SOURCE: Rayfield, Donald. “The Seagull.” In his Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov's Prose and Drama, pp. 135-49. Madison: University Press of Wisconsin, 1999.

[In the following essay, Rayfield puts Chekhov into historical context to explain the importance of his plays, particularly The Seagull, to the evolution of the theater.]

To understand what made Chekhov's plays of such importance to European theatre, we must look at developments—apart from accidents of history—in a European context. Chekhov's reading was unexpectedly varied. In the 1890s he became familiar not only with Hauptmann and Ibsen, but also with Strindberg (Miss Julie in a manuscript translation by Shavrova) and with Maeterlinck (during his 1897-8 stay in Nice). New drama took over Europe's theatres as melodrama and opera yielded. Beginning with Hauptmann's Lonely People Chekhov was drawn into a stream of innovation. The pull must have been strong to overcome the trauma he had experienced at the failure of The Wood Demon. Even so, in a letter to Suvorin of 1892, he showed a preoccupation with the problem of a new ending—‘Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. The damned endings won't come! The hero either gets married or shoots himself’—and his personal life, in the early 1890s, continued to revolve around actresses and theatre directors.

The Seagull is not quite the first step in a new type of play. At the same time as The Wood Demon Chekhov wrote, for Suvorin's eyes only, an extraordinary sketch, Tatiana Repina, meant as a sequel to Suvorin's play (like Chekhov's Seagull perversely subtitled ‘comedy’) of the same name. Suvorin's play (which had already provoked Chekhov's Ivanov as a response to its anti-semitic clichés) was based on real events: an actress, Kadmina, betrayed in love, took poison and died for real, to stunned applause, on stage in Kharkov. Chekhov's sequel shows her faithless lover marrying in church, and the play consists of the marriage service interrupted by the gossip of the best men and the spectators: the main event is the appearance of a woman in black, apparently the ghost of the dead woman, to interrupt the ceremony. Chekhov's Tatiana Repina would be a mere curiosity were it not for his innovating a device of simultaneous dialogue on stage—here the liturgy and the gossip—which is to be the basis for his own mature drama and, later, of Russian Symbolist drama.

Chaika (The Seagull, written in 1895), Tri sestry (Three Sisters, written in 1900) and Vishniovyi sad (The Cherry Orchard, written in 1903) may be linked by their ‘polyphonic’ construction around several characters, usually heroines. But they all share certain fundamental features: all the plays are set far from Moscow and Petersburg and, except for Three Sisters which is set in a stylised Perm (a remote town in the northern foothills of the Urals), they are all set on country estates somewhere south of Moscow. In all the plays, imminent bankruptcy threatens the world in which the characters live; in all of them trees are cut down to clear the way for the new tenants. All have a firearm involved—offstage in Three Sisters, not fired in The Cherry Orchard. All, even The Seagull, have a musical accompaniment. On all the weather encroaches. In all the plays characters eat and drink on stage.

The Seagull, though a ‘comedy’ like The Cherry Orchard, is notably different in more than paucity of music. It is Chekhov's most heterogeneous work and, in some ways, his most literary. Written after a vow not to work for the theatre again, it is an act of vengeance. It not only breaks the theatre's traditional canons; it also attacks the profession through its heroine and her son, and it argues out the two possible approaches, conservative and experimental, to literature (including drama) through its two male antagonists, Trigorin and Treplev. Some of the intensity of The Seagull is undoubtedly due to its extraordinary wealth of autobiographical detail. Chekhov was to say, ‘I have a disease—autobiographobia’ (a letter to Doctor Rossolimo in October 1899), but on this occasion he was free of it. The real urge behind writing and staging the play must have been the need to set off a bomb that would explode the tangle of his private relationships and resolve the ambiguous attitudes of the literary establishment. Even more than ‘The Grasshopper’ or ‘Ariadna’, The Seagull incorporates, recognisably for those who were involved and their intimates, an extraordinary number of persons and situations in Chekhov's own private life. Despite the warning Chekhov had received from Lika Mizinova after the publication of ‘The Grasshopper’, that he did not appreciate how much hurt he caused by transposing past relationships into the public domain, Chekhov went further than ever. His intense love life of the winter of 1893-4, the sufferings of Lika Mizinova, pregnant in exile, the relationship with Potapenko, his fellow writer (and lover of Mizinova), the attentions of other women, notably Lidia Avilova, even the past of the Suvorin household were exhibited for all to see. Not only in the writing, but in the production, The Seagull was an instrument for putting others at a distance. Ironically, it was to Potapenko, of whose character so much was taken to compose Trigorin, that Chekhov entrusted all the work of getting the play through the Imperial Theatres' Censorship Committee and the Aleksandrinsky Theatre. The tickets for the first night were distributed in such a way that Suvorin could be present to watch the suicide of his own son ten years earlier re-enacted, that Lika Mizinova could see her life story—leaving a Chekhov-Treplev for a Potapenko-Trigorin, and abandoned pregnant—given to the public (as she already felt it had been in ‘Ariadna’). Lidia Avilova had to watch her own silver medallion used in an second attempt to seduce a writer. Chekhov relented only by arranging for Potapenko and his second wife to attend on the second night. The unhappiness on stage was to be equalled in the auditorium on 17 October 1896. The flamboyant and ruthless actress Lidia Iavorskaia, with whom Chekhov had ended a two-year love affair, was also in Petersburg; though she did not attend the first night, she had already attended a reading of the play in Moscow and listened to the traits of her own self-centred character that the author had borrowed for Arkadina—beginning her career by marrying beneath her in Kiev, starring in La Dame aux camélias, getting down on her knees to hold onto her lover, as she had in a game, with Chekhov. The manic-depressive and tubercular artist Levitan also contributed details to The Seagull. In summer 1895 he grazed his temple with a revolver bullet, trying to kill himself after a row with his middle-aged mistress over his seduction of her daughter, and Treplev's pointless shooting of a seagull reflects Levitan's often pointless killing of wildlife. The play is littered with more minor details from private life: the Zarechnaia's dog is given the same name as Suvorin's (Trésor); Trigorin's house is owned by a Grokholsky, a house builder in Taganrog and once a creditor of the Chekhovs. The Seagull is ‘concrete theatre’. What was to be particularly horrible about the play is that it shaped, as well as imitated life. Nina's baby in the play dies; Lika Mizinova's daughter was still alive in October 1896, but died three weeks later. Moreover, Chekhov jokingly offered her an inscribed medallion which, when she decoded the inscription, cruelly reminded her of her baby's father. All the hostility and cruelty repressed by a kind and considerate man was released in one drama. It is as if to avoid the fate of Trigorin and Treplev, ruined by their attachments to women, Chekhov had to cut the links by staging the play.

