Michael Chekhov, Part 1

[Back in January, I started on a series of three profiles of figures I thought would make interesting posts for Rick On Theater.  The first was Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian esotericist and spiritualist, posted on  20 January; the second was on Aleister Crowley, a British occultist and self-proclaimed magician, posted in six parts on 28 September and 1, 4, 7, 19, and 13 October.  I’ve now completed the third and last profile, on Russian actor, director, and acting teacher Michael Chekhov, to be posted in three installments starting today and continuing on 5 and 8 November.

[You’ll see that Michael Chekhov, a student of the great Konstantin Stanislavsky and a nephew of renowned playwright Anton Chekhov, is not as well known as other famous historical theater figures, but I hope you’ll see that he was a great influence on modern western theater and film.

[If you haven’t caught “Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist” or “‘The Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley,” I hope you’ll go back and read them.  Both men are fascinating—for entirely different reasons—as is Michael Chekhov.]

Most people with even the slightest contact with modern Western theater know the name Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the esteemed Russian playwright.  If you were a Trekkie starting in 1967, you probably know Pavel Chekov (b. 2241), better known as Ensign Chekov of the Starship Enterprise.  Far fewer people, except some stage actors and directors and theater historians (plus some Alfred Hitchcock fans), have heard of Michael Chekhov. 

A nephew of writer Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov [in Russian: Михаил Александрович Чехов] was born on 29 August 1891 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.  He was the son of Aleksandr Chekhov (1855-1913), Anton’s eldest brother, and Natalya Golden (1855-1919), a Russian Jew and Aleksandr’s second wife.  He was called Misha, the usual Russian nickname for Mikhail, and the name stayed with him all his life. 

(Anton was the third sibling of five brothers and one sister; the other four were: Nikolai, 1858-89, a painter; Ivan, 1861-1922, a teacher; Marya, 1863-1957, an artist and teacher; and Mikhail, 1865-1936, a writer and theater critic.

(A few words about Chekhov’s second name, Aleksandrovich.  For those not familiar with Russian names, it’s called a patronymic or patronym and it’s not really a “middle name” in the conventional western sense.  As the word implies, a patronymic’s a name formed from the person’s father’s name, in this case Aleksandr; the female equivalent would be Aleksandrovna, for a daughter.  Unlike traditional middle names as used in Western Europe, it’s not chosen by the parents; it’s automatically conferred by paternal lineage. 

(Anton Chekhov’s patronymic was “Pavlovich” because his father was Pavel, or Paul.  Even the fictional Ensign Chekhov had a patronymic: Andreievich; his father was named Andrei, or Andrew.  Anton Chekhov’s wife was Olga Leonardovna Knipper; her father was Leonard—not a traditional Slavic name because Mrs, Knipper-Chekhova was of German ethnicity; her father’s name before he Russianized it was Leonhardt. 

(I won’t go into how the patronymic is used in Russian culture because it’s not really relevant here—though it’s very relevant in Anton Chekhov’s plays.  I will add, though, that in Russia it’s common to call someone by just his or her first name and patronymic—as in “Olga Leonardovna” or “Anton Pavlovich”—as a way to distinguish that person from someone else with the same first and last name or as a mark of respect.)

Michael Chekhov (he anglicized his first name when he emigrated first to England and then to the United States) became a renowned actor, director, author, and acting teacher, first in Russia, then Western Europe and Britain, then in the U.S.  The great Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), the father of modern Western acting, called young Chekhov his most brilliant student at the legendary Moscow Art Theater Studio.

In addition to his illustrious stage career as an actor and a director, Chekhov started appearing in films beginning in 1913 with roles in Russian silent movies.  When he came to the United States in 1938, he picked up his movie work (he’d also made some movies in Germany) and in 1945, he had a featured role in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Spellbound.  He was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor in a Supporting Role (as the psychoanalyst of the character played by Ingrid Bergman, also a shrink) in the 1946 Oscar awards. 

He developed his own acting technique involving movement and imagination and conceived the Psychological Gesture (known as the PG; see my posts on Rick On Theater “Psychological Gesture & Leading Center,” published on 27 October 2009, and “Konstantin Stanislavsky and Michael Chekhov: Realism and Un-Realism,” 2 May 2011). 

Chekhov began teaching his technique, the word he used to distinguish his theories from Stanislavsky’s “System” and Lee Strasberg’s (1901-82) “Method,” in Moscow, then around Europe (in France, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, and England), and finally in the U.S.  He wrote On the Technique of Acting [О Технике актёра – O Tekhnike aktyora], a description of his theories, in 1942; it was issued in 1953 in an abridged English version called To the Actor. 

