SOURCE: "Chekhov's Response to Bernhardt," in Bernhardt and the Theatre of Her Time, edited by Eric Salmon, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 165-79.

Biographers of Sarah Bernhardt spend little time on her three Russian tours (1881, 1892, and 1908). For the most part, they are taken to be stations of the triumphal procession through barbaric provinces that followed her success at the Odéon. The American tours have been productive of the most anecdotes; the English tours have been exhaustively covered by memoir literature. But Bernhardt's first visit to Russia in 1881-1882 may be worth closer examination than it has received, both for what it tells us of the development of Russian taste a decade before the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre, and because of the comment made upon it by Antosha Chekhonte, a young journalist who was to become better known under his real name, Anton Chekhov.

In seeking a new audience in Russia, Bernhardt was following a long tradition of European artists who saw in that exotic hinterland illimitable largess waiting to be tapped. Politically, Franco-Russian relations were growing more cordial and would result, at the height of the entente, in a mass purchase of Russian bonds by French capitalists, an investment that they would rue well before 1917. Culturally, the Russian aristocratic fashion for speaking and reading French had been maintained, despite the unmannerly intrusions of Napoleons I and III. The critic Pavel Annenkov recalled in the 1850s that all men of taste of his generation had cut their teeth on Corneille, Racine and other classics of the grand siècle. Abroad, Russians were reputed to be munificent and enthusiastic in the welcomes extended to distinguished foreign performers. After all, had not Rachel managed to make 300,000 francs in a few weeks?

Bernhardt's expectations were not disappointed, and both her vanity and her bank balance were gratified by the results of the venture. Russia proffered her what Louis Verneuil was to call "une réception grandiose".

Every day, for some hours, the crowd waited for her to leave the hotel to give her an ovation. Every night, when she reached the theatre, a wide red carpet was swiftly unrolled on the pavement so that in getting out of her sleigh she needn't put her foot in the snow. Special trains from Moscow had been laid on to allow the residents of that city to attend her performances [in St. Petersburg]. The Grand Dukes, all the members of the Imperial family, were daily in the auditorium where all whom Petersburg deemed most illustrious congregated.

Twice she was commanded to the Winter Palace, home of the Tsar, before whom she played first Le Passant and the death scene from Adrienne Lecouvreur, and the next time two acts of Phèdre. The evening that she was presented to Alexander III, whom she had positively bowled over, he hastily halted her in her curtsey and said, in the presence of all the Court: "No, Madame, it is for me to bow to you!"

Whether or not such stories are to be ranked as haute press-agentry, it is noteworthy that they are set in St. Petersburg, seat of the government and most Westernized of Russian cities. In the Russian mind, Petersburg acted as its founder Peter the Great had intended, as a "window on Europe". Its tastes, amusements and predilections were, in the upper echelons of society, French, German, and English. Since the eighteenth century, it possessed a French theatre with its own company, a kind of Comédie Française East; its audiences were familiar with the standard Gallic repertoire, fluent in the language and rather given to that reverse chauvinism that believed that art is best when imported from the West. Moreover, St. Petersburg had been the climax of Bernhardt's Russian tour, the excitement generated by reports of her appearances elsewhere. As usual, her arrival had been heralded by a carefully and lavishly laid train of publicity.

Less cosmopolitan centres were more erratic in their reception. In Odessa, crowds shouting "hurrah" had thrown pebbles into her carriage, hitting a member of her troupe in the eye with a shard of window glass. Moscow blew hot and, mostly, cold. Priding itself on being the mother of Russian cities, Moscow was more impatient with foreign foppery, and steadfastly loyal to its own heritage of purely Russian acting and play-writing. The advance publicity campaign had disgusted many critics, who supposed that the public's delight in the French star was more the result of pre-conditioning than of any inherent excellence in her abilities. A leading newspaper, Russkie Vedomosti (The Russian Intelligencer) did not even bother dedicating a special article to her touring activities, but simply carried items in its gossip column. On the whole the items were favorable, but they hardly suggested that a marvel was in their midst.

