dilapidated country estate.
Bad omens did not spoil the rehearsal Anton attended with Potapenko on 14 October in the theatre. Anton began to trust the cast, and was impressed by Komissarzhevskaia. (Suvorin had thought her dreadful as Klarchen in Sodom's End and neither he nor Chekhov had
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at first shared Karpov's infatuation with her genius.) Komissarzhev-skaia hit on a solution to the play's most intractable monologue, Treplev's symbolist play-within-a-play which Karpov feared would make the audience laugh. Her fine voice hypnotized the listener, as she worked from her lowest alto to a climax and then lowered to inaudibility as 'all lives, completing their sad cycle, perish'. She decided (and Anton was won over by her musicality) to render Treplev's piece not as parody, but as poetry.
The next night, the dress rehearsal was dismal. Wrapped in a white sheet, Komissarzhevskaia looked absurd, and, clearly, Karpov had a bad eye for sets and costumes. Maria Chitau as Masha was lost in a dress meant for the ample Savina. Sazonova was indignant at the way her husband Nikolai was made up for Trigorin: Rehearsal without an author, sets and one actor missing… Nikolai protected Komissarzhevskaia from Karpov who is so inexperienced mat he is making her do her main final scene from the rear wings, blocking her with a table… when I told Karpov that the play was under-rehearsed, he left… Chekhov was invited [to dinner] but didn't come. The next day, 17 October 1896, Lika arrived, but did not join Anton, Suvorin and Potapenko at the full dress rehearsal. The cast were tired by ten days' work. Chekhov sensed that the play was doomed and told Suvorin he wanted to take it off. The morning of the performance Chekhov took Masha to Lika's room in the Angleterre. Forty years later, Masha recalled her reception: Sullen and stern, Anton met me at the Moscow station. Walking down the platform, coughing, he said: 'The actors don't know their parts. They understand nothing. Their acting is horrible. Only Komissarzhevskaia is good. The play will flop. You shouldn't have come.' Chekhov feared that Potapenko might not stay away and that his wife might attack Lika. He watched the dismal last rehearsal, had his hair cut, and steeled himself.
The first night caused a scandal in the auditorium, the worst that anyone could then recall in a Russian theatre. The play had been put on in the wrong city, in the wrong month, at the wrong theatre, with the wrong cast, and above all before the wrong audience. Many had come to applaud Levkeeva, who was performing two hours later in a
OCTOBER 1896
warhorse of a farce. Others came to vent their dislike of Chekhov and modern drama. Very few at all had any idea at all of what they were going to see. The actors, perturbed, tried to adapt to the audience's mood, but Komissarzhevskaia, the most sensitive of actresses, lost her spirit: her 'Seagull' was earthbound. After Act 1, shuddering, in tears, she ran to Karpov: 'I'm afraid to go on stage… I can't act… I'll run from the theatre.' Karpov forced her back, but the play was lost. All Anton's friends and all the performers in The Seagull that night were shocked in their own ways; all agreed that Petersburg's vindic-liveness had killed the play. Suvorin's and Chekhov's diaries have the same understatement: 'The play was not a success.'
Suvorin concluded that: 'The audience was inattentive, they didn't listen, they chatted, they were bored…' Masha recalled: From the very first minute I sensed the public's indifference and ironic attitude to what was happening on stage. When, later in the act, the curtain rose on the inner stage and Komissar/hevskai.i, who was acting very hesitantly that night, appeared wrapped in a sheet and began her monologue: 'People, lions, eagles, grouse', you could hear open laughter, loud conversations, sometimes hissing, in the audience. I felt cold inside… Finally a real scandal broke out. At the end of Act 1 thin applause was drowned by hissing, whr.il., offensive remarks about the author and the performers… I sat it out in my box to the end. Maria Chitau found Anton sitting in Levkeeva's dressing room. She wrote: [Levkeeva] was looking at him with her bulging eyes, half apologetically, half pityingly, her hands were still. Chekhov sat, his head a little bowed, a lock of hair falling over his brow, his pince-nez sitting crooked on the bridge of his nose… They said nothing. I stood with them in silence. A few seconds passed. Suddenly Chekhov leapt up and rushed out. Even Sazonova, who had found the play depressing and Anton rude, was appalled: The audience was somehow spiteful, they were saying 'The devil knows what this is, boredom, decadence, you wouldn't watch if it were free…' Someone in the stalls declared, 'C'est du Maeterlinck!' At dramatic points people laughed out loud, the rest of the time
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they coughed in a way that was quite indecent… That this piece flopped on a stage where any rubbish is a success speaks for the author. He is too talented and original to strive with mediocrities. Chekhov kept disappearing behind the wings, to Levkeeva's dressing room, and disappeared after the end. Suvorin looked for him but couldn't find him; he was trying to calm down Chekhov's sister who was in the box… Levkeeva's celebrations were as usual, with speeches, gifts, kisses, the audience clapped furiously a mediocre actress after booing our greatest writer after Tolstoy.