Some of Chekhov’s famous students in the United States included Gregory Peck (co-star, with Bergman, in Spellbound); Marilyn Monroe; Gary Cooper; Bergman; Anthony Quinn; Beatrice Straight (who worked with Michael Chekhov to establish the Chekhov Theatre Studio); Patricia Neal; Sterling Hayden; Jack Palance; Feodor Chaliapin, Jr.; Elia Kazan; Robert Lewis; Paula Strasberg (Lee Strasberg’s wife, ironically); Lloyd Bridges; Dorothy Dandridge; Clint Eastwood; and Yul Brynner (author of the preface to Chekhov’s To the Actor); among others. 

Renowned acting teachers Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, Morris Carnovsky, and Sanford Meisner—who all came out of the Stanislavskian Group Theatre—were significantly influenced by Michael Chekhov when they saw his performances on Broadway in February 1935 and then after he met them in New York City that same year.

Michael Chekhov’s father wasn’t his only connection to Anton Chekhov’s household.  His first wife was Olga Konstantinovna Chekhova, née Knipper (1897-1980), the niece of Olga Knipper-Chekhova (1868-1959), for whom she was named; both women were also actresses.  (Indeed, Michael and Olga Chekhov had a daughter, also named Olga, 1916-66, and who also became an actress—in Germany, under the name Ada Tschechowa.  Her last name, by the way, is the German spelling of ‘Chekhova’ or ‘Чехова.’)  So, the nephew of Anton Chekhov married the niece of Olga Knipper-Chekhova. 

(Note that in Russian, as well as several other Slavic languages, family names have a masculine and feminine form.  Because Olga Knipper’s family name is German, it doesn’t inflect according to gender; the same is true of Michael Chekhov’s mother’s name, Golden.  Ada Tschechowa, Michael Chekhov’s daughter, herself had a daughter who became an actress.  Her name is Vera Tschechowa Rust, b. 1940, but she uses the professional name Vera Tschechowa.  On 5 July 2009, I posted an article on ROT about Der Illegale, a German TV miniseries I saw in 1972.  By coincidence, Vera Tschechowa starred as half of a husband-and-wife Soviet spy team in Germany in the 1950s and ’60s.)

Michael and Olga Chekhov’s marriage only lasted four years, from 1914 to 1918; Olga Konstantinovna divorced her husband during the Russian Revolution.  He loved her so dearly that he sank into depression and the break-up drove him to drink; both conditions troubled him severely for the rest of his life.  It was for relief from these afflictions that Chekhov eventually turned to the philosophies of Austrian spiritualist and esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925; see my profile posted on 20 January), many of whose concepts Chekhov adopted into his acting theories and directing practices.

In 1918, Chekhov remarried to another woman of German background (a pattern among Chekhov men, apparently), Ksenia (or Xenia; Russian: Ксения) Karlovna Ziller (1897-1970), who was not in the theater.  Her father owned an automotive lubricant factory and she was kind, gentle, and composed.  Ksenia’s temperament helped steady Chekhov and this second marriage lasted until his death in 1955.

For some reason, unlike other renowned theater and cultural figures, the life of Michael Chekhov is little chronicled.  Despite his low profile among non-theater folks (“civilians,” as one of my acting teachers—who first introduced me to the work of Michael Chekhov—called them), Michael Chekhov is well-known to theater professionals.  The few so-called biographies of the actor-director focus almost exclusively on his acting theories and directing work.  No less a theatrical innovator than Charles Marowitz, a director, critic, and playwright who collaborated with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s and ’70s, wrote in American Theatre:

Most of these men [i.e., the progenitors of contemporary European theater] have already been turned into modern icons.  There is no shortage of  biographies on the pioneers of the Moscow Arts Theatre [Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Evgenii Vakhtangov], and the achievements of [Jacques] Copeau, [Jean-Louis] Barrault, [Max] Reinhardt, [Bertolt] Brecht and [Antonin] Artaud  are chronicled and archived for posterity.  Only one of these artists remains murky and ill-defined.  He is Michael Chekhov, nephew of Anton, the man that Stanislavsky put in charge of the Moscow Art Theatre’s First Studio and described as “the most brilliant actor in all Russia”; an actor and director who challenged many of his mentor’s treasured principles; and the only acting-theorist who developed a viable and thoroughly fleshed-out alternative to the Stanislavsky system and the [Strasberg/Actors Studio] Method which is its off-shoot.

