Comparative Drama

Introduction

At thirty-five, Ivanov feels aged beyond his years. He is torn apart by his own paralysis. His wife is dying. He is deeply in debt. Society is changing, and new social and cultural movements are vying for public attention. Revolution is in the air and on the lips of everyone. Ivanov meanwhile cannot decide what to do, either with himself or with the world in which he lives. He used to love his wife, yet he cannot make up his mind to travel with her to the Crimea in order to stall her tuberculosis. He has no money, he tells himself and others, in order to justify what in reality is a profound personal apathy. Mainly, Ivanov's problem is that he doesn't know what he wants. He is paralyzed by boredom. Ivanov is the so-called superfluous man of nineteenth-century Russian literature, the stereotypical intellectual in an age with no use for intellectuals.¹

Such is the plot of Ivanov (1887), Anton Chekhov's first commercially successful play. As I show in this essay, the story has more global appeal than this casual summary might suggest. Although set in nineteenthcentury Russia, Ivanov has resonated profoundly in twenty-first century Tehran, thanks to the recent Persian adaptation by Amir Koohestani (b. 1978), one of Iran's foremost playwrights and director of the Mehr Theater Group, founded by Koohestani in 1996. When it was staged in Tehran in 2011 and 2016, Koohestani's Ivanov generated much interest among the theatregoing public.² Performances were sold out, and reviews were exuberant.³ Like other major Russian writers, Chekhov is held in high [End Page 31] regard by educated Iranians, but the meaning of Ivanov in Iran today cannot be explained with reference to Russian-Iranian literary connections alone.⁴

The reaction of one Iranian with whom I attended a 2016 performance of the production illustrates the extent to which Iranians are interested in Chekhov's play, less for the light it sheds on provincial Russia, and more for its depiction of the challenges they face in their marriages, careers, and cultural aspirations. During the intermission between the second and third acts, my friend expressed his identification with the play's depiction of a troubled marriage specifically. "Every Iranian can relate to this story!" he exclaimed. "It's only the taboos in our culture that prevent us from talking about these things, which affect us all." My companion's projection of his experience, and that of his fellow Iranians, onto the main characters was striking, particularly because he was not an active theatregoer. In the play, Ivanov is torn by his conflicting feelings for, on the one hand, his dying wife Anna, and on the other hand, for Sasha, a young woman whom Ivanov hopes to marry following Anna's death. As the play progresses, Ivanov's contempt for his wife becomes increasingly evident. He treats her brutally. Yet my companion identified with Ivanov, just as the play demands.⁵

In Iran in 2016, I came to learn about the many ways in which Ivanov's story resonates with young Iranians today. Like Ivanov and his contemporaries, they want change but don't know how to translate their political and social ideals into reality. Like Ivanov, young Iranians are torn between revolutionary idealism and political and cultural apathy. A telling comment on this state of affairs is offered by Leila Daryoush, who reviewed the play during its 2011 premiere. Daryoush quoted a Facebook post by an Iranian actress who declared: "we [Iranians] are all Ivanov."⁶ If all Iranians are Ivanov, then Ivanov is in a deep sense Iranian. And the implications of this refraction—the process whereby Ivanov has become a reflection and possession of the Iranian people and their culture—call for further investigation. This essay will thus explore the intersection between the Iranian stage and the Iranian public sphere through Chekhov's play and its Iranian adaptation, tracing how the play has been received and interpreted by Iranian artists and audiences. I argue that Koohestani's Ivanov reveals the tragic paralysis faced...