Selected plays

IRINA. What is it?

CHEBUTYKIN. Come here. Venez ici. [IRINA goes and sits down at the table.] I can't do without you. [IRINA lays out the cards for patience.]

VERSHININ. Well, if they won't bring tea, let's discuss something.

TUZENBAKH. By all means. What?

VERSHININ. What? Let us dream . . . for instance of the life that will come after us, in two or three hundred years.

TUZENBAKH. Well? When we are dead, men will fly in balloons, change the fashion of their coats, will discover a sixth sense, perhaps, and develop it, but life will remain just the same, difficult, full of mysteries and happiness. In a thousand years man will sigh just the same, 'Ah, how hard life is,' and yet just as now he will be afraid of death and not want it.

VERSHININ [after a moment's thought]. Well, I don't know. . . . It seems to me that everything on earth is bound to change by degrees and is already changing before our eyes. In two or three hundred, perhaps in a thousand years -- the time does not matter -- a new, happy life will come. We shall have no share in that life, of course, but we're living for it, we're working, well, yes, and suffering for it, we're creating it -- and that alone is the purpose of our existence, and is our happiness, if you like.

[MASHA laughs softly.]

TUZENBAKH. What is it?

MASHA. I don't know. I've been laughing all day.

VERSHININ. I was at the same school as you were, I didn't go to the Military Academy; I read a great deal, but I don't know how to choose my books, and very likely I read quite the wrong things, and yet the longer I live the more I want to know. My hair is turning grey, I'm almost an old man, but I know so little, oh so little! But all the same I think that I do know and thoroughly grasp what is essential and matters most. And how I should like to make you see that there is no happiness for us, that there ought not to be and will not be. . . . We must work and work, and happiness is the portion of our remote descendants [a pause]. If it's not for me, but at least it's for the descendants of my descendants. . . .

[FEDOTIK and RODE appear in the dining-room; they sit down and sing softly, playing the guitar.]

TUZENBAKH. You think it's no use even dreaming of happiness! But what if I'm happy?

VERSHININ. No, you're not.

TUSENBAGH [flinging up his hands and laughing]. It's clear we don't understand each other. Well, how am I to convince you?

[MASHA laughs softly.]

TUSENEACH [holds up a finger to her]. Laugh! [To VERSHININ] Not only in two or three hundred years but in a million years life will be just the same; it doesn't change, it remains stationary, following its own laws which we have nothing to do with or which, anyway, we'll never find out. Migratory birds, cranes for instance, fly backwards and forwards, and whatever ideas, great or small, stray through their minds, they'll still go on flying just the same without knowing where or why. They fly and will continue to fly, however philosophic they may become; and it doesn't matter how philosophical they are so long as they go on flying. . . .

MASHA. But still, isn't there a meaning?

TUZENBAKH. Meaning. . . . Here it's snowing. What meaning is there in that? [A