Marowitz did his homework and in 2004, published The Other Chekhov: A Biography of Michael Chekhov,  the Legendary Actor,  Director & Theorist (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books).  What follows is largely distilled from Marowitz’s book (because there’s essentially nothing else), but you’ll see rather quickly that it’s still very general and superficial.

Misha Chekhov’s father, Aleksandr, was from the petite bourgeoisie, the equivalent in the 18th and early 19th centuries of today’s lower-middle class.  He was educated at a gymnasium, similar to a prep school or British college, and in the Natural Sciences Department of  Moscow State University.  His brother, Anton, acknowledged that Aleksandr was the smarter of the two: Aleksandr Pavlovich spoke six languages and contributed columns on science to local newspapers.

Upon graduation, he joined the tsar’s customs service in 1882 and he married young.  His first wife was Anna Khrushcheva-Sokolnikov (1847–88) and they had a daughter, Marya, and two sons, Nikolai and Anton (named for his uncle, the playwright), Misha’s half-siblings.  Aleksandr, however, was widowed in 1888 and he remarried the next year to Natalya Golden, the governess of Nikolai and Anton (Marya died in 1884 at the age of one).

The customs service paid Aleksandr’s wages, but his real passion was writing.  In addition to the scientific articles, he wrote novels, short stories, essays, and memoirs, but was never able to make a profession of his talent.  The principal reason was that Misha’s father and the playwright’s elder brother was an alcoholic.

Marowitz describes Misha’s father as “ingenious, inspired, irascible, unpredictable, alcoholic, neurotic, and entirely inescapable.”  Aleksandr Pavlovich was also eccentric (to say the least).  According to Marowitz, Misha wrote in a mid-1940s memoir that his father was “constitutionally incapable of enduring anything ordinary, habitual or conventional.”  The biographer of Michael Chekhov recounted:

Alexander, for example, owned fifteen pocket watches but preferred to tell the time by means of a wooden clock of his own making that was elaborately decorated with twigs, cork and moss.  In place of pendulum, it was fitted with two balanced bottles of water.  He eschewed typewriters, believing it was ridiculous to expend the same amount of effort on a period or a comma as one did on a letter of the alphabet.  He abhorred telephones because their ring invariably interrupted either his experiments or the trains of thought leading to and from them.  He did, however, have a fire alarm fitted to a panel immediately above his bed that roused him day or night when a fire broke out in Saint Petersburg.

He dominated the household and “terrified, entranced, monopolized, and dominated” his son.  But his alcoholism was so extreme that he frequently just left the home with no warning or luggage and disappeared for days or weeks, frightening his wife and son.  A few days into the disappearance, the family would receive a telegram telling them he was in the Crimea or the Caucasus.  He’d return in disarray, exhausted, and with a look of shame.

When he stayed around home, Aleksandr would go on benders with drinking buddies who were from the city’s “lower depths”: petty crooks, slackers, street people, and members of the underclass.  He handed out cash and joked with them, and they gravitated to him because he seemed to see himself as one of them.  After a binge with these companions, Misha’s father came home loaded, drank more beer, and passed out for hours.

In the home, these incidents became the everyday normality for Misha’s mother, but for the boy, Marowitz asserts, “they were like recurrent nightmares.”  When he was in the grip of drink, Aleksandr would overwhelm his son and hold him as if he were a latter-day Franz Mesmer.  These “séances,” as Marowitz labels them, both terrified and enthralled Misha.  The biographer quoted Michael Chekhov as declaring that his father “opened up different worlds for me.” 

While playing chess, Aleksandr and Misha talked about metaphysics, Greek philosophy, and the origins of Christianity in paganism, enlivened with tales of Diogenes, Caesar, and Alexander the Great ranging through history from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment.  Marowitz asserts that these sessions with his father “laid the foundations for the aesthetic theories [Chekhov] would hatch and rehatch when he became an actor and a teacher.”

After the liquor-fueled lectures on philosophy and history (Marowitz asserts that Aleksandr “coaxed young Misha into becoming his drinking partner”), the elder Chekhov turned to drawing caricatures—members of the household, neighbors, townsfolk—revealing bits of character in the drawings.  (Aleksandr Pavlovich’s brothers and sister were a talented lot, among which was at least one renowned painter in Nikolai, the next-oldest brother between Aleksandr and Anton.)  In Marowitz’s eyes, this affinity for caricature became a part of Misha’s family legacy and influenced him throughout his artistic life, most visibly in “the bizarre make-up and grotesque characterizations he created on the stage.”

