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 into the pictures of the life in which he took such immense interest.

In “The Sea-Gull” we see clearly the increase of Tchekoff’s power of analysis, which is remarkable in his next play, “The Three Sisters,” gloomiest of all his dramas.