But even with these disfigurements Ivanov still stands as Chekhov’s first full, convincing work of dramatic art.

He kept tinkering with it; performances, in St Petersburg now, improved; and, moved by an intelligent review or a discerning friend’s recommendation, audiences grew larger and friendlier, until Chekhov had something of a hit on his hands, though he continued to think the play was popular for the wrong reasons, audiences having seized on its melodramatic incidents rather than its intelligent vision; to an extent he was right.

Ivanov had set Chekhov on a course which he would stick to, after one setback, in the major plays that followed. This is a good place to mention Chekhov’s main subjects, and examine how he dramatized — which is to say, gave stage life to — these themes, or what I once called, in another context, ‘notional presences’, ideas adhering to bodies, spirit to corporeality.

Beyond question Chekhov’s central themes in these plays are love and work (Lieben und Arbeit — Freud’s terse reply when asked what was necessary for a complete life). Closely connected to them are time, with a special emphasis on the future, and art, more particularly what being an artist spiritually demands.

Many ways exist for getting Chekhov wrong, so herewith a short guide to avoiding them. Don’t look for ‘realism’ in these plays; don’t expect conventional endings, happy or otherwise; be aware of how Chekhov often has one character subvert another’s point of view, when it threatens to harden into ideology or melt into sentimentality; keep alert to the hints and nuances in speeches, along with the literal words; don’t look for answers, to your problems or life’s dilemmas; throw away any idea you might have that drama is always about ‘conflict’, or, rather, remember that in these plays conflict is more often internal — within characters — than between them; keep in mind that no single character in any play speaks wholly for Chekhov, the most unbiased and democratic of authors; don’t ever regard, admiringly or not, a Chekhov play as an exercise in ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ — they’re solid works of imagination, not emotional vapours. Here is Virginia Woolf writing in 1920: ‘It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself, or to trouble himself, that he speaks of atmosphere.’ Don’t forget that Chekhov is often very funny, so feel free to laugh, aloud if the impulse strikes you.

The artistic setback I spoke of before was an attempt to write a classical comedy, the kind that ends with lovers united, marriages restored, and a sense of satisfaction, celebration, reigning over everything. Long, complicated, and crowded with incident, The Wood Demon was close to being a disaster. Still, Chekhov saw enough in the piece to carry a great many things over — some characters, settings and scenes, even a few swatches of dialogue — to the making of Uncle Vanya a few years later, though he obstinately insisted that the two plays were wholly independent, which in spirit they certainly are.

LOVE

Chekhov’s notebook contains this rather enigmatic remark about love (as sexual desire or romantic attraction): ‘Either it is a remnant of something “degenerating”, something which was once immense, or it is a particle of what will in the future develop into something immense, but at present it is unsatisfying, it gives much less than one expects.’ In each play that followed Ivanov Chekhov made love and sex central concerns, important notional presences. Love — erotic or romantic or spiritual — carries a great weight of significance in The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, before tapering off in The Cherry Orchard.

The notebook entry, especially the part about love, or sex, being rather unsatisfying, has been exploited by those commentators who, for various reasons — ignorance, literary envy, feminist theory — want to find Chekhov himself deficient in erotic vigour or enthusiasm. Some argue, absurdly, that because so many of his stories and plays deal with unsuccessful love affairs or marriages, he personally thought dimly of such relationships, seeing them as inherently unsatisfying. One biographer asked the nonsensical rhetorical question: ‘What was a woman to him, no matter how desirable, when his life was all pen and paper?’ In all the commentary on Chekhov that sentence is, I think, surpassed in foolishness only by some remarks of a scholar who wrote, without any evidence, that Chekhov had a ‘gloomy view of heterosexual relationships’ and offered the following presumably helpful distinction: ‘A full appreciation of Chekhov’s work requires ... a certain degree of involvement, a response intellectual, or, as in the case of his love-stories, emotional.’