The next stage in the paternal “séance” was “magic”—or what seemed like magic to a wide-eyed boy.  (I’m reminded of sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  “Advanced” is, of course, a relative term, depending on the level of understanding of the observer.) 

Aleksandr used his expertise in chemistry and physics to produce all kinds of fantastic effects, making colorful smoke and crystals appear, generating vapors that dissolved into the air, and causing miniature explosions that generated “lava.”  Marowitz compared this Aleksandr to Prospero, William Shakespeare’s wizard from The Tempest.  The author of The Other Chekhov quotes Michael as proclaiming later: “I trembled before [my father], was amazed by him—but I could never love him.  To me, every aspect of him was terrifying.”

These spectacles were followed by tales of fantasy and “incredible adventures,” blending into astronomy and astrology and cosmic phenomena that exceeded the understanding of humans.  These mental meanderings, Marowitz posits, created “a traceable link between the transcendental intuitions proselytized by” Rudolf Steiner in his Anthroposophy, “and the unforgettable nights Misha spent with his inebriated father probing the mysteries that lay beyond appearances.”  As we’ll see, Anthroposophy, Steiner’s esoteric belief system, which focuses on the spiritual aspect of life and human nature, was an immense influence on Michael Chekhov’s artistic theories and practices.

Aleksandr and Anton Chekhov were extremely close and after the playwright’s death from tuberculosis in 1904 at the age of 44, the elder brother’s behavior became more deleterious.  According to Marowitz’s description (in my interpretation), he began to exhibit traits of obsessiveness and even schizophrenia.  He traveled erratically to distant destinations, then turned around and came home.  On one return, Aleksandr was diagnosed with throat cancer.  He refused surgery and demonstrated no concern for what everyone saw as his “imminent demise.”  He took to what would be his deathbed, drinking heavily and reading obsessively until he died in great pain on 29 May 1913, aged 57.  His father’s death left Misha as conflicted as his life had made him:

Father’s death had a strange effect on me.  [. . . .]  I expected some new truths from him, previously unspoken.  [After his death], I was still waiting.

As early as 1895, Misha’s Uncle Anton saw his nephew’s budding talent.  As a child, Misha would collect odd pieces of clothing from around the home and create characters from the odd bits he’d don.  He gave impromptu performances of caricature sketches, seemingly inspired by Aleksandr’s cartoons and the narratives that went with them. on the balcony for members of the household. 

In The Path of the Actor, Chekhov’s 1928 autobiography, he recorded that these skits became increasingly popular with everyone except his father, and around 1903, Misha “finally succeeded in persuading one of the members of the local amateur dramatic circle to admit me to their club stage.  I was absolutely delighted.”  As he would in his professional career, he played character parts—he described them as “vaudeville old men” in the amateur dramatic clubs—and he observed:                          

It made no difference to me whether I was rehearsing or performing for the public, because when I went out onto the club stage, I completely forgot about myself and my surroundings, and I gave myself up to that elemental feeling which has accompanied me as an underlying mood on the stage not only in my childhood years, but also in the later period of my life . . . .

Starting in August 1907, when Mikhail was only 16, he began studying acting at the Aleksei Suvorin Theater School in Saint Petersburg.  The school’s youngest student, he was the butt of much teasing and bullying from the other students.  He was especially skilled at comic and character parts, according to his school record.

Graduating with a certificate in May 1910, he started acting for the Suvorin Theater (also called the Maly Theater) in the fall, playing the title role in Aleksei Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (commonly known as Czar Feodor) in 1911, including a special performance before Tsar Nicholas II at Tsarskoe Selo, where the company had a post-performance question-and-answer session with the tsar and his entourage.  (Tsarskoe Selo, literally ‘Tsar’s Village’ or ‘Imperial Village,’ was the tsar’s summer residence about 16 miles south of Saint Petersburg.)

With the Suvorin or Maly (‘Small’) Theater in Saint Petersburg (Chekhov used both names indiscriminately, though the playhouse wasn’t officially renamed Maly until after the October Revolution), Chekhov gave 117 performances.  Among his roles were Epikhodov in The Cherry Orchard and Chebutykin in Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, and Osric in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In April 1911, when Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater visited Saint Petersburg, his uncle’s widow, Olga Knipper, one of the troupe’s principal actresses (the playwright’s wife continued to be known by her maiden name professionally after her marriage), asked Mikhail why he didn’t join MAT.  “I dare not dream of the possibility,” he told his aunt, and she offered to arrange for the young actor to meet the great man. 

