In Gooseberries, rain overtakes the two friends, who are on another outing together, and they find refuge in the house of Alekhin, owner of an estate, where this time Ivan Ivanych narrates a story. It is about his brother, a kind of variant of the man in the shell, who slaves and half-starves himself in the city for years in order to buy a little estate in the country where he can be his own lord and master and eat his own gooseberries. This passion for self-sufficiency, for shutting himself up for the rest of his life on a bit of property, seems to Ivan Ivanych an illustration of Tolstoy's gloomy parable: How much land does a man need? The answer comes — only the six feet of earth that a corpse requires. But this is selfishness, declares Ivan Ivanych, a kind of monas- ticism without self-denial. "Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he will have room for the full play of all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit." Here is expressed Chekhov's own unquenchable thirst for all of life, for everything accessible to man.
In the last tale, About Love, Alekhin tells his story to the two guests. Here the problem of freedom is related to a purely personal and emotional situation. Unlike Ivan Ivanych's brother, Alekhin is the kind of estate owner whom Chekhov would approve of — an educated man who
3 A. F. Dyakonov, inspector of the Taganrog school when Chekhov was a student there, has sometimes been mentioned as the prototype of Belikov, but so have others, such as Chekhov's friend, the editor M. O. Menshikov. No doubt several people Chekhov observed in real life contributed to this brilliant characterization of a widely accepted social type at that time.
has dedicated himself to the hardest kind of labor in an effort to make a success of his estate. On his rare visits to town he becomes friendly with a court official, Luganovich, and his beautiful wife, Anna Alek- seevna, who is much younger than her husband. Eventually, the bachelor Alckhin becomes an intimate of this family, "uncle" to the children, and a trusted participant in the joys and sorrows of his friends. This close relationship contributes to the inhibited nature of the love that soon develops between Alekhin and the young wife. He believes, as no doubt Chekhov did, that there is only one incontestable truth about love, namely that it is a great mystery, and that everything written or said about it is not a solution, but only a statement of questions that have remained unanswered. Yet Alekhin insists on posing these unanswerable questions. And he knows that the tormented Anna Alek- seevna is also endlessly catcchizing herself with very much the same questions.
In their unconfessed love, the sterile years pass and tender feelings shrivel and die in the furnace of doubt. To free themselves from the eternal questions dictated by convention is beyond the 'capacities of both lovers. Finally Luganovich is transferred to a post in a distant province. Alekhin goes to the railway station to bid farewell to the suffering and ill Anna Alekseevna. "When our eyes met there in the compartment, our spiritual strength deserted us. I embraced her, she pressed her face to my breast and wept. Kissing her face, shoulders, and hands wet with tears — oh, how miserable we were! — I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I understood how unnecessary, petty, and deceptive was everything that hindered us from loving each other. I realized that when you love you must, in your reasoning about love, start from what is higher and more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue, in their usual meaning, or you must not reason at all."
This was a lesson that must have come directly from Chekhov's heart. These stories, written during the summer of 1898, reveal a writer who had long since learned to compound the rich stuff of objective observation with the deep moral substance of the artist seeking for answers to the problems of life.
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When Chekhov arrived home from Paris at the beginning of May, he found awaiting him a letter from Nemirovich-Danchenko. This old friend, dramatist and teacher of the theater arts, had joined forces with Stanislavsky — who had long been acting in and producing plays for the Society of Art and Literature — to establish the People's Art Theater, the name of which was soon changed to the Moseow Art Theater. It was a momentous partnership that soon revolutionized the Russian theater and eventually exercised a profound influence on the European and American theater. Most of the new eompany was made up of young amateurs in Stanislavsky's group, and the best students of Nemirovich-Danchenko's classes in a Moseow school of the theater. Since Nemirovich-Danchenko had assumed responsibility for selecting the repertoire, he now wrote Chekhov for permission to stage The Sea Gull. He expressed his profound admiration for the play and promised to give it the kind of production that would bring out the hidden beauty and essential dramatic conflicts of eaeh of the characters, features that had been so utterly missed in the Alexandrinsky staging.
This letter reopened the deep wound whieh the initial failure of The Sea Gull had so recently inflicted on Chekhov. He had sworn to abandon playwriting and the theater. To be sure, the previous summer he had read Uncle Vanya to a Serpukhov amateur group whieh was preparing to perform it on behalf of the fund-raising for his Novoselki school project. Shortly after, however, he had refused Korsh permission to stage it professionally in Moscow. And although he was pleased with the revival of Ivanov at the Alexandrinsky, he had written Suvorin from Nice on March 13, 1898: "You are becoming more elosely eonneeted with the theater, but I obviously am getting further and further away from it —and I'm sorry, for the theater once gave me a great deal that is fine (and my earnings from it have not been bad; in the provinces this winter my plays have succeeded as never before, even Uncle Vanya). Formerly I had no greater satisfaction than in going to the theater, but now I go there with the feeling that someone in the gallery is going to shout 'Fire!' And I don't like actors. Writing plays has demoralized me."
Accordingly, Chekhov rejected the offer of the new theater to stage The Sea Gull. "He wrote," Nemirovich-Danchenko reports in his recollections,4 "that he neither wished, nor did he have the strength, to undergo the great agitation of the theater which had occasioned him so mueh pain, and he repeated, not for the first time, that he was not a dramatist, that there were mueh better dramatists than he, etc."
4 Chekhov's letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko has been lost.
Nemirovich-Danchenko, however, was not easily discouraged. At first he tried in vain to persuade Masha to use her influence on her brother, and on May 12 he wrote Chekhov again, praising him as the only contemporary playwright whose work represented any significant interest for the theater, and he promised, if permission were granted, that he would visit and discuss the whole production plan with him before rehearsals. This new request must have caught Chekhov in a good mood, or perhaps because of his unfailing hospitality he could not resist the prospect of a visit from Nemirovich-Danchenko, for he replied: "Come, do me the kindness! You cannot imagine how much I want to see you, and for the satisfaction of seeing and talking with you, I'm prepared to give you all my plays." (May 16, 1898.) Nemirovich- Danchenko regarded this as an expression of willingness to allow him to stage The Sea Gull and so informed Chekhov.
Debates and disagreements took place that summer between Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko 011 the meaning of The Sea Gull and the most artistic way of staging it. The significance of its inner meaning evaded Nemirovich-Danchenko, who discovered its value in the fact that one felt the pulse of contemporary Russian life in the play. Stanislavsky frankly admitted that he could not understand The Sea Gull. And at first the young actors in the company, appalled at the thought that they were expected to succeed in a play which had failed dismally in Petersburg when performed by some of the most experienced actors in Russia, were entirely uncertain of how their roles should be played. Indeed, without the tireless and enthusiastic advocacy of Nemirovich- Danchenko, The Sea Gull might never have seen the boards of the Moscow Art Theater. Nevertheless, while Stanislavsky retired to his brother's estate near Kharkov to write his meticulous production notes for this play, the young actors, in their first exciting summer together, at a dacha outside Moscow, rehearsed it with others in the repertoire designed for their opening season. In September they came up to Moscow and were informed that Chekhov would be present at a rehearsal of his play.