As late as summer 1895 Chekhov avowed that if The Seagull really was seen to satirise his intimates, as well as the theatre that would perform it, it was unstageable. Yet he did everything to propel the play into production. Censorship objections to the morality of a son conniving at his mother's cohabitation with a writer proved unexpectedly easy to overcome: the censor Litvinov was a crony of Suvorin's. The theatrical committee was dismissive of ‘unnecessary Ibsenism’ and ‘scenes thrown onto paper haphazardly … without dramatic consequentiality’, but demanded no serious changes.

A number of associates read the play with dismay. Suvorin's confidante, the novelist Sazonova, declared it ‘thoroughly depressing … a stone on your soul … unrelieved gloom’. Korsh, who had commissioned Ivanov, remarked ‘that's bad theatre: you have a man shoot himself off-stage and don't even let him speak before he dies’.

A further impulse to put on The Seagull may have been Chekhov's desire to pay tribute to Maupassant, who had died in 1893. The opening exchange between Masha and Medvedenko, ‘Why do you wear black?’—‘I'm in mourning for my life’, comes directly from an episode in Maupassant's Bel-Ami, where Mme Walter, abandoned by the roguish hero, is asked by her rival Madeleine why she now wears black and replies that she has ‘reached the age where one is in mourning for one's life’. The symbolic role of women in black (Masha Shamraeva) and women in white (Nina Zarechnaia) is born from Maupassant. Maupassant's death from incurable hereditary syphilis, at an age when Chekhov expected to die of the tuberculosis that ravaged his family, had brought Chekhov to an even closer appreciation of his French predecessor. Unlike the fulsome praise of Maupassant we find in ‘A Woman's Kingdom’, the tribute in The Seagull is wholly sincere. The section in Maupassant's travel reflections Sur l'eau, which discusses the dangers of writers to society ‘as rats to corn merchants’ and of women to writers (as priests who bar access to the temple of the writer and thus cut him off from the world and inspiration), is in fact the core idea of The Seagull.

The roots of The Seagull are buried deep. Much of the phraseology, especially Trigorin's derogatory comparisons of himself with Turgenev and Tolstoy, would date the idea to 1893, but conscious preparation for the play came later. In February 1894 Chekhov was interested in Ludwig Börne's Letters from Paris and intended to create a play around a character called Ginselt, loved by women and ill at ease with men—a forerunner of Trigorin. The Seagull (Chaika) was the title of a literary magazine that Suvorin and Chekhov considered in 1893. (Chekhov also greeted his women friends, Shchepkina-Kupernik and Iavorskaia, upon their return to Russia with the phrase ‘to two white seagulls’, which may link these two ‘temptations of St Anthony’ with the yearning sensuality of the play.)

The play took on its final form in autumn 1895. Its immediate impulse may have been in April, when Chekhov sorted out his correspondence and was struck by the liveliness and interest of his letters to and from Suvorin in 1889, when both were busy with plays. But The Seagull was written immediately after Chekhov's first contact with the new drama. He had read Hauptmann's Lonely People and Ibsen's Little Eyolf, and the morality of The Seagull shows the same crumbling of family ties and convention as real antipathies and bonds are revealed.