Like Suvorin, Leikin was dismayed. He recalled 'Reviewers walked the corridors and the buffet with Schadenfreude and exclaimed 'The fall of a talent', 'He's written himself out.''26 As Suvorin, lost for words, left his box, Zinaida Gippius's husband, the novelist Dimitri Merezhkovsky, told him that The Seagull was not clever, because it lacked clarity. Suvorin retorted rudely, and from that moment Zinaida Gippius took charge of the anti- Chekhovian camp.
Karpov retreated to his office. Chekhov entered, his lips blue, his face frozen in a grimace, and said in a barely audible voice, 'The author has flopped.' Anton then vanished into the freezing streets of Petersburg.27
FIFTY-SIX
The Death of Christina
October-November 1896
WHILE THE reviewers scribbled to meet their deadlines, the author wandered the streets. Anton's disappearance caused a commotion. Seven weeks later, he gave vent to his disgust in his diary:
True, I ran out of the theatre, but not until the play was over. I sat out two or three acts in Levkeeva's dressing room… Fat actresses, in the dressing room, talked to officials in respectful buoyant tones, flattering them… serfs visited by their masters.
While Levkeeva reclined on her laurels, Chekhov walked to the Peripheral Canal; back in the centre of Petersburg, he found Romanov's restaurant still open and ordered supper. Perturbed, Aleksandr called (»n the Suvorins in search of his brother. Then Anton walked back to Suvorin's house, spoke to nobody, went to bed and pulled the blanket over his head. Masha waited for two hours in silence with Lika at the Angleterre; then Aleksandr rang. Neither he, Potapenko nor Suvorin had seen Anton since Act 2. At 1.00 a.m. Masha took a cab to the Suvorins:
It was dark and only miles away, after a whole enfilade of rooms did a light shine through the open doors. I went towards the light. There I saw Anna, Suvorin's wife, sitting alone with her hair down. The whole setting, darkness, an empty flat, depressed my mood still further. 'Anna, where can my brother be?' I asked her. Apparently trying to distract and calm me, she started chatting about trivia, about actors and writers. After a while Suvorin appeared and started to tell me about die changes and reworkings he thought were necessary to make the play a success in the future. But I was in no mood to listen to this and just asked him to find my brother. Then Suvorin went off and quickly came back in a cheerful mood. 'Well, you can calm down. Your brother is back, he's lying under a blanket, but he won't see anybody and refused to talk to me.'
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Through the blanket Suvorin and Anton exchanged words. Suvorin reached for the light switch. 'I beg you, don't turn the light on,' Anton shouted. 'I don't want to see anyone. I'll tell you just one thing: you can call me [a very coarse word, says Anna] if I ever write anything for the stage again.' 'Where have you been?' - 'Walking the streets, sitting. I couldn't just say to hell with that production. If I live another 700 years, I won't let the theatre have another play.'28 Anton said he would take the first train out of Petersburg: 'Please don't try and stop me.' Suvorin told Anton that the play did have faults: 'Chekhov is very proud, and when I let him know my impressions, he listened with impatience. He couldn't take this failure without deep upset. I very much regret that I didn't go to
