After the curtain the whole cast come up on stage several times to be greeted by the audience. What sort of 'flop' that was?" Leo Tolstoy who saw the performance on January 17, in a letter back home called it 'excellent'. On 15 January 1869 "An Ardent Heart" was performed in "Saint Petersburg"s Alexandrinsky Theatre, as Yulia Linskaya's benefit (she played Matryona Kharitonovna), featuring Pavel Vasilyev (Kuroslepov), Yelena Struyskaya (Parasha), Pyotr Zubrov (Silan), Vasily Samoylov (Gradoboyev), Fyodor Burdin (Khlynov), Nikolai Zubov (Aristarkh), Ivan Gorbunov (Narkis), Nikolai Sazonov (Vasya the Quick One). Ostrovsky was greatly upset with this performance. "For someone who's never known what failure was, experiencing it for the first time is tragedy. This grievance hit me for the first time in 1869 in Saint Petersburg, where "An Ardent Heart" premiered... Now I think it would have been much better for this play never to appear on the Petersburg stage... They proved to be completely ignorant there about what the 'folk drama' genre was about, and the production... was so negligent and incompetent, it wouldn't have been recognized at all by those who'd seen the play [in Moscow]," he later wrote. According to The Society of Russian Dramatists, in 1874-1886 the play was missing from the two major cities theatres' respective repertoires but enjoyed more than 30 productions in the province. In 1887-1917 it was produced all in all 196 times. In 1893 the Alexandrinsky Theatre revived the play and this time had success with it. In 1948 actor Yury Yuriev wrote in his memoirs:  "An Ardent Heart" was successfully revived by several Soviet theatres. The 1926 Moscow Art Theatre's production was considered to be one of the best, with actors like Ivan Moskvin (Khlynov), Mikhail Tarkhanov (Gradoboyev), Vladimir Gribunin (Kuroslepov), Boris Dobronravov (Narkis), Nikolai Khmelyov (Silan) and Faina Shevchenko (Matryona) involved.