Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchYALTA, November 1, 1899.I understand your mood, dear actress, I understand it very well;but yet in your place I would not be so desperately upset. Both thepart of Anna* and the play itself are not worth wasting so muchfeeling and nerves over. It is an old play. It is already out of date, andthere are a great many defects in it; if more than half the performershave not fallen into the right tone, then naturally it is the fault ofthe play. That’s one thing, and the second is, you must once and forall give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let thatconcern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day,quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes which are inevitable, forfailures—in short, to do your job as actress and let other peoplecount the calls before the curtain. To write or to act, and to beconscious at the time that one is not doing the right thing—that isso usual, and for beginners so profitable!The third thing is that the director has telegraphed that the secondperformance went magnificently, that everyone played splendidly,and that he was completely satisfied ….*In Hauptmann’s “Lonely Lives.”378