law, an expert on Soviet theater and translator of many works by Soviet playwrights, reports in her reconstruction of Chekhov’s Hamlet that the production “represented a complete break with the traditional Russian interpretations of Hamlet as a spineless, superfluous man.”

Chekhov’s Hamlet was restless, a man of action led to an examination of the fundamental question of good and evil.  Although there were many protests from those looking for a more familiar image of the Renaissance hero, Chekhov’s Hamlet spoke directly to an audience that had, like Chekhov, lived through revolution and civil war.

Though there were three MAT directors assigned to the production, Law writes that “there is little question that the production was almost wholly Chekhov’s.”  “I managed to realize in it some of my cherished theatrical dreams,” the new MAT 2 leader affirmed.  He trimmed the traditional five acts to three acts comprised of 14 scenes, making large cuts in the script—based principally on the 1844 Russian translation by Andrei Kroneberg (1814-55) with insertions from earlier renderings by Pyotr Gnedich (1855-1926; Hamlet, 1891), a writer, poet, dramatist, and translator, and Nikolai Polevoi (1796-1846; Hamlet, 1838), a critic, journalist, and historian—largely in Hamlet’s soliloquies and other dialogue.  Chekhov cut the cast down and, as Law observed, deleted anything that he felt “slowed the headlong course of the tragedy.”

The MAT 2 artistic director focused his staging on the personal life of the title character.  Co-director Smyshlyaev felt that Chekhov saw the play as a conflict between Hamlet, “protesting, heroic, . . . fighting for the affirmation of what makes up the essence of his life,” and Claudius (played by Aleksandr Cheban in Kabuki kumadori-like make-up), “conservative, obstructing all that is holy and heroic, . . . trying to hold back everything that is striving forward.”  Law, however, says that Chekhov’s interpretation went further, incorporating his anthroposophical beliefs in the production, employing many of Steiner’s movement and speech techniques in the actors’ performances.

Law sees Chekhov’s interpretation of the play, as revealed in his rehearsal notes and other writings, as a reflection of the actor’s “anthroposophical concept of Hamlet as a spiritual battle taking place in the soul of man, ‘the visible embodiment of the victory of the spirit of light over the spirit of darkness.’”  The characters of the play were separated into two camps: those supporting Hamlet—the soldiers and guards (represented by Horatio, the Players, and Ophelia)—costumed in white (except Chekhov, who wore black “with leather appliqués suggesting armor,” and those supporting Claudius—the courtiers, led by Polonius—in black.

The production, as described act by act “based on available material” in Law’s “Chekhov’s Russian Hamlet (1924)” (Drama Review, Fall 1983) with additional (and sometimes conflicting) details provided in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, was characterized by one critic as an “expressionistic tragedy.”  It was highly stylized from the set (which evoked a Gothic cathedral—the production was set in the Middle Ages—dominated by two stained-glass windows), to the costumes and make-up, to the music and lighting (creating a “mystical atmosphere”), to the acting and movement.  Law describes it as “almost nightmarishly phantasmagorical.” 

The reception was very mixed.  Chekhov’s theater colleagues (with the notable exception of Stanislavsky) greeted the interpretation with enthusiasm.  Many others, according to Law, criticized it for “its eclecticism” and others simply didn’t understand it.  On the other hand, the poet and novelist Andrei Bely, who was a symbolist and a follower of Steiner’s Anthroposophy, wrote in a long, detailed letter to his younger friend, “Tonight for the first time I understood Shakespeare’s Hamlet . . . .  I didn’t see Chekhov, ‘the great actor,’ I saw Hamlet, and forgot about Chekhov.”  Chekhov’s mentor and former teacher, the great Stanislavsky, was in the middle: he objected to the production’s “eclectic and anti-realistic form” and “grotesquely-symbolic interpretation,” but praised his former pupil for his “image of tragic and nervous force.” 

