SOURCE: Curtis, James M. “Spatial Form in Drama: The Seagull.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 6, no. 1 (spring 1972): 13-37.

[In the following essay, Curtis highlights Chekhov's contribution to modernism as exemplified by The Seagull.]

INTRODUCTION

Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years. The Origins of the Avant Garde, 1885 to World War I says much to anyone who wishes to understand the nature of modernism. By treating in detail the interrelated careers of Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire, he conveys a vivid sense of the atmosphere of Paris during the rise of modernism (and certainly makes anyone interested in Russia realize how much we need a comparable book on St. Petersburg in the same period). More important for the present essay, Shattuck concludes his book with a cogent extended definition of the nature of modernist art. He puts the essence of the matter in one sentence, which applies to all forms of creativity: “The twentieth century has addressed itself to arts of juxtaposition as opposed to earlier arts of transition.”¹ Although he says that the arts of juxtaposition (which he also calls “simultanism”) had “few clear precedents in the three centuries preceding 1885,”² nevertheless, “the history of the attitude that produced simultanism reaches as far back as human consciousness. Most religious experience expresses it.”³ One need not take the dates as precise, for G. Wilson Knight, in his extremely influential book The Wheel of Fire (1930; many subsequent editions) and the French structuralist Roland Barthes, in On Racine (1963) have argued that the greatest dramatists of England and France respectively created structures similar in nature to those of simultanism.

In this essay, I wish to emphasize Chekhov's affinities with modernism (a pan-European movement, after all) by presenting a close reading of The Seagull in keeping with Shattuck's remarks. (As the previous paragraph indicates, Chekhov's use of the art of juxtaposition in drama is hardly unique; in terms of form, modernist art generally resembles the art of Europe before what T. S. Eliot called the “dissociation of sensibility.”) Such a reading may explain the odd fact that general agreement that Chekhov's plays constitute a major innovation in European drama coexists with general bafflement as to what—besides such vague qualities as “plotlessness” and “use of mood”—distinguish them from their nineteenth-century predecessors. Shattuck gives a useful clue when he says that the art of the past hundred years has used “the principle of interval and tension between parts”;⁴ if “interval and tension between the parts” create the structure of a play, as they surely do in The Seagull, it has no need of the usual plot, which involves the use of transition from one part to another; a beginning, a middle, and an end.

More specifically, Shattuck makes a distinction between simultanism, which juxtaposes “heterogeneous elements” and thus produces “an explosive, exciting texture in which connectives are actively missed …,” and “the classical strain of juxtaposition [which] combines homogeneous elements to produce a far different effect. … Style here becomes circularity, a distortion of linear development and direction in the traditional sense: an absence of style.”⁵ If ever a dramatist wrote in a way which deserves the paradoxical tag of “an absence of style,” Chekhov, with his use of card games and casual conversations, did. But Shattuck, in his concern with the nature of modernism and the lives of those who helped to create it, does not suggest a method for the close analysis of a complete text; for such a method, I turn to two seminal texts, Joseph Frank's “Spatial Form in Modern literature” (1945) and T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917). Because Frank's very well-known, frequently reprinted essay deals with the problems of close analysis of modernists texts, I take the title of this discussion from it; let us therefore begin with Frank, and then pass on to Eliot.

Very much in the spirit of simultanism, Ezra Pound defined an image as “that which presents an intellectual or emotional complex in an instant of time”; in “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Frank uses this definition to discuss such works as The Waste Land:

… Where syntactical sequence is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships between disconnected wordgroups. To be properly understood, these wordgroups must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously; only when this is done can they be adequately understood, for while they follow one another in time, their meaning does not depend on this temporal relationship.⁶

Frank describes the proper method for analyzing a work written in spatial form in a passage on Joyce's Ulysses:

Joyce composed his novel of an infinite number of references and cross-references which relate to one another independently of the time-sequence of the narrative; and, before the book fits together into any meaningful pattern, these references must be connected by the reader, and viewed as a whole.⁷

These two related statements imply that an image, as Pound defined the term, forms the structure of the work in that it creates an organizing network of “disconnected wordgroups” through which the work achieves meaning, and that without a knowledge of this network no one can understand the work. (To avoid confusion, I shall use the term Gestalt when discussing the structure of a work in spatial form.) The Gestalt constitutes the whole of a work in spatial form, and is realized in the text; in order to interpret such a work rigorously, one must analyze the interrelationships in the Gestalt. Yet, for all its convenience, the term “spatial form” may have a deceptive quality in that it implies a completely static organization which precludes change and development; actually, spatial form simply means that one must understand all the relationships of the Gestalt in order to perceive meaningfully the change and development which may occur.

