[In the following essay, Strongin contends that Chekhov intended The Seagull to be ironic and included many parodies of contemporary theater within it.]

The play's ending suggests melodrama: Nina, the innocent country girl seduced and abandoned by the worldly writer Trigorin, delivers an emotional speech about faith and endurance and bearing her cross before she runs out into the stormy autumn night. Treplev, the sensitive young man who loves her and has lost her as he has also failed in his attempt to become a great writer, tears up his manuscripts, throws them under his desk, and leaves the stage. Now, as Treplev's mother, the actress Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina, and her companions enter and resume their game of lotto, the sound of a gunshot is heard off-stage. Dr. Dorn leaves to see what has happened and “returns in half a minute” to report that a bottle of ether has exploded in his medicine bag. Arkadina breathes a sigh of relief as she remembers her son's suicide attempt of two years before. The lotto players resume their game and Dorn casually leads Trigorin, Treplev's successful rival in love and art, toward the front of the stage, drops his voice, and speaks the last lines of the play: “Somehow get Irina Nikolayevna away from here. The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself. …”¹ The curtain falls and the audience, as well as the many directors, actors, and critics of The Sea Gull, all assume that Treplev is dead. But what if Chekhov has himself left the actual success of Treplev's second suicide attempt ambiguous?

To assume that Treplev is successful in that attempt is, of course, to go along with the traditional view of the play and its place in the development of Chekhov's dramatic art, for according to that view, as it is expressed by a critic like J. L. Styan, The Sea Gull is Chekhov's

compromise with nineteenth-century theatre practice in many respects. Although we see neither event, the young female lead is seduced and the young male lead does commit suicide. The play is still built upon several intense and potentially melodramatic relationships. … Chekhov has not yet fully managed to arrange his characters to undercut melodrama. … Although Treplev shoots himself offstage rather than in full view like Ivanov, the effect of an over-strong theatrical statement remains as potent. …²

However, as Styan goes on to say, “When in 1900 Chekhov saw Hedda Gabler's theatrical suicide, he declared to Stanislavsky, ‘Look here, Ibsen is really not a dramatist’,” a remark which Styan interprets as Chekhov's declaration “against the artificial in drama.”³ Yet it may be possible that Chekhov had already made that declaration in 1896 with the writing of The Sea Gull, a play which itself deals with the nature of art, particularly in terms of the theater. Chekhov called The Sea Gull a “comedy in four acts,” and it may very well be that Nina's final speeches are implicitly undercut, while the success of Treplev's second attempt at suicide is left deliberately ambiguous. The evidence for such a reading rests not only on Chekhov's use of the word “comedy,” itself the subject of years of interpretation and debate, but, more importantly, on the structure of the play—a structure which is essentially circular, grounded as it is on the continual ironic parodying of the characters' self-conscious poses which undercut the authenticity of their words and actions.

To begin to establish the possibility of a more deeply ironic reading of The Sea Gull, it is helpful to recall Chekhov's well-known pronouncement on what he thought the task of the modern theater should be:

The demand is made that the hero and the heroine should be dramatically effective. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, or running after women or men, or talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage.⁴

Although implicit in this statement, made while Chekhov was working on The Wood Demon (1889-90), the play which immediately preceded The Sea Gull, is the rejection of all the excesses of nineteenth-century dramaturgy, it cannot be denied that in The Sea Gull the “hero” shoots himself twice (albeit off-stage), the “heroine,” as well as many of the other characters in the play, suffers the ecstacy and the agony of falling in love, and almost all the characters are given to delivering clever or grand speeches at every opportunity. What is important, however, is that these excesses of speech and behavior are self-conscious to the point at which each character sees himself or herself through a kind of third eye and so becomes the hero of a drama of his or her own making.⁵

