conquered the imperial stage as well. He seemed to be everywhere. So it was hardly surprising that in November Leikin decided to feature the man of the moment, his former contributor, on the cover of Fragments. The full-page spread showed Chekhov in a cart poised at a crossroads in the middle of the steppe: which road was he going to take – the dramatic road or the story road?49 As we know, he took both those roads, and simultaneously, to judge from a comment in his famous letter to Suvorin of 21 November 1895 about The Seagull. 'Well, I've already finished the play,' he wrote. 'I began it forte and ended it pianissimo against all the rules of dramatic art. It's come out as a story.' But then Chekhov would not be the first Russian writer to rebel against what was expected of traditional genres.
It was agreed that The Seagull would be submitted directly to the Alexandrinsky's repertoire committee after it was approved by the censor. Chekhov was quite apprehensive, and not only because he felt less comfortable writing plays than short stories. On the first night of a new play, he was always terrified of how the audience would react. It was like stepping in front of a bear, he said once, except that an audience was more frightening.50 There were also, in the case of the Imperial Theatres, all the bureaucratic hurdles to contend with. Chekhov had firmly established his reputation at the Alexandrinsky in 1889 with the productions of Ivanov and his two vaudevilles, but the theatre's committee had rejected his new play The Wood Demon when it was presented to them that October, and it would be several years before he picked up the manuscript again and transformed it into Uncle Vanya. By that time, Svobodin, the actor who had become Chekhov's close friend and the driving force behind the composition of The Wood Demon, was no longer around: he had died of tuberculosis after collapsing on stage in 1892. Chekhov had even more cause to be nervous about how The Seagull would be received, as it was far more ambitious in exploring new territory than any other play he had written. From the point of view of conventional drama, it was nothing short of revolutionary.
After The Seagull had been typed out, the manuscript was sent off to
the Central Administration for Matters Relating to the Press, to be scrutinized by a government censor. That was in March. In May it turned out that the censor objected to, among other things, the indifference with which Treplev regarded his mother's relationship with her lover. The censors had become so crazy, joked the friend who was kindly overseeing the play's progress through the censorship committee, that there were rumours that literature was soon simply going to be abolished.51 Chekhov finally received his manuscript back in July, and duly sent it on to St Petersburg after making the required changes.52 Then came the Theatrical-Literary Committee at the Alexandrinsky, which had reservations about the play's unpleasant Ibsenesque qualities and apparent lack of logical structure, but nevertheless approved it for inclusion in the theatre's repertoire on 14 September.
The more forward-thinking actors in the company, many of whom had been involved in the production of Ivanov seven years earlier, were excited at the prospect of a new Chekhov play. But then came another problem. The renowned comic actress Elizaveta Levkeyeva decided she wanted the play to be performed on her benefit night on 17 October, when the twenty-fifth anniversary of her acting career with the Imperial Theatres would be celebrated. While first-rank actors at the Alexandrinsky were allotted annual benefit nights, those of the second tier, like Levkeyeva, had to wait patiently for anniversaries, and then often chose works for performance which might not even include a role for them, if there was a greater likelihood of there being a full house.53 This was the reasoning behind Levkeyeva's choice; she also remembered the warm reception Ivanov had received – but she had yet to see the script of The Seagull. Chekhov joked that the plump forty-seven-year-old was going to take the role of Nina, the slender seventeen-year-old, but, of course, there was no appropriate part for her in the play.54 She was a talented actress, but one who remained her naturally comic self in whatever role she played, liable to provoke chuckles the minute she appeared on stage. Chekhov was therefore understandably alarmed at the suggestion that Levkeyeva should play Shamrayev's wife, since that would lead the audience to expect something funny, and they would certainly be disappointed.55
Just nine days were allocated for rehearsals, and when the bewildered cast first read through the play on 8 October, they immediately realized that its complexity and novelty demanded a far longer preparation time.
Chekhov was despondent when he arrived from Moscow and came along to the fourth rehearsal. Half the cast still had not learned their lines, some were not bothering to show up at all, and he was tempted to call the production off.56 And then, less than a week before the premiere, Maria Savina decided that she really could not play Nina. Vera Komissarzhevkaya, her replacement, was an inspired choice: she was not only ten years younger than Savina, but she intuitively understood what the play was about – unlike many of her colleagues. Chekhov was impressed with her performance in rehearsals, and began to feel more optimistic: her acting had been so moving one day that the people sitting in the stalls had actually started crying, bowing their heads in embarrassment.57
But the play was doomed. A theatre which was run by the Russian government was never going to be a showcase for avant-garde theatre, let alone a revolutionary work like The Seagull which undermined its very foundations. Its productions were classical, like the theatre itself -highly predictable, conventional and unadventurous, redeemed only by the quality of some of the works staged and the acting of its company. Chekhov's play, however, was a work which, as he put it, did 'dreadful violence to stage conventions', beginning with the fact that it contained a great many conversations about literature (and what place did they have in the theatre?), but hardly any action. It was subtitled 'A Comedy', but where were the jokes? Everything was ambiguous, and there was neither an obvious hero or heroine, nor a familiar plot line ending in a satisfying denouement. Furthermore, the characters were ordinary people! When Chekhov wrote that he had begun his play forte and finished it pianissimo 'against every rule of dramatic art', he was acutely conscious of how subversive it was. Conventional late nineteenth-century European drama fell into a set number of categories, such as vaudeville, melodrama, classical tragedy and comedy, and The Seagull seemed to fit into none of them and all of them. It had far more in common with the unfamiliar, modern drama of Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck, who also discarded theatrical effects in favour of symbols and the creation of a particular mood.
The people who made up the typical Alexandrinsky audience, particularly those who packed the huge theatre on 17 October 1896, had little to no appreciation of the innovations in Chekhov's new play. The bank clerks, shop owners, officers and middle-ranking civil servants
who had bought tickets were expecting to see something light-hearted. They were happy to pay over the odds in return for being entertained by Elizaveta Levkeyeva, one of their favourite actresses. And they were not disappointed by the comedy in which she starred, which was the second item on the double bill. But they were not prepared for the sophisticated, nuanced drama of irony and parody which preceded it. They had laughed uproariously at Chekhov's hilarious little vaudevilles when they had been performed at the Alexandrinsky, but what was this? Following a dismal dress rehearsal, the cast lost whatever confidence they had gained during rehearsals, and then completely lost their nerve when the audience started tittering – which they did almost as soon as the curtain was raised on an inept-looking second-hand set. By the time Komissarzhevkaya began reciting Nina's famous monologue in the first act, the titters had turned to outright guffaws. The actors were heckled throughout the play.
Chekhov's diary entry for 17 October recorded laconically: 'My Seagull was performed at the Alexandrinsky theatre. It was not a success.'58 He fled the theatre halfway through the performance and went wandering through the freezing cold Petersburg streets until the early hours. At noon the next day he decided he would prefer to climb aboard the slow train back to Moscow and face a twenty-two hour journey rather than stay a minute longer in the capital. Sitting among the shopkeepers and Chekhov's bewildered friends and supporters at the Alexandrinsky had been journalists from all the major newspapers. Many of them were longing to cut him down to size and had been sharpening their knives. 'Probably no other play in the whole history of poor Levkeyeva's employment with the theatre has experienced such a breathtaking failure or been such an overwhelming fiasco,' wrote one critic. Another
