The opening night of The Seagull on October 17, 1896, at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, was a disaster. The audience hissed, jeered, booed; the actors were completely disconcerted and could hardly speak their lines. Chekhov watched the first two acts, but fled backstage at the intermission and left the theater and Petersburg after the performance, swearing he would never write another play. “It was a failure I couldn’t have imagined in my worst dreams,” he wrote three weeks later to his friend, the liberal lawyer and writer Anatoly Koni. “I thought that if I had written and staged a play so obviously abounding in monstrous shortcomings, then I had lost all sensitivity and consequently my mechanism had run down once and for all.”^*

      In fact, as Koni had tried to convince him, the failure was not Chekhov’s. The premiere was a benefit performance for the actress Elizaveta Levkeeva, known for playing in light comedies, and her admirers, who filled the theater on the opening night, were not expecting anything like what confronted them in The Seagull. The second and third performances, on the other hand, went very well. The brilliant young actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who played Nina Zarechnaya, wrote to Chekhov after the second night: “I’ve just returned from the theater, dear Anton Pavlovich . . . The play is a complete, unanimous success, just as it ought to be, just as it had to be. How I’d like to see you now, but what I’d like even more is for you to be present and hear the unanimous cry of ‘Author.’”^† Unfortunately, the reviews in the Petersburg press following the opening debacle were so bad that the theater management closed the show after only five performances.

      The Seagull did not simply fly away, however. Over the next two years, the play was staged quite successfully in some twenty-one cities across Russia, the Ukraine and Georgia, and was also translated into Czech for a production in Prague. Meanwhile, during that same time, an event of great importance for Russian and world theater was taking place: Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a playwright and director, and the actor-director-theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky were in the process of founding a new theater dedicated to the highest professional quality—the Moscow Art Theatre. The two men met for the first time on June 22, 1897, over lunch at the Slavyansky Bazar hotel in Moscow. They sat down at two P.M. and talked until eight A.M. the next morning, ending with a fully formed project for their theater: Nemirovich-Danchenko would be in charge of repertory and literary matters in general, Stanislavsky in charge of production, and they would both direct. Next they had to choose the actors and plays for their first season, which was planned for the winter of 1898.

      Chekhov was born in 1860. Stanislavsky was three years younger, Nemirovich two years older. They were both familiar with Chekhov’s work, and in particular with his two four-act plays, Ivanov and The Wood Demon, which had been staged in Moscow in 1887 and 1889. Nemirovich had known and been in correspondence with Chekhov since 1888, and had strongly disagreed with the negative reviews of The Seagull. On April 25, 1898, he wrote to him asking for permission to include the play in the opening season of the newly founded theater. Chekhov was on his way back to Russia from the south of France and received the letter only on May 6. On May 16 he wrote giving Nemirovich rights to stage not only The Seagull but his other plays as well. That October The Seagull went into rehearsal, with its opening set for December 17. Stanislavsky himself was to play the writer Trigorin; the young Vsevolod Meyerhold, who would become a famous director and innovator in his own right, took the part of Konstantin Treplyov; and the role of the actress Arkadina went to Olga Knipper, who three years later became Chekhov’s wife.

      The plays in that first season included Tsar Fyodor Ioannovych by Alexei K. Tolstoy, The Sunken Bell by Gerhart Hauptmann, the Antigone of Sophocles, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Goldoni’s La Locandiera. Tsar Fyodor Ioannovych, which opened the season, was very well received by both audience and press, but the others had a cooler reception, and there was great tension in the dressing rooms on the opening night of The Seagull. In his memoirs, My Life in the Russian Theatre, Nemirovich recorded the moment that followed the first act:

      There was a silence, a complete silence both in the theater and on the stage, it was as though all held their breath, as though no one quite understood [what they had seen] . . . This mood lasted quite a long time, so long indeed that those onstage decided that the first act had failed, failed so completely that not a single friend in the audience dared applaud . . . Then suddenly, in the auditorium something happened. It was as if a dam had burst, or a bomb had exploded—all at once there was a deafening crash of applause from all: from friends and enemies.^‡

      Chekhov had attended some earlier rehearsals, but avoided the opening; he distracted himself with his new house in Yalta.