YALTA,
October 30, 1899.
... You ask whether I shall be excited, but you see I only heard properly
that “Uncle Vanya” was to be given on the twenty-sixth from your letter
which I got on the twenty-seventh. The telegrams began coming on the
evening of the twenty-seventh when I was in bed. They send them on to me by
telephone. I woke up every time and ran with bare feet to the telephone,
and got very much chilled; then I had scarcely dozed off when the bell rang
again and again. It’s the first time that my own fame has kept me awake.
The next evening when I went to bed I put my slippers and dressing-gown
beside my bed, but there were no more telegrams.
The telegrams were full of nothing but the number of calls and the
brilliant success, but there was a subtle, almost elusive something in them
from which I could conclude that the state of mind of all of you was not
exactly of the very best. The newspapers I have got to-day confirm my
conjectures.
Yes, dear actress, ordinary medium success is not enough now for all you
artistic players: you want an uproar, big guns, dynamite. You have been
spoiled at last, deafened by constant talk about successes, full and not
full houses: you are already poisoned with that drug, and in another two or
three years you will be good for nothing! So much for you!
How are you getting on? How are you feeling? I am still in the same place,
and am still the same; I am working and planting trees.
But visitors have come, I can’t go on writing. Visitors have been sitting
here for more than an hour. They have asked for tea. They have sent for the
samovar. Oh, how dreary!
Don’t forget me, and don’t let your friendship for me die away, so that we
may go away together somewhere again this summer. Good-bye for the present.
We shall most likely not meet before April. If you would all come in the
spring to Yalta, would act here and rest--that would be wonderfully
artistic. A visitor will take this letter and drop it into the post-box....
P.S.--Dear actress, write for the sake of all that’s holy, I am so dull and
depressed. I might be in prison and I rage and rage....
YALTA,
November 1, 1899.
I understand your mood, dear actress, I understand it very well; but yet in
your place I would not be so desperately upset. Both the part of Anna
[Footnote: In Hauptmann’s “Lonely Lives.”] and the play itself are not
worth wasting so much feeling and nerves over. It is an old play. It is
already out of date, and there are a great many defects in it; if more than
half the performers have not fallen into the right tone, then naturally it
is the fault of the play. That’s one thing, and the second is, you must
once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t
let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day,
quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes which are inevitable, for
failures--in short, to do your job as actress and let other people count
the calls before the curtain. To write or to act, and to be conscious at
the time that one is not doing the right thing--that is so usual, and for
beginners so profitable!
The third thing is that the director has telegraphed that the second
performance went magnificently, that everyone played splendidly, and that
he was completely satisfied....