The autobiographical strands in The Seagull, which make it so eccentric, should first be disentangled. The belle-lettriste Trigorin, the lover of the heroine, is not, of course, Chekhov, yet he shares many essentials of Chekhov as a writer, and caricatures a number of personal traits. First of all, he is obsessed with his rank as a major writer, though one worse than Turgenev or Tolstoy. Others—for instance, his rival Treplev, Arkadina's son—find his writings talented, but inferior to those of Tolstoy or Zola. Trigorin's epitaph for himself, ‘He was a good writer, but he wrote worse than Turgenev’, reflects Chekhov's self-assessment in his letters to Suvorin of 1892-3. There are even closer parallels, particularly in the compulsive urge to continue writing. In his first long talk with Nina, the young girl friend of Treplev who is now falling in love with Trigorin, he tells her: ‘Day and night I'm in the grip of a thought that I can't get rid of: I must write, I must write, I must …’. In March 1894 Chekhov complained to Lika Mizinova (whose relationship to him overshadows the play): ‘I'm miserable … because not for a minute am I free of the thought that I must, am obliged to write, write, write’.

Other parallels with Chekhov's own writing are well known. Treplev in an envious monologue complains that Trigorin has a set of tricks which make his writing easy: ‘He has the neck of a broken bottle shining on a weir and the dark shadow of a mill-wheel—and there you have a moonlit night’ (a passage from Chekhov's ‘Wolf’ of 1886). In January 1896, Lidia Avilova gave Chekhov a medal inscribed with a page number and a line number from his last book: Chekhov consulted the book and found the lines in his ‘Neighbours’ of 1891, ‘If you should need my life, come and take it’. He gave the same line to Trigorin's book, Days and Nights, to which Nina refers on a medallion, giving page and line numbers. Chekhov lent Avilova's medal to the actress Komissarzhevskaia for use in the Petersburg production.

There are many other links between author and protagonist. Nina and Arkadina are both amazed that Trigorin should derive more pleasure from fishing than writing. ‘His portraits are sold, he's translated into foreign languages, and he spends all day fishing and is glad he's caught two bullheads.’ This reproduces the reactions of the Kiseliovs and Lintvariovs to Chekhov's summer days and nights with a fishing-rod. Trigorin is shy and taciturn, except tête-à-tête, and disarmingly polite—like Chekhov.

Yet the reasons for making Trigorin so autobiographical are not confessional. Trigorin seduces Nina and abandons her when she is pregnant: this outlines Potapenko's behaviour with Lika Mizinova, not Chekhov's. (Chekhov was worried enough by the resemblance to be afraid that Potapenko and Mizinova would appear in adjacent boxes on the first night.) Trigorin, however, is the epitome of belles-lettres reaching the end of their development, the end of the literature which analyses reality, the emotions and the senses, and which long ago reached its apogee with Tolstoy and Turgenev. His sexual and literary rival is Treplev, the young ‘decadent’. It is a mistake to laugh at Treplev's playlet, which is presented to the other characters in Act 1 and which Nina, who performs it, recalls almost in its entirety in Act 4. Treplev's mother, Arkadina, is contemptuous; Nina is disappointed by its coldness; Trigorin understands nothing. Nevertheless, when the Petersburg production of The Seagull adopted Arkadina's tone, the play was doomed to failure. Chekhov wanted the smell of sulphur and the imagery of cold and satanic spirits to linger over the rest of Act 1. Treplev's play may be a failure, even untalented, but it is meant as a serious attempt to find new forms of art, and new realms to operate in. Its neo-Platonic idea of all creation reverting to the spiritual state of the Soul of the World—every living thing from the fish to Alexander the Great—and then fighting the spirit of evil was to turn into a predominant theme in Russian Symbolism, which Chekhov is anticipating, not parodying. Ideas of Treplev's kind are not to be found until, ten years later, Blok's ominous ‘marsh’ poems of his ‘second book’ recreate Treplev's atmosphere. Treplev's play has its stylistic origins, its myth-making tone, in Mæterlinck, but Chekhov is not sneering at him. The play is a pastiche of a style which Chekhov neither liked nor disliked: he was to assure Bunin that his own art would not survive him for more than a few years; he felt that new forms must be found. If these new forms seem more impoverished and inflexible than the old, that is posterity's business.