For a character like Trigorin, for example, the dispassionate collector of the facts of other people's lives, his own involvement with Nina arises itself out of an idea for a story, for what is essentially a melodrama of his own making. For Sorin, on the other hand, the drama he has created for himself would be titled, as he says, “L'homme qui a voulu” (p. 165), a kind of tragicomedy of unfulfilled dreams and aspirations. For Nina, as for Treplev, Masha, and Polina, the self-created role is that of the tragic figure forced to suffer by a cruel fate which has made their lives a torment to them. And for Arkadina, who sees herself as the great actress surrounded by worshipping admirers, hers is a melodrama for which the script has been provided by her reading of de Maupassant's On the Water in Act II; for in the third act, worried about Trigorin's growing infatuation with Nina, Arkadina throws herself on her knees before him and, as de Maupassant's words have already described it for her, “besieges him with compliments, flattery, and favors” (p. 141), so that, like the “conquered” writer in the passage which Arkadina so pointedly does not read out loud, Trigorin agrees to stay with her, “to yield up his mind to her.”⁶ Only Dorn, the sympathetic, though detached observer, himself cast in the role of savior and torturer by the lovelorn Polina in her own drama, is not a “star” but a self-conscious chorus character who can do little more than comment on the dramas being acted out around him—“How upset everyone is! How upset! And everybody seems to be in love …” (p. 140)—while not really being able to participate in any of them, for as he tells Masha, “But what can I do, my child? What can I do?” (p. 140).

If there are any characters in The Sea Gull who are authentically themselves rather than their visions of themselves, they are Medvedenko, the school teacher who loves Masha to the point of his own self-abnegation, and Shamraev, Polina's boorish husband and the manager of Sorin's estate. Given the presence of Medvedenko and Shamraev, the first too beaten down by the daily grind of his life to star in it—though, interestingly enough, he does tell Trigorin that “someone ought to write a play about how teachers live. That ought to be put on the stage!” (p. 136)—and the second too concerned with running the estate to spend much time constructing a personal drama, the posturings of the other characters are thrown into ironic relief. Thus to take these characters' views of themselves as Chekhov's view of them may be to miss that very irony which makes The Sea Gull a parody of so much of nineteenth-century drama as well as a satiric comment on the sort of people who live life as though they are characters in books and whose words and actions are, therefore, essentially inauthentic. In calling his play a “comedy,” Chekhov may be pointing to the possibility that much of the suffering of his characters is not so much authentically felt as it is acted, or, when it is felt, is continually projected in self-consciously theatrical terms that make the sufferer both the performer of and the audience to his or her own suffering.

In this play, then, concerned so much with artists and the nature of art, the key to what Chekhov may be doing can be found in the sea gull itself, that theatrically rather clumsy—looking all too often like a dead duck or an overgrown pigeon—stage prop. It is the characters who, much like Gregers and Hedvig of Ibsen's Wild Duck—a play at which Chekhov may be aiming some satiric jabs⁷—make the bird into a symbol of youthful innocence and aspiration and hope gratuitously destroyed. Nina is the first of the characters to compare herself to the bird as she speaks of being “pulled” to the Sorin estate, “to this lake, as if I were a sea gull” (p. 130); but it is Treplev who shoots the literal bird and lays it at Nina's feet. Though Nina can only ask, “What does this mean?” (p. 146) since Trigorin has not yet presented Nina with the script of what will become her own drama, it is Treplev who takes the first turn at making the dead sea gull into a symbol, in this case a symbol of himself and what he sees as the tragedy that is his life:

TREPLEV:
I was rotten enough to kill this sea gull today. I lay it at your feet.
NINA:
What's wrong with you? Picks up the sea gull and looks at it.
TREPLEV:
after a pause. And soon I'm going to kill myself in the same way.
NINA:
What is wrong with you? This isn't like you at all!
TREPLEV:
That's true! I began to change when you did. You've changed towards me and you know it. … You're cold to me, and my very presence bothers you.
NINA:
You've been so irritable lately, and most of the time you talk in riddles and I don't understand a word you're saying And I suppose now that this sea gull, here, is some kind of symbol too. Well, forgive me, I don't understand that either. … Putting the sea gull down on the seat. I'm too simple-minded to understand you.

(p. 146)

It is interesting to suggest that there may be a kind of parodic echo in this conversation of the exchange between Ibsen's Gina and Hedvig in their response to Gregers' desire to be the “clever dog” that drags the wild duck up from the “ocean's depths”:

GINA:
… A funny idea, to want to be a dog!
HEDVIG:
Do you know, mother—I believe he meant something quite different by that.
GINA:
What else could he mean?
HEDVIG:
I don't know; but I thought he seemed to mean something quite different from what he said—all the time.
GINA:
Do you think so? It certainly was queer.(8)

Yet unlike the mysterious wild duck which is never seen on stage in Ibsen's play, Chekhov's sea gull is all too visually present, and unlike the enigmatic Gregers, Treplev provides the gloss for his symbolism. And if Gina, the simple-minded literalist, remains mystified by Gregers' emblematic language, while Hedvig goes on to read or invent a subtext which makes the wild duck the symbol of herself and so dictates her suicide, Nina's response to Treplev here is closer to that of Gina than it is to Hedvig, though, like Hedvig, Nina will go on to act out a script of someone else's invention as she comes to make the sea gull into the emblem of herself.

