The Proposal

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian writer who qualified as a doctor and kept practising medicine while he wrote. He is remembered for hundreds of short stories and for four famous full-length plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Those plays are slow, sad and full of people who cannot say what they feel. The Proposal is the opposite kind of writing - a short, loud, fast comedy that Chekhov wrote in the late 1880s as a light piece for the stage. Knowing both sides of Chekhov is useful, because the same sharp eye for human weakness is at work in the sad plays and in this noisy one.

The play is a one-act play. Everything happens in one place, in one unbroken stretch of time, with a very small cast. There is no interval, no change of scene, no sub-plot and no jump of days or years. The whole action takes place in the drawing room of a Russian country house belonging to the landowner Chubukov, and only three people ever walk on stage. Because the form is so tight, a one-act play has to begin at speed, so Chekhov drops us straight into the middle of a situation: a nervous neighbour has arrived, dressed up, with something to say.

It is also a farce. A farce is a comedy that gets its laughs from exaggeration rather than from realistic behaviour. The characters over-react, the disputes are about small things, people shout, faint and threaten to shoot themselves, and the audience laughs because everyone on stage is treating a triviality with deadly seriousness. In a farce we are not meant to worry about the characters. We watch them the way we watch two neighbours fight over a boundary wall: the fight is silly, the noise is enormous, and nobody is really hurt.

The world of the play is nineteenth-century rural Russia, where a class of small landowners lived off their estates. Their wealth was land - fields, marshes, birch woods - along with horses and hunting dogs, and their standing in society depended on all of it. In such families a marriage was often a practical arrangement between two neighbouring properties rather than a love match. Chekhov is quietly laughing at exactly that world. His characters can produce a passionate speech about a strip of meadow and a full technical argument about a dog's jaw, but the actual proposal of marriage is never even completed.

One more useful point before you start writing answers. We read the play in an English translation from the Russian, so the exact phrasing you see may differ a little from another edition. That does not damage the comedy, because the humour here is situational - it comes from what happens, not from wordplay that works in only one language. When you quote in an examination, stick to the wording printed in your own textbook.

The play has exactly three characters, and all three are cut from the same cloth. That is the joke Chekhov is building: they quarrel because they are alike, not because they are different.

Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov is a landowner and Natalya's father. He is loud, sentimental and completely two-faced. He greets Lomov with a shower of endearments - darling, my treasure, and the like - while thinking privately that his neighbour has come only to ask for a loan, and deciding that he will not give him one. The moment he hears the word marriage he is delighted, because getting his twenty-five-year-old daughter settled is exactly what he wants. Yet within minutes, when Oxen Meadows are mentioned, he is abusing Lomov and Lomov's ancestors. At the end he does not wait for the two young people to agree about anything: he pushes their hands together, tells them to kiss, and calls for champagne to drown out the argument before it can undo the match. Chubukov is an opportunist. Warmth, insults and blessings are all simply tools for getting what he wants.

Natalya Stepanovna is twenty-five, an excellent housekeeper, and every bit as combative as her father. She talks about land boundaries and dog pedigrees like a person of business, and she will not concede a point even when the point is worth almost nothing. She herself admits that the disputed meadows are small and cheap, but says she cannot bear unfairness - which is the polite name she gives to her own stubbornness. Her most revealing moment comes after Lomov storms out. As soon as her father tells her the man had come to propose, she becomes hysterical and cries out to have him brought back at once; yet when he returns she picks a fresh quarrel about a dog within minutes. She wants to be married and she wants to win every argument, and she cannot manage both.

Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov is Chubukov's neighbour, a landowner of thirty-five. The cast list describes him as large and hearty but very suspicious, yet he behaves like an invalid: palpitations, a twitching lip and eyebrow, a leg that goes numb, dizziness and sleepless nights. He is a hypochondriac - a person convinced that he is ill, forever listening to his own body. He arrives in formal evening clothes to make a proper proposal, but he can never get the words out, because he cannot resist an argument - first about the land, then about a dog. His own reasoning for marrying is coldly practical: at thirty-five he wants a quiet, regular life, and Natalya is a good housekeeper, educated and pleasant enough to look at. Love does not enter the calculation anywhere.

