the rehearsals.'
Confident of the play's triumph, Suvorin had written his review in advance; now he had to compose new copy. Then he left a letter by Chekhov's bed.
While Anton slept, Lidia Avilova tossed and turned. Unlike Lika, she had had no inkling mat her life would be publicly enacted. She watched the Seagull hand Trigorin the same silver medal on a chain that she had inscribed and given to Anton, but the page and the line numbers no longer referred to Chekhov's lines 'If you need my life, come and take it.' At home, she picked up the Chekhov volume from which she had encrypted her message. The new message made no sense. Only in the early hours of the morning did she decide he might have encoded one of her own books of stories. She found the page and line: they now, she claims, gave the message 'Young ladies should not go to balls.'29 Rebuffed, she went back to bed.
Modest Tchaikovsky had been in the audience: 'It is many years since the stage last gave me such pleasure and the audience gave me such unhappiness as on Levkeeva's benefit night,' he wrote to Suvorin.30 Elena Shavrova, the youngest of Chekhov's admirers, had also been there; profoundly shaken both by the play and by its reception, she consoled her cher maitre: All I know is that it was amazement, ecstasy, intense interest and at times sweet and awesome suffering (the monologue of the World Soul) and pity and compassion for them, the characters in the play - the pity you feel only for real, live people. The Seagull is so good, so touching.31
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Shavrova would soon give her cher maitre a physical token of her compassion.
In mid morning Chekhov got up, not waking Suvorin or his wife, rang Potapenko, wrote a note for Masha, a letter to Suvorin and one to Misha in Iaroslavl and then left the house. Masha's note ran: I'm leaving for Melikhovo… I shall be there by two p.m. [tomorrow]. What happened yesterday has not stricken me or embittered me very much, because the rehearsals prepared me for it - and I don't feel all that bad. When you come to Melikhovo, bring Lika with you. The letter to Suvorin ended: 'Hold up the printing of the plays. I shan't ever forget last night, but I slept well and am leaving in a very tolerable mood. Write to me.' To Misha, Anton made fewer pretences: The play has flopped and failed sensationally. There was a heavy tension of misunderstanding and disgrace in the theatre. The acting was abominable, stupid. The moral is: don't write plays. Nevertheless I'm still alive, healthy and in perfect eupepsia. Your Daddy Chekhov. Before leaving the Suvorins, and without asking, Anton took from the library the last three issues of The European Herald, in which a long essay by Sokolov, 'At Home', presented a shattering picture of the miseries of the Russian peasant. 'At Home' was to be one of the progenitors of Chekhov's harsh post-Seagull prose.
Accompanied by Potapenko and Vasili, Suvorin's manservant, who was, like Emilie the governess, as much Anton's follower as his master's, Chekhov went to the station. He would not wait for the overnight sleeper. He showed his rail pass and took the first train to Moscow, the slow noon goods and passenger train. After wandering at night in an icy city, he sat for a day and a night in an ill-heated train. The effect on his lungs would soon be apparent. As the train trundled the 440 miles to Moscow, Chekhov took out Aleksandr's note. It was to be the only time that Aleksandr praised Anton's serious plays: the gesture brought them closer: I got to know your Seagull tonight in the theatre for the first time; it is a wonderful, excellent play, full of deep psychology, thoughtful and heart-rending. I shake your hand firmly and with delight.
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On the back of Aleksandr's note Anton drafted a placatory letter to Anna Suvorina: Dear Anna, I left without saying goodbye. Are you angry? The fact is that after the performance my friends were very upset; someone was looking for me in Potapenko's flat after i a.m., they searched the Moscow station for me… It's touching, but unendurable. In fact I'd decided mat I'd leave the next day regardless whether it was a success or a failure. The sound of glory overwhelms me: I left the next day even after Ivanov. So I felt an irresistible urge to run, and it would have been impossible to get downstairs and say goodbye to you without giving in to your charm and hospitality and staying on. I kiss your hand firmly, in the hope of forgiveness. Remember your motto! I've had my hair cut and now look like Apollo. Imagine, I think I'm in love. Though the motto on Anna Suvorina's writing paper was 'Com-prendre - pardonner', Anton was cautious when he wrote to her, and when he copied out his draft letter, he excised the phrases about being in love. This love was not Lika, but Liudmila Ozerova.
