This week is a week of rehearsals: four Gamblers and three Alas. Coates has a boil inside his nose and is confined to home, so the Gambler rehearsals were taken by Dranishnikov and me. We were competing with Aslanov simultaneously rehearsing Le Prophète,* which was drawing off all those  involved in our opera, but such was the interest in The Gambler that, rather touchingly, they all came in every spare moment they had, so there was always someone to rehearse our piece. Yershov applied himself very seriously to the work and never missed a rehearsal. He was deeply absorbed, made mistakes, apologised, gestured expansively and generally displayed enormous talent for the stage whenever he was illustrating one or another passage. Popova knew her part and sang it accurately; Bossé as the General was excellent; the Babulenka did not put in an appearance at all. The General's role in the second act provoked much general hilarity.