It is, of course, ironic that Nina fails to understand Treplev's meaning here, since he tells her outright that he will soon kill himself “in the same way” as he has killed the sea gull, though what is even more ironic is the fact that he fails in his first suicide attempt and so, in essence, is wrong. Yet Treplev's problem is that he is never given the attention he craves and, therefore, in his own mind at least, is never understood or valued or, even more important for him, applauded.

Treplev, whose play within the play has begun The Sea Gull and launched Nina's acting career, is, as that play so clearly demonstrates with its references to the “common soul of the world,” the “Prince of Darkness … father of Eternal Matter,” and the “Kingdom of the Cosmic Will” (p. 134), a writer of the kind of self-indulgent, heavy-handed symbolist school which Chekhov is lampooning here. As Nina says of Treplev's play, “There aren't any living characters in it” (p. 131), and, as Trigorin will say about Treplev's writing two years later, “none of his characters seem to have any life” (p. 170), a statement which points to Treplev's lack of development as a writer just as it also points to the circular structure of Chekhov's play. Yet the self-indulgent symbolist Treplev, in killing the sea gull, has self-consciously projected his life in terms of art as he takes on the role of suicidal genius literally shot down by the insensitivity of the people around him. Having lost her adolescent crush on Treplev in her equally adolescent infatuation with Trigorin, Nina cannot respond to Treplev's symbolism, though he has, in fact, cast her in one of the chief supporting roles in his life as drama.

Like everyone else in this play, Nina does not want to perform a secondary role in someone else's drama; she wants to star in a drama of her own. Having already identified herself with a sea gull, Nina is fully prepared to respond to the romantically tragic story of her life as it is about to be created for her by Trigorin. Ever ready with notebook and pen in hand to jot down the details of real life to be used in the service of ideas for new stories, Trigorin paves the way for Nina's own taking over of the sea gull as the symbol of herself:

TRIGORIN:
… Seeing the sea gull. What's that?
NINA:
A sea gull. Kostya killed it.
TRIGORIN:
What a beautiful bird! … Writes in his notebook.
NINA:
What are you writing?
TRIGORIN:
Just making a note … An idea for a story suddenly came into my head. A young girl, like you, has lived in a house on the shore of a lake since she was a little girl; she loves the lake like a sea gull, and she's free and happy as a sea gull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her, like this sea gull here. A pause. …

(pp. 150-51)

It does not matter that Nina, as we have heard about her and as she has described herself, is neither “happy” nor “free,” subject as she is to the tyrannical dictates of her father and stepmother from whom she must sneak away in order to come to the Sorin estate. What is important is that Nina is in love with her romantic vision of Trigorin as a “great and wonderful person” (p. 150) and that, as Chekhov's direction for a pause here suggests, she has, in a sort of metatheatrical moment, identified herself with the gratuitously murdered sea gull at the very instant in which the audience has made that same identification.

For Nina, as for himself, Trigorin has projected future experience in terms of future art as he outlines the script of the affair that he will play out with her during the two years' time that separates the last two acts of The Sea Gull. Trigorin has given Nina the plot of her drama and the symbol of herself as its heroine, a point that Chekhov will stress again in Act III when Trigorin tells Nina: “I'll think of you as you were on that sunny day … when you were wearing that white dress … there was a white sea gull lying on the seat”; and Nina replies, “pensively … Yes, a sea gull” (p. 153). Now it is only left to Nina to embellish that drama, which she very quickly does by handing Trigorin a medallion inscribed with the title of one of his books and the pertinent page and line numbers. Those lines are, of course, blatantly romantic, as befits the personal context in which Nina can now place them: “If you ever need my life, come and take it” (p. 157). But what is ironic is that those lines, like the plot of her drama itself, are not Nina's creation, just as her final use of the sea gull as personal emblem will not merely be taken from Trigorin's idea for a story, but will be cribbed, both clumsily and imprecisely as we shall see, from Pushkin's play The River Nymph (p. 166). Nina may indeed suffer as the star of a rather shabby melodrama of seduction and betrayal, but the ironic part of that suffering is that, like the suffering of Treplev, it is not completely authentic, projected as it is in terms of Trigorin's story and Pushkin's play. The point, then, is not so much that Nina suffers and endures, but that she at once acts out that suffering and is the audience held enraptured by her own acting.