Put the three together and you have a family portrait of a whole class: proud, property-minded, thin-skinned and unable to let go of an argument. Chekhov gives none of them a single moment of real self-knowledge, and that is what keeps the play a comedy instead of a sad story. If any one of them could pause and see how ridiculous the fight is, the farce would collapse.

Lomov turns up at Chubukov's house dressed in formal evening clothes. Chubukov is surprised by the outfit and greets him with extravagant affection, but privately assumes his neighbour has come to borrow money and quietly decides to refuse. Lomov, stammering with nerves, finally explains that he has come to ask for the hand of Natalya Stepanovna. Chubukov is overjoyed - this is what he has been hoping for - and hurries off to fetch his daughter, leaving Lomov alone on stage to talk himself into a panic about his heart, his sleeplessness and his need for a settled life.

Natalya comes in. She does not know why he has come. They make polite conversation, and Lomov, working his way slowly towards the proposal, happens to refer to Oxen Meadows as his own - the strip of land wedged between her family's birch woods and the Burnt Marsh. Natalya stops him at once: the Meadows, she says, belong to her family. Within seconds the proposal is forgotten and the two are shouting about documents, grandfathers and forty-year-old arrangements. Chubukov returns, hears the subject, and takes his daughter's side. The three of them start insulting one another's families, Lomov's heart begins to hammer and his leg goes numb, and he is finally driven out of the house.

Then comes the turn that makes the play. Chubukov, still fuming, lets slip that the fool he has just thrown out had come to propose marriage. Natalya screams for him to be brought back and collapses into hysterics, blaming her father; Chubukov panics, shouts that he will shoot himself or hang himself, and goes after Lomov. Lomov is fetched back, still clutching at his heart. Natalya behaves as though nothing has happened and even admits, briefly, that the Meadows really are his.

The peace lasts less than a page of dialogue. Natalya, making conversation, asks whether he will be shooting soon, and Lomov replies that his dog Guess has gone lame. Natalya says he paid far too much for that dog and that her father's Squeezer is much the better animal. The second quarrel is under way, and it is fiercer than the first. Chubukov comes back and again sides with his daughter, so the shouting becomes a three-way match. Lomov's symptoms multiply until he clutches his heart, staggers and drops into an armchair. Father and daughter look at him and decide he is dead, and Chubukov is loudly declaring that he wants a knife or a pistol when Lomov stirs and asks where he is.

Chubukov wastes no time on the news that his neighbour is alive. He seizes Lomov's hand and Natalya's, announces that she is willing, tells them to kiss, and treats the whole matter as settled. Lomov, still dazed, accepts: he says he is happy, kisses her hand, and in the very next breath complains that his foot has gone to sleep. Natalya says that she is happy too, and then adds that Guess is still the worse dog. The newly engaged couple are shouting Better! and Worse! at each other as the curtain comes down, while Chubukov tries to drown them out by calling for champagne. The proposal named in the title is never actually spoken aloud.

Oxen Meadows are a strip of land wedged in between Chubukov's birch woods and the Burnt Marsh. The dispute over them is the first engine of the plot, and it is worth learning the argument on both sides, because you may be asked to state each claim and not merely to say that the characters fought.

Lomov's claim goes back several generations. He says that his aunt's grandmother gave the peasants belonging to Natalya's father's grandfather the free use of the Meadows for an unlimited period, and that in return those peasants were to bake bricks for her. The peasants used the land free of charge for about forty years and, as people do, fell into the habit of treating it as their own. That habit, Lomov argues, is not the same thing as ownership, and he offers to produce the documents that prove the land is his.

Natalya's claim is shorter and blunter. Her grandfather and great-grandfather always understood that their land ran right up to the Burnt Marsh, which puts the Meadows well inside their boundary. Her family has held the property for something close to three hundred years, and she flatly refuses to be told out of the blue that a piece of it is not hers. She will not even look at his papers.

