Selected plays

TUZENBAKH. Dear, I'll be back directly.

IRINA. Where are you going?

TUZENBAKH. I must go into the town, and then . . . to see my comrades off.

IRINA. That's not true. . . Nikolay, why are you so absent-minded today? [a pause] What happened yesterday near the theatre?

TUZENBAKH [with a gesture of impatience]. I'll be here in an hour and with you again [kisses her hands]. My beautiful one . . . [looks into her face]. For five years now I've loved you and still I can't get used to it, and you seem to me more and more lovely. What wonderful, exquisite hair! What eyes! I shall carry you off tomorrow, we'll work, we'll be rich, my dreams will come true. You'll be happy. There's only one thing, one thing: you don't love me!

IRINA. That's not in my power! I'll be your wife and be faithful and obedient, but there is no love, I can't help it [weeps]. I've never been in love in my life! Oh, I have so dreamed of love, I've been dreaming of it for years, day and night, but my soul is like a wonderful piano which is locked and the key has been lost [a pause]. You look worried.

TUZENBAKH. I didn't sleep all night. There has never been anything in my life so dreadful that it could frighten me, and only that lost key torments my soul and won't let me sleep. . . . Say something to me . . . [a pause]. Say something to me. . . .

IRINA. What? What am I to say to you? What?

TUZENBAKH. Anything.

IRINA. Stop it! Stop it! [a pause]

TUZENBAKH. What trifles, what little things suddenly a propos of nothing acquire importance in life! You laugh at them as before, think them nonsense, but still you go on and feel that you don't have the power to stop. Let's don't talk about it! I'm happy. I feel as though I were seeing these firs, these maples, these birch trees for the first time in my life, and they all seem to be looking at me with curiosity and waiting. What beautiful trees, and, really, how beautiful life ought to be under them! [A shout of 'Halloo! Aa-oo!'] I must be off; it's time. . . . See, that tree is dead, but it waves in the wind with the others. And so it seems to me that if I die I'll still be part of life, one way or another. Good-bye, my darling . . . [kisses her hands]. Those papers of yours you gave me are lying under the calendar on my table.

IRINA. I'm coming with you.

TUZENBAKH [in alarm]. No, no! [Goes off quickly, stops in the avenue.] Irina!

IRINA. What is it?

TUZENBAKH [not knowing what to say]. I didn't have any coffee this morning. Ask them to make me some [goes out quickly].

[IRINA stands lost in thought, then walks away into the background of the scene and sits down on the swing. Enter ANDREY with the baby carriage, and FERAPONT comes into sight.]

FERAPONT. Andrey Sergeyevitch, the papers aren't mine; they are government papers. I didn't invent them.

ANDREY. Oh, where is it all gone? What's become of my past, when I was young, happy, and clever, when my dreams and thoughts were exquisite, when my present and my past were lighted up by hope? Why on the very threshold of life do we become dull, drab, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy? . . . Our town has been in existence for two hundred years -- there are a hundred thousand people living in it; and there's not one who's not like the rest, not one saint in the past, or the present, not one man of learning, not one artist, not one man