Stanislavsky invited Mikhail to join the company and the Moscow Art Theater First Studio in the summer of 1912 at the conclusion of the Suvorin/Maly Theater season, and he began his study of the Stanislavsky System of actor training with Evgenii Vakhtangov (1883-1922) and Leopold Sulerzhitsky (1872-1916).  (Stanislavsky himself tutored Chekhov in the fundamentals of the System )

The next year, he also began his film career as Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich in the historical short, Tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty’s Accession [Трёхсотлетие царствования дома Романовых – Tryokhsotletie tsarstvovaniya doma Romanovykh], a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Russian ruling family.  (In 1914, Chekhov appeared with Vakhtangov in When the Strings of the Heart Sound [Когда звучат струны сердца – Kogda zvuchat struny serdtsa], a romance directed by Boris Sushkevich, 1887-1946.)

Near the end of 1912, his inaugural year with the First Studio, Chekhov and his class began working on a production of Dutch novelist and dramatist Herman Heijermans’s The Wreck of “The Good Hope” [Dutch title: Op hoop van zegen, literally, “Hoping for the best”].  Richard Boleslavsky (1887-1937), who went on to become a renowned teacher of the Stanislavsky System, first in Russia then in Western Europe and finally in the United States, had taken it upon himself to use the production as a training exercise, but when Stanislavsky saw it, he was so pleased with the work as representative of his theories, he suggested performing it before an invited audience.

The Wreck of “The Good Hope” was such a success in its private showing in January 1913 that it was opened to the public, the First Studio’s initial public performance.  Chekhov was cast in the role of Kobe, an old fisherman, and he was highly praised for giving the cast’s best performance.  According to Mel Gordon, a theater professor who also wrote about Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, in an issue of The Drama Review devoted entirely to Michael Chekhov, the young actor

portrays the idiot fisherman as a strange and morbid seeker of truth.  Inventing his own grotesque make-up—with a cone-shaped head and sunken skull—Chekhov transforms a low-comedy character into a creature of pathos and lyricism.

Criticized by some detractors as not following the playwright’s intentions, Chekhov responded “that he went beyond the playwright and the play to find Kobe’s true character.”

Mikhail Chekhov’s subsequent appearances for MAT included Friebe in Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Festival of Peace (Friedenfest, 1913); directed by Vakhtangov; Caleb in a stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth (1914), directed by Sushkevich; Frazer in Henning Berger’s The Deluge (Syndafloden [also called The Flood], 1915), directed by Vakhtangov; Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1920), directed by Sushkevich; and the title role in August Strindberg’s Erik XIV (1921); directed by Vakhtangov. 

[An additional word or two about the Russian names and words in the text above: Because the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet doesn’t align with the Latin alphabet or English letter sounds at all precisely, there are many ways to transliterate Russian into English.  (This doesn’t even count transliterations into other languages.  You’ve all seen how Chekhov’s family name is spelled differently depending on which language into which it’s being transliterated: Chekhov for English, Tchekhoff for French, and Tschechow for German.  There are even more spellings for other languages that didn’t appear in this post.) 

[For the Russian names, I’ve tried to use a consistent transliteration of the Cyrillic spellings, but I have used the common spellings for names that have become standardized in English (usually because the bearers of those names have become well known or have immigrated here), such as Vladimir Sokoloff (instead of Sokolov), a Russian-born actor who had a long career in Hollywood.  I haven’t routinely supplied the Cyrillic spellings of Russian names except in a few instances—mostly because there are so many, it would unnecessarily clutter up the text.  I did include the Russian spellings for a few names where I thought it would be useful for those ROTters who can read Russian. 

[For the titles of Russian plays (or Russian translations of foreign plays) and for Russian-language books, journals, and articles I reference in the post, I have included (where I could determine them) the Cyrillic spelling, the English transliteration, and the English translation.  (Note that many Russian titles have several alternative English versions, even titles of some works published in English.)  I did this so that readers who are interested can do a search for more information on these works and often that requires having the original form of the title—even if you can’t read it yourself.) 

[As with the names, I have tried to use the same transliteration system for all Russian titles and words so that they are as consistent as I can make them.  (In several cases, unhappily, I wasn’t able to find the Russian original of the titles—and in many of the same instances, the English title varies depending on who’s doing the translating.   Unfortunately, this situation makes it hard to look up titles and names, especially in printed reference works.

[With that, I want to invite you to come back to ROT on 5 November for the second installment of “Michael Chekhov.”  I’ll be picking up where Part 1 leaves off, with the production of The Inspector General which gave Chekhov one of his most recognizable roles.]