Frank rightly suggests that “the primary reference of a wordgroup is to something inside the poem itself,”⁸ and Shattuck states the general principle that “Twentieth-century art has tended to search itself rather than exterior reality for beauty of meaning or truth, a condition that entails a new relationship between the work of art, the world, the spectator, and the artist.”⁹ But the very mode of existence of the work needs explicit formulation. In addition to internal references, many modernist plays, poems, and novels refer to other works of literature—most explicitly in Eliot's notes to The Waste Land, but elsewhere as well. What of these external references, which also help to form the Gestalt? Here the critic must employ a concept such as the “historical sense,” as Eliot defined it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.¹⁰

Eliot's famous concept of the “simultaneous order” of all literature (which bears a more than coincidental resemblance to Pound's definition of an image) allows the interpreter to consider both explicit and implicit references to other work simply as manifestations of the “simultaneous order,” without which the individual work in question could not have come into existence, and to which it belongs.

I

I propose to use the ideas in “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” and “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to create a Gestalt for The Seagull, and to demonstrate the manner in which it is realized in the play. Since drama takes place in the theater, it can use physical juxtaposition, as poetry and the novel, the forms which Frank discusses, cannot. Thus, Chekhov often juxtaposes on the stage groups of characters who engage in different activities at different levels of emotional intensity. His plays have no central characters because each individual character becomes meaningful only when understood in relation to all the other characters, just as we see each character on the stage in his relationship to all the other characters on the stage at the same time. Chekhov's use of “references and cross-references” produces the random, disorganized effect of his plays—in which, as the cliche has it, “nothing happens”—and which takes the place of the traditional plot. The wordgroups impart to specific words and phrases meanings of which the characters have no awareness, and which transcend the context and denotative meaning of the speech in question. Chekhov uses the pause—Shattuck's “interval”—so frequently because it serves to mark the break between different wordgroups.

The Gestalt of The Seagull consists of two juxtaposed themes, the seeking of fulfillment either through art or through love; for the sake of convenience, I shall henceforth refer to these as the “art theme” and the “love theme.” These themes define the overall form, and are linked by the three motifs of the lake, the gull, and flowers; these motifs provide the principal means through which Chekhov develops the themes, and form a central pillar. One can arrange these elements so that they can be grasped “in an instant of time” in the following manner:

	Flowers
Art	Lake	Love
	Gull

One can use this Gestalt as a touchstone which makes specific passages and incidents meaningful, since the text of the play constitutes its realization. To do so requires, however, an awareness that the Gestalt, reproduced in two dimensions, only approximates a true spatial image. Just as one cannot consider any single view of a work of sculpture “correct” or “definitive,” so any single interpretation of a work in spatial form must remain inadequate. Thus, the themes—whose separation is highly arbitrary, since they both emerge from the same actions by the same set of characters—and the motifs have a dialectical nature; they contain destructive as well as creative aspects.

The character relationships which use this Gestalt comprise external references to Eliot's “simultaneous order” of literature in that they follow closely the character relationships of two other plays, each of which is linked to one of the themes. The love theme is linked to Hamlet, and the art theme to Pushkin's brief cabinet drama, Mozart and Salieri. Thomas G. Winner, in “Chekhov's Seagull and Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Study of a Dramatic Device,”¹¹ has enumerated most of the allusions to Hamlet, without attempting to discuss their significance for the play as a whole; but no one has mentioned the analogies between Mozart and Salieri. References to each play explain part of the work. Yet neither explains it all, for the analogies to the two plays are presented here as allusions, not precise correspondences. Although one can present the basic Gestalt for a work such as The Seagull spatially, demonstration of the manner in which it serves as the actual structure of the play must proceed temporally. Let us consider first the themes, and then the motifs.

