His health, however, did not improve. In 1889 he began to have attacks
of heart trouble, and the sensitive artist's nature appears in a remark
which he made after one of them. "I walked quickly across the terrace
on which the guests were assembled," he said, "with one idea in my
mind, how awkward it would be to fall down and die in the presence of
strangers."

It was during this transition period of his life, when his youthful
spirits were failing him, that the stage, for which he had always felt a
fascination, tempted him to write "Ivanoff," and also a dramatic sketch
in one act entitled "The Swan Song," though he often declared that he
had no ambition to become a dramatist. "The Novel," he wrote, "is a
lawful wife, but the Stage is a noisy, flashy, and insolent mistress."
He has put his opinion of the stage of his day in the mouth of
Treplieff, in "The Sea-Gull," and he often refers to it in his letters
as "an evil disease of the towns" and "the gallows on which dramatists
are hanged."

He wrote "Ivanoff" at white-heat in two and a half weeks, as a protest
against a play he had seen at one of the Moscow theatres. Ivanoff (from
Ivan, the commonest of Russian names) was by no means meant to be
a hero, but a most ordinary, weak man oppressed by the "immortal
commonplaces of life," with his heart and soul aching in the grip of
circumstance, one of the many "useless people" of Russia for whose
sorrow Tchekoff felt such overwhelming pity. He saw nothing in their
lives that could not be explained and pardoned, and he returns to his
ill-fated, "useless people" again and again, not to preach any doctrine
of pessimism, but simply because he thought that the world was the
better for a certain fragile beauty of their natures and their touching