On the train Anton's mind was soon embroiled in the misery of peasants. The journals he had taken from Suvorin led him to write to the author for an offprint. He arrived in Moscow before dawn on 19 October 1896 and got into the last third-class non-smoking carriage of the first train to Melikbovo. At 8 a.m. he stepped out of the train, leaving behind his dressing gown and bed linen. (The station master retrieved them for him the same day.) Melikhovo provided opportunities to forget. On Sunday drunken peasants caroused in the Chekhov kitchen: Aniuta Naryshkina, betrothed by her father against her will in exchange for the vodka the Melikhovo men were drinking, was being married. Sick peasants had gathered in the three weeks that Anton was away. A three-day council meeting in Serpukhov, to thank Chekhov for his school building and to promise him a new road from Lopasnia, took up the end of October. Anton planned a reference library for Taganrog. 'Peasants', the first work for four years purged of personal material, began to obsess him: he tried (for his command of French was inadequate) to have Vignier d'Octon's Le Paysan dans la litterature franqaise published in Russian.
Meanwhile Suvorin was taking steps to salvage The Seagull. He and Karpov made cuts and changes so that the play would be less
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provocative. The next night a full house applauded wildly, although of the actors only Komissarzhevskaia was inspired. The intelligentsia, rather than high society, were watching, and The Seagull revived, although the older actors still felt half-hearted. In Suvorin's revision it was performed again on the 24th, 28th and on 5 November, to full houses. Then it was dropped from the repertoire.
Anton ignored reviews, but friends kept him informed. Sympathy was hard to endure, especially Suvorin's frank insistence that Anton had to take responsibility and that he lacked stage experience. Leikin (still smarting because Chekhov had not called on him on this visit to Petersburg) blew hot and cold about The Seagull in a sketch in Fragments, in a letter to Chekhov and in his diary, which runs: If Chekhov gave this play to any run-of-the-mill dramatist the latter would pump it full of effective banalities and cliches and make it a pleasing play… If the play really is a flop, that's no reason to knock Chekhov off his writer's pedestal. Look at Zola's plays. Zina Kholmskaia's consort, Kugel, reviewer for The Petersburg Newspaper (but two years later the most perceptive Chekhovian critic in the city), was not unbiased. He mocked Chekhov with questions: 'Why is the writer Trigorin living with an ageing actress? Why do they play lotto and drink beer on stage? How can a young girl take snuff and drink vodka?'32 Kugel (whom Chekhov compared as a writer to 'a pretty woman with bad breath') shrewdly compared Chekhov's use of recurrent images and phrases, Leitmotive, to Wagner's; unfortunately, Kugel loathed Wagner and misunderstood Chekhov. Kugel was undermined on his own paper. Avilova forgave Anton for flaunting her medallion and, as the editor's sister-in-law, was allowed to defend The Seagull and its author in the same paper: 'They say The Seagull is 'no play'. Then look at a 'no play' on the stage. There are plenty of plays.'
Praise for the play grew louder. The second performance attracted Chekhov's admirers. Potapenko sent an exultant telegram and Komissarzhevskaia herself, not easily swayed by applause, wrote ecstatically to Anton: I'm just back from the theatre. Anton, darling, we've won! Sheer wholehearted success, as it should have been and had to be. How I
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want to see you right now, I want even more for you to be here, hearing the unanimous shout of 'Author!' Your Seagull, no, ours, for my soul has fused with her, lives, suffers and believes so ardently that it will make many others believe.33 Lavrov and Goltsev begged Anton to let Russian Thought publish the play. Chekhov was regaining faith in himself as a dramatist when Leikin, as snide as he was supportive, wrote that he had remonstrated with Kugel and his editor: 'You have a few true friends in Petersburg.' The difference between 'few' and 'a few' in Russian is just an inaudible gap between two words, ne mnogo or nemnogo.
Masha and Lika took the overnight express and arrived in Meli-khovo only a little later than Anton. Without a hint of resentment at what Anton had done to her, Lika stayed for three days and nursed him through what he called flu. She was rewarded by renewed affection. Then, reassured that Anton was not going to hang himself, Lika
