Ivanov – A Modern Archetype

I knew that I was supposed to be looking for a theatre that doubled as a café, but it still did not register with me, as I strode along the pavement, that the unassuming coffee house to my immediate right was the venue for Ivanov.  When I finally entered the theatre, I was startled by how small the space of the performance truly was.  I had to be careful not to trip over set props, as I cradled my coffee and weaved carefully through the crowd   of theatre goers to get to our seats in the “upper row”.

The play began with Ethan Hawke’s Ivanov stretched out in his bed, reading pensively, as a figure approached with a gun (yes, Chekov’s gun).  From the very beginning, I came to appreciate the intimacy of the venue, as the subtle movements and expressions of the characters brought a new life to Chekov’s script.  I admit that I was a little underwhelmed by some of the early action of the play.   I thought the dialogue was sometimes lacking in vigor and authenticity.  But, as the scene progressed, the tensions built, the dialogue flowed, and all the humor and pathos of Checkov’s work was brought to visceral realization.

Hawke’s performance, although not perfect, included moments of fierce brilliance and revelatory clarity.  The role of his ailing wife, Anna, was cast well, although I would have liked to have seen more of her as Ivanov grew increasingly morose and reckless.   Ivanov’s new love interest, Sasha, and her father also were acted very well     The actor playing Michael Borkin , however, seemed exaggerated, even amateurish, although many people seemed to like him in the role.

Probably the most interesting pairing in the play, and the one in which Hawke’s performance excelled particularly, was that between Ivanov and the “honest” doctor.  The doctor seemed to me to be an embodiment of the “conscience” interposed in and set against the artistic molding of the play.    The climax of the play came with the glint of recognition in Ivanov,’s eye, as he embraced the doctor and thanked him.  The doctor, whom we have come to despise as a dour moralist, is right in the end.    Beneath all the poetry of sorrow and self-pity, beneath every attempt to rationalize and redeem, is the perfectly base, avaricious, cruel, and irredeemable self  – pricked and agitated by a thorny conscience, reproached by a voice that whines and squeals, but that does not –that cannot- speak falsely.  The pathos of Ivanov’s character would crystalize into a grand edifice of poetic sorrow, only to be undermined by the reflexive, revealing self-examination that is manifested outward as the doctor.

Perhaps, in Ivanov , Chekov anticipated the modern condition, with its intolerable burden of self-knowledge, with its exhaustion of poetry and of Irony, with the incessant, ever-conquering cynicism that has become the cultural air we breathe .  The play, which seems to fixate on the charecter of Hamlet,  brings to mind Nietsche’s comments on Shakespeare’s tragic Prince of Denmark:

In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet. Both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that they are expected to set right a world which is out of joint. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion. That is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, too many possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No! The true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect. His longing goes out over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or an immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.

Ivanov kills himself not for any poetic reason.   Nothing could be so artistically unsatisfying as the truly desperate, ugly, and un-poetic suicide that concludes the play.   Yet there is a sort of relief that we must feel as the audience; a sense that what has occurred was inevitable, inscribed in the first moments of the play, as an unnamed gunman approached Ivanov in his bed.  In Ivanov we have a Raskolnikov without a Sonya, a Luther who cannot bring himself to believe in the grace of God.   His goodness is so small in comparison to his baseness that it can only urge him to self-annihilation, to blot out what cannot be altered.     There is an expression of this archetype in our own culture    It appears as a plot element in many science fiction stories: a  machine (or something of the sort) grows increasingly intelligent, develops an autonomous will, and proceeds to evolve into a monstrosity.    The glint of humanity that gradually arises in the machine will move it to the only decision that is possible rationally and ethically: self-destruction.   Having seen into itself, having tasted goodness, and knowing, with its vast intelligence, that redemption is impossible, the technological monster must approximate redemption in death   Shelley’s Frankenstein is, of course, one of the earliest and most memorable variations of this modern archetype.  Falseness, and a certain degree of unconsciousness , is always the pre-condition of life for “the good”, at least in this conception.  Could Ivanov have ended differently?  That is certainly more than a literary question.