Sadko and May Night (with the 24-year-old Rachmaninov conducting) in 1897, The Tsar's Bride in 1899, and Kashchei the Immortal in 1902. These were tremendously important productions - their great strength being their visual elements, with colourfully stylized folk-like sets and costumes by Korovin, Maliutin and Vrubel in perfect keeping with the music of these folk-based opera fantasies. They were a major influence on the synthetic ideals of the World of Art movement and the Ballets Russes. Such, indeed, was Mamontov's success that in 1898 he agreed to co-finance the costs of Diaghilev's review the World of Art. But then disaster struck. Mamontov was accused of appropriating funds from his railway empire to support the Opera. There was a scandal and a noisy trial in 1900. Mamontov was acquitted of corruption on a wave of public sympathy for a man whose love of art, it was generally concluded, had carried him away. But financially he was ruined. His company collapsed and the Private Opera closed. Mamontov himself was declared bankrupt, and the effects of his Moscow house were sold off by auction in 1903. One of the sale items was a peasant's wooden model of a railway station crafted at Abramtsevo.105
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Private theatrical undertakings were something of a Moscow fashion following the lifting of the state monopoly in 1882. The actress Maria Abramova, for example, set up her own theatre, with the help of merchant patrons, where Chekhov's Wood Demon (1889) had its premiere; and in the 1900s another well-known actress, Vera Komis-sarzhevskaya, owned a private theatre in St Petersburg. By far the most important of these private ventures was the Moscow Arts Theatre, founded by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky in 1898. Here Chekhov's last great plays were first performed. Stanislavsky was born in Moscow to a merchant family which 'had already crossed the threshold of culture', as he would later write. 'They made money in order to spend it on social and artistic institutions.' His maternal grandmother was the French actress Marie Varley, who had made herself a star in Petersburg. But while his parents were rich enough to put on lavish balls, they basically inhabited the old Moscow
mercantile world. Stanislavsky's father slept (with his grandfather) in the same bed.106 As a student Stanislavsky took part in the Mamontov amateur productions. These convinced him that, while huge efforts had been put into the music, the costumes and the sets, very little had been done about the acting, which remained extremely amateurish, not just in the operas but in the theatre, too. He trained himself as an actor by standing for hours before a mirror every day and developing his gestures over several years to make them appear more natural. His famous 'method' (from which 'method acting' was to come) boiled down to a sort of naturalism. It was acting without 'acting' - which fitted in so well with the modern dialogue (where the pauses are as important as the words) and the everyday realities of Chekhov's plays.107 Later his method was made more systematic through a series of techniques to help the actor convey the inner thoughts and emotions of a part. They were all about recalling moments of intense experience in the actor's own life, supposedly to help him produce the emotion on demand. Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote a blistering satire of the Moscow Arts in his farcical, unfinished Black Snow (1939- ), ridiculed these methods in a scene in which the director tries to get an actor to feel what passion is by riding round the stage on a bicycle.
Stanislavsky's vision of an independent theatre brought him together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Both men were committed to the idea that the theatre should reach out to the masses by producing plays about contemporary life. The Moscow Arts was originally called the Accessible Arts Theatre. Cheap seats for students and the poor were mixed in with the expensive ones at the front of the stalls. Even the building, the rundown hermitage in Karetny Row, had a democratic feel. It had previously been used for circuses, and when the actors first moved in there was an all-pervasive smell of beer.108 After a quick coat of paint, they began in 1898 rehearsals for the opening performances of Alexei Tolstoy's Tsar Fedor (1868) and Chekhov's The Seagull (1896).
Nemirovich was a great admirer of Chekhov's play. In St Petersburg it had been a dreadful failure; the critics had panned it. But in the simple, lifelike style of the Moscow Arts' production it was a triumph. 'The public lost all sense of the theatre', wrote Nemirovich: 'the life they now beheld in these simple human contacts on the stage was
"real", not theatrical.' People felt 'almost embarrassed to be present', as if they were eavesdropping on a mundane domestic tragedy. There was 'nothing but shattered illusions, and tender feelings crushed by rude reality'.109 The production relaunched Chekhov's career as a playwright - and he now came home to Moscow as its favourite literary son.
Born in Taganrog, in southern Russia, to a devout, old-style merchant, Anton Chekhov came to Moscow at the age of seventeen and two years later, in 1879, enrolled as a student of medicine at the university. He fell in love with the city from the start. 'I will be a Muscovite for ever', he wrote in a letter of 1881.110 As a hard-up student, and then as a doctor, Chekhov was acquainted with the city's slums, and he was a lifelong client of its brothels, too. His first literary efforts were as a journalist ('Antosha Chekhonte') for the humorous tabloids and weekly magazines aimed at Moscow's newly literate labourers and clerks. He wrote sketches of street life, vaudeville satires on love and marriage, and stories about doctors and magistrates, petty clerks and actors in Moscow's poor districts. There were many writers of this kind - the most successful being Vladimir Giliarovsky, author of the 1920s classic Moscow and the Muscovites (still widely read and loved in Russia today) and something of a mentor to the young Chekhov. But Chekhov was the first major Russian writer to emerge from the penny press (nineteenth-century writers such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had written for the serious or 'thick' periodicals that combined literature with criticism and political commentary). His concise written style, for which he is so famed, was fashioned by the need to write for commuters on the train.