MELIHOVO,
November 11, 1896.
You cannot imagine how your letter rejoiced me. I saw from the front only
the two first acts of my play. Afterwards I sat behind the scenes and felt
the whole time that “The Seagull” was a failure. After the performance that
night and next day, I was assured that I had hatched out nothing but
idiots, that my play was clumsy from the stage point of view, that it was
not clever, that it was unintelligible, even senseless, and so on and so
on. You can imagine my position--it was a collapse such as I had never
dreamed of! I felt ashamed and vexed, and I went away from Petersburg full
of doubts of all sorts. I thought that if I had written and put on the
stage a play so obviously brimming over with monstrous defects, I had lost
all instinct and that, therefore, my machinery must have gone wrong for
good. After I had reached home, they wrote to me from Petersburg that the
second and third performances were a success; several letters, some signed,
some anonymous, came praising the play and abusing the critics. I read them
with pleasure, but still I felt vexed and ashamed, and the idea forced
itself upon me that if kind-hearted people thought it was necessary to
comfort me, it meant that I was in a bad way. But your letter has acted
upon me in a most definite way. I have known you a long time, I have a deep
respect for you, and I believe in you more than in all the critics taken
together--you felt that when you wrote your letter, and that is why it is
so excellent and convincing. My mind is at rest now, and I can think of the
play and the performance without loathing. Kommissarzhevskaia is a
wonderful actress. At one of the rehearsals many people were moved to tears
as they looked at her, and said that she was the first actress in Russia
to-day; but at the first performance she was affected by the general
attitude of hostility to my “Seagull,” and was, as it were, intimidated by
it and lost her voice. Our press takes a cold tone to her that doesn’t do
justice to her merits, and I am sorry for her. Allow me to thank you with
all my heart for your letter. Believe me, I value the feelings that
prompted you to write it far more than I can express in words, and the
sympathy you call “unnecessary” at the end of your letter I shall never
never forget, whatever happens.