Although everything about The Wood Demon had grown distasteful to him — for a time he would not let Suvorin see a copy of it and he refused offers to publish it —he nevertheless obviously continued to nurture the hope of seeing it performed. In November, his friend, the actor N. N. Solovtsov, read the play and, declaring himself to be in raptures over it, urgently requested it for the new Moscow Abramov Theater with which he was connected. Accordingly Chekhov promptly set about revising The Wood Demon for performance, especially the fourth act, and he continued to make changes during the period of rehearsals. Nevertheless, its opening performance on December 27 was almost unanimously condemned in the reviews. The articles accused him of ignorance of the conditions of stage representation, a mechanical reproduction of life, and with blindly copying the trivial aspects of reality.
On the whole, his critics can hardly be blamed for failing to discern the reasons behind his selection of content or the new principles of dramatic structure that he had fumblingly attempted to work out.
For again and again Chekhov employs the old conventions of the theater in The Wood Demon, using melodramatic effects which he had criticized in contemporary plays; and in his attempt to depict life as it is he failed to create it in his play. Obviously he had not yet fully understood the direction in which he was moving — by concentrating on the inner substance of people, he wished to reveal them as they really exist and not as they appear to be in real life. And just as this kind of concentration would require a realism that stressed not the events of life but a character's inner reaction to them, so must it be articulated by a dialogue that would reflect inner rather than outer action. Chekhov seemed finally to recognize that his attempts at innovation in The Wood Demon were crude, for he would never permit the play, despite much pressure on him, to be published. However, after he had perfected his innovating approach to drama, he transformed The Wood Demon into one of his greatest plays, Uncle Vanya.4
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The years 1885 to 1889 were among the happiest in Chekhov's relatively short life. By the end of this brief period he had emerged from obscurity to become one of the most appreciated and discussed writers of the day. The hardships and harsh memories of his early youth were behind him, and he had brought his family from indigence to a position of material security and social acceptance. If he still had to worry somewhat financially, he could count on a reasonably steady income and the knowledge that many publishers were bidding for the products of his pen. Although not yet thirty, he had made swarms of friends, and many of the nation's foremost writers and artists sought his acquaintance. It was in 1889 that the great Tschaikovsky, whose music, particularly his opera Eugene Onegin, Chekhov loved, visited at Sadovaya- Kudrinskaya Street. They exchanged inscribed photographs, and Tschaikovsky invited Chekhov to do the libretto of an opera based on Ler- montov's story Bela (although the composer died before anything could come of this project), and Chekhov received permission to dedicate to
4 It is generally supposed that Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya in 1896 and considered it a new play, although it is plainly a reworking of The Wood Demon. However, there is some evidence, though not conclusive, that he actually completed this task between March and April of 1890. A summary of the facts supporting the early date of Uncle Vanya may be found in N. I. Gitovich, Letopis zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (Chronicle of the Life and Works of A. P. Chekhov), Moscow, 1955, pp. 282-82..
Tschaikovsky his forthcoming collection of tales, Gloomy People. Upon sending him his photograph Chekhov rapturously added, "and I would send you the sun if it belonged to me." Masha described her famous brother at this time as wonderfully high-spirited, always jolly, always working, incessantly joking, and absolutely unable to do without company.
Over this whole period of glorious success and carefree existence, however, various elements of discontent —a number of which have already been pointed out — seriously disturbed Chekhov's satisfaction with his accomplishments. Like the overseer in his beautiful story Happiness (1887), Chekhov no doubt believed that there was happiness enough for all in this world if only we knew how to look for it, a significant motif that runs through so much of his writing. But, as the wood demon put it in Chekhov's play, most people wandered in the dark forest of life, groping their way, with only enough intelligence, knowledge, and feeling to ruin their own lives and those of others.
Chekhov's customary reticence in all the inner circumstances of his life leaves one very much in the dark as to why his moments of discontent over this happy period culminated, at the end of 1889, in a decision of striking importance for himself and his career. No doubt Nikolai's death and the self-image which his brother's illness suggested — besides the frustrated efforts on his novel, the critical misunderstanding of what he had attempted to do in A Dreary Story, and the utter failure of The Wood Demon — had all contributed something to his mounting spiritual malaise.
His sense of disillusionment was also undoubtedly influenced by the still unresolved social and artistic problems which had begun to trouble him at the very outset of his success as an author. To a certain extent his anxieties mirrored those of all thinking people of the Eighties, this "epoch of social stagnation." But the charge of the liberal critics that his writings lacked a social outlook tended only to confirm the natural independence of a mind that held in some contempt the programs of both the liberals and conservatives. Nor could he easily tolerate the kind of criticism that held him culpable for remaining a friend of the reactionary Suvorin and for continuing to publish in his newspaper. By now he perhaps understood the curious political ambivalence of Suvorin's mind, whatever may have been the policy of New Times, better than most of his critics. It was noticeable, however, that Chekhov had lately grown extremely touchy about any favors from Suvorin that could be interpreted as aiding Chekhov's career. In the face of a veiled suggestion that Suvorin might use his immense influence to have The Wood Demon produced in Petersburg, Chekhov deftly counteracted the possibility by warning him that "every word of mine is understood in Petersburg as a request and every one of yours as a protection." (November 1, 1889.)
If Chekhov's artistic convictions prevented any direct preaching about the unhappiness, suffering, and vulgarity of Russian life which he revealed in his tales, his critics were wrong in assuming that he accepted "life as it is." His turning to the moral principles of Tolstoy during this period, a philosophy essentially uncongenial to him, was some measure of his concern, and his seemingly unlimited willingness to help a constant stream of petitioners betokened a degree of involvement in human misfortune that demanded more personal sacrifice than wordy preachments did. And occasionally he lashed out at inequities, as when he wrote Suvorin to condemn an article in New Times for applauding the fact that diligent German housemaids worked like navvies for a mere two or three roubles a month. "In the first place" he declared, "it is revolting to talk about servants as though they were convicts; in the second place, servants are equal members of society and are made of the same flesh and blood as Bismarck; they are not slaves but free workers." (March n, 1889.)