My regards to Praskovya Nikiforovna and St. Fyodor.[13] Each time I write, my family sends its regards, but, forgive me, I always forget to include them.
When will we have dinner at Testov's?[14] Come pay us a visit.
Yours, A. Chekhov
12. To Alexander Chekhov
Moscow, November 20, 1887
Well, the play has opened. . . . Let me take it point by point. To begin with, Korsh promised me ten rehearsals and gave me only four, of which only two can be called rehearsals, because the other two were more like tournaments for the actors to display their skills of disputation and invective. Only Davydov and Glama1 knew their parts; the rest of them relied on the prompter and inner conviction.
First Act. I'm backstage in a tiny box that looks like a prisoner's cell. The family is in an orchestra box—and trembling. Contrary to my expectations, I feel calm and collected. The actors are keyed up and tense; they keep crossing themselves. Curtain. Enter the celebrant,2 unsure of himself, unfamiliar with his lines. He is then presented with a wreath, with the result that from the very first lines I don't recognize my play. Kiselevsky,3 on whom I had staked such high hopes, does not get a single line right. Literally not a single one. He says whatever comes into his head. Despite all this and the director's blunders, the first act is quite successful. Many curtain calls.
Second Act. A crowd on stage. Guests. Not knowing their lines, they fumble and talk nonsense. Every word is like a knife in my back. But—О Muse!—this act is successful too. The entire cast gets a curtain call. Even I am called twice. Everyone congratulates me on my success.
Third Act. The acting doesn't go too badly. An enormous success. I get three curtain calls. Davydov shakes my hand during one of them and Glama presses my other hand to her heart a la Manilov.4 Talent and virtue reign triumphant.
Act Four, Scene One. Everything goes all right. Curtain calls. Then a long, tedious intermission. Not in the habit of getting up and moving out to the buffet between scenes, the audience grumbles. The curtain goes up. A beautiful set: dinner table (wedding) seen behind an arch. The orchestra plays a fanfare, and out come the men of the wedding party. They are drunk, you see, and therefore feel obliged to clown around and cut up. A circus, a drunken brawl. I am horrified. Thereupon Kiselevsky's grand entrance. A heart-rendingly poetic passage. But, because my Kiselevsky doesn't know his lines and is drunk as a lord, the short poetic dialogue comes out long-winded and vile. The audience is perturbed. The hero dies at the end of the play because he cannot stand to live after being insulted. By this time the audience has grown so tired and so indifferent that they are unable to understand why he must die. (The actors insisted on this ending; I have an alternate one.) Both the actors and I take our curtain calls. During one of them I detect a clear hissing, though it is drowned out by applause and stamping feet.
On the whole I feel exhausted and chagrined. I am disgusted even though the play was a big success (which fact is denied only by Kicheyev5 and Co.). Theater lovers say they've never seen so much ferment, so much universal applause-cmrc-hissing, or heard so many arguments as they saw and heard at my play. And Korsh has never had an author take a curtain call after the second act.
The play will be performed for the second time on the twenty- third—with the alternate ending and several other changes: I'm getting rid of the wedding-party men.
Details when we get together.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Tell Burenin6 that I've fallen back into my routine, now that the play is out of the way, and am hard at work on my contribution for the Saturday issue.
Vladimir Davydov and Alexandra Glama-Meshcherskaya were two of the brightest names in the impressive all-star cast that Korsh assembled for the first performance of Ivanov. She appeared in the role of Sarah.
The opening night was also the occasion of a benefit performance honoring the actor Nikolai Svetlov, who played the role of Misha Borkin. In accordance with the quaint custom, his first entrance was interrupted by the ceremonial presentation of a wreath.
Ivan Kiselevsky, a highly popular actor of the time, played Count Shabelsky.
A sentimental character in Gogol's Dead Souls.
The critic Pyotr Kicheyev's review of Ivanov qualified the play as "profoundly immoral," accused it of an "insolent and cynical confusion of ideas" and described its form as "incoherent."
The arch-reactionary critic and playwright Viktor Burenin was at the time one of the editors of New Times, where Alexander Chekhov was also employed.
13. To Alexander Chekhov
Moscow, November 24, 1887
Well, dearest Gusev,1 the dust has finally settled and everything has calmed down. Here I am as usual, sitting at my desk and placidly writing stories. You can't possibly imagine what it was like! The devil only knows what they've made out of so insignificant a piece of junk as my miserable little play. (I've sent a copy to Maslov.)2 As I wrote you, the premiere caused more excitement in the audience and backstage than the prompter had seen in all his thirty-two years with the theater. People were screaming and yelling and clapping and hissing, there was almost a brawl in the buffet, some students in the gallery tried to throw someone out and two people were ejected by the police. The excitement affected everybody. Masha almost fainted, Dyukovsky,3 whose heart started palpitating, ran out of the theater, and Kiselyov4 for no earthly reason grabbed himself by the head and wailed in all seriousness, "What am I going to do now?"
The actors were in a state of nervous tension. Everything I've written you and Maslov about their acting and their attitudes must of course be held in strict confidence. A great deal can be explained and justified. It turns out that the actress who played the leading role has a daughter who was on her deathbed. How could she keep her mind on the stage? Kurepin5 did well to praise the actors.
The day after the performance the Moscow Press published a review by Pyotr Kicheyev calling my play insolently cynical and immoral claptrap. The Moscow News praised it.
The second performance went well, though it did have its surprises. Without any rehearsals, a new actress took over for the one with the sick daughter. Again we had curtain calls after the third act (two of them) and the fourth, but this time no one hissed.
There you have it. My Ivanov will go on again this Wednesday. Now everyone's quieted down and fallen back in their rut. We've marked off November 19th on the calendar and will celebrate it every year with a drunken spree; it will be a day long remembered by our family.
I won't be writing you any more about the play. If you feel like getting an idea of what it's like, ask Maslov to let you have a look at his copy. Reading the play won't tell you what all the excitement was about; you won't find anything special in it. Nikolai, Schechtel and Levitan—all of them painters—assure me that it's so original on stage that watching it is a strange experience. None of this comes through when you read it.
If you notice anyone at New Times about to come down on actors in my play, ask them to refrain from calumny. At the second performance they were splendid.
Well, in a few days, I'll be leaving for Petersburg. I hope to get away by December 1st. We'll celebrate your eldest puppy's name day together at any rate. . . . Warn him there won't be any cake.
Congratulations on your promotion. If you really are a secretary now, then insert a notice in the paper saying that "Ivanov had its second performance on November 23rd at the Korsh Theater. The actors, especially Davydov, Kiselevsky, Gradov-Sokolov and Kosheva,G earned many curtain calls. The author was called to the stage after the third and fourth acts." Something along those lines ... A notice like that will make them do the play again, and 111 get an extra fifty or a hundred rubles. But if it's inconvenient for you, then forget about it.