The Seagull, Anton Chekhov | John Reid (essay date winter 1998)
John Reid (essay date winter 1998)
SOURCE: Reid, John. “Matter and Spirit in The Seagull.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 607-22.
[In the following essay, Reid discusses the nature of the symbolism Chekhov used in The Seagull and the influence of the mystic Vladimir Solovyov on the author.]
Our time must be defined by two opposing features—it is a time of extreme materialism and, at the same time, of the most passionate idealistic outbursts of spirit. We are present at a great, significant struggle of two views of life, two diametrically opposed world views.
—Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1892)1
[T]he materialistic movement is not a school or tendency in the narrow journalistic sense; it is not something passing or accidental; it is necessary, inevitable and beyond the power of man. … Outside matter there is neither knowledge nor experience,...
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