Bernhardt opened at Moscow's Bolshoy Theatre, a house primarily devoted to opera, ballet and spectacle, on 26 November 1881 in La Dame aux camélias, and the first reports were temperate and measured. Russkie Vedomosti benignly declared, "Yesterday instead of a pompous heroine we saw the living image of a deeply loving, deeply suffering woman from a notorious milieu—who grappled to herself the audience's sympathy and attention with irresistible force." The perfection of her technique, the flexibility of her voice and the careful plotting of the rôle's details were all noted with favour. But other papers were not so charmed. S. Vasil'ev, the influential critic for Moskovskie Vedomosti (The Moscow Intelligencer), after granting that Bernhardt's Marguerite Gautier had something of the eternal feminine about her, even if she was "a Parisienne from top to toe", went on to complain: "everything is deliberate, everything is accurate, everything is typical; all the intonations are in place; all the gestures and movements are truthful. But truthfulness [pravlivost'] is not truth [pravda], eternal truth". His later reports emphasized the same deliberate sophistication of Bernhardt's acting and its accompanying lack of candour. A viewing of her other rôles revealed that her vocal tricks and poses were constantly repeated, well-wrought gimmicks. Bernhardt, Vasil'ev summed up, "is very talented, but not an actress of genius. She gives us remarkably clear, so to speak really palpable, almost chiselled types. They are splendid statuettes, which one would gladly place on one's mantelpiece. But a statuette, not a statue": Similar opinions were echoed by the Russkiy Kur'ër (Russian Courier), Sovremennye Izvestie (Modern Tidings) and Novoe Vremya (New Times), whose critic V. P. Burenin remarked that Bernhardt's affected gesticulation, pseudo-tragic sobs, and cardboard romanticism made her moments of truth and power all the more surprising for being unexpected.

Among those who found Sarah Bernhardt grist for their journalistic mills was twenty-one-year-old Anton Chekhov, a medical student who had begun to contribute squibs and anecdotes to various humour magazines solely with a view to increasing his income. From childhood, Chekhov had been stage-struck, first performing in various amateur productions at home and in school, later religiously attending the Taganrog Civic Theatre, a solid provincial company with a broadly-based repertoire. In Moscow, Chekhov mingled with the Bohemian world of the greenroom and the pressroom: he rapidly became au courant of the latest scandals, knew the ins and outs of backstage intrigue, and avidly followed the fluctuations of the box-office.

The two articles that Chekhov devoted to Bernhardt are written in the flippant, know-it-all style that "Antosha Chekhonte" practised in those post-adolescent days: the writer's tongue is firmly lodged in his cheek and one eyebrow is permanently cocked. But for all that, the aesthetic concerns that lie behind these grimaces both reflect the serious connoisseur's interest in acting and strike a chord that can be heard throughout Chekhov's later, important work—the question of an artist's integrity and diligence in the creative act.

His first article, "Sarah Bernhardt", appeared in Zritel' (The Spectator) on 30 November 1881, before he had seen her perform. His piece is in the nature of a news item cum potted biography, derivative of the sketches by Sarcey and others, that had already appeared in the Moscow press; the others included Evgeniya Tur' who wrote under the elegant nom-de-plume of Saliasse de Tournemire. Chekhov intends to inform his readers of the diva's arrival, her impact on the average Muscovite, and her background; but, because his essay is satirical, he dwells on the hyperbole of her publicity campaign. With sardonic deadpan, reminiscent of Mark Twain, he begins with the astonished discovery that the divine Sarah has, after traversing all the world, deigned to call in at Belokammenaya Street.

Two days ago Moscow knew only four elements; now it won't stop talking about a fifth. It knew seven wonders; now a fraction of a second doesn't go by without it discussing an eighth. Those who had the luck to get even the worst ticket are dying with impatience for nightfall. Forgotten are foul weather, poor roads, expenses, mothers-in-law, debts. Not a scurvy coachman sitting on his box but will give lectures about the new arrival. The reporters forget to eat and drink, they run around and make a fuss. In short, the actress has become our idée fixe. We feel that something is going on in our heads much like the onset of dementia praecox.

