Chekhov was the favorite contemporary author of most of these young actors, and Nemirovich-Danchenko had instilled in them a reverence for him. Though they had at first been puzzled by The Sea Gull, the more they worked over it the more they loved it, and they had come to believe that their future somehow depended on the performance of this play. When Chekhov appeared at their rehearsal on
September 9, a sense of agitated expectation swept through the company. But he quickly put them at ease by the charm of his personality and the simplicity of his behavior. With some embarrassment at first, he tugged at his beard and played with his pince-nez as he haltingly replied to their eager questions, and they could not be quite certain whether he intended his answers to be serious or funny. After he watched the first act and part of the second, however, there could be no mistaking the directness of his language as he spoke of his reactions. "They were very tense," Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote Stanislavsky, who was unable to be present. "He agreeably discovered at the rehearsal that we had a splendid company that worked excellently together." But Nemirovich-Danchenko took the precaution to introduce a number of changes that Chekhov had suggested. And when he attended a second rehearsal two days later, Chekhov expressed satisfaction over the improvements, although he severely criticized two of the actors, one of them playing the important role of Trigorin, and he suggested that Stanislavsky, who intended to portray Dorn, should take this part.
Although Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote Stanislavsky that the latter's elaborate mise-en-scene had impressed Chekhov, other sources indicate that some of the effects disturbed him.
Meierhold reports that one of the actors told Chekhov that Stanislavsky intended to have frogs croaking, the sound of dragonflies, and dogs barking on the stage.
" 'Why?' Chekhov asked with a note of dissatisfaction in his voice.
" 'It is realistic,' the actor replied.
" 'Realistic,' Chekhov repeated with a laugh, and after a slight pause he said: 'The stage is art. There is a canvas of Kramskoi5 in which he wonderfully depicts human faces. Suppose he eliminated the nose of one of these faces and substituted a real one. The nose will be 'realistic,' but the picture will be spoiled.' "
Another actor proudly informed him that Stanislavsky expected to introduce a woman with a weeping child at the end of the third act.
"That's unnecessary," Chekhov said. "It is just like playing a pianissimo at the very moment the lid of the piano drops."
"But it often happens in life," one of the group of actors objected, "that a forte, entirely unexpectedly, becomes a pianissimo."
"True, but the stage," answered Chekhov, "is subject to known conventions. You have no fourth wall. Apart from this, the stage is art, the
5 A celebrated Russian painter.
stage reflects in itself the quintessence of life, so one must not introduce on it anything that is superfluous."
At these early rehearsals of The Sea Gull Chekhov must have observed closely the actress who played the difficult role of Arkadina — Olga Leonardovna Knipper — a thin-lipped woman of twenty-eight with an expressive, intelligent face and a beautiful voice. She had only recently finished Nemirovich-Danchcnko's dramatic school, and with the ardor and strong will that were part of her nature she had joyously dedicated her life to the theater. In a sense she had already fallen in love with Chekhov through her love for his play, and his first attendance at the rehearsal, as she remarks in her memoirs, was for her an unforgettable day.
It may have been a dawning interest in Olga Knipper rather than his growing curiosity about the artistic promise of the new theater that led Chekhov, two days later, to attend the rehearsal of A. K. Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor, the historical tragedy with which the company planned to open its first season. lie sat, muffled in an overcoat, in the damp, cold Hermitage Theater, not yet remodeled for the opening, its bare stage lacking a curtain and illuminated by candlcs stuck in bottles. "And it was a joy to feel," Olga rhapsodically recalled, "that a 'soul' beloved by all of us sat in that black, empty parterre and heard us." As he watched her in the role of Irina in Fyodor he obviously thought the discomforts worth it, for, not long after, he wrote Suvorin about the rehearsaclass="underline" "Its cultured tone had an agreeable effect on me and the performance was a truly artistic one, although no great talents were acting. In my opinion Irina was splendid. Her voice, her nobility, her sincerity were so superb that I felt choked with emotion. Fyodor seemed to me not so good. . . . But best of all was Irina. If I had remained in Moscow I would have fallen in love with this Irina." (October 8, 1898.)
« 4.»
In fact, Chekhov left the next day for the Crimea, for with the approach of autumn he had begun to cough up blood again. The illusion of improving health had vanished. Now that travel had become a necessity, this enthusiastic devotee of it regarded his journey as a form of exile —he complained, toward the end of summer, that the very thought of having to leave Melikhovo for a warmer clime depressed his spirits and prevented him from writing or doing anything constructive.
Chekhov had written ahead to his friend Mirolyubov at Yalta for details on furnished rooms there, for he could not afford a lengthy stay in a hotel. His selection of this resort town, the "pearl of the Crimea," was not dictated by any liking for it; his previous visits had left him with a poor impression. Its climate, however, especially in the autumn and early winter months, was regarded as excellent for consumptives. He would have preferred to go abroad, but he lacked the money to do this and continue his support of the family at Melikhovo, to say nothing of fulfilling financial obligations he had assumed in building the new school in his village. It is interesting to find the accomplished novelist Ertel writing to a friend at this time that Chekhov — no less talented than Maupassant or Turgenev, he declared — "must stoop to humiliating negotiations on loans in order to obtain money, because his writings, which all of Russia reads, do not provide this sick man with an income adequate for his needs, or for taking a period of rest or a journey to the South, and especially so since he has on his hands the support of a numerous family."
Chekhov arrived in Yalta on September 18 and rented two rooms in a private dacha with an attractive garden and a pleasant outlook. Sunny weather, beautiful views of the sea, and the surrounding greenery and flowers still in full bloom delighted him. Life at Yalta flowed on drowsily, zoologically. His daily walks along the shore usually took him to the "intellectual center" of the town — I. A. Sinani's bookshop, where the lively sale of tobacco, pipes, and cigarettes compensated for the sluggish trade in belles lettres. Here gathered novelists, poets, and artists on vacation in Yalta. Chekhov met at Sinani's and invited for walks or meals Mirolyubov, S. Ya. Elpatievsky, distinguished physician and writer, the singer Chaliapin, and the poet Konstantin Balmont. He also encountered Rachmaninoff, who sent him one of his compositions, Fantasy for an Orchestra, with an inscription which indicated that it had been inspired by Chekhov's tale, On the Road.