In September Moscow's writers returned to their desks. Palmin boasted of implausible amorous adventures on the Volga. Anton had no love affairs to ponder. His third and last story inspired by the steppes, 'Panpipes', evoked the doomed rivers and forests of the Don basin, and irritated critics who wanted more humanity, morality and plots in fiction. Mikhailovsky, the Northern Herald's purveyor of opinions to the intelligentsia, went for Anton's collection, In the Twilight, which Suvorin had just published in book form: Questions without answers, answers without questions, stories with no beginning or end, plots with no denouement… Mr Chekhov should turn on his work lamp in his study to light up these half-lit characters and dispel the gloom that conceals their silhouettes and contours. A man whom there were few to praise, worried by debt and by his brothers, Anton fell into gloom.
156
x57
TWKNTYTWO Ô
Ivanov in Moscow September 1887-Jarmaiy 1888 IN SEPTEMBER 1887 Anton wrote a letter apparently so suicidal that Aleksandr destroyed it, responding: You write that you're alone, have nobody to talk or to write to… I deeply sympathize with all my heart and soul, for I am no happier than you… One thing in your letter I can't understand: lamenting that you hear and read only lies and more lies, petty, but endless. What I can't understand is why you're hurt by it and driven to moral vomiting by an overdose of vileness. Undoubtedly you're a clever decent person, don't you realize that in our age everything lies?… I don't deserve the order of St Anna [his sick and unloved wife, Anna, and a civil service award], but it's hung round my neck and I wear it workdays and holidays. The answer, Aleksandr told his brother, was to move to Petersburg, but Anton now found Petersburg repellent. Suvorin was still in the country, mourning, while the 'Zulus' as Anton dubbed the journalists of New Times, were lambasting Darwin or Nadson. He salved his conscience by fancying that he and his brother counterbalanced the reactionaries. Suvorin saw no conflict, saying: 'Chekhov did not condemn New Times' political programme, but angrily argued with me about Jews… It New Times helped Chekhov to get on his feet, then it is good that New Times existed…''9 Suvorin never doubted that his affection for Anton was reciprocated: 'If Chekhov loved me, he did so for something serious, far more serious than money,' he was to say to Doroshevich. Nevertheless, Suvorin did not always shield Anton from his underlings' attacks, even if he sometimes defended Anton against them: 'Chekhov is a very independent writer and a very independent man… I have facts from his literary life to prove what a straight, good and independent man he is.'20 ()ther Petersburgers irritated Anton. He wrote less for Fragments:
158
SEPTEMBER 1887-JANUARY l888 Leikin and Bilibin bored him, whining about each other - hen-pecked Bilibin's anaemia and anorexia; Leikin's deviousness, obesity and hysterical fits. Babkino, not least Aleksei Kiseliov's sexual frustration, was also becoming tedious.
Anton was short of money too. For 150 roubles he sold the Verner brothers, typographically Moscow's most innovative printers, the rights to fourteen of his comic stories; he was waiting for Suvorin to market a more substantial book. In Russia in the 1880s it was more profitable to write full-length plays: a playwright received two per cent of the gross takings for each act of a play. To be performed in the State theatres, a play had to pass many hurdles. In Moscow there was one reputable private theatre: Korsh's. Lily Markova had acted there, as had Daria Musina-Pushkina, Masha's friend. Chekhov made fun of a 'preposterous' drama at Korsh's theatre. Korsh challenged him: 'Why don't you write a play yourself?' Korsh's actors told Chekhov he would write welclass="underline" 'You know how to get on people's nerves.'21 Chekhov agreed to write a play, and then join the Russian Society of Dramatists and Operatic Composers.
Chekhov's title, Ivanov, was a clever ploy. Ivanov is a surname as common in Russia as Smith in England, and the play could bring one per cent of the population to see their namesake. Ivanov, a bright intellectual (we are told), spends all four acts of the play in manic depression. The Jewish girl he has married and cut off from family and religion is dying of ÒÂ; he falls for the daughter of his creditors. Self-hate overcomes him. For the Korsh theatre Ivanov at least had melodramatic curtain falls: Act 2 ends with the sick wife catching her husband embracing his new love; Act 3 ends with his telling her the doctor's prognosis, and the play ends with the hero's death - by heart attack and later, Chekhov decided, by bullet. Modern audiences are more enthralled by Ivanov's conflicts with the priggish doctor who denounces him and the evil steward who eggs him on - three central male figures suggesting one multiple personality. Chekhov himself saw the play as charting a mental disease, but he was to baffle actors who wanted to know only whether Ivanov is villain or victim? Chekhov bemused them by subtitling the play 'Comedy'.
Ivanov, his 'dramatic miscarriage', was written in ten days. Chekhov shut his study door and upset Nikolai Ezhov by his 'pensive, taciturn, somehow disgruntled' mien. Ezhov was the first outsider to read the
159
MY B KOI ÏÊ Its' KEEPER play out: Chekhov listened with detachment. Ezhov praised it to Chekhov's face, but privately reacted 'with amazement, since instead of the expected cheerful comedy in the Chekhov genre I found a gloomy drama crammed with depressing episodes… Ivanov seemed unconvincing.'22 Chekhov was happy: the play was: 'light as a feather, without a single longueur. An unprecedented plot'. Korsh liked it too, and Davydov, who was to play the lead part, kept Chekhov up until three in the morning, enthusing. Twenty years on, he wrote: 'I don't recall any other work captivating me like this. It was as clear as anything that I was seeing a major playwright laying new paths.'23
The first performance on 19 November 1887 launched Chekhov as a dramatist. He had produced something 'big', 'serious', though - as he saw himself - unpolished. Leikin was a mean-spirited and uncalled-for mentor: he slandered Davydov, and told Chekhov to stay away from rehearsals. The first night went awry: Chekhov was aghast. Only Davydov and Glama, who played Sarra, knew their parts, and the minor actors were drunk. Nevertheless the audience applauded and the author took three curtain calls, though the finale with Ivanov's coincidental heart attack at his second wedding bewildered them. For the second performance four days later, Chekhov tinkered with this act. Piotr Kicheev, the literally murderous editor who had never forgiven Anton for deserting The Dragonfly, went for the jugular: 'deeply immoral, cynical rubbish… the author is a pathetic slanderer of the ideals of his time. [Ivanov is] not a hero of the times we live in, but just an outright blackguard, trampling on all laws, God's and man's.' Surrounded by beer bottles and duck dung, Palmin wrote to Leikin: 'In all the scenes there is nothing comic and nothing dramatic, just horrible, disgusting cynical filth, which creates a revolting impression.'