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When Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" first opened in St. Petersburg, in October, 1896, the hubbub of catcalls was so loud that the actors had trouble hearing themselves. Recounting the play's sensational failure--the humiliated author stopped writing plays for a few years--Chekhov wrote to a friend, "The theatre breathed malice, the air was compressed with hatred, and in accordance with the laws of physics, I was thrown out of Petersburg like a bomb." Chekhov asked for the play to be withdrawn; the theatre refused. Two years later, at the Moscow Art Theatre, in a production directed by Constantin Stanislavsky, the play's fortune was reversed. On opening night, after the ...