II

Since the themes are linked to Hamlet and Mozart and Salieri, let us begin with a comparison of these two plays. While Hamlet is much longer, more complex, and has a much larger cast of characters than Mozart and Salieri, the same basic situation causes tension in both plays; in both Hamlet and Mozart and Salieri, one man has something a second man desperately wants, and the second man kills the first. Thus, Hamlet eventually kills Claudius, who has the power that is rightfully his; Salieri poisons Mozart, whose seemingly effortless success renders meaningless his own meager, hard-won accomplishments. In The Seagull, the relationship between Treplev and Trigorin merges both plays in the following manner: Trigorin/Mozart enjoys the artistic success in the attainment of which lies Treplev/Salieri's only hope of self-respect; and Trigorin/Claudius as the lover of Irina Nikolaevna Arkadin/Gertrude denies Hamlet/Treplev the maternal affection he needs. In an additional twist, Trigorin/Claudius can seduce Nina/Ophelia because of his prestige as an artist; art in The Seagull has the same significance as political power in Hamlet. Trigorin unwittingly and innocently, but no less completely for that, blocks Treplev's need for fulfillment through art, and fulfillment through love.¹² The pervasive irony of these relationships derives from Chekhov's reversal of the denouement; Treplev cannot take arms against a sea of troubles (although Trigorin says that Treplev has spoken of a possible duel between them), and he is too honest to delude himself into believing that he has a divine justification to kill, as Salieri does. Left without self-respect or hope, he has no recourse but suicide. It is as though Chekhov had decided to work with the possibility of Hamlet's taking the other option in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

Before the beginning of the play within the play, The Seagull's most obvious reference to Hamlet, Treplev asks for his mother's patience, a way of asking her to respect his work, and thus his dignity. She refuses to do so, and replies with Gertrude's words from the closet scene in Hamlet (III, 4), when Hamlet reproaches her with her hasty marriage to Claudius:

Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.(13)

This seemingly inappropriate reply may suggest her own awareness that she is keeping her son from finding an outlet for his energies. Gertrude's speech appears fairly accurately in the Russian translation, which Winner has identified¹⁴ as that of Nikolai Alekseevich Polevoi (1796-1846), a romantic writer and critic; however, Polevoi significantly abbreviates Hamlet's outburst:

                                                  Nay but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty,—

In the Russian translation, these lines become a question: “Why have you given in to vice, / Why have you sought love in the abyss of transgression?” The bandaging scene in Act Three which, as Winner observes,¹⁵ also derives from the closet scene in Hamlet, refers to the love theme when it ends in an argument between mother and son about the mother's lover. The play within the play in The Seagull is not completed, as the play within the play in Hamlet is not; the difference in the use of the device in the two plays is that in Hamlet it evokes the larger tensions in the work, while in The Seagull it has a more specific function.¹⁶ As Robert Louis Jackson put it in “The Seagull: The Empty Well, the Dry Lake, and the Cold Cave”:

In the context of Chekhov's subtle juxtaposition and interplay of real and fictional lines in the episode of the play within the play, we recognize that Konstantin's announcement, “the play is finished,” anticipates the abortive ending of his life drama; it constitutes a dramatic rehearsal for the ending of The Seagull.¹⁷

