This outburst probably worried Chekhov more than it exasperated him. His reply was cautious and temporizing, as though he were dealing with a neurotic person. He mentioned first his impending departure for the Crimea and how distasteful was this vagabond life forced upon him by his illness. In his only reference to the contents of her letter, he wrote: "Your judgment about the bee is incorrect. It must first see the bright, beautiful flowers, and only then does it gather the honey. And as for what followed — indifference, boredom, and that talented people live and love only in a world of their own images and fantasies — all I can say is: Another person's soul is darkness. ... I press your hand. Keep well and happy." (August 30,1898.)
It would appear that the very innocuousness of Chekhov's reply, his pointed evasion of her charge that he had exploited for literary gain what she regarded as their hallowed relationship, infuriated Lidiya Avilova. He refused to play her romantic game of make-believe or "Let's pretend." She was getting older, and the claims of marriage and now three children were binding her to a fate she resisted. In her prolonged pursuit, she might have been placated by just a bit of emotional sentiment or personal feeling for her; but this, too, Chekhov failed to give. In her next letter, if we may judge from Chekhov's answer,8 she seized upon his polite "Keep well and happy" as a deliberate attempt on his
s This letter is entirely ignored in Avilova's memoirs. In fact, it was one she asked his sister to exclude from her collection, a request with which Masha complied.
part to end their correspondence. To this half-mad accusation, he answered: "I read your letter and could only throw up my hands in despair. If I wished you health and happiness in my last, it was not because I wished to break off our correspondence or, Heaven forbid, because I wished to avoid you, but simply because I have always wished you happiness and health, and I do so now. It is very simple. And if you sec things in my letters that are not there, it is probably because I don't know how to express myself." Then, on a calmer note, he told a bit about his life at Yalta, the death of his father, and the fact that this would probably necessitate building a new nest for his family in the South. And with his dislike of giving offense, even if it were imaginary, he ended: "At any rate, do not be angry with me, and forgive me if there was anything cruel or disagreeable in my last letter." (October 21, 1898.)
Clearly Chekhov had not found in Lika, Lidiya Avilova, or in any other woman that special essence — "love, sexual attraction, being of one flesh" — which he had singled out in his letter to Misha as the sine qua поп of happy married life. But then he gave no evidence of having been searching for it. Throughout his mature existence the emphasis he placed on getting married had been largely negative. Now, seriously ill and at the age of thirty-eight, had the desire to begin the search for such a love caught his imagination as one last experience he must enjoy or suffer before it was too late? It will be remembered that he had enthusiastically written Suvorin, after he had seen Olga Knip- per as Irina in Tsar Fyodor, that he could have fallen in love with her if he had remained in Moscow. The feeling may have been mutual, for this was possibly the rumor Lika had referred to in her letter in September. Though he had passed off as a joke her guess that he was planning on marriage, he perhaps did betray the direction of his thoughts in a couple of sentences which repeat what he had told Suvorin: "Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky have a very interesting theater. Beautiful actresses. If I were to remain there a little longer, I would lose my head. As I grow older, the pulse of life in me beats faster and stronger." And he dropped still another unconscious hint in a letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko. In congratulating him on the laudatory reviews of the Moscow Art Theater's performance of Tsar Fyodor, he remarked: "But why don't they write about Irina — Knipper? Is anything the matter? I didn't like your Fyodor, but Irina was extraordinarily good; yet Fyodor gets more mention than Irina." (October 21,1898.)
Chekhov was hardly in love with Olga Knipper, but her image somehow had never left his thoughts since the night he first saw her.
« 9 »
Perhaps because of both Olga Knipper and the impending performance of The Sea Gull, the Moscow Art heater was very much in Chekhov's thoughts while he was in Yalta. He had admired the zeal and artistic sense of its directors and the enthusiasm and dedication of the young actors. In his own thinking, Chekhov had anticipated, in certain respects, Stanislavsky's revolution against the stultifying conventions of the Russian theater. He shared the new company's detestation of the old method of acting with its theatricality, false pathos, declamation, and he sympathized with the intention to achieve artistic staging and a higher level of repertoire. In writing Nemirovich-Danchenko on the success of Tsar Fyodor, with which the Moscow Art Theater had opened its first season on October 14, he had declared: "Judging from the newspapers, the start was a brilliant one — and I'm very, very glad; you can't imagine how glad I am. Your success is still another proof that the public as well as the actors need an intelligent theater." All this, he no doubt felt, augured well for The Sea Gull when its turn came.
Fortunately for his peace of mind, what Chekhov at Yalta did not know was that between the success of their opening night and the date set for the first performance of The Sea Gull, December 17, the new theater had suffered comparative failures in five other plays in their repertoire. Another failure threatened to ruin the new company, which had become an object of ridicule on the part of some of the critics because of its bold challenge to the conventional Russian stage. Though Stanislavsky had lavished all his brilliant talents in devising an exhaustive mis-en-scene that would highlight every external action and bring out what he believed to be the melancholy mood of Chekhov's play, he had very little faith in The Sea Gull, whose meaning was still unclear to him. It was a bad omen that late changes had to be made in the casting; the dress rehearsal went off poorly; and a last-minute complication ensued when Chekhov's sister appeared at the theater and pleaded with tears in her eyes that the play be postponed because she was desperately worried over the effect a second failure would have on her brother's precarious health.9 The directors wavered, but in the end they decided
»In her memoirs Chekhov's sister denies that she ever made such an appeal, but the evidence appears to support the allegation.
to go through with the performance; much money and twenty-six rehearsals had been expended on The Sea Gull. To withdraw the play meant to close the theater.
The evening of December 17 came. The audience was not large. In his My Life in Art, Stanislavsky relates that the actors were determined to create not success but a triumph, for they believed that if they failed the man and writer whom they loved would die, killed by their hands. Stanislavsky could not recall how the first act went off, only that all the actors smellcd of valerian drops — a common Russian sedative. Playing the part of Trigorin, he also remembered how he tried to still the trembling of his leg while sitting with his back to the audience — one of the theater's breaks with convention in order to suggest a fourth wall to the stage.