Act 1, with its elegant allusive opening tribute to Maupassant, then moves, with a lightness unprecedented in the theatre, to the main themes. The setting itself has the mythical quality of Chekhov's late drama: a lake, from whose far shore we hear music; a sombre elm tree, dominating the stage; above all the stage-within-a-stage, announcing a bewildering composition en abîme, as well as reminding us of Hamlet. Despite the poetic and allusive touches, there should be no doubt that this is a comedy: a female character who takes snuff; the usual Chekhovian uncle, unable to manage his estate; Treplev as a parody of Oedipus, counting flower petals to see if his mother, rather than Nina Zarechnaia, loves him. When the play within a play opens, however, we are at a loss whether to laugh or to let ourselves be moved by it. To a small extent, Treplev's playlet about the end of life in the universe, as it merges with the World Soul for battle with the devil, catches some of the lyricism of Chekhov's mystical feeling for nature. The passing of life into a lonely battle of good and evil, the development of the piece from a catalogue of creatures to a cosmic vision of the universe passing away reminds us of passages in ‘Pan-pipes’ of 1887 or the thoughts of Ragin in ‘Ward No. 6’. It is to be developed into the satanic noises and lights of such stories as ‘An Incident in Practice’. For Chekhov's contemporaries, who could have read Flammarion's Plurality of Worlds and even H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, the play within a play is less absurd than it may seem. Most striking of all, apart from the rising moon effect, is Chekhov's first use of smell: the satanic sulphur that finally rouses Arkadina to protest. Between the indifference of the women to the play and Treplev's own commitment to new forms, to writing about life as it is dreamt, not as it is or should be, some objective opinion, perhaps authorial, can be found in the assessment of Dr Dorn, who believes that Konstantin has a future. The most detached figure in the play, Doctor Dorn, appreciates the playlet best, when he sees that its fault is not its anti-materialism but its lack of direction. Dorn is the most Chekhovian of all doctors in his ability to understand, and even sympathise with, what is going on and yet refuse to intervene. As night falls, the focus switches from the play to the writer's pursuit of the actress, to Treplev's obsession not with his work, but with the girl who has so reluctantly interpreted it. The original idea of the play, that opened with Medvedenko pursuing Masha, is resumed in Treplev pursuing Nina: a senseless, endless chain of unrequited love.

If Act 1 is dominated by a funereally dark elm, Act 2 has the light and fragrance of the lime tree in another part of the garden. Dr Dorn provides the musical atmosphere, by singing a line, ‘Tell her, my flowers’, from Meyerbeer's Faust, from an aria just before Faust, with Mephistopheles' deadly help, seduces Marguerite. This hints at the seduction to come of Nina by Trigorin. From Meyerbeer we move again to Maupassant, and the significant point is the moment at which Arkadina slams the book shut, where Maupassant deplores the destructive influence of women like her on writers like Trigorin. The act then moves from allusion to the farce of incompetence: Dr Dorn refuses to treat Sorin's old age with anything but valerian drops; Shamraev refuses to let his masters have any horses to ride out with; the masters, Sorin and Arkadina, refuse to make a stand against their anti-servant. Farce succeeds in clearing the stage, for Nina's encounters with her two pursuers. Treplev enters with a dead seagull he has shot; Chekhov makes it quite clear how perfunctory he thinks his symbol to be, by giving Nina a line that, in Formalist terminology, ‘lays bare the device’: ‘This seagull seems to be a symbol, too, but I'm sorry, I don't understand’. After Treplev's complaint of his rejection and failure, Trigorin takes over as writer in residence. His complaints of the miseries of creation, however, have quite another effect on Nina. It must be said that the speeches that follow are unique in Chekhov's work. He may have presented himself as an artist in the guise of a priest, but never had he, or would he, put himself directly as a writer into his own work. The phrases about shapes of clouds, about sickly scents, about compulsion to write, about humiliations of obscurity and fears of hostility—all correspond to what we know of Chekhov personally and his work. However, Trigorin is no more Chekhov (and no less) than Treplev. Both are given a more rhetorical, apostrophic tone than their creator's. They have remarkable similarities, not just in alliterating surnames, but in imagery. If Trigorin complains of ‘a heavy cast-iron cannon ball turning in my head’, he is matched by Treplev complaining of ‘a nail in my brain’. Trigorin and Treplev are brothers in mediocrity. Just as Treplev shot the seagull as a symbol of his destruction of his play, so Trigorin takes up the dead seagull as a metaphor for a future story of the destruction of a young girl. The symbol of the seagull belongs not to the author but to the impoverished imagination of his characters.

