In 1881, armed with the confidence of youth, the twenty-one-year-old Anton Pavlovich Chekhov fronted up to the Maly Theatre in Moscow, at that time one of the foremost theatres in the world, in order to present its leading actress, Maria Yermolova, with a copy of his recently written and probably first play. The great lady promptly returned the manuscript, which the disappointed young author equally promptly destroyed. However, to quote Bulgakov’s devilish Woland, ‘manuscripts don’t burn’, and in the 1920s an earlier version of the play was discovered in a bank vault. This is a rambling untidy work that, if played in its entirety, would take over four hours to perform. The title page, if it ever had one, is missing, and it is usually presented under the name of its protagonist, Platonov.