Against such an array of unseeing commentators I have space for only one rebuttal. In the best, most illuminating essay on Chekhov’s fiction, ‘Reality in Chekhov’s Stories’, Eudora Welty said, simply and sanely, that ‘Chekhov wrote of sex with honesty and lack of fuss as he wrote of all human experience ... Much ahead of its time, and perhaps of ours, in “The Duel” he treated with candour and seriousness a young woman of compelling sexuality. “The Lady with the Little Dog” is a compassionate study of a cynical middle-aged man surprised when, almost against his will and against his belief, his sexual worldliness turns into the honesty and difficulty of belated love.’

In October 1895, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin that he was working on a new long play, his first for several years. Among other things, he continued, the play had the usual ‘four acts, a landscape ... much conversation about literature, little action, and five tons of love.’ Chekhov actually wrote puds, a pud being a unit of about thirty-six pounds. At the end of Act One a major character will exclaim, ‘You’re all so highly strung ... And such a lot of love ...’

The Seagull does indeed contain two or three puds of love, if not five — how does one measure such things? — and much talk not only about literature but also about plays and playwrights, art and artists. Love and art, art and love — Chekhov weaves back and forth between these categories of experience and aspiration.

The most ardent lovers in this play of romantic cross-hatchings are the most infected by the practice, or dream, of art — the actresses Nina and Arkadina, the writers Trigorin and Treplyov — and the play they’re in is in a sense a drama of selves seeking, or failing, to reconcile the various modes of living.

Chekhov once wrote that ‘Nina’s part is everything in the play.’ The first of Chekhov’s heroes of what I call existential sobriety, a person who neither begs for the impossible nor abjectly surrenders to what seems inevitable, but courageously lives through whatever life demands of her, at the same time as it grants her — if she’ll seize them — the virtues she needs to survive, to go on: clear understanding, courage, humility, stamina. Sonya in Uncle Vanya, all three Prozorov sisters, and Anya, Varya and Mme Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard will follow in Nina’s footsteps.

Against her balanced and hard-earned self-knowledge, her integrity, Chekhov puts Treplyov’s immaturity, romanticism and moral weakness. The climactic scene, Nina’s unavailing visit to Treplyov, takes its place among the great moments of Chekhovian theatre, and is a workshop in his techniques. I have space for one central example: after Nina says, ‘You’re a writer, I’m an actress,’ she adds, ‘I loved you, I dreamed of being famous, but now?’ She breaks off and tells him some details of her physical life since she left him, which we know has been bitterly painful. Treplyov’s fateful response is to ignore her words and burst out with ‘life has been unbearable for me’ and ‘I call you, I kiss the ground on which you’ve walked ...’ To this Nina (‘bewildered’) asks, ‘Why is he talking like this?’ and repeats the words, which, we quickly see by her use of the impersonal ‘he’, are not a question but a complex recognition: that Treplyov doesn’t so much love as desperately need her, that his emotional immaturity extends to his would-be artist’s self; his writing is lifeless because in some deep dimension he himself lacks animation, life. Before leaving, Nina tells Treplyov what she has learned about being an artist: ‘I know now, I understand ... the most important thing isn’t fame or glory or anything I used to dream about — but the ability to endure. To know how to bear your cross and have faith ... when I think about my vocation I’m not afraid of life.’

Treplyov, who lacks a true vocation, is afraid, and his shooting himself is an extreme demonstration of his inability to persevere. A measure of Chekhov’s artistic growth is the difference between the suicides with which both Ivanov and The Seagull end. Nikolay’s shooting himself is inorganic and arbitrary, issuing from the stock of melodramatic actions and situations with which Chekhov was familiar. Treplyov’s suicide comes from the heart of the play’s vision, which itself is seized from actuality in order to be dramatized.

Perhaps the shrewdest comment on the play and its ending was made by someone outside the theatre and academic life. After praising the work, the well-known jurist Anatoly Koni wrote to Chekhov:

‘How good the ending is.