Act 3 comes a week later and is set indoors, with the suitcases that usually indicate a final act in Chekhov's work. Like Act 1, it opens with Masha shocking convention, this time drinking vodka and brandy. Treplev's attempted suicide is the offstage act propelling the action forward, dispersing the characters. Despite, however, the tragic implications of this Oedipal conflict, the rest of the act quickly turns to farce. The sight of Trigorin unable to conceal his eagerness to decipher the message—‘If you ever need my life, come and take it’, from Chekhov's own story ‘Neighbours’—on the medallion Nina gives him is made to last the whole of the act. The rest consists of a classical vaudeville technique, the same scene repeated three times, each time with a minor change. Arkadina enters into conflict with all three men in her life and each time comes out victorious. Sorin asks her to let her son have some money at least for clothes, if not for travel, and she reveals the full extent of her meanness by her terror when she refuses. Then, in a delicious parody of Hamlet and his mother, she changes Treplev's dressing, defeating him in each of his attempts to gain the ascendancy. She refuses to give Sorin any money to escape to town; she responds with devastating abuse to his critique of Trigorin's and her conservatism. Treplev, like his uncle gives in. Finally, once Trigorin is sure of his influence over Nina, Arkadina has her last battle, using every histrionic trick to get him to agree to come away and not stay, flattery so gross—‘Russian's salvation’—that Trigorin's acceptance of it lowers him permanently in our eyes as a comic, cowardly victim. Trigorin's defeat is so thorough, when Arkadina can make the aside ‘He's mine now’, that she can finally give him permission to stay behind for a week, certain in the knowledge that he will not. After this defeat, his last minute assignation with Nina loses all the Mephistophelean potential of the beginning of the act.

Act 4 is unlike any other in Chekhov's work, being an aftermath, two years later, although, as usual, it is an ill-lit and autumnal Act 4. This time the trees are unseen, but heard in the roaring wind. Sorin's deterioration, which maps the course of the play, is the pretext for Arkadina and Trigorin to revisit the estate. The symmetry is stressed by the act, once again, opening with Masha behaving badly. If she takes snuff in Act 1, is too idle to walk in Act 2 and drinks vodka in Act 3, here she shocks with her refusal to go home and feed her baby. The symmetry of the play is also underlined by the use of a game to unify the act. Act 1 had Treplev's play, Act 2 the reading of Maupassant, Act 3 Trigorin's deciphering of Nina's message of love, and Act 4 has a game of loto, a genteel version of bingo, to symbolise the lots the characters will draw, a game which Trigorin will win and Treplev lose. At first Treplev seems to be saved: Polina congratulates him on becoming ‘a real writer’; Trigorin, when he arrives, brings a copy of his publication (but unopened) and news of interest in his identity. Dr Dorn, however, takes charge of the Act: his line of song ‘The moon floats through the heavens’ comes from The Tiger Cub, a song that was popular throughout Europe with its theme of desperate and destructive love. Dorn announces that he has spent his savings on a trip through Europe, and has understood the ‘world soul’ in Treplev's play to be incarnate in the harmonious crowds of Genoa (an observation Chekhov made in a letter of 1894). From the recurrence of the theme of the world soul, we have the idea of death (already broached by Sorin's terminal deterioration) and a pretext for an interrogation of Treplev about the fate of Nina. While the game of loto goes on and Treplev looks disparagingly at his own work, other elements from previous acts return. Shamraev has had the seagull stuffed on Trigorin's orders—removing the last doubt in the audience about Chekhov's respect for his own symbol—and Trigorin cannot remember why. The final return is that of Nina, drenched and half-crazed, as much like Ophelia as Treplev is like Hamlet. She repeats almost verbatim the words of Treplev's play, thus setting the pattern for mature Chekhov drama, in which Act 4 is a recapitulation in mirror form of Act 1. Despite the imagery of water and madness, it would be a mistake to see in Nina a woman destroyed by male rejection. Chekhovian females are tougher than Ophelia: they are all potential Gertrudes. Nina, announcing her determination to continue the miserable life of a provincial actress, shows that she is in fact to be a second Arkadina, battling her way up from obscurity to fame. Her confession that she loves Trigorin more than ever, despite his abandonment of her and the death of their child, is the final trigger for Treplev. Ironically, he hopes that Nina will find her way home without Arkadina finding out, ‘That might upset mama’, but does not consider whether his killing himself might upset her even more.

The silent scene that follows—in which Treplev tears up his complete works—is Chekhov's most effective destructive scene (one to which few directors allot the full two minutes). The off-stage shot, which Dorn attributes to an exploding ether bottle before instructing Trigorin to take Arkadina away from the scene, is perhaps Chekhov's most difficult finale. It caused laughter on the first night and in many modern productions (e.g. Zakharov's) is changed, so that Arkadina can be shown with the full horror of the comedy sinking in before, rather than after, the last curtain.

The failure of The Seagull, with the wrong audience, the wrong cast, and in the wrong city for such modern drama, is one of the most scandalous moments in Russian drama. It sent Chekhov to bed with a blanket over his head, a determination never to touch the theatre again and to take the first train, however slow, back to Moscow and Melikhovo. A cartoon in Leikin's Fragments shows Chekhov flying a seagull over a marsh, being shot at by all the critics in hunting gear.

