The Seagull next day, Chekhov, who had taken refuge backstage for the last two acts, announced to Suvorin that he was finished with writing plays. When supporters assured him that later performances were more successful, Chekhov assumed they were just being kind. "The Seagull" impressed the playwright and friend of Chekhov Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, however, who said Chekhov should have won the Griboyedov prize that year for "The Seagull" instead of himself. Nemirovich overcame Chekhov's refusal to allow the play to appear in Moscow and convinced Stanislavski to direct the play for their innovative and newly founded Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. Stanislavski
Ann Dunnigan plays: "Ivanov", "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", and "The Cherry Orchard"; each of these translations has been performed onstage. Dunnigan went on to translate Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Ilya Tolstoy in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Her translations have served as the basis for numerous scholars' comments and analyses of Russian literature. Tennessee Williams regarded her rendering of "The Seagull" to be the best available in English, and made it the principal reference for his 1981 adaptation, "The Notebook of Trigorin". Dunnigan's rendering of "War and Peace" (New American Library, 1968) was the first American English