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The life of the company : Chekhov’s Borkin as deconstructed fool Public Deposited

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  • In Act I of Anton Chekhov’s play, Ivanov, Borkin strolls onto the stage drunk, with a shotgun flung over one shoulder and intent to sneak up on his contemplative cousin and employer, Ivanov. Already there is tension between light and dark, between Borkin’s playfulness --he enters on tiptoe--and Ivanov’s sobriety. Borkin is set up instantly as a foil to Ivanov, a situation reminiscent of the relationship between Shakespeare’s fools and their protagonists. The audience is ready, then, for “a ‘normal’ play—as the conventional theater required it” (Melchinger, 103). We are ready for a progression in which Borkin, in his silliness, will tether Ivanov to reason and guide him to self-knowledge and truth. Like Lear’s Fool, Borkin will stand in serio-comic contrast to Ivanov’s melancholy and hubris. Except he doesn’t. Throughout four apparently conventional acts, Borkin is the clown who sings, dances, chides Ivanov and displays his loyalty, yet none of it serves to change Ivanov in any way. Instead, Borkin becomes one voice among many, of no more or less existential value than any other. Much like the modernist artists to come after him, Chekhov lays all the pieces out flat so that while the viewer may recognize familiar forms, they are presented in an unfamiliar and perhaps unsettling context. This is not Shakespeare’s moral universe, and Ivanov is no Hamlet, as he himself often points out. Ivanov’s depression, his madness, is not the clear manifestation of a tragic flaw, but a condition open to varying interpretation. In his resemblance to a classic archetype, the Fool, Borkin serves to confront the audience with its own expectations; rather than guide the protagonist to a single conclusion, he helps the audience to arrive at conclusions of its own.
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  • description.provenance : Submitted by Irene Cooper (cooperi@onid.orst.edu) on 2013-06-17T18:54:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Ivanov and Borkin.doc: 34816 bytes, checksum: f21739f7d98461a1b8c522ce0be0699e (MD5)
  • description.provenance : Made available in DSpace on 2013-06-17T18:54:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ivanov and Borkin.doc: 34816 bytes, checksum: f21739f7d98461a1b8c522ce0be0699e (MD5)

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