Chekhov's The Seagull, first performed on 17 December 1898, was the Moscow Art Theatre's sixth production, but only the second to score a success. It saved the theatre from plummeting to financial disaster in its first season. After the scandalous first production of The Seagull by the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg, Chekhov was reluctant to risk his play turning into a travesty a second time. In the end, he had no cause to regret giving his agreement after Nemirovich-Danchenko had pleaded with him twice, and hii last two plays were written specifically with the Moscow Art Theatre in mind. Before Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, however, came Uncle Vanya, which had been written a few years earlier in Melikhovo and initially promised to the Maly Theatre. Chekhov was in Yalta when the premiere took place, and it was in Yalta that he first saw the Moscow Art Theatre production when the companycame on tour in the spring of 1900. He was also in Yalta on 11 January 1902, when a special matinee performance of the play was given for the hundreds of Russian doctors who had gathered as delegates to the Lighth Pirogov Congress to discuss problems of national health care.
Alexander Vishnevsky as Uncle Vanya in the first Moscow Art Theatre production, 1899
Dr Astrov : i Uncle Vanya, perhaps Chekhov's most famous physician cnaracter, was partly i ispired by his friend Pyotr Kurkin, a zemstvo doctor he had got to know during the Melikhovo years - Cnekhov had borrowed his friend's maps for the actor playing Astrov to use in the Moscow Art Theatre production.^ Dr KurLn was responsible for correlating disease with geographic^ factors as part of his work as a zemstvo doctor, and it was only a short step from poring over maps to pondering the looming ecological crisis. 'Russian woods are groaning under the axe,' exclaims
Astrov in the first act, 'millions of tr ees are d>. ig. the dwellings of animals and birds are being ravaged, rivers are silting up and going dry, beautiful landscapes are disappearing for ever, and all because lazy human beings can't be bothered to bend over and pick up firewood from the ground.'5 Chekhov had also put a great deal of himself into Astrov and was extremely concerned that the play should make a good impression on his medical colleagues at the Pirogov Congress, as is evident from the increasingly anxious letters he sent to Stanis1avsky and 01ga Knipper in che days running up to the performance, containing instructions to the actors. Writing from Yalta on the day itself, cut off from his colleagues and friends, he complained to Olga that he felt as if he were exiled in Siberia. Uncle Vanya was a huge success with the doctors, of course; some of them even cried, and one woman had to be carried out in hysterics. Zemstvo doctors from the 'remotest corners of Russia' sent Chekhov a telegram afterwards to assure him that they would remember 11 January for the rest of their lives.6
It is ironic that tuberculosis was high on the agenda at the Eighth Pirogov Congress. In 1899, two years aftei Chekhov was officially diagnosed with the disease, a 'Pirogov Tuberculosis Commission' had been set up, chaired by Professor V Shervinsky of the Moscow University medical school. In 1900 the fifteen members of the commission reported chat about 350,000 people were dying from tuberculosis each year in Russia, and at the Eighth Congress it was advocated that their work be expanded to bring improvements in the living environments of the poor, among whom the disease mostly spread. After attending a tuberculosis conference in Berlin, Shervinsky organized a three-day conference in Moscow in May 1903.7 It all came sadly too late for Chekhov, who had little more than a year to live at this point.
Visiting Moscow a year after Chekhov's death on his way to Manchuria, the English critic Maurice Bowra was able to attend a performance of Uncle Vanya. He declared unequivocally that the Moscow Art Theatre was, after the services at the Kremlin's Assumption Cathedral and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the most interesting place to visit. It was, he noted, almost the only thing in Russia which was organized. Uncle Vanya seemed to him to reflect 'the profound discontent of educated people with the manner in which they are governed', a discontent so 'hopeless and inconsistent as to lead to hysteria'. To this English "w'tor, who was vaguely
A. ЈL 4ewom> ..Дядя Ваня", д. IT.
A scene during Act 4 of Uncle Vanya in 1899
reminded of Bernard Shaw minus the paradox and the extravagance, as he put it, the character Professor Serebryakov came across as a kind of Casaubon figure (from Eliot's Middlemarch), while 1 ^s sultry wife Elena was 'a land mermaid, a middle class Pagan, not immoral but amoral, a passionless Cleopatra'. Chekhov had got heartily fed up with Stanislavsky's desire for his stagings to become hyper- realistic, but Bowra was impressed with the way Astrov killed flies on his cheek, and with other small details in the performance of Uncle Vanya that he attended, so that 'the sultry oppressiveness of the thundery day seems to reach us over from the footlights'. Bowra also had some perceptive comments to make about Chekhov's dramatic technique, which he felt was important politically as well as artistically, 'even though politics are never directly mentioned':
What he leaves unsaid, what he suggests is far more potent and effectual than any harangue or polemical discussion. He shows the Russian soul crying out in the desert, he shows the hopelessness, the straining after impossible ideals, the people who have been longing for the dawn, and condemned to the twilight ciuefly owing to their own weakness.8
A DREAM OF MOSCOW III
The Church of the Exattacion of the Cross, Moscow, where Chekhov married Olga Knipper, May 1901
Part-Time Husband
On 25 May 1901 in Moscow came an event wh?ch most people had not expected: Chekhov's marriage. The seventeenth-century Church of the Exaltation of the Cross was chosen for the wedding ceremony, not only because it was small and out of the way, on a quiet back street in a rather nondescript part of town near the Moscow River where mostly merchants lived, but the priest, Father Nikolai, had officiated at the funeral of his father a year and a half earlier. For help with his wedding arrangements, Chekhov had turned to his brother Ivan as he always did where practical matters were concerned, and who knew Father Nikolai from the days when he taught at a school on the Arbat near to the church. Chekhov's sister had realized that marriage was on the cards. The day before the wedding, she had made clear her feeUngs in a letter sent from Yalta: 'Let me express my opinion about your marriage. I find the whole wedding process awful! And all that unnecessary stress wouldn't be good for you either... You'll always be able to get hitched... Tell that to your Knipschitz ,.. You after all brought me up not to have prejudices!'9