In short, it appears that Chekhov was experimenting with The Wood Demon and vaguely moving in the direction of the "inner action" plays of the great period of his dramatic writing. He now wished to present on the stage life as it is, avoiding the theatrical effects of which he himself had been somewhat guilty in Ivanov. However, with the further desire to transcend the artistic position of a mere observer of life, he again succumbed to the influence of Tolstoy by introducing a moral purpose and aim. For the play is essentially a struggle between good and evil, in which characters representing virtue ultimately convert those who are evil-minded. Old Serebryakov, a retired professor, and his virtuous second wife, the young and beautiful Elena, typify this moral struggle. The portrayal of Serebryakov has in it something of the flavor of Chekhov's generalization, in another connection, to Suvorin: "I have my knife out for professors, although I know that they are excellent people. Like authors, they have no daring and much self-importance." (November 27, 1889.) Mikhail Khrushchev, the wood demon and the prototype of Mikhail Astrov in Uncle Vanya, symbolizes, in his passionate and poetic love of trees, the force for good in human affairs that resides in nature. The involved love triangles and Serebryakov's cunning plan to sell the estate which does not belong to him complicate the action and at the same time provide previews of motifs which Chekhov made better use of later in his more famous plays.
Work on The Wood Demon went forward by fits and starts. Not only the events of his personal life and the efforts on his novel and on A Dreary Story interrupted its progress, but also the apparent difficulties he experienced in coping with a new dramatic approach. In periods of discouragement he dropped the play more than once, although he jubilantly anticipated the six to seven thousand roubles he thought it would bring him — and he had already promised The Wood Demon for a benefit performance for Svobodin in Petersburg and for Lensky in Moscow. In September, however, he returned to it with a will, rejected what he had written up to that point, and started out afresh. Later he wrote Suvorin that he worked on it "with great satisfaction and even with enjoyment...." (October ij, 1889.)
At the beginning of October Chekhov gave copies of The Wood Demon to Svobodin and Lensky, although he regarded the play, and especially the fourth act, as requiring more revision. Shortly thereafter he heard from Svobodin, who had read the play to the Committee of the Alexandrinsky Theater on which Grigorovich sat (it was regarded as an unofficial committee since some of its regular members were still on vacation). The committee, wrote Svobodin, had rejected The Wood Demon for performance primarily because of "the absence of action and its tedious dialogue." Perhaps more important, the director also indicated that the Grand Duke, a patron of the theater, would clearly not like the play.
Some two weeks later, Chekhov received a letter from Lensky. "I will say only one thing: Write tales. You refer too scornfully to the stage and to dramatic form. You esteem them too little to write a play.
This form is more difficult than that of fiction, and — forgive me — you are too spoiled by success in order, so to speak, to start fundamentally to study dramatic form from the beginning and to love it." To add to the rout, this letter was followed by one from Nemirovich-Danchenko, who had also read the play: "Lensky is right, you ignore too many of the demands of the stage, but I've not observed scorn for them, rather simply a lack of knowledge of them."
In his chagrin Chekhov could not have known that Svobodin, a most experienced and talented actor, had written a friend, V. M. Lavrov, to deplore the action of the committee in banning the play from the Alexandrinsky Theater, which was inundated, he said, with stupid, untalented trivialities. The Wood Demon, he wrote, "is not a conventional comedy, but life-like figures, living speech, and characters which are beyond the whole Alexandrinsky trash that does not deserve even a part of a play of Chekhov."
On the surface Chekhov seemed to take his failure philosophically. He thanked Lensky for his letter and humbly agreed that his talent was apparently not that of a playwright. He also willingly accepted the advice of Nemirovich-Danchenko on revising The Wood Demon. And he could appreciate the humor of a caricature of himself as a playwright which appeared in Fragments at this time. The drawing depicted him driving a troika. One horse was labeled "Ivanov," the second, "The Bear," and the third, "The Wood Demon." The troika is halted at a crossroad, one of which bears a sign: Road to Fiction and the other: Road to Drama. Chekhov good-naturedly replied to Leikin that when he published his own humorous journal, he would insert in it a caricature of this prolific author — an Eiffel Tower made up of his books.
Beneath the surfacc, however, Chekhov was deeply hurt, especially over the attitude of the Petersburg Theatrical Committee, a few of whose members, such as Grigorovich, had formerly professed their devotion to him and had offered him advice on how to write successful plays. He referred to their rejection as a "field court-martial," and in regard to an inspired piece in the Petersburg Gazette saying that the committee had condemned The Wood Demon because it was merely a dramatized story, he wrote Pleshchccv: "It follows that either I am a bad playwright, to which I readily put my signature, or all these gentlemen who love me as a son and implore me for the love of God to be myself in my plays, to avoid cliches, and to provide complicated conceptions, are hypocrites." (October 21,1889.)
But what angered Chekhov more than anything else in the whole matter was the rumor in Petersburg that he had designed old Professor Serebryakov as a satire on Suvorin. He tended to hold Grigorovich responsible for this rumor, as also did Pleshcheev. Chekhov implored Suvorin not to believe a word of this and offered an analysis of the old professor to support his point. "Ah, how happy is this Grigorovich!" he declared. "And how they would all rejoice if I had added some arsenic to your tea or exposed you as a spy serving the secret police." This kind of gossip is not a trifle, he went on to say. "The other day I met at the theater a Petersburg writer. We talked. Learning from me that at various times in the summer Pleshcheev, Barantsevich, you, Svobodin, and others visited me, he sighed sympathetically and said: 'You are wrong if you think this is a good advertisement. You are much mistaken if you count on them.' That is, I invited you so that I should have someone to write about me, and Svobodin in order that I should push my play on himl After my conversation with this writer, I had a feeling in my mouth as though I had swallowed, instead of vodka, a glass of ink with flies in it. All this is a trifle, nonsense, but if it were not for these trifles, all human life would be made up of delights, whereas now it is half disgusting." (October 17,1889.)