aged him and he ominously wrote brother Misha that nothing good would come of it. And not long before the opening Davydov declared that he must drop the lead, which he had played so well in Moscow, because he simply could not understand Chekhov's altered characterization of Ivanov. In despair, Chekhov visited him in the evenings and patiently coached him on the spiritual and intellectual content of the role, yet at the rehearsals, he complained, he continued to quarrel and become reconciled with "the tedious Davydov" ten times a day.
Though Chekhov had grown to hate Ivanov long before the Petersburg opening night, something told him that his extensive revisions had improved the play, that he had portrayed people who were not contrived, and that in his protagonist he had succeeded, where other Russian novelists and playwrights had failed, in creating a believable image of the educated, disillusioned man of the eighties obsessed by the inner emptiness of his life. Where he had gone wrong, he guessed, was in the shading of the characterization and in the manner of his presentation of Ivanov. More than talent and freshness were needed here, and especially a feeling of personal freedom which, as a self-made intellectual, he had only just begun to acquire. Rather poignantly he wrote to Suvorin: "What gently born writers have been endowed with by nature, self-made intellectuals buy at the price of their youth. Write me a story about a young man, the son of a serf, a former shopkeeper, a choir boy, high school and university student, brought up on respect for rank, kissing the hands of priests, belonging to a generation alien to thought, offering thanks for every mouthful of bread, often whipped, going to school without shoes, quarreling, tormenting animals, fond of dining with rich relatives, playing the hypocrite before God and people without any cause, except out of a recognition of his own insignificance — then tell how that young man presses the slave out of him drop by drop and how he wakes up one fine morning and feels that in his veins flows not the blood of a slave, but real human blood." (January 7, 1889.)
Preoccupied with the business of his play, Chekhov saw few Petersburg friends apart from Pleshcheev and Leontiev-Shcheglov. He had dinner with Barantsevich. He sought a brief meeting with old Grigorovich, no doubt to ease his conscience for his failure to call on him on his previous visit. Though he still loved the old man, he remarked to Suvorin, he had begun to detect a virtuoso-like insincerity in Grigorovich. One evening he accepted an invitation to a party at the home of
S. N. Khudekov, editor and publisher of the Petersburg Gazette. There he met Lidiya Avilova, a tall attractive lad)' of twenty-four, with rosy cheeks and luxurious hair which she wore in two long thick braids. She was the sister-in-law of Khudekov, married to a young man working in the Ministry' of Education, to whom she had recently borne a son. As a mere girl Lidiya Avilova had nourished ambitions to be a writer and had passionately admired Chekhov's tales, some of which she knew by heart. His starched collar that hung around his neck like a horse collar and his plain tie were forgotten when they were introduced and-he held her hand in his and smiled at her tenderly. He told her of his worry about Ivanov, and at supper they talked of writing. "Living images create thought," he said, "but thought does not create images." And he went on to explain that the life which he depicted in his stories was that "which you have not seen or never noticed before: its divergence from the norm, its contradictions." Before they parted, he said that he would send her a ticket for Ivanov, and he urged her to let him see her manuscripts: he would read them attentively. In her memoirs, Lidiya Avilova wrote of this first meeting: "Something exploded in my soul. ... I scarcely doubt that something the same happened to Chekhov. We looked at one another with surprise and joy. 'I'll come again,' said Chekhov. 'Shall we meet?'" Subsequent events suggest that her feminine intuition, about her own feelings, at least, was correct.
Though to Madame Suvorina he pretended indifference on the opening night, Chekhov later confessed that he was terribly agitated about the play. His fears quickly vanished. Its originality, and the brilliant acting, captivated the audience, and at the concluding scene between Ivanov and Sarah at the end of the third act, the audience acclaimed the author and director in a tremendous ovation. The theater-going public — surfeited with virtuous, self-sacrificing heroes prating about human dignity and the happiness of people — were agreeably surprised by Chekhov's effort to tell them the truth about themselves. On every hand the play was hailed. With minor exceptions, the many reviews were highly favorable, reflecting pretty generally the opinion of the Petersburg Gazette, which wrote that Ivanov represented "the triumph of a truly powerful talent. ... Its success was colossal, the kind of success which rarely happens on our stage." In general, opposition to the play centered in the "left" writers such as Mikhailovsky, Korolenko, and Gleb Uspensky. For them its tendentiousness lacked a meaningful social message. The still greater and much more conservative author
Leskov thought otherwise. He jotted down in his diary that there were, unfortunately, too many weak, will-less Ivanovs in Russia who evaded the significant problems of society. "A wise play," he concluded. "A great dramatic talent."
A wealthy admirer, N. M. Sokovnin, arranged a banquet in Chekhov's honor the night after the opening performance. All the toasts embarrassed the author, but when the host drank to Ivanov, which he compared to Griboedov's immortal masterpiece Woe from Wit, the unhappy Chekhov blushed. "Not even Shakespeare had to listen to the speeches that I heard," he ironically wrote later to Leontiev-Shcheglov, who was present at the occasion. (February 18, 1889.) The next day he hurriedly left for Moscow. He felt suffocated, exhausted, like a hunted hare. When lucky, he was a coward and always felt a desire to crawl under a table — this was the excuse he offered Barantsevich for his hasty departure. "There are two heroes at present in Petersburg," he wrote to Mariya Kiseleva after his return home: "the naked Phrvne bv Semiradsky,1 and myself fully clothed. Both have created a stir." (February 17, 1889.) The news from his brother Alexander that he had collected from the Alexandrinsky Theater 994 roubles in payment for five performances of Ivanov and two of The Bear placed a happy period to Chekhov's first dramatic efforts in Petersburg.
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Back at Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya after his Petersburg triumph, Chekhov felt somewhat bored and let down. He now could not tolerate people talking about Ivanov. Though he already contemplated another play, he urged Leontiev-Shcheglov, a fiction writer with a passion for drama, that since they were not generals in this genre, they ought not to demean themselves by contending with subalterns. To regard writing plays as a kind of sport was all right, but one must not take it seriously. As for himself, he experienced a strong desire to return to humble stories. To write plays was not in his character, he told Leikin in the course of explaining why he had left Petersburg without calling on him — he had been so pushed by people. Although he asked Leikin, who knew them well, to give his regards to the Khudekovs, whose "wife is a very sympathetic woman," he did not mention her sister, Lidiya Avi-