Even the critics of the production as a whole, though, praised Chekhov’s performance.  One significant exception to this reception were the far-left (that is, Bolshevik) critics, who objected to the actor’s “neurotic and unwholesome mysticism.”

In May 1922, Vladimir Lenin, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, the head of the government of the new Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, had a series of strokes that incapacitated him, and Joseph Stalin took over as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (a newly established post as head of what was now the USSR).  Lenin, born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, died on 21 January 1924 as a result of the strokes.  Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia, in 1878, ran the Soviet Union until his death in 1953. 

Under the ultra-conservative leadership of Stalin, the Soviet arts, including the theater, came under the rigid control of the People’s Commissariat for Education (or Narkompros).  The Proletkult, the revolutionary organization that promoted innovation in the arts, was absorbed into Narkompros in 1921, and the period of seemingly boundless artistic experimentation that had begun at the turn of the 20th century and continued into the new regime, came to an abrupt end, eventually leading to one approved artistic style that was known as Socialist Realism.  Artists and organizations that defied the strictures imposed by Stalin’s Narkompros were censored, closed, imprisoned, or worse. 

The disapproval voiced, often in stinging terms, by the critics of Chekhov’s work—generally assumed to be speaking with the tongue of the government—quickly impressed the newly installed artistic director of MAT 2 that his days of free expression in the Soviet Union were numbered. 

Circumstances were compelling me to renounce my views with ever increasing urgency.  Resistance was becoming futile.  My activity as an actor, director and head of the theatre gradually came to an end by itself.  It was potentially dangerous even for members of our theatre to communicate with me.

In September 1925, the Vechernyaya Gazeta [Вечерняя Газета – Evening gazette] ran an attack by theater critic Emmanuil Beskin on the MAT 2 for “morbid mysticism.”  By the next year, open conflict divided the members of the company and Chekhov was again attacked in the press.  In December, the journal  Krasnaya Gazeta [Красная Газета – Red gazette] asserted that the troupe was coming apart and that it would be coming under the scrutiny of Narkompros. 

In early 1927, the government-controlled press was reporting on continuing strife within MAT 2.  The stories specifically assailed Chekhov’s inculcation of Anthroposophy in his work.  The journal Novyi Zritel’ [Новый Зритель – New spectator] printed an attack on Chekhov by a member of MAT 2, further dividing the troupe into those who supported the artistic director and those who opposed him.  In May, seven MAT 2 dissenters were dismissed from the company and Narkompros appointed a collective to lead the company. 

In January 1928, Chekhov’s autobiography, The Path of the Actor (Путь актёра – Put’ aktyora) was published.  Largely focused on his professional life and the experiences that led to his artistic revelations, it soon became an unexpected bestseller.  (First translated into English as To the Actor in an abridged version in 1953, a fuller translation was released in 2005 under the original title.  This edition also includes excerpts from Life and Encounters [Жизнь и встречи – Zhizn’ i vstrechi], originally published in 1944-45 but never released in a complete English edition.)  

Word reached Chekhov that an arrest warrant would soon be issued for him by the GPU, the State Political Directorate [Государственное Политическое Управление – Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie], the predecessor of the KGB.  The membership was still divided and a difficult meeting occurred in March 1928.  A few days later, Chekhov announced that he was leaving MAT 2. 

Chekhov decided to take his Hamlet abroad (his performance of the role, not the entire production) and after receiving an invitation from Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), the internationally renowned Austrian stage impresario and director, to come to Berlin, he surprisingly got permission from Narkompros for him and Ksenia to travel outside of the USSR ostensibly for medical treatment abroad. 

Chekhov and his wife left Moscow in July and stayed for a while in Bavaria at the home of an associate of Rudolf Steiner.  The Chekhovs went to Berlin, where Mikhail met with Stanislavsky and, in September, signed a contract with Reinhardt.  The Hamlet idea was tabled, against Chekhov’s desires, and the actor was essentially cowed into accepting frivolous entertainments like cabaret work.  In November, Reinhardt invited the actor to stay with him in Salzburg, Austria, to talk over future work. 

