Over the next two months Ivanov dominated Chekhov's correspondence as well as his thoughts and activities. Even the devoted Alexander grew annoyed: "I've just received your letter and I must confess that I've never read anything more silly. You carry on about your play like a man who everlastingly fusses about something." No doubt
Chekhov's unusual excitement was largely caused by the fact that Ivanov was the first of his dramatic writings to be staged. The frenetic measure of self-praise he indulged in, however, could come only from a man who was uncertain about the success of his artistic creation; this was reflected in his clear insights into the play's deficiencies. He sat up to three in the morning discussing Ivanov with the able actor V. N. Davydov, who was to take the lead and whom Chekhov described as being "in raptures over the play." He informed Yezhov: "If I am to believe such judges as Davydov, then I know how to write plays. It seems that instinctively, because of some kind of flair, and without being aware of myself, I have written an entirely finished piece and not made a single stage error." (October 2-j, 1887.)
As soon as Chekhov began to attend the rehearsals, his hopes for the success of Ivanov received a sharp setback. The actors talked nonsense and did not appear to understand the import of their roles. Even Davydov as Ivanov now seemed a bit inadequate. So discouraged did he become that at one point, as he told Leikin, he actually proposed to Korsh — "a merchant," he now dubbed him, "who seeks the success not of his artists and plays, but only of a full house" —to withdraw Ivanov (he thought of moving it over to the Maly Theater). Tire producer, however, would not dream of releasing the play. When Leikin wrote Chekhov that an author ought to keep away from rehearsals because he only confused and cramped the style of the actors and frequently offered stupid suggestions, Chekhov acrimoniously replied: "The author is the proprietor of the play and not the actors; everywhere the casting is the obligation of the author if he is not absent; all my instructions up to this point have been helpful and have been carried out as I indicated; the actors themselves ask for instruction. ... If the author's participation is to be eliminated entirely, then the devil knows what will happen." (November 15, 1887.) That is, at the outset of his career as a playwright Chekhov was firmly convinced the author must insist that his play be produced as he had written it. To this end, he believed that an expert knowledge of the theater was essential to the playwright, who should be prepared to adapt the characters, dialogue, action, and spirit of his play to the productive means available in a given theater.
Of the ten rehearsals promised only four took place and Chekhov attended all of them. They amounted to only two, he complained, for in the others the actors behaved as though they were in a tournament, engaging in arguments and foul language, and most of tliem stumbled through their lines only with the aid of the prompter or through inner conviction. One of the actors testified that Chekhov behaved well at the rehearsals and did not interfere with them; other evidence indicates that he worked hard with the actors. Meanwhile a tryout performance of Ivanov took place at a provincial theater in Saratov on November 10, from which, Chekhov lamented, he realized not a kopeck, for he lacked the necessary fifteen roubles for membership in the Dramatic Society which would have guaranteed him an honorarium.
The Moscow opening night finally arrived — November 19. After the performance Chekhov entertained all the actors at his house and then got off to Alexander a characteristically amusing account of the opening. The family, filled with anxiety, sat in a box while Chekhov remained behind the scenes in what he described as a kind of prisoner's cage. Contrary to his expectations, he felt cool and collected, but the actors were excited, tense and crossed themselves as they went on the stage. The first act, he thought, was a great success despite the producer's blunders and the tendency of Ivan Kiselevsky, who played the important role of Count Shabelsky, to speak his own lines instead of Chekhov's. When the guests came 011 in the second act, however, they did not know their parts, mixed everything up, and spoke nonsense. But this act, as well as the third, wrote Chekhov, were enormous successes. There were many curtain calls. Chekhov himself was summoned three times, "and as I'm bowing, Davydov takes my hand, and Glama, in the style of Manilov, presses my other hand to her heart. Triumph of talent and virtue." The last act, however, was spoiled for him by the clowning of the best man at the wedding and because Kiselevsky, who was now "drunk as a cobbler," fumbled his lines and turned a "poetic dialogue into something odious and boring." (November 20, 1887.) Yet at the end bedlam reigned in the audience. Loud hissing was drowned out by applause and stamping of feet. In the refreshment bar people came to blows. In the gallery students wanted to throw somebody out and the police escorted two obstreperous individuals to the street. The place was in an uproar and Chekhov's sister almost fainted. His friend Dyukovsky, "who got palpitations of the heart, ran out of the theater," while Aleksei Kiselev for no good reason clutched his head in his hands and cried out in all sincerity, "Now what am I going to do?"
At the moment Chekhov seemed more impressed by the turmoil caused by his play than by anything .else. The prompter had told him, he wrote Alexander in a letter which he jubilantly signed, "Schiller Shakespearovich Goethe," that in all his thirty-two years of service he had never witnessed such excitement in the audience and behind the scenes. And, Chekhov proudly asserted, "there has been no other occasion at Korsh's when the author was called before the curtain after the second act." (November 24, 1887.) This immediate stirring effect somehow made inconsequential the reactions of the Moscow reviewers, which were both favorable and unfavorable. One described the play as "brashly cynical, immoral, and repulsive."
Chekhov's unusual interest in the excitement of the audience at the opening of Ivanov was anchored in the fact that he had written a tendentious full-length play designed as a kind of answer to those critics who now expected from him something large and significant, a work that would confront squarely one of the strident social issues of the day. In the character of Ivanov he attempted to expose a type that had been much written about but inadequately understood — from Chekhov's point of view —by contemporary novelists and dramatists. Ivanov was intended to symbolize those people among the educated class who, dissillusioned by the repressive political and social conditions that followed the assassination of Alexander II, had fallen into dejection and despair. Chekhov wished to debunk this type, to unmask the futility of the intellectual who dreams pleasantly about his past accomplishments but quails before the abuses of the present, then experiences a vague sense of guilt over them, and ends with unstrung nerves among the "shattered" and "misunderstood" people of society.