A frightful amount has been written about Sarah Bernhardt and is still being written! If we were to pile together everything that has been written about her and were to sell it by the ton (at 150 rubles per ton), and if we were to dedicate the receipts from the sale to the "Society for the Protection of Animals", then—we swear by our quills!—we could at least give dinner and supper to the horses and dogs at Olivier's and the Tatar's [a very exclusive and a very seedy restaurant, respectively: L. S.]. Much has been written and, of course … many lies have been told. She's been written about by Frenchmen, Germans, blacks, Englishmen, Hottentots, Greeks, Patagonians, Indians.… We'll even write something about her, we'll write and try not to lie.

This last statement is followed by a footnote which remarks, "It's incredible, gentlemen! No sooner does one begin to write about Sarah Bernhardt, than one has a desire to tell a few lies. The respected diva, it must be stated, has bewitched the loveliest of human passions." Chekhov then proceeds to recount some of the celebrated incidents in Sarah's early life, her intention to take the veil, her recitation of a La Fontaine fable which procured her admission to the Conservatoire. "Had she not recited a fable with feeling, had she flunked," Chekhov surmises sarcastically, "she probably would never have got to Moscow." Obviously following the standard press release, Chekhov continues to chronicle her career: the fiasco of her début at the Comédie, her abandonment of the Théâtre de Gymnase and flight to Spain, her return to Paris and obscurity, and her eventual success at the Odéon. At this point, the humourist gets the upper hand over the reporter, and despite his avowed intent, Chekhov begins to spin yarns after the fashion of Sarah's advance agents.

"Her success was so spectacular," he proclaims, "that the commander-in-chief of literature, Victor Hugo, wrote the rôle of the queen in Ruy Blas specifically for Sarah Bernhardt.… Hitherto-microscopic dramatists began, thanks to Sarah's acting, to creep forward and attain visibility." As he expatiates on her motto, "Quand même", and her passion for publicity, Chekhov's prose accelerates and his exaggerations burgeon, as if the legend of Bernhardt impels him willy-nilly to hysteria. "Sarah's 'Quand même' is straightforward and urgent. With it Sarah Bernhardt rushed headlong into the sort of ghastly messes that only an extraordinary mind and a will of, at least, iron could break through. She strode, as the saying goes, through fire, water and copper pipes." After touching on her skill at sculpture, painting and literature, which make her the rival of all the muses, he moves on to her recent trips to England and America:

In America she performed miracles.… She flew on her journey through a forest fire, fought Indians and tigers, and so forth. There she visited, among others, the professor of black magic, the wizard Edison who showed her all his telephones and phonophones. According to the French artist Robidà, the Americans drank up all of Lake Ontario in which Sarah had swum.… In America she gave (horribile dictu) 167 performances! The total sums of the box-office receipts were so long that no professor of mathematics could read them… .

He congratulates her on ignoring the Germans on her European tour, but notes that "'tis an ill wind blows nobody good, an extra hundred thousand rubles will remain at home in German pockets, and the little children can use the hundred thousand for milk money." Finally, Chekhov promises his readers to keep them impartially informed of Sarah's exploits in Moscow. "We shall compliment her as a guest and criticise her up and down as stringently as we can as an actress."

Clearly, Chekhov, like his colleagues, had been put off by Bernhardt's fondness for réclame, and could hardly believe that any performer could stand up to claims made so extravagantly. "More about Sarah Bernhardt", his second article, published in Zritel' on 6 December 1881, after he had seen her on stage, begins on a note of exasperation.

What the hell is going on! We wake up in the morning, trick ourselves out, draw on our swallow-tail coat and gloves and round about twelve we head for the Bolshoy Theatre.… We return home from the theatre, gulp down lunch without chewing it and do some scribbling. At eight at night, it's back to the theatre; from the theatre back home and more and more scribbling till about four. And it's like this every day! We think, speak, read, write about nothing but Sarah Bernhardt. O Sarah Bernhardt! All this folderol will end with our straining our reportorial nerves to the maximum, our catching, thanks to irregular mealtimes, a most virulent stomach catarrh, and sleeping soundly for two straight weeks as soon as the eminent diva departs.

