Caught up in his new interest, Chekhov missed few performances at the Maly theater and the Korsh, and even acted as Suvorin's agent when the latter contemplated buying the Korsh playhouse, although nothing came of the matter. He improved his knowledge of staging and
б A reference to Turgenev's tale with this title, which is a kind of swan song to his literary efforts. (Between October 4-6, 1888.) acting and cultivated further his acquaintance with the actors and actresses, some of whom, such as Davydov and A. P. Lensky, became his close friends. At times he seemed to play the part of a booking agent, soliciting the manuscript plays of his friends, criticizing them very skilfully, then submitting them to Korsh and the actors, who had a great deal to say about the approval of a play. And in some cases, if selected, he would choose the cast and see the play through rehearsal. He performed all these functions, for example, on behalf of Suvorin's play Tatyana Repina which was produced at the Maly Theater.
Curiously enough, Chekhov's intimacy with the theater — which he had achieved as an habitud, a reporter and critic of the stage, and a dramatist — seemed to intensify his contempt for many of its practices. Repeatedly he lashed out against the theater; it had fallen into the hands of scoundrels, ignoramuses, and drunks. Most of the plays he saw he regarded as slanders on life. "We must strive with all our power to see to it that the stage passes out of the hands of grocers and into literary hands, otherwise the theater is doomed," he told Suvorin in full anticipation of the conviction held by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich- Danchenko when they set out to reform the Russian stage a few years later. (November 3, 1888.) "I do not have any love for the stage," he wrote Leontiev-Shcheglov. "The contemporary theater — it is an eruption, a nasty disease of the cities. One must clcan up the disease, but to like it — that is unhealthy. You will begin to quarrel with me, and to use the old phrase: The theater is a school, it educates — and so forth. But I'll tell you how I see it: The theater at present is not higher than the crowd; on the contrary, the life of the crowd is higher and more intelligent than the theater. This means that it is not a school but something quite different." (November 7, 1888.)
Rather cynically Chekhov explained to Suvorin that it was possible to hate the theater and at the same time write for it with satisfaction. You go to the manager's office to pick up your royalties with the same element of expectation and surprise with which the fisherman goes to his net to see what the catch is. "An agreeable amusement," he concluded. (November 18, 1888.)
Whatever Chekhov may have felt about the execrable conditions of the Russian theater, it did not prevent him from working away on the revision of Ivanov over the last three months of 1888. Despite the mixed success of its Moscow performance, he had decided, and with considerable reason, that the point of this realistic play, which attempted to portray life as it is, had been badly or entirely misunderstood by the audience and even by friends who had read copies of it. The principal reason for his drastic changes in the last act was to clarify the characterization of the hero. He wished to make it clear that Ivanov did not die because of the slanders and public insults heaped upon him, but because he had reached the end of the road; that even the love of Sasha, who had unsuccessfully endeavored to reform him, had only lowered him in his own eyes.
With a deep feeling of relief, Chekhov finished the revision on December 19 and sent a clear copy to Suvorin. "Now my Mr. Ivanov is much more intelligible," he wrote. "The finale does not entirely satisfy me (except for the shot, everything is flabby), but I comfort myself with the thought that its form is not yet final. ... I give you my word that I shall never again write such intellectual and rotten plays as Ivanov." (December 19, 1888.) And he asked Suvorin to see that the play was brought to the attention of the Petersburg Alexandrinsky Theater, whose producer had requested it for his benefit night. He even listed the actors and actresses who, he thought, should play the principal roles.
Much to Chekhov's chagrin, the reactions from Petersburg, which were not long in coming, indicated that even the revised version had not always conveyed the meaning he had struggled so hard to put into the play. The producer imagined Ivanov to be a superfluous man in the Turgenev tradition, and a leading actress of the company wanted to know why the hero seemed to be such a scoundrel. Suvorin advised that Ivanov be endowed with some quality that would make it apparent why women were attracted to him, and he asked why Doctor Lvov was a great man. Chekhov replied that if three people had misunderstood him in this fashion, then he had not put down what he wished to write and the play ought not to be produced. Patiently he wrote out for Suvorin a detailed description of just how he understood each of the main characters. And he concluded: "If the audience leaves the theater with the conviction that Ivanovs are scoundrels and Doctor Lvovs are great men, then I'll have to give up the theater and send my pen to hell. . . . In my imagination Ivanov and Lvov appear as living people. In all conscience I tell you sincerely that these people were born in my- head, not out of ocean spray or preconceived ideas, not of 'intellectuality,' and not by chance. They are the result of observation and the study of life. . . . If they have emerged on paper lifeless and indistinct, it is not their 174 I first fame as a writer 1886 - 1889
fault but my lack of ability to convey my own ideas. It seems as though I took up playwriting too early." (December 30,1888.)
News from the Alexandrinsky Theater that the play would be performed gladdened him. Yet he was still worried about its inadequacies, and on the last day of the year he wrote Leontiev-Shcheglov that if certain conditions which he had posed for the production of Ivanov were not accepted he would withdraw the play.
chapter ix
"There Is a Sort of Stagnation in My Soul"
January 31, 1889 —the opening night of the Petersburg performance of Ivanov — seemed so close! Much work still had to be done on the play. Chekhov had come to stay with the Suvorins in order to see Ivanov through rehearsal. He could not overcome a feeling of inadequacy in playwriting, for which, he decided, one must have a special talent. Parodying an earlier observation, he remarked to Pleshchcev that fiction was his legal wife but the dramatic form "a showy, noisy, impertinent and tiresome mistress." (January 15, 1889.) Worse still, he said, to make over what he considered a bad play was as difficult as trying to turn the old trousers of a soldier into a dress coat.
However, much more than money, which Chekhov had by no means lost sight of in this venture, was now at stake. Though he had realized that the hurriedly written Ivanov, which he had served up in Moscow two years ago, would not do for the more sophisticated Petersburg theater patrons and critics, his thoroughly revised version had now run into additional complications which called for further changes. Since the opening was designed as a benefit performance for F. A. Yurkovsky, this eminent director of the Alexandrinsky Theater had taken the precaution to assign the roles to his foremost players. The great actress Mariya Savina would play the part of Sasha — one that Chekhov had deliberately reduced in importance in the revision — and he now felt it necessary to build up that portrayal and even add lines doing justice to the special qualities of her art. All this involved additional corrections, interpolations, and again some radical changes in the fourth act, which he never resolved to his own satisfaction. The early rehearsals discour-.