This situation of characters who are self-consciously their own audience and who use others as an audience for themselves suggests yet another ironic facet of Chekhov's play: although Treplev, Trigorin, and Nina all see the dead sea gull as a symbol of purity and freedom, innocence, youth, and hope gratuitously destroyed, the fact is that live sea gulls, welcome harbingers of land that they may be for weary sailors, are themselves scavengers and birds of prey. Sea gulls live off the refuse along coast lines and dive into the water to pull out the fish they devour. What is more, this particular sea gull, whose freedom everyone in the play is romanticizing, did not live on the ocean, but was itself trapped on a lake, an inland body of water with no outlet to the sea. Thus the sentimentalized symbol which Treplev applies to himself, Trigorin applies to the heroine of his story, and Nina takes over as her own, though none of them realizes it, is, in fact, the authentic emblem that suggests the real, unvarnished activities of them all; for all of them, as well as most of the other characters in the play, are essentially trapped by the dynamics of their relationships with each other, feeding off each other, scavenging bits and pieces of each other's lives, either to turn them into art, as Trigorin does, or to fill out the plot of a private drama.

That scavenging continues from the beginning of the play to the end and points to the fact that nothing really changes for the characters, that they have, in essence, done no more than go around in a circle. Thus The Sea Gull opens with Masha's self-conscious response to Medvedenko's question about why she “always wear[s] black”: “I'm in mourning for my life,” she replies. “I'm unhappy.” But Masha continues to play her role of “mourner” as she keeps on projecting her identity in terms of her unrequited love for Treplev, attaching herself to him like a kind of lichen even after she has married Medvedenko in order to “tear this love out of my heart by the roots” (p. 151), itself a rather affected theatrical statement. Similarly, Polina keeps hounding Dorn, ironically living off his frustrating lack of attention to her in order to keep on playing her own role of tragic heroine. It is, therefore, no wonder that when, in Act IV, the sound of a “melancholy waltz” is heard being “played two rooms away,” it is Polina who knows how to interpret it: “Kostya's playing again,” she says. “He must be very sad” (p. 163). Self-conscious sufferer that she is herself, Polina knows very well what Treplev's piano playing is all about, for he, too, is performing for an audience. And indeed, one cannot help wondering if Treplev, so consciously acting the role of tortured romantic hero, would play his melancholy waltz were there no one in the other room to respond to the angst it objectifies for him.

Perfectly willing to play the role of such an audience is, of course, Dorn who, from the beginning of the play to the end, comments on the lives going on around him as he sings snatches of opera and sentimental songs in keeping with the mood of the poseurs and sentimentalists, the self-conscious “actors” whose “dramas” he is observing. As for the most polished of those “actors,” Arkadina, she continues to play the role of eternally young, eternally glamorous star, belittling her son to flatter Trigorin, the younger lover upon whom her image of youth and desirability depends, while Trigorin, whose love of fishing itself suggests a sea gull, continues for his part to scavenge the details of the lives of the people around him to be used as material for his stories. And, finally, Treplev, writing stories of his own and playing melancholy waltzes on the piano, ironically keeps feeding off the very insensitivity of the others around him in order to play out his role of suffering artist, just as Nina seems almost to revel in Trigorin's shabby treatment of her so that she may act the tragic heroine who comes to perform her grand exit scene before Treplev.

Yet in this play where characters move only in circles, it is all too possible that Nina performs that grand exit scene rather badly, for such a possibility is not only suggested by the structure of the play itself, but also by the comparison implicitly drawn between Nina and Treplev, the two aspiring artists in the play, and Arkadina and Trigorin, the two successful, though essentially second-rate, “artists.” Famous as she may be, particularly from the perspective of the people out in the backwater of the country estate, the irony is that Arkadina, as her son describes her, acts in plays that are nothing but “clichés and shopworn conventions,” “parad[ing] about in … costumes in front of footlights … try[ing] to squeeze a moral out of commonplace phrases and meaningless events—some cliché that everyone knows and is suitable for home consumption … a thousand variations of the same old thing over and over again …” (p. 129). And though Treplev has described his mother as “talented and intelligent” (p. 128), given the quality of her “performance” for Trigorin in the third act, a performance which gives us some sense of what her professional acting must be like, Arkadina is not so much talented as she is shameless and not so much intelligent as she is shrewd.