The reason for all this theatre-going is to discover whether the actress in any way corresponds to the rhetoric used to describe her, but, Chekhov confesses, he can find in her no resemblance to the Angel of Death or any other epithet bestowed on her by her admirers.

In amusing detail, Chekhov limns the crush at the theatre for Adrienne Lecouvreur, the boxes filled to bursting with families sitting on one another's laps. He observes the curious phenomenon of an audience made up not only of the regular playgoers, the aficionados of acting, but the sensation-seekers, who do not know the difference between the Bolshoy and the Salamonsky Circus, the businessmen who ordinarily have no time for the theatre, the deaf and paralytic who have not been seen in public since 1848. Astutely, he recognises that the attraction of beholding a sacred monster is only part of the explanation; it is the fact that the entertainment smacks of Paris that has drawn this audience together. The three knocks that announce the show (in lieu of the Russian bell), the eighteenth-century décor familiar from reproductions of salon paintings in illustrated magazines, the luxurious costumes and the incomprehensibly guttural language conjure up for Chekhov all the clichés about Paris.

You dream, and before your eyes flash one after the other, the Bois de Boulogne, the Champs Elysées, the Trocadéro, Daudet with his long hair, Zola with his round beard, our Turgenev and our "heart-throb" Mme. Lavretskaya, carousing, tossing Russian gold-pieces hither and yon.

The first act ends in silence, no applause even from the gallery.

In the second act Sarah Bernhardt herself appears. She is handed up a bouquet (it can't be called a bad one, but it's not exactly, no offence meant, a good one either). Sarah is nothing like the postcards you bought… .

The curtain falls—and the audience applauds, but so listlessly! Fyodotova and even Kochetova are applauded far more energetically. But the way Sarah Bernhardt takes her bow! With her head cocked somewhat to one side, she comes out the door centre, walks slowly and grandly down to the apron, looking in no particular direction, much like the pontifex maximus at a sacrificial offering, and with her head describes an arc in the air not visible to the naked eye. "Here you are, take a look!" seems to be written all over her face. "Take a look, wonder, marvel, and say thank you for being allowed the honor of seeing 'the most original of women', 'notre grande Sarah'!"

The coolness of the Muscovite audience, Chekhov imagines, may provoke in the minds of the French actors the belief that it is composed of brute beasts, insensitive to the subleties of refined performances and ignorant of French. But this would be a misconception: for the most part, the audience is made up of experts ready to debate heatedly every nuance of an interpretation and quite fluent in French. No, declares Chekhov, this audience has been spoiled by the mellow acting of Sadovsky, Zhivokini, Shumsky, Samarin and Fyodotova, sensitized by the socially responsible writing of Turgenev and Goncharov, and keenly attuned to real emotion and pathos on the stage. "No wonder," he concludes, "it doesn't fall into a swoon the moment that Sarah Bernhardt lets the audience know a moment before her death by the most energetic convulsions that she is now about to die."

His summing-up of Bernhardt as an actress is worth quoting at length, because it distills the general opinion in Moscow while underlining certain important features of Russian critical thought on the subject of acting:

We are far from worshipping Sarah Bernhardt as a talent. She has none of the stuff that makes our most respected audience love Fyodotova; she has none of the spark that alone is capable of moving us to bitter tears or ecstasy. Every sigh Sarah sighs, every tear she sheds, every antemortem convulsion she makes, every bit of her acting is nothing more than an impeccably and intelligently learned lesson. A lesson, reader, and nothing more! As a very clever lady, who knows what works and what doesn't, a lady of the most grandiose taste, a lady deeply read in the human heart and whatever you please, she very deftly performs all those stunts that, every so often, at fate's behest, occur in the human soul. Every step she takes is profoundly thought out, a stunt underscored a hundred times.… She remakes her heroine into exactly the same sort of unusual woman she is herself.… In her acting, she goes in pursuit not of the natural but of the extraordinary. Her goal is to startle, to amaze, to dazzle.… You watch Adrienne Lecouvreur and you see not Adrienne Lecouvreur in her but the ultra-clever, ultra-sensational Sarah Bernhardt.… What shines through all her acting is not talent, but tremendous, strenuous hard work.… That hard work comprises the whole key to this enigmatic artiste. Not the slightest trifle exists in any of her rôles great or small that has not been put through the purgatory of that hard work a hundred times. Extraordinary work. Were we as hard-working as she is, what wouldn't we write! We would scribble all over the walls and ceilings just in revising the most paltry scrawl. We envy and most respectfully kowtow to her hard work. We have no objection to advising our first- and second-rate artistes to learn how to work from our guest. Our artistes, no offence meant, are dreadfully lazy! For them, study is harsher than horseradish. We deduce that they, the majority of our actors, work at practically nothing from the simple fact that they are at a standstill: they go neither forward nor … anywhere! Were they to work as Sarah Bernhardt works, were they to know as much as she knows, they would go far.… We watched Sarah Bernhardt and derived indescribable pleasure from her hard work. There were brief passages in her acting which moved us almost to tears. But the tears failed to well up only because all the enchantment is smothered in artifice. Were it not for that scurvy artifice, that premeditated tricksiness, that over-emphasis, honest to goodness, we would have burst into tears, and the theatre would have rocked with applause.… O talent! Cuvier said that you are at odds with facility! And Sarah Bernhardt is monstrously facile!

