Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends

TO SUVORIN.

MELIHOVO, July 12, 1897.

... I am reading Maeterlinck, I have read his “Les Aveugles,” “L’Intrus,” and am reading “Aglavaine et Selysette.” They are all strange wonderful things, but they make an immense impression, and if I had a theatre I should certainly stage “Les Aveugles.” There is, by the way, a magnificent scenic effect in it, with the sea and a lighthouse in the distance. The public is semi-idiotic, but one might avoid the play’s failing by writing the contents of the play—in brief, of course—on the programme, saying the play is the work of Maeterlinck, a Belgian author and decadent, and that what happens in it is that an old man, who leads about some blind men, has died in silence and that the blind men, not knowing this, are sitting and waiting for his return....