In fact, the next four performances, to more intellectual audiences, and after alterations had been agreed in Chekhov's absence between Suvorin and the inexperienced director (Evtikhii Karpov, the lover of Vera Komissarzhevskaia, who, as Nina, was the one effective interpreter), were applauded by full houses. Failure was so emphatic that it brought about eventual success. The novelist Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko was horrified by the play and wrote to his younger brother: ‘This isn't a play … I think Chekhov is dead for the stage. The first performance was so horrible that when Suvorin told me about it, tears welled in my eyes’. The younger brother, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, had, with Stanislavsky, just formed the Moscow Arts Theatre. He was so stirred by this reaction (and by his memories of a hostile reaction to a reading in Moscow he had himself attended) that in May 1898, when Chekhov had returned to Russia from convalescence in Nice, begged importunately for the right to perform the play in Moscow, pleading: ‘The Seagull enthrals me. … I will stake anything you like that these hidden dramas and tragedies in every character of the play, given a skilful, extremely conscientious production without banalities, can enthral the auditorium too’. Nemirovich-Danchenko's importunacy—and the sight of him and Stanislavsky at work in Moscow, as well as the pretty actresses (Knipper and Andreeva) whom they proposed to cast—won Chekhov round. From October 1898 The Seagull became the logo and flagship of the Moscow Arts Theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko the chief interpreter of Chekhov's dramatic text, and Stanislavsky the man charged with realising his stage instructions. Their interdependence was irreversible. In October 1898, the success of the new production was complete: the fact that Stanislavsky was reported to be ‘acting Trigorin like an impotent recovering from typhoid’ did not detract from the triumph.

On a personal level, The Seagull seemed to have achieved its aim. Anton's affairs with Lika Mizinova and Iavorskaia cooled into friendship. Avilova saw her medallion treated with the same disrespect as the stuffed seagull—Chekhov refused to take it back from Komissarzhevskaia. The unexpected consequence in Chekhov's life was a series of women determined to be his ‘seagull’. The irony is perhaps, that, like Trigorin, Chekhov eventually married Knipper, who played Arkadina.

Unique in its discussion of literature, The Seagull remains a little apart from the Chekhovian canon and for all its daring innovation, does not have the balance or perfection of the last three plays. Its eccentricities are many, notably its allusions to many other writers, as well as its private references which make it an insider's play.

Critics at the time treated it as a response to modernism. The first playwright Chekhov has in mind, obviously, is Ibsen. The Imperial Theatres Committee, which reluctantly passed the play for the Aleksandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg, assumed the title to be an alignment with Ibsen's Wild Duck. In the gratuitous way in which a dead seagull is picked up and Nina associated with it we can see not just a parody of Ibsen, but a parody of Trigorin's way of poeticising the ugliness of reality. By casting Nina as a ‘seagull’, a victim, he soothes any guilt he may feel at having hurt a human being. The Petersburg committee, however, saw only ‘preconceived and unnecessary Ibsenism’.

Hamlet is the play that figures most in The Seagull, even though Treplev's and Hamlet's deaths are not similar. Konstantin Treplev's resentment of his mother's lover and of her whole attitude to life, mingled with his touching dependence when Arkadina bandages his head for him, recall Hamlet. The device of provoking his mother to rage and guilt by a play, and the lines from Hamlet that he and Arkadina exchange before the play begins, all show how crucial was the influence of Shakespearean material. Most of Chekhov's prose up to 1895 quotes and ponders Hamlet. Time and time again, he uses Hamlet's line of bewilderment, when faced with the mystery of an actor merging with his role, ‘What's Hecuba to him and he to Hecuba?’. It is not just the Hamlet role of the Russian intellectual, torn between the State he hates and the people he stands above; it is Hamlet, bemused by art, tormented by sexuality, the lover of the sea, who is so close to Chekhov. Hamlet is not quite purged in The Seagull; Lopakhin parodies it in The Cherry Orchard, but it disappears from Chekhov's late prose. On a more general level, the complexity of The Seagull's situations, with its network of unrequited love, like the extravagant plotting of Three Sisters (which has overtones of Macbeth), points to a Shakespearean influence. The influence is all the more remarkable when we consider how different are Shakespeare's and Chekhov's doctrines of nature.

The third and most important of the avowed influences, as we have seen in the play, is that of Maupassant. In Act 1 Treplev relates his horror at his mother's vulgar ideas of art to Maupassant's mad flight away from the Eiffel Tower that ‘threatened to crush him with its vulgarity’. But Maupassant gets more than an affectionate tribute in The Seagull. In Act 2, Doctor Dorn is reading aloud to Arkadina and Masha, the daughter of the estate manager Shamraev (in the first version of the play Masha is explicitly Dorn's natural daughter); the book he is reading is Maupassant's Sur l'eau, a natural enough choice, being an account of a sailing trip along the Côte d'Azur, Arkadina's spiritual homeland, like Ranevskaia's in The Cherry Orchard. Suddenly Maupassant's comments begin to strike home and hit at the relationship between the ageing actress and her acquiescent lover, the writer. Arkadina, as always, is alert to danger and takes over the reading:

and of course for people in society to cherish and attract novelists is just as dangerous as it is for a corn merchant to raise rats in his stores. And yet they love them. Thus when a woman has set her mind on a writer she wants to adopt, she besieges him with compliments, kindnesses and treats.