These remarks come as the climax of a century of tension within the Russian theatre between native impulses and foreign examples. The first great Russian actor, Ivan Dmitrevskiy (1734-1821) had founded his technique on Western models: personally acquainted with Garrick and Lekain, he had introduced the declamatory mode back home. Dramatists and actors were hard pressed to warp Slavonic sounds and rhythms into the formal diction and constraints of the hexameter, and to pare down generous emotions to suit histrionic decorum; but they tried. To the unconditioned observer, however, the results were often ludicrous and out-of-keeping; French modes sorted ill with the growing nationalism of writers, popular interest in Russian culture and mores, and the development of self-taught native actors. A sharp distinction developed between the state theatres in Petersburg and those in Moscow. The Petersburg company aped its French colleagues: the accepted manner in tragedy was cool, restrained and, in its opponents' view, punctiliously bureaucratic. Karatygin (1802-1853), for many years the city's leading tragedian, playing his tortured heroes with chill precision; "he commits suicide by numbers", complained the radical writer Herzen. The polished technique of Petersburg actors was exemplary and mirrored the manners of its aristocratic audience.

Moscow, on the other hand, considered its theatre to be "the second Moscow University": the audience was variegated, a mixture of officials, merchants, students and artisans. Its star tragedian Mochalov (1800-1848) has been characterized as the Russian Kean, erratic and impulsive, uneven in his performances because dependent on inspiration steeped in vodka, but always genuine and always exciting. The Moscow theatre's actors had, in many cases, received irregular training; some of them were even of serf origin. They knew life better than they knew the rules of art. Chief among these was Mikhail Shchepkin (1788-1863), who had been redeemed from serfdom by his admirers after he had become the most famous actor in the provinces. Realism and naturalness were Shchepkin's keywords, and he propagandized tirelessly, through his teaching in the dramatic academy, his correspondence and his own sedulously prepared performances, for emotional truth on stage. Shchepkin was no naturalist insistent on the photographic reproduction of everyday details, but he demanded observation of life and the selection of general traits from it that would harmonize with a playwright's conception. Subordination to character was a prime desideratum.

The years that the French tragedienne Mlle. George had spent in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century (1802-1812) had imprinted the neo-classic style of declamation on her epigones, a style which Shchepkin strove to uproot. When Rachel arrived in 1853, playing classical tragedy and romantic melodrama in Petersburg and Moscow, she offered a later generation the opportunity of contrasting an accepted European style, executed by a specialist, with the home-grown approach. Pavel Annenkov, the dean of Petersburg critics, devoted three lengthy and detailed essays to Rachel's performances, concluding that her finest moments were those outbursts of passion which owed least to art, and that her failures came when she embroidered most. In a correspondence with Annenkov, Shchepkin considered the question of Rachel's natural talents, and suggested that, had she not been corrupted by the French school of artificial acting, her genius and understanding of human nature might have preserved her from mechanical gimmickry. Both Annenkov and Shchepkin were convinced that Russia was following the right path in forgoing the French elocutionary manner, and in pursuing goals of emotional authenticity. (However, it should be pointed out that the French artists who visited Russia were luminaries of the Comédie, wedded to the academic style and, as prime donne, to self-aggrandizement. Had Shchepkin encountered Frédérick Lemaître, he might have revised his negative appraisal of French actors.)

