in the ultimate salvation of humanity.

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 su