Arkadina cannot let this pass: she argues that Russian women are different and fall in love themselves, as she has with Trigorin. When Nina enters, however, Arkadina reads a few lines to herself and refuses to go on, changing the subject. The rest of Maupassant's paragraph is the truth that Arkadina cannot face. Perversely, Chekhov's point is in an excerpt at which he himself stops short.

Like water piercing the hardest rock drop by drop, praise falls word by word on the sensitive heart of the man of letters. Then, as soon as she sees him softened, moved, won over by this constant flattery, she isolates him, cuts bit by bit all his links that he might have elsewhere and, without his feeling it, gets him used to coming to her, to being at home there, installing his thoughts there.

For Chekhov this passage from Maupassant was a horrible warning. All his life, unlike Trigorin, he had cut short his love-life in order to avoid becoming the prisoner of a salon, or, as Maupassant puts it, ‘the God of a church’ whose priestess is his mistress. This is the fundamental difference that the author is anxious to make between Trigorin and himself.

The weight of literary themes explains why Chekhov said, after writing The Seagull, ‘the result is a story’; but it is theatrical in a very literal sense. Arkadina represents everything Chekhov felt was wrong in the old theatre. She is worshipped above all by her estate manager, Shamraev, who can tyrannise over the estate while enthusing over the second-rate farces and melodrama in which Arkadina made her name. She loves the life of fame, of peregrination from hotel room to hotel room; her main characteristic, apart from her self-centredness, is her avarice. Her son is reduced to rags; her brother Sorin, whose estate is the play's setting, is too poor to pay for medical treatment, while Arkadina hoards her takings in an Odessa bank. Applause and money motivate the old theatre, but the new theatre, in the shape of Konstantin Treplev's amateur stage effects (a remarkable anticipation of Stanislavsky's interest in evoking total atmosphere), does not win. Nina, abandoned by Trigorin, becomes an actress of the same kind as Arkadina. Full of stamina, intoxicated by the joy of acting, travelling third class from one provincial backwater to another, she is just as much a victim of the theatre as Katia in ‘A Dreary Story’. Only the carpentry of Konstantin Treplev's stage survives: the provincial theatre swallows up all the human talent.

All this points to the uniqueness of The Seagull in Chekhov's work. The audience at the first night saw this uniqueness as a sign of hostility. The actors and producer were only partly to blame. They themselves were more Arkadinas than Ninas: they were used to farce, not to the indeterminate genre of Chekhovian comedy. They did not know their parts and they ruined the final effect of Konstantin's suicide: Doctor Dorn said that a bottle had been drunk (lopnula) instead of a phial of ether bursting (also lopnula), and the horrible anticipation of the news of the fatal shot was lost in general laughter. 17 October 1896 was one of the worst nights in Chekhov's life: he had sensed a conspiracy of reviewers who, at the end of the first act, were shouting out their contempt in the bar. But by showing a play so outspoken in its discontent with the theatre, so close to parody, so perverse in what it left unsaid, so obviously aimed at Petersburg's most conservative theatre, Chekhov must subconsciously have been asking for a showdown. He resolved never to write for the theatre again. He even held up the printing of The Seagull and Uncle Vania. It was not until 1898 that the Moscow Arts Theatre, or rather those people in it (Nemirovich-Danchenko and Vishnevsky, whom Chekhov had known for nearly twenty years), persuaded him that the new theatre which could feel for and realise his work had arrived.

The Chekhovian peculiarities of The Seagull are present in its structure, its non-verbal effects, its characterisation, and its language. They are common to Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, and to Uncle Vania as far as its deviations from The Wood Demon are concerned. The most obvious feature is the continuity. Scene boundaries are abolished and acts flow on uninterrupted. The first act carries the bulk of the material and the climax is reached in the third, in which Trigorin quarrels with Arkadina and gives Nina an assignation. The Seagull is still, however, more primitive than Uncle Vania. The opening of Act 4 has a clumsy exposition to explain Nina's seduction and her return and, though it is muted, the act ends with a bang, rather than a whimper. Treplev's suicide is subtly plotted beforehand; it breaks inevitably into the final game of cards, but it is nonetheless conventional.

