Swan Song | Page 5

and laughed to the verge of colic."
His health, however, did not improve. In 1889 he began to have attacks
of heart trouble, and the sensitive artist's nature appears in a remark
which he made after one of them. "I walked quickly across the terrace
on which the guests were assembled," he said, "with one idea in my
mind, how awkward it would be to fall down and die in the presence of
strangers."
It was during this transition period of his life, when his youthful spirits
were failing him, that the stage, for which he had always felt a
fascination, tempted him to write "Ivanoff," and also a dramatic sketch
in one act entitled "The Swan Song," though he often declared that he
had no ambition to become a dramatist. "The Novel," he wrote, "is a
lawful wife, but the Stage is a noisy, flashy, and insol ent mistress." He
has put his opinion of the stage of his day in the mouth of Treplieff, in
"The Sea-Gull," and he often refers to it in his letters as "an evil disease
of the towns" and "the gallows on which dramatists are hanged."
He wrote "Ivanoff " at white-heat in two and a half weeks, as a protest
against a play he had seen at one of the Moscow theatres. Ivanoff (from
Ivan, the commonest of Russian names) was by no means meant to be a
hero, but a most ordinary, weak man oppressed by the "immortal
commonplaces of life," with his heart and soul aching in the grip of
circumstance, one of the many "useless people" of Russia for whose
sorrow Tchekoff felt such overwhelming pity. He saw nothing in their
lives that could not be explained and pardoned, and he returns to his
ill-fated, "useless people" again and again, not to preach any doctrine of
pessimism, but simply because he thought that the world was the better
for a certain fragile beauty of their natures and their touching faith in
the ultimate salvation of humanity.
Both the writing and staging of "Ivanoff" gave Tchekoff great difficulty.
The characters all being of almost equal importance, he found it hard to
get enough good actors to take the parts, but it finally appeared in
Moscow in 1889, a decided failure! The author had touched sharply

several sensitive spots of Russian life--for instance, in his warning not
to marry a Jewess or a blue-stocking--and the play was also marred by
faults of inexperience, which, however, he later corrected. The critics
were divided in condemning a certain novelty in it and in praising its
freshness and originality. The character of Ivanoff was not understood,
and the weakness of the man blinded many to the lifelike portrait.
Tchekoff himself was far from pleased with what he called his "literary
abortion," and rewrote it before it was produced again in St. Petersburg.
Here it was received with the wildest applause, and the morning after
its performance the papers burst into unanimous praise. The author was
enthusiastically feted, but the burden of his growing fame was
beginning to be very irksome to him, and he wrote wearily at this time
that he longed to be in the country, fishing in the lake, or lying in the
hay.
His next play to appear was a farce entitled "The Boor," which he
wrote in a single evening and which had a great success. This was
followed by "The Demon," a failure, rewritten ten years later as "Uncle
Vanya."
All Russia now combined in urging Tchekoff to write some important
work, and this, too, was the writer's dream; but his only long story is
"The Steppe," which is, after all, but a series of sketches, exquisitely
drawn, and strung together on the slenderest connecting thread.
Tchekoff's delicate and elusive descriptive power did not lend itself to
painting on a large canvas, and his strange little tragicomedies of
Russian life, his "Tedious Tales," as he called them, were always to
remain his masterpieces.
In 1890 Tchekoff made a journey to the Island of Saghalien, after
which his health definitely failed, and the consumption, with which he
had long been threatened, finally declared itself. His illness exiled him
to the Crimea, and he spent his last ten years there, making frequent
trips to Moscow to superintend the production of his four important
plays, written during this period of his life.
"The Sea-Gull" appeared in 1896, and, after a failure in St. Petersburg,
won instant success as soon as it was given on the stage of the Artists'

Theatre in Moscow. Of all Tchekoff's plays, this one conforms most
nearly to our Western conventions, and is therefore most easily
appreciated here. In Trigorin the author gives us one of the rare
glimpses of his own mind, for Tchekoff seldom put his own personality