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

In the following essay, Senelick discusses Bernhardt's acceptance by critics and Anton Chekhov's opinion of the actress.'

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...