"swnsg10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chekhov Anton)

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