What makes the quarrel funny is that neither of them actually wants the land very much. Natalya says herself that the Meadows come to only about five dessiatins - a dessiatin was an old Russian land measure of about 2.7 acres - and are worth perhaps three hundred roubles. By her own account the disputed property is small and cheap. What she cannot bear, she says, is unfairness. Lomov is no better: he has come to propose marriage, and he is ready to wreck the proposal rather than let a point of principle go. Both of them would rather be right than be happy, and that single sentence explains most of the play.

The quarrel also shows how thin their good manners are. Within a minute of polite conversation about the weather and the harvest, they are calling each other names and dragging in dead relatives - Chubukov calls Lomov's grandfather a drunkard, says one of his aunts ran away with an architect and calls his father a gambler, while Lomov hits back with a rude remark about Chubukov's mother's looks. None of this has the slightest bearing on who owns a field. It is pure temper, and Chekhov lets it run just long enough for us to see how ugly and how ridiculous it is.

Notice the stagecraft as well. The land dispute does two jobs at the same time. It stops the proposal, which the plot needs it to do, and it tells us everything about these three people without a single speech of explanation. And when Natalya, after learning why Lomov came, gives the Meadows away in one short sentence, we discover that the principle she was defending so fiercely was never worth anything to her at all. That reversal is the sharpest piece of comic writing in the first half of the play.

The second quarrel is even more absurd than the first, and that is exactly Chekhov's design. A farce raises the stakes by lowering the subject.

Lomov owns a hunting dog called Guess, bought from a man named Mironov for a hundred and twenty-five roubles. Natalya asks whether he will be shooting soon, and he answers that the dog has recently gone lame, which is how the topic comes up at all. Natalya says the price was far too high, and that her father's dog Squeezer, bought for eighty-five roubles, is much the better animal. Lomov's counter-attack is technical: Squeezer, he insists, is overshot - his lower jaw is shorter than the upper - and a dog built like that cannot get a proper grip. Natalya replies that Squeezer is young, thoroughbred and has a proper pedigree, while Guess is old and worn out and nobody even knows his ancestry. Lomov answers that he would not exchange his old dog for five Squeezers.

Read that again and notice what has happened. Two adults, one of whom walked in twenty minutes ago to propose marriage, are arguing about the shape of a dog's jaw. Neither shifts position by a millimetre. Chubukov then walks in and, instead of calming things down, immediately takes his daughter's side and adds insults of his own, so the shouting becomes a three-way match with nobody left to referee it.

Running alongside the quarrel is Lomov's hypochondria. A hypochondriac is somebody constantly convinced that he is ill. From his first entry Lomov is reporting symptoms: he shivers, he cannot sleep, his heart pounds, his lip twitches, his right eyebrow jumps, his leg goes numb, there is a pulling in his side, and he keeps asking for water. Every time the argument grows hotter, the list grows longer. Chekhov, who was a doctor, handles this beautifully. The symptoms are the body's honest report on a man who cannot control his temper, and the audience laughs because the cause is so small and the reaction so enormous.

The collapse is the high point of the farce. At the peak of the dog quarrel Lomov clutches at his heart, staggers, and falls into an armchair. Natalya and her father look at him and decide he is dead. Chubukov, who was abusing him a moment earlier, now calls for water and a doctor and then cries out for a knife or a pistol - and Lomov comes round and asks where he is, and the tragedy evaporates in a single line.

That sudden drop from a death scene to a marriage arrangement is called anticlimax, and it is the funniest technique in the play. Chubukov does not even allow Lomov to ask the question he came to ask. He puts his daughter's hand into Lomov's, declares that she is willing, orders them to kiss and treats the matter as closed. Lomov's first words as an engaged man are that he is happy, followed at once by a complaint that his foot has gone to sleep. Within moments Natalya has restarted the dog argument, and the two are still contradicting each other when the curtain falls. The dogs matter far more to these characters than the engagement does, and Chekhov never has to say so out loud.

The play is short, but it carries three or four ideas that are worth building a full answer around.

Marriage as a business deal. Nobody in this play mentions love in any believable way. Lomov decides to marry because he is thirty-five and wants a quiet, regular household, and because Natalya is a good housekeeper who is educated and not bad-looking. Chubukov wants the match because it settles an unmarried daughter, and the two estates lie side by side. Natalya, the play suggests, wants it because she is twenty-five and does not want to lose a suitable match. This is a marriage of convenience - an arrangement in which suitability, property and status count and feelings do not. Chekhov never lectures us about it. He simply shows two people who cannot agree about a field or a dog being pushed into a lifetime together, and lets us draw the conclusion ourselves.

