For three-fourths of this century we got so poor and tired and lost all hope that many are now helpless and resigned, and sometimes we think only heaven’s intervention can help us.

—A Chekhovian voice speaking of Russia

Anton Chekhov wrote Ivanov, his first produced full-length play, in the fall of 1887 when he was twenty-seven. As he says in a letter to his brother, “I wrote the play by chance, after a single conversation with Korsh [a friend who owned a theater in Moscow]. I took two weeks over it or, more truly, ten days.” The Moscow premiere, as described by Chekhov to his brother, was a comedy of errors: he sat “in a tiny box like a prisoner’s cell,” and listened to the actors forget or reword almost all his lines. “Every word cuts me like a knife in my back. But—O Muse!—this act is also a success. . . . I am congratulated on the success.” But he was disgusted by this facile éclat and extensively revised Ivanov for presentation in St. Petersburg, where it was triumphantly received at the Alexandrovsky Theater on January 31, 1889. It was not until October 1904 that the Moscow Art Theater produced this revised Ivanov, under the direction of Nemirovich-Danchenko. The Moscow Art Theater had, under co-founders Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, brought Chekhov’s later masterpieces to the stage in the intervening years, but the playwright was not to see Ivanov in this setting. He had died of