The sensational onstage suicide of Russian actress and opera singer Kadmina in 1881 led Alexei Suvorin to memorialize her in his 1888 four-act play Tatyana Repina. One year later, his friend Anton Chekhov, himself fascinated by Kadmina, sent Suvorin a one-act play, which was in fact a fifth act continuation of Tatyana Repina, with instructions to show it to no one. When the play was finally made public years later by Chekhov's brother Mikhail, it presented a Was it, as the brother claimed, a parody? Or was the brother simply distancing himself from a then controversial Suvorin? Russian historian and linguist John Racin examines the enormous documentary record to make the case that Chekhov's one-act was written as an earnest artistic complement to Suvorin's. Racin's convictions led him to retranslate both Tatyana Repina s, presented here with additional relevant texts.