Property and greed. Land and possessions are what these characters are made of. The instant ownership is questioned, courtesy disappears and even a marriage proposal becomes less important than five small fields. The satire is aimed at a landowning class whose entire sense of self is tied to what it owns, and who therefore cannot separate an argument about a boundary from an attack on the family name.

Irony. The play is thick with it. It is called The Proposal, and the proposal is never spoken. Lomov comes to join a family and spends the whole visit fighting it. Chubukov abuses Lomov and his family one minute and blesses him as a son-in-law the next. Natalya defends the Meadows to her last breath and then hands them over in a sentence. And there is fine dramatic irony in the first quarrel, because we in the audience know why Lomov has come and Natalya does not, so we watch her wreck her own chance while she believes she is winning.

Ego and the smallness of quarrels. Strip the play down and it is about people who would rather win than be happy. Not one of the fights is about anything of real value - a cheap strip of grass, a lame dog, a jawline. They fight because backing down feels unbearable. That is why the play still works for readers in India today. Everyone has seen a family or a neighbourhood argument that began over nothing and ran for years, and everyone has met somebody who would rather lose a relationship than lose a point.

Satire. Satire uses laughter to criticise. Chekhov is not merely making jokes about three silly people; he is exposing a whole way of life in which property is the most important member of the family, marriage is a transaction and nobody has any self-knowledge. Because the criticism arrives inside a farce, wrapped in shouting and fainting, it goes down easily - which is exactly why it lands.

The ending seals the point. The couple are engaged and are already quarrelling; the father's solution is to shout for champagne. Nothing has been resolved and nobody has learned anything. The marriage, we understand, will simply be this same argument continued indoors for the next forty years. That is funny and slightly bleak at the same time, and holding both of those together is what makes Chekhov more than a joke writer.

Drama questions become much easier once you can name the technique, so learn these terms and attach one example from the play to each of them.

Stage directions. The words printed in brackets - a character clutching his heart, staggering, drinking water, speaking to himself - are the playwright's instructions to the actor, and in this play they carry a great deal of the comedy. When you answer a question on a drama, it is worth mentioning what a stage direction asks the actor to do, because it shows that you have read the text as a performance and not just as a story.

Aside. An aside is a line spoken to the audience which the other characters on stage are not supposed to hear. Chubukov's private thought that his visitor has come to borrow money is an aside, and it instantly tells us that his warm welcome is worthless. Asides are a quick way for a playwright to show the gap between what a person says and what he means.

Repetition and rapid short lines. Long stretches of the play are single-line exchanges fired back and forth, with a word repeated three times over for emphasis. On stage this is fast and very funny, and it is Chekhov's main method of building a quarrel to boiling point without adding any new information.

Hyperbole. Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration. Chubukov talking about shooting or hanging himself, and Lomov's ever-growing catalogue of fatal symptoms, are both hyperbole. Nobody is actually dying - that is precisely the point.

Anticlimax. A build-up that collapses into something trivial. The death scene that turns out to be a fainting fit, and the engagement that turns straight back into an argument about a dog, are the two big examples in the play.

Now some practical rules for writing. First, use the characters' full names correctly at least once - Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov, Natalya Stepanovna, Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov - and then shorten them for the rest of the answer. Second, when a question asks about character, give the quality and then the incident that proves it, in that order; one line of evidence is worth more than three adjectives. Third, for a question on the ending, state what happens and then state what it means: the marriage is fixed, the quarrel continues, and so the comedy finishes where it started. Fourth, keep quotations short and accurate, and if you are not certain of the exact words, describe the moment instead, because an accurate description is always safer than a misquotation. Finally, keep the tone right. This is comedy, so an answer that treats Lomov as a tragic invalid or Natalya as a heartless villain has misread the play. Write about them as Chekhov wrote them: ridiculous, recognisable and never once aware of it.