Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,39

how things were taken from her, or she was punished for no reason, or her curiosity went unsatisfied; at those moments the constant expression of trustfulness on her face would be mixed with sadness—and that was all. I wasn’t able to intercede for her, but only felt a longing, when I saw her sadness, to draw her to me and pity her in the tone of an old nanny: “My dear little orphan!”

I also remember that she liked to dress well and sprinkle herself with scent. In that respect she was like me. I, too, like fine clothes and good scent.

I regret that I had no time or wish to follow the beginning and development of the passion that already filled Katya by the time she was fourteen or fifteen years old. I’m referring to her passionate love for the theater. When she came home from boarding school for vacation and lived with us, she spoke of nothing else with such pleasure and such ardor as of plays and actors. She wore us out with her constant talk about the theater. My wife and children didn’t listen to her. I was the only one who lacked the courage to deny her my attention. When she had a wish to share her raptures, she would come to my study and say in a pleading voice:

“Nikolai Stepanych, let me talk with you about the theater!”

I would point to the clock and say:

“I’ll give you half an hour. Go on.”

Later she started bringing home dozens of portraits of the actors and actresses she adored; then she tried a few times to take part in amateur productions, and finally, when she finished school, she announced to me that she was born to be an actress.

I never shared Katya’s theatrical infatuation. I think, if a play is good, there’s no need to bother with actors for it to make the proper impression; it’s enough simply to read it. And if a play is bad, no performance will make it good.

In my youth I often went to the theater, and now my family reserves a box twice a year and takes me for an “airing.” Of course, that is not enough to give one the right to judge about the theater, but I will say a little about it. In my opinion, the theater has become no better than it was thirty or forty years ago. As before, I can never find a glass of clean water either in the corridors or in the theater lobby. As before, the ushers fine me twenty kopecks for my coat, though there’s nothing reprehensible about wearing warm clothes in winter. As before, they needlessly play music during the intermissions, adding to the impression of the play a new and unwanted one. As before, men go to the buffet during intermissions to drink alcoholic beverages. If no progress is to be seen in small things, it would be futile to start looking for it in major things. When an actor, bound from head to foot in theatrical traditions and preconceptions, tries to read the simple, ordinary monologue “To be or not to be” not simply, but for some reason with an inevitable hissing and convulsing of his whole body, or when he tries to convince me by one means or another that Chatsky, who talks so much with fools and loves a foolish woman, is a very intelligent man, and that Woe from Wit12 is not a boring play, I feel the same routine wafting from the stage that I already found boring forty years ago, when I was treated to a classical howling and beating of the breast. And I leave the theater each time more conservative than when I entered it.

The sentimental and gullible crowd may be convinced that the theater in its present form is a school. But no one acquainted with school in the true sense can be caught on that hook. I don’t know what will happen in fifty or a hundred years, but in the present circumstances the theater can serve only as entertainment. But this entertainment is too expensive for us to go on resorting to it. It robs the country of thousands of young, healthy, and talented men and women, who, if they had not devoted themselves to the theater, might have been good doctors, tillers of the soil, teachers, army officers; it robs the public of the evening hours—the best hours for mental labor and friendly conversation. To say nothing of