Thunder and Lightning

An invented vaudeville Chekhov pitches to Suvorin in §8 of this letter, for Savina, Davydov, and "the ministers": during a nighttime thunderstorm the rural doctor Davydov (a comic role imagined for the actor V. N. Davydov) calls on the young lady Savina (imagined for the actress Maria Savina); Davydov has a toothache and Savina an unbearable temper; their conversation is interrupted by thunderclaps, and Chekhov marries them off at the end. Presented as a comic riff and self-deprecating boast about his fluency in vaudeville plots (compared to oil gushing from the Baku fields) rather than a firm literary commitment; no evidence elsewhere in this corpus that the piece was ever written.