Chekhov’s Oedipal Journey

Abstract

In this paper, I posit that Chekhov, in composing his plays, came to master the oedipal tensions and conflicts embodied by his psychic image of his mother and biological father as well as of his artistic father, Shakespeare. Chekhov framed his feelings about his parents through his many versions of the Hamlet closet scene, in which Hamlet kills Polonius and upbraids his mother for having married Claudius. Chekhov eventually transformed that scene to embody his new post-oedipal vision of his parents and of himself. In the process, he created a new scenic structure for dramatizing oedipal strivings.

Keywords:

• Chekhov
• Shakespeare
• Hamlet
• Oedipus Complex
• waning of the Oedipus Complex
• post-oedipal
• incest/parricide
• literary influence

Acknowledgment

I wish to thank Steven Goldberg for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1 Except for Platonov, which was not performed in Chekhov’s lifetime, all the dates of his plays refer to the year in which they premiered. All quotations from Platonov are from Magershack’s translation (1964a); all quotations from Ivanov and The Wood Demon are from Rocamora’s translation (1999); all quotations from Chekhov’s other plays are from Garnett’s translation (1963).

2 I wish to note that this paper focuses on the positive Oedipus Complex. A discussion of the negative one in Chekhov and his plays lies outside the scope of this paper.

3 The biographical sketch that follows is largely based on Hingley (1989) and Rayfield (1997).

4 The three lines Voynitsev quotes from Hamlet (1599/1601?): “And to this villain…/How could you yield yourself” do not actually appear in Shakespeare’s play, but in a Russian translation, as Chekhov did not read English. Magershack’s translation of these three lines into English is not based on Chekhov’s text and creates confusion. I therefore insert here L. Selenick’s (c.1880b, p. 128) accurate translation of the lines instead. As Selenick suggests (p. 128), the three lines are probably a translation of either of the following actual lines from Hamlet: “Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed/ And batten on this Moor? Ha! have your eyes/ You cannot call it love” (3.4. 66-70) or: “Oh shame! where is thy blush!/ Rebellious hell/ If thou canst mutiny in a matron's bones,/ To flaming youth let virtue be as wax/ And melt in her own fire” (3.4. 79-83).