That performance, staged by Arkadina to keep Trigorin from dropping her for Nina, would be dismissed by anyone other than the egoist whom it flatters as a flagrant piece of overacting, for Arkadina “[f]alls on her knees” before Trigorin and speaks lines that could come straight out of what Treplev has called the “lousy third-rate plays” (p. 157) in which Arkadina stars:

My joy, my pride, my happiness! … Embraces his knees. If you leave me even for a single hour I won't survive it, I'll go out of my mind—my wonderful, marvelous, magnificent man, my master … I'm not ashamed of my love for you. Kisses his hands. My darling reckless boy, you may want to be mad, but I won't let you … Laughs. You're mine … mine … This forehead is mine, and these eyes, and this lovely silky hair. … All of you is mine. …

(p. 159)

And as for Trigorin himself, the audience to all this, he is in his way one of the more honest characters in The Sea Gull, for though Arkadina goes on to call him “the best of all modern writers, Russia's only hope” (p. 159), he has told Nina that he “can't stand” the things he writes, that, as he says, “until my dying day … everything [I write] will be charming and well done—and nothing more. And after I'm dead my friends will pass by my grave and say: ‘Here lies Trigorin. He was a good writer, but no Turgenev’” (p. 149).

Thus if Arkadina and Trigorin, viewed with awe though they may be by the people on the estate, are in reality no more than second-rate artists, the fact is that Nina and Treplev rank even lower. And if Treplev's ponderously symbolic play of the first act has found its perfect expression in Nina's clumsy acting, in Chekhov's own play—where situations and people are, in essence, very much the same at the end as they were at the beginning—there is no reason to assume that either Treplev or Nina has improved as an artist. Treplev, as noted above, is still writing pieces in which “none of” the “characters seem to have any life,” for, as Trigorin also says of him, “There's [still] something vague and mysterious about his style; it's like the ravings of a madman” (p. 170). And even Treplev himself, in a rare moment of insight, can finally say about his writing, “It's terrible” (p. 171). Yet Nina cannot go that far when talking about her acting; though, in her final scene with Treplev, she can admit that her “acting was very bad” when she began (p 174), Nina goes on from here to insist: “I've become a real actress. I enjoy acting! I revel in it! The stage intoxicates me …” (p. 174).

The stage, however, has always intoxicated Nina, for as she says at the beginning of the play, her “one and only dream” is to become an actress (p. 136). And while it is true that in this final scene she can tell Treplev, “I know now … that what matters most for us, whether we're writers or actors, isn't fame or glamor, or any of the things I used to dream of. What matters most is knowing how to endure, knowing how to bear your cross and still have faith” (p. 174), it is also possible—and it would be interesting to see a production of The Sea Gull in which the director and the actress have made this choice—that Nina is delivering these lines like the bad actress she still may be; for the authenticity of almost every word she says here is ironically undercut by the self-conscious theatricality with which those words are declaimed. Throughout her final speeches Nina not only quotes from Turgenev, to whom she gives credit (p. 172), but lifts her repeated line, “I am a sea gull … No, that's not it,” from Pushkin's play The River Nymph.

We have been prepared for Nina's use of Pushkin by the earlier conversation between Treplev and Dorn in which Treplev, recounting the events that Dorn has missed during his trip abroad, tells him about Nina's unfortunate affair with Trigorin. “She never complained,” Treplev says,

but I could tell [from the letters she wrote] that she was unhappy, every line showing that her nerves were on edge. And then her mind seemed to be a little unbalanced. She always signed herself ‘Sea Gull.’ You remember, in Pushkin's The River Nymph the miller calls himself a raven.

(pp. 166-67)

It is, however, the miller's daughter who, like Nina herself, has been seduced, become pregnant, and then abandoned by a man outside her sphere, in this case a prince who, rather like Trigorin on holiday at the country estate, happens just to be passing through. Yet though Treplev has said that Nina's mind “seemed a little unbalanced” and though Pushkin's miller goes mad with grief, the fact is that Nina's identification is obviously with the miller's daughter, while the lines she speaks, allowing for the necessary change from “raven” to “sea gull,” belong to the miller. Thus the pathos of Nina's last speeches is balanced by irony, for when Nina calls herself a sea gull and immediately follows this with “No, that's not it,” that line, coming itself from Pushkin's River Nymph, turns into a kind of joke as it takes on a double meaning in Chekhov's play and calls attention to Nina's bad acting: although the role she is so self-consciously playing is that of the miller's daughter in Pushkin's play, the lines Nina is speaking are, in fact, “not it,” for they belong to the miller.