The same dichotomy between French craftsmanship and Russian values was apparent in the repertory that Chekhov beheld in the early 1870s as a boy in Taganrog. The local theatre alternated the neatly-tailored melodramas of Scribe and Dennery with comedies and dramas of Russian life, accurate in reproducing real dialogue and recognizable types. Because dramatists like Ostrovsky and Potekhin viewed the theatre as a means of educating and reforming public opinion, Russian actors in their rôles sought to move the audiences by touching their hearts. And the audiences responded in kind by favoring those actors who displayed the greatest depth of feeling. It was axiomatic that any actress worth her salt could cry real tears. The actors whom Chekhov mentions as Muscovite favorites—Sadovsky, Zhivokini, Shumsky and Samarin—were distinguished by the realism of their impersonations and the ability to create a character from within. Their own identification with the character aroused an empathy in the audience.

Bernhardt's opposite numbers at the Moscow state theatre, Mariya Ermolova and Glikeriya Fyodotova, excelled at this. Ermolova (1853-1928), a grande dame not much liked by Chekhov, was apportioned the heroic parts, such as Laurencia in Fuente ovejuna and Schiller's Maria Stuart and Jeanne d'Arc, in addition to flashy rôles in an undistinguished repertoire, which she was able to endow with considerable nobility. She combined the highly-colored romanticism of Mochalov with the emotional authenticity of Shchepkin to work upon the spectator's loftier feelings; young audience members would leave the theatre aglow with revolutionary fervor after one of her classical renditions, illustrating once again the performer's importance in Russia not simply as an entertainer but as a social impetus. (This function was of special significance in the politically repressed 1880s, when outright protest and criticism were stifled.) Those close to Ermolova recalled that she had no private life, but dwelt in the lives of the characters she incarnated, retiring into the rôles she created.

Fyodotova (1846-1925), whom Chekhov greatly admired, had an even wider range than her colleague, playing in tragedy, drama, romantic spectacle and comedies of manners; a student of Shchepkin, she was noted for the warmth and pathos with which she imbued her characters. The novelist Pisemsky stated that in his travels throughout Europe, visiting all the best theatres and seeing all the most celebrated actresses, nowhere had he found anyone with the emotional range and depth of Fyodotova.

These women, of unimpeachable moral character, profoundly involved in the progressive social and literary movements of the time, held in affectionate esteem by their public, were the yardsticks by which Bernhardt was measured. It was natural, then, that the enlightened Muscovite impression was of a mountebank and an exhibitionist whose behaviour on stage bore little correspondence to life as it is lived. What must be emphasized, however, is that the Russians were not asking for the kind of true-to-life behaviorism sought by Zola and Antoine. A certain M. N. R. writing in Gazeta A. Gattsuka (Gattsuk's Gazette) after Bernhardt's departure sharply criticized her depictions of Marguerite Gautier's demise from consumption and Adrienne Lecouvreur's death by poison. "The essence of dramatic art," he opined, "is to show and interpret what causes a person's death, what spiritual and not what corporeal motions accompany his removal from life." Curiously, the same charge of sensational naturalism had been levelled by Annenkov at Rachel a generation earlier, when her writhing and hysteria in Adrienne's death throes sent women screaming from the auditorium; in his opinion, such melodramatic devices made no statement about the character. Rather, the Moscow public hoped that Bernhardt would drop the mask of star and let the woman appear; wielding the upper hand on stage at every moment, in complete control of each vocal modulation, Bernhardt lacked vulner-ability. "Let me whisper my general impression in your ear", confided Spectator in Sovremennye hvestie: "It is all clever, pretty, detailed, with forceful and appropriate expression, but … but not once did any of it make my heart beat any the faster, not in the least."