In Moscow, the MAT held a celebration for its 30th anniversary on 29 October 1928,  Stanislavsky had a massive heart attack on stage, but he finished the performance before calling for medical help.  He survived the attack but it put an end to the master’s acting career—though he continued to teach and write for his remaining years.

An unsuccessful approach to Narkompros to negotiate his return to Moscow if he could be in charge of a theater devoted to classic plays rather than Soviet propaganda offerings clinched Chekhov’s decision.  He resolved to remain abroad and immediately began learning German, quickly becoming fluent.  This also began a period of wandering for the Russian theater artist that lasted until 1934, bringing his talents and acting techniques all around Europe to Berlin; Vienna; Paris; Riga, Latvia; and Kaunas, Lithuania.

In Vienna between November and December 1928, Chekhov appeared as Skid, a tragic music hall comic, in Artisten [Artists], the German translation of George Watters and Arthur Hopkins’s 1927 Broadway musical Burlesque.  Staged at the Theater an der Wien in an arena configuration like a circus  by Max Reinhardt, it was Chekhov’s first German-language production. 

Working with a language coach—who not only corrected Chekhov’s German pronunciation but gave him line readings (“Listen here, my dear Chekhov, that absolutely must be pronounced like this”)—Chekhov played the role, one of the two lead characters, 28 times in Vienna after the show had opened in Berlin in June (with émigré Russian actor, another MAT alumnus and student of Stanislavsky, as Skid: Vladimir Sokoloff, 1889-1962, who eventually came to the United States and had a long, successful career in Hollywood).

Immediately following Artisten, Chekhov appeared in two more Reinhardt productions.  (For many of Chekhov’s appearances on stage and film in Germany and Austria, his name was listed in its German transliteration, Tschechow.)  In April 1929, he played the title role in Heinz Hilpert’s German staging of Osip Dymov’s grotesque Yiddish comedy, Jusik [Yoshke muzikant ­– Yoshke the musician] on the Kammerspiele stage of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.   On the Deutsches Theater’s main stage, Chekhov performed his best-known role in Reinhardt’s theater, Prinz Orloff in Fritz von Unruh’s expressionistic comedy Phaea, a montage of social criticism, the perception of women, psychoanalysis, and the film industry.  His role in the production, which ran in June and August 1930, was a Russian émigré singer in Berlin who had been reduced to working as an extra in a movie crowd scene.

What appears to have been the Russian actor’s first German film role was the silent Der Narr seiner Liebe [A Fool through love; the English title varies] in the spring of 1929 (released in August).  Ironically, it was directed by his former wife, Olga Tschechowa, by then a well-known actress in Germany.  Chekhov played the title role, Didier Mireuil, called Poliche (the title of the French play by Henry Bataille on which the German movie was based), a light-hearted fellow in love with a beautiful woman.  He does everything he can to please her but she doesn’t love him, and returns to her former love, a charming flyer whom she finds she still loves.  He proposes to her, but one day, she discovers that the funny little Poliche is just a mask behind which hides a serious Didier.  She tries to make amends and win him back but the rift she created is too large.

Chekhov acted in only two more German movies, Phantome des glücks [Phantoms of happiness; released in January 1930) and Troika (released in April 1930; Olga Tschechowa appeared in the cast, too).  These are considered “talkies,” though in reality, they were both made without sound, which was later dubbed in after shooting—mostly in the form of recorded songs—with only a few scenes with spoken dialogue while the rest of the film was silent. 

[Thank you for reading the first two installments of my profile of Michael Chekhov, one of the most seminal figures in modern Western theater.  I hope you’ll all come back for Part 3, which will be posted on 8 November, and the conclusion of this biographical sketch of the innovative Russian actor, director, and teacher.  I’ll be starting with Chekhov’s career in Germany, France, and the Baltics, and ending with his moves to England and, finally, the United States.]