Even more ironically, however, that pathos is also undercut by Chekhov's own final treatment of the literal sea gull itself. Now in the keeping of the character least likely to respond to its romantic symbolism—the boorish Shamraev—the bird has been stuffed and put away in a cupboard. When Shamraev “leads TRIGORIN to the cupboard … Takes [out] the stuffed sea gull,” and says, jovially, “This is what you ordered,” Trigorin can only look at the rigid, preserved bird and reply, “I don't remember. Musing. No, I don't at all!” (p. 175) And there is no time to determine whether Trigorin's response is truthful or the result of guilt, for at this point “[t]here is a sound of a shot off-stage” (p. 175).

The sound of that gunshot, coming when it does, is placed in a context in which ironies are in the process of being piled on top of ironies, for the sea gull, now stuffed and stuck away in a cupboard, has become a grotesque parody of itself, just as Nina's repetition of Pushkin's lines has not only become a kind of parody of Pushkin's play, but also a parody of the very authenticity of her own experience and emotions. And it is, therefore, also interesting to suggest here that given any literate Russian's knowledge of Pushkin, Chekhov may be pointing to what is, in effect, Trigorin's act of plagiarism, for scavenger and second-rate writer that he is, Trigorin may very well have lifted the idea for his own story of seduction and betrayal as well as his use of the sea gull as a symbol from Pushkin's play.

In light of all these ironies, the self-parody and lack of authenticity, it is no wonder that the sound of Treplev's gunshot comes at the moment at which we see the romantic symbol turned into a stuffed bird, the moment at which Trigorin's faulty memory (or outright guilt or dismissal) comes together with Nina's projection of herself as a character in a play. Because the sound of that gunshot recalls Treplev's suicide attempt of two years before, it is possible to suggest that the present situation, like the one two years ago, finds Treplev again upstaged by his mother's vanity and the presence of his successful rival Trigorin, whom Nina still loves “passionately … desperately” (p. 175). As also happened two years ago, Nina has again not managed to complete her performance of Treplev's symbolist play, using its lines this time in order to make her own theatrical exit (p. 175) and leaving Treplev reduced once more from lead player in his own drama to supporting actor and finally audience to a drama that stars someone else.

Thus it is finally Nina's second rejection of him, coupled with his mother's insensitivity and Trigorin's success as writer and lover, that inspires Treplev to play out what he intends to be his own final scene. He proceeds to spend “the next two minutes silently tearing up all his manuscripts and throwing them under the table” (p. 175), believing, no doubt, that they will be discovered as a symbol of his despair, though, ironically enough, they go unnoticed by the returning lotto players. Having been given the cue for his final performance by Nina's reference to Turgenev's Rudin (p. 172), Treplev, self-consciously projecting himself now as Rudin, can also see all his dreams and aspirations as having ended in failure, and the storm raging outside becomes for him, as it is in Turgenev's novel,⁹ the perfect setting for the death of the “hero.”

Yet the irony here may be that though Treplev has his stormy night on which to recognize his failure, both in the final loss of Nina and in his own realization that everything he “write[s] turns out lifeless and gloomy and bitter” (p. 173), the success of his second suicide attempt may be left ambiguous. When Dorn returns to report on the source of the explosion heard off-stage, it is all too fitting that he says that a bottle of ether has blown up in his medicine bag, for his statement places Treplev and his posturings in the context of a vessel filled with no more than a lot of volatile gas which blows up and leaves no trace.

Treplev playing Rudin, like Nina playing Pushkin's miller's daughter while speaking the wrong lines, has undercut the authenticity of his emotions and his actions, for they seem to have come not so much out of a genuine sense of despair as out of despair seen through a third eye and so, in essence, removed from him. What is more, in the English versions of The Sea Gull,¹⁰ Dorn's line to Trigorin, traditionally viewed by directors and critics as Chekhovian understatement¹¹ and translated as “Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself” implicitly casts doubt on the success of that suicide attempt in the choice of the word “shot,” as opposed to “killed”; for in English at least, to shoot oneself is not necessarily to succeed in killing oneself, particularly in light of the fact that Treplev has shot himself once before and did not die as a result.

