Chekhov's next serious playwriting effort, the one-act On the High Road of 1885, which he adapted from his story "In Autumn," ran afoul of a drama censor with the resoundingly Germanic name Kaiser von Nilckheim, who found it filthy and morbid and arranged to get it banned. The situation and the mood of this play, which showed a group of derelicts in a sleazy inn on a stormy night, were eventually reincarnated in Gorky's
Lower Depths and still later Americanized in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.
In September of 1887, at the request of the impresario Fyodor Korsh, Chekhov undertook to write a full-length play for Korsh's theater and within less than two weeks completed the first version of Ivanov. In this play Chekhov had hoped finally to put to rest that tired old commonplace of the Russian critical tradition (still with us today, alas): the superfluous man, that sensitive and bright nobleman, unable to find the proper use for his talents. Unimaginative critics have been discovering this prototype for decades in Lermontov's Pechorin, Turgenev's Rudin, Goncharov's Oblomov and the heroes of innumerable other books. With his habit of breaking through stereotypes, Chekhov wanted to show that for men of this ilk disappointment and frustration spring not so much from immutable social reality as from their own inability to translate their idealism into a meaningful program of action because their interest in any project or undertaking fades so quickly. With all his faults and shortcomings, the weak and ineffectual Ivanov (his ordinary name was meant to be symbolic) was contrasted in the play on the one hand with a group of provincial bores and gossips, every one of them far less attractive than he, and on the other hand with the humorless radical fanatic Dr. Lvov, who passes judgment on him for all the wrong reasons and reduces Ivanov's complex predicament to simple-minded sociological cliches.
The play was produced first by Korsh in Moscow and then by several provincial companies and, despite Nikolai Mikhailovsky's denunciations, enjoyed a considerable success, placing Chekhov in the front rank of Russian playwrights of the period. It was not until the preparations for a St. Petersburg production of Ivanov were under way one year after its initial production that Chekhov finally realized to what extent his play had been generally misunderstood. Conditioned by the conventions of the nineteenth- century well-made play, the director and the actors of the St. Petersburg production, as well as Chekhov's friend Suvorin, all saw Ivanov himself as either a sly fortune hunter or as the old familiar superfluous man. The idealistic verbiage of Dr. Lvov, furthermore, led them to take him for the play's attractive hero and caused them to overlook or to minimize his heart- lessness and cruelty. The realization of the misunderstanding hit Chekhov hard; he reworked the play drastically in order to clarify its meaning and he wrote Suvorin a long and detailed letter, explaining the play and its characters with utmost precision. This letter to Suvorin is of course a basic key to Chekhov's intentions in Ivanov; but, despite its wide availability, this key has remained unused to this day. In the Soviet Union, a production that would realize Chekhov's intentions as he spells them out would offend some of that society's most cherished beliefs about itself and its past; in the West, directors who put on this play are usually not aware of the Russian social and intellectual realities with which Chekhov is dealing. Sir John Gielgud's widely acclaimed London and New York production of Ivanov a few years ago is a good case in point. Just how thoroughly Gielgud missed the meaning of the play was made clear in his article 011 Ivanov in the New York Times of May 1, 1966: "One feels that Chekhov must have seen something of himself both in the character of Ivanov and that of Doctor Lvov, the two most intelligent men in the play, whose attempts to understand each other and win each other's confidence result in such violent mutual destruction." In line with this totally erroneous conception of the play and of its principal characters, Gielgud played Ivanov as an aging Russian Hamlet and allowed the actor who played the fanatical Dr. Lvov to turn him into a sort of languid romantic poet.
Yet there surely must be a way of making the polemical aspects of Ivanov clcar and comprehensible to a contemporary Western audience. A production that would bring them out in an imaginative way could generate considerable excitement; and it would also tell the non-Russian public for practically the first time just what Chekhov's first important play is really about.
11. To Nikolai Leykin
Moscow, November 15, 1887
Forgive me, kind Nikolai Alexandrovich, for not sending you a story this time round. 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. 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';
where the author is present, casting the play is his responsibility;
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; (5) there is a new Shpazhinsky[9] play presently in rehearsal at the Maly; Shpazhinsky has changed the furniture three times and gotten the authorities to lay out money for new props on three occasions. And so on. If you reduce author participation to a naught, what the hell will you come up with? Remember how Gogol raged when they put on his play![10]
And wasn't he right?
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.
All the Innocent Talk[11] stories are printed on one type of paper.
I'll be in Petersburg by December.
We have a lot to talk about.
I don't know what to say to your remark about Davydov.[12] Maybe you're right. My opinion of him is based not so much on my personal impression as on Suvorin's recommendation. "You can trust Davydov," he writes.