“Her hair isn’t naturally curly; she curls it. It’s a strange thing! She works from morning to night, and yet she has time to curl her hair.”
After several lessons, wherein he has only learned the word “memoir,” he decides she doesn’t know what she’s doing. (Is it possible she doesn’t know what she’s doing? Or is it more likely that he’s hopeless?… I ask, unrhetorically, because I had Russian tutors who thought the same about me: “Idiot!” And my only way out was to accept my hopelessness and nevertheless slowly stumble toward being regarded by them as “very slow” or “as competent grammatically as a little boy.”) He resolves to give her a week’s pay and fire her. But when he notices that she, having guessed his intentions, is upset, and that she must really count on the money, he changes his mind. Like distracted students everywhere, he amuses himself as he can:
The lessons began again. Vorotov felt no interest in them. Realizing that he would gain nothing from the lessons, he gave the French girl liberty to do as she liked, asking her nothing and not interrupting her. She translated away as she pleased ten pages during a lesson, and he did not listen, breathed hard, and having nothing better to do, gazed at her curly head, or her soft white hands or her neck and sniffed the fragrance of her clothes.
He is smitten, but she has absolutely no interest in him. He continues to pay her for her incomprehensible, useless lessons of reading and translating to him.
Though the neat, clever, amusing, story resounds for me as a teacher and student, there does not seem to be any special or immediate biographical connection to Chekhov. He would have earned sixty rubles from the Petersburg Gazette for it. What he and “Alice,” the French teacher, needed was money, whether or not readers were paying attention to a good story.
*
He followed up on his first invitation to the Kiselevs to the November 19 premiere of Ivanov in Moscow with another, to Aleksei Kiselev, on November 10: “If you don’t come I’ll give you such a pill in the newspapers shaming you that you’ll flee to America. Important reasons for not appearing might be: a) dysentery, b) rivers overflowing the banks, c) bankruptcy, d) people’s unrest, e) doomsday and f) a visit to Babkino by the shah of Persia. I don’t recognize other reasons. Hear that? […] If Maria Vladimirovna doesn’t come, then I, first, will not give her story to Spring, and, second, I will my whole life campaign against children’s magazines.”8
He also wrote to Alexander on November 10, the day of Ivanov’s first staging in distant Saratov, to ask him to send him the payment as soon as possible for “The Cattle-Dealers.” He was out of money. He wouldn’t get paid for out-of-town performances of Ivanov until he joined (for fifteen rubles) the Society of Playwrights. (He did so on November 16.)9
Chekhov was abuzz with Ivanov and queried a confused and insecure Lazarev about how he was doing with their “vaudeville” Hamlet. They needed, he wrote Lazarev on November 15, to “pound while the iron is hot.” If all went well, the Korsh actors could begin performing it by January. Among Chekhov’s suggestions for Lazarev was that there be a “a complete jumble,” “each person has to be a character and speak in his own language,” “continuous movement,” roles for eleven actors, and “no longwindedness.” “In expectation of your quick answer, I recommend to you, kind sir, to lie down on the bed, take your brain in your hands, and partake in contemplation; after a long contemplation, sit at the table and sketch out your plan.”
On November 15 he also wrote to Leykin:
Forgive me, kind Nikolay Aleksandrovich, for not sending you a story this time around. Wait a bit. My play is opening on Thursday, and as soon as that is over with, I’ll sit myself down and hack away.10
After the apology and promise, he took to testy argument:
Your lines about production of plays puzzle me. You write that the author only gets in the production’s way, makes the actors uncomfortable, and more often than not contributes only the most inane comments. Let me answer you thusly: (1) the play is the author’s property, not the actors’; (2) where the author is present, casting the play is his responsibility; (3) all my comments to date have improved the production, and they have all been put into practice, as I indicated; (4) the actors themselves ask for my comments […]
You write that Suvorin agrees with you. I’m surprised. Suvorin wrote me not long ago that I should “take my actors in hand” and advised me how to go about the in-hand-taking process.
In any case, thank you for bringing up the subject. I’ll write Suvorin and raise the question of the limits of an author’s competence in such matters.
You also write, “Why the blazes don’t you forget about your play?” An eye for an eye: “Why the hell don’t you forget about your shareholding operations?” Dropping the play means dropping my hopes for a profitable deal.
But since all this whining of mine must be getting on your nerves, let’s move on to more timely affairs.
Of those “timely affairs,” wrote Chekhov, “We have a lot to talk about.” He would be arriving in Petersburg at the end of the month. “I don’t know what to say to your remark about Davydov [the actor playing Ivanov]. Maybe you’re right [Leykin had written that Davydov wasn’t to be trusted]. My opinion about him is based not so much on my personal impression as on Suvorin’s recommendation. ‘You can trust Davydov,’ he writes.”
Leykin had to know he had been supplanted.
Opening night for Ivanov poster.
November 19 was Ivanov’s opening night. Anton reported on the action to Alexander the next day:
Well, the first performance is over. I will tell you all about it in detail. To begin with, Korsh promised me ten rehearsals, but gave me only four, of which only two could be called rehearsals, for the other two were tournaments in which messieurs les artistes exercised themselves in altercation and abuse. Davydov and Glama were the only two who knew their parts; the others trusted to the prompter and their own inner conviction.
Act One.—I am behind the stage in a small box that looks like a prison cell. My family is in a box of the benoire and is trembling. Contrary to my expectations, I am cool and am conscious of no agitation. The actors are nervous and excited, and cross themselves. The curtain goes up… the actor whose benefit night it is comes on. His uncertainty, the way that he forgets his part, and the wreath that is presented to him make the play unrecognizable to me from the first sentences. Kiselevsky, of whom I had great hopes, did not deliver a single phrase correctly—literally not a single one. He said things of his own composition. In spite of this and of the stage manager’s blunders, the first act was a great success. There were many calls.
Act Two.—A lot of people on the stage. Visitors. They don’t know their parts, make mistakes, talk nonsense. Every word cuts me like a knife in my back. But—o Muse!—this act, too, was a success. There were calls for all the actors, and I was called before the curtain twice. Congratulations and success.
Act Three.—The acting is not bad. Enormous success. I had to come before the curtain three times, and as I did so Davydov was shaking my hand, and Glama, like Manilov, was pressing my other hand to her heart. The triumph of talent and virtue.
Act Four, Scene One.—It does not go badly. Calls before the curtain again. Then a long, wearisome interval. The audience, not used to leaving their seats and going to the refreshment bar between two scenes, murmur. The curtain goes up. Fine: through the arch one can see the supper table (the wedding). The band plays flourishes. The groomsmen come out: they are drunk, and so you see they think they must behave like clowns and cut capers. The horseplay and pothouse atmosphere reduce me to despair. Then Kiselevsky comes out: it is a poetical, moving passage, but my Kiselevsky does not know his part, is drunk as a cobbler, and a short poetical dialogue is transformed into something tedious and disgusting: the public is perplexed. At the end of the play the hero dies because he cannot get over the insult he has received. The audience, grown cold and tired, does not understand this death (the actors insisted on it; I have another version). There are calls for the actors and for me. During one of the calls I hear sounds of open hissing, drowned by the clapping and stamping.