Secure in his reputation and income at the age of thirty, Chekhov made the surprising move of travelling ten thousand miles to Sakhalin, the Russian Devil's Island, in 1890; the journey alone was arduous, for the Trans- Siberian Railway had not yet been built. The enterprise may have been inspired by a Tolstoy-influenced desire to practice a new-found altruism. In any case, the ensuing documentary study of the penal colony was a model of impartial field research and may have led to prison reforms. On a more personal level, it intensified a new strain of pessimism in Chekhov's work, for, despite his disclaimers, he began to be bothered by his lack of outlook or mission. The death of his brother Nikolay and his own failing health led him to question the dearth of ideals or motives in his writing. ,4 Boring Story (Skuchnaya istoriya, 1889) initiated this phase, with its first-person narrative of frustrated ideals and isolation.
The steady flow of royalties enabled Chekhov in 1891 to buy a farmstead at Melikhovo, some fifty miles south of Moscow, where he settled his parents and siblings. There he set about 'to squeeze the last drop of slave out of his system' (to Suvorin, 7 January 1899); 'a modern Cincin- natus,' he planted a cherry orchard and became a lavish host. This rustication had a beneficial effect on both his literary work and his humanitarianism. He threw himself into schemes for road-building, ameliorating peasant life, establishing schools and other improvements; during the cholera epidemic of 1892-93, he acted as an overworked member of the sanitary commission and head of the famine relief board. These experiences found their way into the character of Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya.
During this period, Chekhov composed masterful novellas that explored the dead ends of life: The Duel {Duel), Ward No. 6 (Palata No. 6), The Black Monk (<Chyorny monakh), The Teacher of Literature (Uchitel slovesnosti), The House with the Maisonette (Dom s mezaninom), My Life (Moya zhizn) and Peasants (Muzhiki), carefully wrought prose pieces of great psychological subtlety. They recurrently dwell on the illusions indispensable to making life bearable, the often frustrated attempts at contact with one's fellow-man, the inexorable pull of inertia preventing humans from realising their potential for honesty and happiness. Chekhov's attitude is clinically critical, but always with a keen eye for the sympathetic detail that leads the reader to deeper awareness.
The success of Ivanov and the curtain-raisers, The Bear (Medved) and The Proposal (Predlozhenie) (1888-89), had put Chekhov at a premium as a dramatist. Urged on by Korsh and others, and frustrated by abortive projects for a novel, Chekhov plugged away at the comedy The Wood Demon (Leshy). It was promptly turned down by the state-subsidised theatres of Petersburg and Moscow which regarded it as more a dramatised story than a genuine play; they recommended that Chekhov give up writing for the theatre. A production at Abramova's Theatre in Moscow was received with apathy bordering on contempt, and may have confirmed Chekhov's decision to go to Sakhalin. For some years he did abandon the theatre, except for a one-act farce The Jubilee (Yubiley, 1891) and an unfinished comedy, The Night Before the Trial (Noch pered suda).
Not until January 1894 did he announce that he had again begun a play, only to renounce it a year later: 'I am not writing a play and I don't feel like writing one. I've grown old and I've lost my spark. I'd rather like to write a novel a hundred miles long' (to V. V. Bilibin, 18 January 1895). A year and a half later he was to break the news, \ . . can you imagine, I'm writing a play. . . it gives me a certain pleasure, although I rebel dreadfully against the conventions of the stage. It's a comedy, three female roles, six male roles, a landscape (view of a lake); lots of talk about literature, little action, a ton of love' (to Suvorin, 21 October 1895).
This comedy was The Seagull (Chayka), which had a rocky opening night at the Alexandra Theatre in 1896: the actors misunderstood it, the audience misapprehended it. Despite protestations of unconcern - 'I dosed myself with castor oil, took a cold bath - and now I wouldn't even mind writing another play' (to Suvorin, 22 October 1896) - Chekhov fled to Moscow, where he cultivated a distaste for writing for the stage. Although The Seagull grew in public favour in subsequent performances, Chekhov disliked submitting his work to the judgment of literary cliques and claques. Yet barely one year after this event, a new drama appeared in the 1897 collection of his plays: Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya), a reworking of The Wood Demon; and he began to draft the play that became Three Sisters (Tri sestry).
Chekhov's illness was definitively diagnosed as tuberculosis in 1897, and he was compelled to leave Melikhovo for a milder climate. For the rest of his life, he shuttled between Yalta on the Black Sea and various French and German spas. To pay these new expenses, Chekhov sold all he had written before 1899, excepting the plays, to the publisher Marks for 75,000 rubles, along with the reprint rights to any future stories. It was an improvident move, since Marks had had no idea of the number of Chekhov's works. This error in calculation may have induced Chekhov to concentrate on playwriting which would prove to be more profitable.
The remainder of his dramatic career was bound up with the fortunes of the Moscow Art Theatre, founded in 1897 by his friend Nemirovich-Danchenko and the wealthy dilettante K. S. Alekseyev who acted under the name Stanislavsky. Chekhov was one of the original shareholders in the enterprise, for he admired their announced programme of ensemble playing, a serious attitude to art, and plays of high literary quality; at the opening production, Aleksey Tolstoy's blank-verse historical drama Tsar Fyodor loannovich, his eye was caught by Olga Knipper, the young actress who played the Tsarina. With only slight misgiving Chekhov allowed the Art Theatre to revive The Seagull at the close of its first season; Stanislavsky, the co-director, had greater misgivings, for he did not understand the play. But a strong cast and a heavily atmospheric production won over the audience, and the play had a resounding success. The Moscow Art Theatre adopted an art-nouveau seagull as its insignia and henceforth regarded itself as the House of Chekhov. When the Maly Theatre insisted on revisions to Uncle Vanya Chekhov withdrew the play and allowed the Art Theatre to stage its premiere, along with a revival of Ivanov. Three Sisters (1901) was written with Moscow Art actors in mind.
Chekhov's chronic reaction to the production of his plays was revulsion, and so two months after the opening of Three Sisters, he was writing 'I myself am quite discarding the theatre, I'll never write another thing for it. One can write for the theatre in Germany, Sweden, even Spain, but not in Russia, where dramatic authors aren't respected, are kicked with hooves and never forgiven success or failure' (to Olga Knipper, 1 March 1901). Nevertheless, he soon was deep into The Cherry Orchard (Vyshnyovy sad, 1904), tailoring the roles to specific Moscow Art players. Each of these productions won Chekhov greater fame as a playwright, even when he himself disagreed with the chosen interpretation of the Moscow Art Theatre. Not long before his death, he was contemplating yet another play, this one even more untraditional, in which an Arctic explorer would be visited by the ghost of his beloved, and a ship would be seen crushed by ice.
At the age of forty, Chekhov married Olga Knipper. His liaisons with women had been numerous but low-keyed. He exercised an involuntary fascination over a certain type of ambitious bluestocking, who saw him as her mentor and herself as his Egeria. But whenever the affair became too demanding or the woman too clinging, Chekhov would use irony and playful humour to disengage himself. In his writings, marriage is usually portrayed as a snare and a delusion that mires his characters in spirit-sapping vulgarity. His relationship with Olga Knipper was both high- spirited - she was his 'kitten,' his 'puppy,' his iambkin,' his 'darling crocodile' - and conveniently aloof, for she had to spend much of her time in Moscow, while he convalesced at his villa in Yalta. On these terms, the marriage was a success.