Anton Chekhov

This comedy was The Seagull (Chayka), which had a rocky opening night at the Alexandra Theatre in 1896: the actors misunderstood it, the audience misapprehended it. Despite protestations of unconcern - 'I dosed myself with castor oil, took a cold bath - and now I wouldn't even mind writing another play' (to Suvorin, 22 October 1896) - Chekhov fled to Moscow, where he cultivated a distaste for writing for the stage. Although The Seagull grew in public favour in subsequent performances, Chekhov disliked submitting his work to the judgment of literary cliques and claques. Yet barely one year after this event, a new drama appeared in the 1897 collection of his plays: Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya), a reworking of The Wood Demon; and he began to draft the play that became Three Sisters (Tri sestry).

Chekhov's illness was definitively diagnosed as tuber­culosis in 1897, and he was compelled to leave Melikhovo for a milder climate. For the rest of his life, he shuttled between Yalta on the Black Sea and various French and German spas. To pay these new expenses, Chekhov sold all he had written before 1899, excepting the plays, to the publisher Marks for 75,000 rubles, along with the reprint rights to any future stories. It was an improvident move, since Marks had had no idea of the number of Chekhov's works. This error in calculation may have induced Chekhov to concentrate on playwriting which would prove to be more profitable.

The remainder of his dramatic career was bound up with the fortunes of the Moscow Art Theatre, founded in 1897 by his friend Nemirovich-Danchenko and the wealthy dilettante K. S. Alekseyev who acted under the name Stanislavsky. Chekhov was one of the original shareholders in the enterprise, for he admired their announced pro­gramme of ensemble playing, a serious attitude to art, and plays of high literary quality; at the opening production, Aleksey Tolstoy's blank-verse historical drama Tsar Fyodor loannovich, his eye was caught by Olga Knipper, the young actress who played the Tsarina. With only slight misgiving Chekhov allowed the Art Theatre to revive The Seagull at the close of its first season; Stanislavsky, the co-director, had greater misgivings, for he did not under­stand the play. But a strong cast and a heavily atmospheric production won over the audience, and the play had a resounding success. The Moscow Art Theatre adopted an art-nouveau seagull as its insignia and henceforth regarded itself as the House of Chekhov. When the Maly Theatre insisted on revisions to Uncle Vanya Chekhov withdrew the play and allowed the Art Theatre to stage its premiere, along with a revival of Ivanov. Three Sisters (1901) was written with Moscow Art actors in mind.

Chekhov's chronic reaction to the production of his plays was revulsion, and so two months after the opening of Three Sisters, he was writing 'I myself am quite discarding the theatre, I'll never write another thing for it. One can write for the theatre in Germany, Sweden, even Spain, but not in Russia, where dramatic authors aren't respected, are kicked with hooves and never forgiven success or failure' (to Olga Knipper, 1 March 1901). Nevertheless, he soon was deep into The Cherry Orchard (Vyshnyovy sad, 1904), tailoring the roles to specific Moscow Art players. Each of these productions won Chekhov greater fame as a play­wright, even when he himself disagreed with the chosen interpretation of the Moscow Art Theatre. Not long before his death, he was contemplating yet another play, this one even more untraditional, in which an Arctic explorer would be visited by the ghost of his beloved, and a ship would be seen crushed by ice.

At the age of forty, Chekhov married Olga Knipper. His liaisons with women had been numerous but low-keyed. He exercised an involuntary fascination over a certain type of ambitious bluestocking, who saw him as her mentor and herself as his Egeria. But whenever the affair became too demanding or the woman too clinging, Chekhov would use irony and playful humour to disengage himself. In his writings, marriage is usually portrayed as a snare and a delusion that mires his characters in spirit-sapping vul­garity. His relationship with Olga Knipper was both high- spirited - she was his 'kitten,' his 'puppy,' his iambkin,' his 'darling crocodile' - and conveniently aloof, for she had to spend much of her time in Moscow, while he convalesced at his villa in Yalta. On these terms, the marriage was a success.