When the final curtain fell, there was a tomblike silence throughout the auditorium. Olga Knipper fainted — she was ill, and had acted the role of Arkadina in a high fever. In deep despair the cast started to move to their dressing rooms. Suddenly there camc an unearthly roar from the auditorium. The curtain went up and the surprised actors were caught in various odd postures, grim expressions of failure still on their faces. Pandemonium broke loose as the antics of the audience turned into a demonstration. The actors embraced each other, kissed, shouted, and wept. Stanislavsky did a wild dervish dance of triumph on the stage as the audience roared its demand that a telegram be sent to Chekhov.
The telegram arrived at Yalta: just performed the sea gull, success colossal. play so took iiold from first act that series of triumphs followed. curtain calls endless. . . . we are mad with
joy. The next day another telegram came from Nemirovich-Danchenko:
with wonderful unanimity all newspapers acclaim success of the sea gull as brilliant, tumultuous, enormous. reviews of play rapturous. for our theater success of the sea gull surpasses success of fyodor. In truth, the extraordinary performance of Chekhov's play saved the Moscow Art Theater and set it on its glorious course of future achievements and world influence. The Moscow Art Theater became Chekhov's theater, a fact symbolized by the emblem of the sea gull that henceforth appeared on its curtain.
Chekhov answered Nemirovich-Danchenko with a telegram:
convey to alclass="underline" infinite thanks with all my soul. l'm confined to yalta, like dreyfus on devil's island. i grieve that l'm not with you. your telegram made me well and happy.
Olga Knippcr's illness delayed repetition of The Sea Gull for some days and Chekhov dismally commented that he had such bad luck in the theater that if lie were to marry an actress she would no doubt give birth to an orangutan or a porcupine. When it resumed, each performance had a full house. Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik tells how she often passed the theater in the early hours of the morning and saw the square filled with people, mostly young, some sitting on stools and reading books by lanterns, others dancing, but all waiting through the night to buy tickets for The Sea Gull, the lucky purchasers then rushing off to their various jobs.
Telegrams and letters from friends and family kept pouring into Yalta, most of them ecstatic in their praise of The Sea Gull. Even Gorky in Nizhny Novgorod, who had only read the play, hurried off a letter becausc a friend — an old, experienced hand in drama criticism — had told him, "with tears of agitation," that in forty years of going to the theater he had "never seen such a marvelous, heTetically talented piece as The Sea Gull." And Gorky added: "So you don't want to write for the theater?! You must, by God! Forgive me that I write so boldly, but truly I feel terribly fine and merry and I love you."
For days Chekhov was busy answering these congratulatory communications — he felt it his duty. All his thoughts were in Moscow. When and where would he see his play? In replying to A. L. Vishnevsky, an old Taganrog school comrade who acted the part of Dorn, he pathetically exploded: "Ah, if you could only feel and understand how bitter it is for me that I cannot be at The Sea Gull and see all of you!" (December lg, 1898.) To have been present at that first terrible failure and now to have missed the superb triumph was a piece of ill-luck which he never ceased to regret. But to the depths of his being he felt that he had been morally and artistically resurrected.
chapter xx
"I Have Become a 'Marxist'"
"If I did not have то live in Yalta," Chekhov wrote his admirer Urusov on February 1, 1899, "this winter would be the happiest of my life." Indeed, as reports continued to come in on successive performances of The Sea Gull, cappcd by greetings and thanks signed by three hundred spectators, Chekhov's happiness grew lyrical. The play was creating a furor — wrote Masha, who saw it a number of times — everybody was talking about him; she joyfully suggested that he call his new Yalta house "The Sea Gull." Chaliapin, among the many, sent a telegram of rapturous praise of his talent, and news of a succcssful staging of The Sea Gull in Prague reached him. In letters he urged friends to see the play and write him about it, and soon the first royalties of over thirteen hundred roubles added to his pleasure. "Who could have thought," Chekhov wrote Sergcenko about their Taganrog schoolfellow, "that this former dunce and starveling Vishnevsky would act in the Art Theater in a play written by another former dunce and starveling?" (January 1,1899.)
But this letter to the Tolstoyan Scrgeenko, whose loud laughter and' comic demeanor always made Chekhov feel uncomfortable, conccrned a proposal which Sergecnko had conveyed to him: the well-known publisher A. F. Marx had offered to buy all Chekhov's works and get out a complete edition. Chekhov had heard rumors of this interest earlier. Tolstoy, it appears, had urged Marx, who had published his Resurrection, to make such an offer, assuring him that Chekhov's writings were of more consequence than those of Turgenev or Goncharov. Even Masha in Moscow had heard from Scrgeenko that he would be willing to negotiate with Marx and that Chekhov should demand at least a hundred thousand roubles.
An obstacle to such an arrangement was Chekhov's agreement to let Suvorin publish his complete works; in fact, at that very time Chekhov was correcting proof on the first volume. However, he had become involved in prolonged wrangling with Suvorin's editors. They lost his manuscripts and failed to answer his letters; in exasperation he remarked that at the rate they were going the edition would not appear until 1948. For several years now Chekhov had been expressing considerable dissatisfaction over the shoddy way in which his books were handled by Suvorin's minions. One of the chief reasons was Suvorin's failure to devote much attention to this aspect of his many enterprises. Delays in publishing, poor promotion and distribution, and execrable bookkeeping had resulted in substantial financial losses to Chekhov. He now averaged only about thirty-five hundred roubles annually on the various editions of some thirteen volumes in circulation, but the little book Kashtanka, he maintained, could alone earn him a thousand a year if properly pushed. During the past year his earnings had run up to eight thousand simply on the strength of the publication of Peasants. Besides, he had grown weary of fighting often losing battles over paper, type face, bindings, titles, and the size of an edition. He longed to be relieved of all these decisions, which Marx's firm promised to undertake, and in addition this publisher had the reputation of turning out attractive books and selling them well. Then, too, Marx sought to buy all his writings outright, whereas Chekhov's arrangement on the Suvorin edition was the old one — he would receive a percentage of the income from the sale of the books. The prospect of an immediate large sum of money was perhaps the conclusive argument in favor of Marx's proposal, for Chekhov urgently needed funds for his new house and to pay off his debts. Further, in the light of his precarious health, he now felt it essential to plan for the future of his mother and sister as well as of himself. So with almost impatient eagerness he assured Sergeenko that he was more than willing to have him negotiate a contract with Marx.