Reading Chekhov

left the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg after the second act of an exceptionally trite and listless Carmen, but not before mingling with the intermission crowd in one of the buffets, where children in velvet party clothes and adults in evening dress crowded around refreshment stands and carried away glasses of champagne and fruit drinks and dishes of ice cream and small plates piled with sandwiches and pastries and chocolates wrapped in cornucopias of colored foil. I felt a stir of memory, a flutter of the romance theater held for me when I was myself a child in a velvet dress. The role of theater in relieving the bleak joylessness of Chekhov's childhood has been noted by his biographers. He and his classmates would go to the Taganrog Theater to see plays or hear operettas, sitting in the cheap seats, and sometimes even wearing dark glasses and their fathers' coats to avoid expulsion. (Unaccompanied schoolboys were not allowed in the theater. A boyhood memory doubtless inspired the moment in "The Lady with the Dog" when two schoolboys, illicitly smoking on the stair landing of a provincial theater, look down and see Gurov emotionally kissing Anna's face and hands.)

Chekhov began writing plays at an early age. (The untitled manuscript of the half-baked play we call Platonov surfaced in the 1920s and was thought to have been written when he was twenty or twenty-one.) In the English-speaking world, Chekhov is better known as a dramatist than as a story writer. Everyone has seen a Cherry Orchard or an Uncle Vanya, while few have even heard of "The Wife" or "In the Ravine." But Chekhov was never comfortable as a playwright. "Ah, why have I written plays and not stories!" he wrote to Suvorin in 1896. "Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproduc-tively." A year earlier, when the first draft of The Seagull had been coolly received by theater people and literary friends, Chekhov had written to Suvorin, "I am not destined to be a playwright. I have no luck at it. But I'm not sad over it, for I can still go on writing stories. In that sphere I feel at home; but when I write a play, I feel uneasy, as though someone were peering over my shoulder."

Chekhov wrote "The Steppe" (1888) in a month and "The Name-Day Party" (1888) in three weeks; it took him almost a year each to drag the Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard out of himself. Ill health undoubtedly played a role, but there is reason to think that the feeling of being watched as he worked, of no longer being alone in his room, was implicated as well. Of course, writing a play is never as private an act as writing a story or a novel. As he works, the playwright feels a crowd of actors, directors, scenery designers, costumers, lighting specialists, and sometimes even an audience at his back. He is never alone, and he evidently likes the company. But, just as Chekhov never resolved his ambivalence toward actual guests, so he never resolved his ambivalence toward the imaginary figures who, peering over his shoulders when he wrote for the theater, inhibited him as he was not inhibited when he wrote stories. (In 1886, though, when his stories first began attracting notice, he reported a similar feeling of invasion to his friend Viktor Bilibin: "Formerly, when I didn't know that they read my tales and passed judgment on them, I wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes; now, I'm afraid when I write.") The theater drew and repelled Chekhov in equal measure. When, in 1898, he was approached by Nemerovich-Danchenko of the newly formed Moscow Art Theater, for permission to perform The Seagull, he refused. He had sworn off the theater. As Nemerovich-Danchenko reported in his memoirs, "he neither wished nor did he have the strength to undergo the great agitation of the theater that had occasioned him so much pain." Nemerovkh persisted, however, and prevailed. Had he not, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard might still be rattling around the imaginary lumber room where Chekhov stored the subjects he didn't want to "waste."