Chekhov gratefully answered by recalling the nightmare of the opening performance and the way he had left Petersburg, ashamed and wondering whether he had lost his senses. "But your letter," he continued, "has acted upon me in a very positive way. I have known you for a long time, esteem you profoundly, and have more faith in you than in all the critics put together —you must have felt that when you wrote your letter, and that is why it is so fine and convincing. My mind is at rest now, and I can think of the play and the performance without loathing." (November 11, 1896.)
The critics of the first performance of The Sea Gull, Chekhov now began to discover, had not reached their almost unanimous verdict of condemnation without an element of conspiracy. Leikin wrote to tell him that he had observed how the reviewers congregated after the first act and did their best to provoke the offensive behavior of Levkeeva fans. And in November, Theatergoer published an article on the play in which it declared that The Sea Gull had been, in many respects, unique in the annals of the Alexandrinsky Theater. "There was a certain mockery of the author and the actors, and a kind of furious, malignant joy among certain parts of the audience. A good half of the theater was occupied by the worst enemies of Mr. Chekhov. . . . Especially malignant were those stern evaluators and judges of the 'scribbling' brotherhood. They were out to settle personal accounts."
All this once more left a bad taste in Chekhov's mouth. Again he felt nothing but loathing for The Sea Gull and found it extremely difficult to correct the proof of the volume of his plays. "You will repeat," he wrote Suvorin on December 14, "that this is unreasonable and stupid, that it is my conceit, pride, etc., etc. I know, but what am I to do? I would gladly rid myself of this stupid feeling, but I simply cannot do it. The reason is not that my play was a failure; indeed, the majority of my plays have failed, and every time it was like water off a duck's back so far as I was concerned. On October 17 it was I and not my play that failed. At the time of the first act I was struck by a particular circumstance, namely, that those with whom I had always been frank and friendly before October 17, with whom I had dined pleasantly, and on whose behalf I had broken lances (for example, Yasinsky) — all wore a strange expression, terribly strange. ... I am quiet now, in my usual mood, yet I cannot forget what happened any more than I could forget a slap in the face."
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Chekhov found an escape from his distressed feelings in the multitude of tasks that now customarily occupied him at Melikhovo. He visited schools, argued the cause of his project of a highway at Serpukhov, took care of the sick, and wrote numerous letters to friends to obtain reference books for the information division of the Taganrog library. And he took on the further obligation of a worker in the national census for the following year. Л fire — in the wall by the stove in his mother's room — caused some excitement. The bell in the new firehouse he had built in the village clanged; the apparatus dashed up; a servant appeared with an ikon in her hands, and Father Chekhov ran about shouting nonsense. The damage, he informed Misha, would run to two hundred roubles.
To Tolstoy's daughter Tatyana he wrote to explain his failure to accept her earlier invitation to visit the family at Yasnaya Polyana to read them one of his new stories. His trip to Petersburg and the business of his play, he explained, had got in the way of the visit, and now, because of the snow, it was impossible to travel to them. He would like to have read them from the proof sheets of My Life, but now it had appeared in print, he said, and it had been so altered by the censor as to become unrecognizable and repulsive to him.
Literature in general seemed repulsive to him over the last months of 1896. When his Sea Gull appeared in print, he suspected that the the critics would lash out at him again. And in the course of correcting the proof of his plays for Suvorin, he wrote him: "Ah, why have I written plays and not stories! Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproductively." (December 7, 1896.) And a project that he had recently, and enthusiastically, discussed with Goltsev — to start a newspaper in Moscow — he now began to discourage.
On one of his several trips to Moscow at this time, Chekhov visited Levitan, who was ill. He discovered that his friend had an enlargement of the heart and would probably not live long. In the face of this situation, he marveled at Levitan's passionate thirst for life and at the superb studies he continued to work on in his studio.
Though Chekhov ultimately tried to adopt a dispassionate attitude toward the cruel experience he had undergone in Petersburg, it is clear that it cankered his feelings and left a permanent scar. It was not so much the failure of his play, as he said himself, but the fact that this debacle could arouse such evil in many he had considered his friends. In the words of the critic of the Week, he must have wondered . . what evil could Chekhov have done to anyone, whom had he offended or obstructed, to deserve the evil which was suddenly heaped upon him?" The experience tended to deepen the natural distrust he had of the genuineness, loyalty, and capacities of the rank and file of his literary confreres and of the social milieu in which they functioned. When Nemirovich-Danchenko queried him on why men of letters seemed incapable of serious conversation, he replied — modestly including himself in his general censure — that writers are incapable of talking on general problems because they have no political interests, are isolated from the world, read few books, and seldom go places. And literary conversation, he insisted, inevitably ended in who wrote better, who worse. Conversation about personal life, he admitted, could sometimes be interesting, but in this area writers become shy, evasive, insincere, and the instinct for self-preservation restrains them. In this type of talk his friend Sergeenko, "shaking his finger in the air and loudly babbling in all the railroad cars and homes of the land, will reach a decision on why I live with N at a time when В is in love with me. I'm afraid of our morals and of our ladies." And Chekhov concluded: "To put it briefly, don't blame yourself or me for our silence or for the absence of seriousness or interest in our conversation, but blame what the critics call 'the times' or the climate, or the vast expanses of the country, or whatever you like . .." (November 26,1896.)
In December, upon hearing of the possibility of a conflict with England over the Near East, Chekhov wrote Suvorin and indicated the true state of his feelings at this time: "If there is a war in the spring, I'll go. During the last one and a half to two years so many events of all kinds have happened in my life . . . that, like Vronsky, there's nothing left for me to do but go to war, to heal, of course, not to fight. The only bright interval during this time was my stay with you at Feodosiya; all the rest was so rotten that I dismiss it." (December 2, 1896.)
But as the next New Year's celebration approached, Chekhov's customary resilience returned. Cheerfully he wrote Lika to come for the party and to bring some wine. "Only, I beg you, don't drink it up on the way."
chapter xvii
"I'll 60 with the Spring Freshets"
The disastrous first-night failure of The Sea Gull has often been credited with contributing to the crisis which five months later occurred in Chekhov's health. However, stubborn unwillingness to seek treatment for his disease and remorseless draining of his physical resources made the crisis inevitable.
As a worker in the national census, from January 10 to February 3, 1897, he went the rounds of peasant huts in the district, knocking his head against the low doorways which he could never get used to. During most of this period he ran a fever from an attack of influenza and his head ached constantly. He had the further responsibility of supervising a team of fifteen census-takers, lecturing them on the forms, checking the results, and turning in a final report. Officials of the County Council were supposed to aid him, but they knew little about the business and frequently pleaded sickness when they were wanted. The census had exhausted him, he wrote a medical friend, and never had he been so busy. By the time it was over he had become heartily sick of the effort, and without any comment he entered in his diary only the stark record of his reward: "I received a medal for the census."