The non-verbal effects of The Seagull are less extreme than those of the later plays, where a town on fire or forty thousand cherry trees create an almost cosmic, symbolic mood. But the lake, which separates Sorin's estate from Nina's house, and is the background of Treplev's play, has much of the poetry of the cherry-orchard, the same interconnection with the rising moon which tenses the atmosphere of Act 1 of The Seagull and Act 2 of The Cherry Orchard. The effects of Konstantin's play, the horn, the sulphur and the glowing red eyes, are effects that belong to Chekhov's prose. They recall the pan-pipes of 1887 and they anticipate the devil's eyes reflected in the windows of ‘An Incident in Practice’. The sound-effects are fewer. Music in The Seagull is limited to a melancholy waltz in Act 4, and the incursion of time comes out only in the banging of the night-watchman. But the stage properties are remarkable: all of them are Chekhov's possessions. A visitor to the Chekhov museum in Yalta will find the game of loto (bingo), the rifle, the revolver, the fishing-rods that play such a part in The Seagull among the small collection of objects that Chekhov hung onto in his wanderings. These mundane properties, like the game of loto, are meant to create not just the illusion of normal trivial life, as people eat, drink and smoke their way through disaster, but a sort of counterpoint in which the line of action is set against the line of small-talk and absurd incident, arousing that bemused, bewildered reaction, as quick as comedy and as long-lasting as tragedy, which is the intention of Chekhov's plays.

The characterisation of The Seagull provides material for the two last plays. Arkadina, in her indestructible love of life and her sexuality, anticipates Ranevskaia (though there are substantial differences). Her brother Sorin is, like Ranevskaia's brother Gaev, derided as ‘an old woman’, unable to control his estate. Though very different in their nature, Konstantin Treplev and Nina fill the same place in the scheme of the characters as do Trofimov and Ania in The Cherry Orchard: hopeful youth pitted against hopeless middle age. Doctor Dorn, who believes in no treatments and who hides his affections behind a screen of indifference, anticipates Doctor Chebutykin in Three Sisters in his cool, casual handling of death. His inventive ‘a phial of ether has burst’ is only a little less pathetic in its forced gaiety than Chebutykin's ‘tarara-boom-de-ay’. Medvedenko, the teacher in love with Masha, has all the stupidity and persistence of the teacher Kulygin, married to Masha of Three Sisters. Masha the daughter of Shamraev, dressed in black with extravagant self-parody, anticipates Masha, also in black, of Three Sisters. Shamraev, the employee who has somehow become the master, unaccountable, irrelevant and evil, looks ahead to Epikhodov of The Cherry Orchard. The ‘two hundredweight’ of love, that Chekhov enjoyed loading the play with, makes The Seagull, in fact, more stylised than the later plays. A situation in which Arkadina loves Trigorin who fancies Nina (whom Treplev loves) while Masha loves Treplev, Medvedenko loves Masha, Polina Shamraev loves Dorn (who admires Nina), stretches to absurdity the use of unrequited love as a generator of intrigue and comedy. The perversity of love, on the classical formula of A's love for B being in inverse proportion to B's love for A, is the comedy of The Seagull, a comedy which otherwise only flares up at individual moments. The individual comic moments are in fact as classical as they are in Molière: Arkadina giving a rouble to be divided among three servants, Nina's refusal to answer Treplev's questions, the sudden transitions in Treplev from infantile affection to proud hostility, the revelation of Trigorin's conceit when he cuts the pages of a magazine to read his own work (but not Treplev's)—these are all moments when the mask of generosity, love, or deference slips to reveal the miser, the infatuated lover, the child, or the egocentric monster.

If The Seagull is an experimental work, sometimes too aggressive, sometimes too timid, it is none the less one of the first great modern dramas. It is the first ‘comedy’ to take death in its stride: Nina's survival makes Treplev's death an accepted loss. The moral freedom of Ibsen and Hauptmann has found a new form that solves none of the questions, makes no divisions between good and evil, but leaves us with a feeling for the complexity and absurdity of life. For Chekhov's contemporaries, the Ibsenian morality was shocking enough. The censor found it intolerable that Sorin and Treplev should view Arkadina's affair with Trigorin with so much equanimity; that Nina recovers, and does not end as a stuffed monument to sin and love, like the seagull, also seemed to show a lack of a sense of retribution. The flabby will of old Sorin, who prides himself on being ‘l'homme qui a voulu’, and lets his manager Shamraev reverse the roles of ruler and servant, seemed to be a comment on the decline of the gentry which Chekhov had failed to follow up: critics felt it therefore lacked ‘dramatic consequentiality’. Only Nemirovich-Danchenko in the Moscow Arts Theatre could see that the morality of love and social position was not the point of the play—which defended life against symbols, rules and explanations, humanity against divisions into major and minor characters, and the theatre against routine.

In 1898 the Moscow Arts Theatre made its name and Chekhov's reputation with The Seagull. It is a symbiosis unusual in the history of the theatre. The very name of the theatre, known by its capital letters of MKhaT, caught on as a synonym for the theatre as art dedicated to life. (MKhaT is also the Georgian stem for mkhatvari, meaning ‘artist’, which helped to fix the name.) The dominance of director over actors, the idea that the part should project out of the play so that the actor entered into his role as a new personality to be lived from birth to death in every trivial action, the stress on realistic stage effects, largely—but not altogether—fell in with what Chekhov was trying to do. In his last two plays, Chekhov was to consider the theatre and its techniques as much as his own verbal material.