In Russian, of course, that ambiguity is reduced, since the line reads “Konstantin Gavrilovich zastrelilsja”—the perfective form of the verb “zastrelit'sja,” to shoot oneself, implying a completed action and, therefore, the probability of death. Yet it is interesting that Chekhov's choice of words here is still not as unambiguous as it could have been, even when one accounts for the effect of understatement, since Chekhov could have written, “Konstantin Gavrilovich zastrelilsja na smert'”—“Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself to death”—and thereby removed all doubt.¹²

Given the fact that in The Sea Gull the more things appear to have changed, the more they have, in essence, remained the same, it is quite possible that Chekhov has deliberately cast a certain degree of doubt on the success of Treplev's second attempt at suicide, for if this play is seen as Chekhov's break with the conventional, melodramatic dramaturgy of his day, he may indeed be parodying that dramaturgy through his creation of characters who not only consider themselves to be artists, but who self-consciously go about their lives as though they are characters in novels and plays. Thus in The Sea Gull Chekhov may not simply be taking a step beyond the on-stage suicide of his own melodramatic Ivanov, for again to recall Ibsen's Wild Duck, Hedvig, like Treplev, also shoots herself off-stage and of that play Chekhov said, “Ibsen does not know life. It is not so in life.”¹³ Instead, if Chekhov is indeed parodying the artificial convention of suicide itself, Treplev, not suffering authentically—that is, not suffering as himself, but projecting that suffering in terms of the fictional Rudin—can perhaps literally not die authentically: having remained a failure as a writer, the final irony may be that Treplev also remains a failure as a marksman. Because he has not succeeded in killing himself once before in the play, it is all too possible that Treplev has missed a second time, and in such failure lies the true Chekhovian balance of pathos and farce.

As Chekhov himself said of The Sea Gull, “I began it forte and ended it pianissimo—contrary to all the rules of dramatic art.”¹⁴ And contrary to all the rules of dramatic art of his time, Chekhov may also have left the fate of his “hero” in doubt, particularly when it is remembered that in the plays that follow The Sea Gull intentions do not result in their desired ends, since Vanya misses shooting the hated Professor at pointblank range, while Solyony, in The Three Sisters, succeeds in killing Tusenbach only because he had intended to do no more than wound him. Like these later plays, The Sea Gull, too, is continually exposing the ironic gap between aspiration and fulfillment of aspiration, the pose and the person, the wish to be the star of one's own drama and the reality of finding oneself to be, as T. S. Eliot's Prufrock will put it, no more than “one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two. … At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool.” And finally, parodying as it does the artificial and melodramatic conventions of so much of the theater of its day, Chekhov's Sea Gull becomes, as Styan has said of all of Chekhov's mature drama, the kind of play in which the “fundamental concern is to give us the feel of life by showing us the balance of life,” as “[e]very character and every attitude … [is] seen from two sides or more; every posture of body or mind is its own critic.”¹⁵

Notes

1. Anton Chekhov, The Sea Gull, trans. Robert W. Corrigan, in Six Plays of Chekhov (San Francisco: Rinehart Press, 1962), p. 176. All further citations refer to this edition.

2. J. L. Styan, Chekhov in Performance: A Commentary on the Major Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), p. 13.

3. Styan, p. 14.

4. Corrigan, p. xxvii.

5. See Styan, p. 16.

6. Paul Schmidt, “Textual Notes,” in The Sea Gull, trans. Jean-Claude Van Italie (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 94.

7. See Dorothy U. Seyler, “The Sea Gull and The Wild Duck: Birds of a Feather,” Modern Drama, 8 (September 1965), 167-73.

8. Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, trans. R. Farquharson Sharp, in Four Great Plays by Ibsen (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), p. 251.

9. Schmidt, pp. 101-02.

10. See Corrigan; Constance Garnett (London: Modern Library, 1923); Stark Young (New York: Random House, 1950); Jean-Claude Van Italie (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Ronald Hingley (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977); Eugene K. Bristow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).

11. See Styan, p. 88.

12. I am indebted to Olga Markof-Belaeff, Oberlin College, for her help with the Russian.

13. Nicholas Moravčevich, “Chekhov and Naturalism: From Affinity to Divergence,” Comparative Drama, 4 (1970-71), 226.

14. Daniel Gillès, Chekhov: Observer Without Illusion, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1967), p. 216.

15. J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 74.