theater in Paris. His whole company joined together in expressing this excellent play; special mention goes to the actress Lolleh Bellon (Lolleh Bellon), who played the role of the quiet, sick, suffering wife, aided in this by her beautiful face, the enchanting tone of her voice, and the calm of her measured movements. Irène Sergine (Irène Sergine) played the role of Sashenka, the beautiful young girl; she was a flash of lightning in a dark night, casting a gleam over the pitch darkness of the souls hovering around her. "Harry Max" played the role of the Count, and was the one who makes us laugh and weep at once, expressing thereby the essence of Chekhovian art in the theater.
As for the story of Ivanov, it is the story of a man of thirty-five, a modernizing landowner with progressive, up-to-date ideas, who once wished to help the peasants and raise them up, and to that end carried out several experiments whose lot was failure; so that now he has become despairing and weary, looking at life through black spectacles, and seeing that his own life has gone for nothing, without meaning. He is, moreover, in a barren emotional desert: he married a woman whom he loved and who loved him against her family's wishes, and here he is, a few years after his marriage,
emptied of this love, filled with a cold void, weary of his home, seized at dusk by an oppression of spirit and a melancholy he cannot explain. "Anna Petrovna" tries to cheer the soul of her beloved husband and searches for that magic chord that once bound them with love's luminous flame; but she tries in vain — that ember has died out and she will never be able to rekindle it, though she is the complete woman in her beauty, her sweetness, the refinement of her feeling, and her understanding of her husband's morbid state of mind. Ivanov flees the atmosphere of his house, taking refuge in the evenings at the house of his friend Lebedev; but before long he feels the weariness mastering him with its black, crushing nightmare. Young Sashenka, Lebedev's daughter, feels a tenderness toward this despairing man and tries to deliver him from his crisis of soul; and Ivanov imagines that he has awakened to life anew, and that the love of the merry, hopeful Sashenka will pull him out of the fathomless pit of despair.
Ivanov's wife dies wretched, wretched; and Ivanov decides to marry Sashenka — at Sashenka's own insistence. But he feels in the depths of his soul that he is inescapably lost, that his life has ended while his fiancée is at the break of her first dawn. He tries
to free himself from the pledge he gave her, but she refuses to release him from it. Ivanov feels that he is leading her into the abyss with him, and so he fires a bullet into himself — the final word in his violent dispute with her..
Perhaps we may ask: what does the author intend by all this, and what are the play's important events? To the first question Chekhov himself gave the answer when he once said: "The writer's task is to bear witness and to record, not to judge." He portrays the life of despair that had seized the Russian people in his time with precise and truthful strokes. His feeling toward these wretched ones is one of human compassion, not of unjust judgment. It is as if he wished to say to his people: "Here is the model of your failed life — take heed, and look toward the ideal life, for you have it in your power to wake from your morbid nightmare."
As for the second question, the answer is that Chekhov's plays are distinguished by the unimportance of their events, for nothing important happens in them. They are pictures of life, slow and silent; but the volcano of the soul boiling beneath this surface crust is what concerns us, and in it lies the essence of his theatrical art...