Along with Chekhov, several critics advised young actresses to ignore Bernhardt's example, except in regard to her firm grip on the rôle in all its details, her disciplined work habits and her ability to listen on stage. Chekhov's friend, the powerful editor Suvorin, suggested that Russian actors pay close attention to her pauses, for "she performs her rôle like a piece of music [for] she knows that certain mimic moments on stage should be more pronounced than they are in life". It may be that the famous Moscow Art Theatre pause derives in part from Bernhardt, filtered through Maeterlinck to Chekhov and Stanislavsky. But the consensus remained that Sarah Bernhardt was less the product of genius than of puffery. For the Moscow cognoscenti, the press campaigns had resulted in overkill. Chekhov, returning to his analysis of Adrienne at last, finally bursts out:

Or else, look here, reader! You're fed up reading my gibberish, and I want awfully to go to bed. The clock is striking four, and the cock is bawling at my pretty neighbor-lady's place.… My eyelids are sticking together as if smeared with glue, my nose is grazing my writing-d… .

Tomorrow, back to Sarah Bernhardt … ugh! However, I won't write any more about her even if the editor pays me fifty kopeks a line. I'm written out! I quit!

He meant it. One can examine Chekhov's writings and letters from this point on and find very few references to Bernhardt, except as a commonplace for an internationally known actress. His full-length portrait of a spoiled, capricious leading lady, Arkadina in The Seagull, was modelled after Russian stars with whom Chekhov was better acquainted, among them his mistress Lidiya Yavorskaya, whose favorite rôle was Marguerite Gautier. Arkadina, her son Konstantin tells us, cannot stand being compared to Bernhardt or Duse; but this is vanity, not criticism.

Actually, Duse was the foreign actress who, ten years later, attracted Chekhov at a time when his outlook on the Russian stage had been soured by first-hand involvement in it. After he had seen her in Petersburg in Antony and Cleopatra, he wrote to his sister (March 17, 1891): "What an actress! I've never seen anything like her. I watched Duse and worked myself into agonies thinking that we have to cultivate our temperaments and tastes through the medium of such wooden actresses as Ermolova and her ilk, whom we consider great because we haven't anyone better. After Duse I can understand why the Russian theatre is so boring." Once again, the moral uplift provided by art, the refining influence of a sensitive performance, are the main criteria for aesthetic evaluation.

Such an attitude, which somewhat parallels that of Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm in their contrasting of Duse and Bernhardt, was not uncommon among experienced judges in Russia, who found it revealing to compare visiting stars in the same rôles. Speaking of the scene in act three of La Dame aux camélias, in which Armand flings his packet of banknotes in Marguerite's face, the Baron Drizen, an official of the Petersburg state theatre, recalled that;

Sarah Bernhardt at that moment hid her face in her hands and sobbed deeply. Tina di Lorenzo automatically fell into an armchair and simply gnawed her lips in silence. Duse reacted quite differently. She could not believe her eyes. What, was this her Armand? He who had sworn eternal love to her, pleaded and wept at her feet? No, it is some other. And with half-closed eyes and outstretched arms, she repeats in different tones but one word: "Armando! Armando!" … I have never experienced a keener sensation in the theatre.

The Baron's impressions are seconded by the shrewd critic A. R. Kugel' ("Homo Novus") who was unimpressed by Bernhardt's emotional grasp of the rôle. He considered Marguerite Gautier to be her masterpiece in many ways; he admired the feminine tenderness of the first act, the sophisticated style of the interview with Armand's father, the expressiveness of her hands and her moaning. But Kugel' was left utterly cold by any scene that required of her "inner life and great sorrow". These were the very qualities that the Russians esteemed most highly in an actor. The word I have translated as "inner life"—perezhivanie—actually means "experiencing, reliving, living through an emotion" and was to become the touchstone of Stanislavsky's approach to acting. For him, the performer had to exploit his emotional memory and re-create, within himself, the feelings of the character he undertakes to impersonate. Stanislavsky codified and formalized what was already the common direction and predilection of the Russian theatre. So it is little wonder that Sarah Bernhardt, ultimate exemplar of the cult of personality, past mistress of métier, should have seemed to the informed Russian spectator an irrelevant throwback to an obsolete and superseded form of exhibitionism.