The failure of the play affects Treplev as the appearance of the ghost affects Hamlet. As Nina tells Treplev when he places the gull at her feet, “Recently you have become irritable, you constantly express yourself incomprehensibly, in symbols of some kind.”¹⁸ Like Hamlet, Treplev perceives the truth about his mother, and his perception of this truth becomes a major source of the love theme. In Act One, he makes several comments about her, and subsequent developments justify each of them. He says, for example, that “She cares for the sick like an angel,” but human concern for others forms no part of her conscious personality. When Treplev later mentions that she took care of a beaten washerwoman, she cannot remember the incident (as Trigorin will be unable to remember his order to have the gull stuffed), although she remembers having coffee with two ballerinas. Treplev says, “She is miserly. She has seventy thousand in a bank in Odessa—I know that for sure. But ask her for a loan, and she'll start crying.” And when Sorin hesitantly suggests that she might loan her son some money, she does indeed begin to cry, protesting “I don't have any money.” Treplev understands with deadly clarity why she thrusts him away: “I remind her that she is no longer young,” he says, “When I'm not around, she's only 32, but 43 when I'm there, and she hates me for it.” Here, too, she is attempting to repudiate the mother/son relationship, and Treplev is vindicated when, in the beginning of Act Two, she stands next to the unhappy Masha, and forces Dorn to say that she looks younger than the girl.

Like Hamlet, Treplev presents an example of the classical Oedipal situation in his need for his mother's affection and approval, and in his rebellion against a powerful father figure. Just before Treplev goes out to shoot himself, he says, “It will be bad if someone meets her [Nina] in the garden and then tells Mama. That might sadden Mama.” The fact that it occurs to him to be concerned about her feelings at the point of death starkly expresses his failure to overcome his dependence on her; as he clearly understands at the outset, only through the failure that will rob him of his self-respect can he please her. One might therefore say that by remaining in his mother's sphere of influence Treplev wills his own emotional destruction, just as he wills the premature end of his play, and his own death.

“Denmark's a prison,” Hamlet glumly observes, and Treplev, who certainly wishes to go to Moscow or abroad as much as Hamlet wishes to go to Wittenberg, might say the same about Sorin's estate, which resembles a prison for those who can neither find fulfillment within its confines or leave it. Chekhov develops the metaphor of Sorin's estate in a manner typical of spatial form, through a series of interlocking imagistic statements and restatements. Only Treplev states the matter directly; when he says of Nina, “Her father and step-mother guard her, and it's as difficult for her to get out of the house as out of a prison,” he is surely thinking of himself as well. In Act Four, Treplev communicates his own desire to escape by opening a window, and meekly obeys his mother when she tells him to close it.

Early in Act One of The Seagull, a dog howls—one of those homely touches with which Chekhov's plays are filled. It turns out that this is a watchdog belonging to Shamraev, the bailiff, who, for fear of theft from unwatched storerooms, refuses to release it at night; the howls of the dog keep Sorin awake at night, so he says, and thus image the frustration of all those confined to the estate. Furthermore, Shamraev, the only character for whom the native hue of resolution is not sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, tells the story of the singer in a church choir who sang, “Bravo, Silva” a full octave lower than the performer on stage; such an action expresses the envy of professional artists which motivates Nina and Treplev.

Shamraev controls the direct means of escape from the prison—horses. (The significance of horses in The Seagull leads one to wonder whether Chekhov was thinking of that cry of despair in Shakespeare's darkest statement about the destructive qualities of ambition, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”) Shamraev's denial of a horse to Medvedenko, one of the several characters who repeat and reinforce Treplev's failure, creates some near-farce in the last two acts. By contrast, in Act Two, Shamraev temporarily denies horses to Irina and Trigorin, but provides them when they finally decide to depart. Of the three young people—Nina, Masha, and Treplev—Nina alone escapes, and therefore she refers to horses just after her first appearance on stage, and just before her final exit. Nina's second speech contains the remark “I drove the horse, I drove him.” Just as Nina manages to gain access to a horse to perform in Treplev's play, so she will eventually escape her oppressive home life to find fulfillment in art—if not in love—by acting in vastly more significant plays. When she turns to leave in Act Four, Treplev pleads, “Stay, I'll give you some dinner,” but Nina replies, “No, no … Don't see me out, I'll get there by myself … My horses are nearby …”. Now that she is a mature, independent adult, she has her own horses, and needs no help from anyone.

I have mentioned that the outcome of Hamlet is reversed in The Seagull; much else is reversed as well. Trigorin is not a usurper, as Claudius is; he has no guilt to expiate. The fact that Treplev uses “Words, words, words,” Hamlet's reply when Polonius asks him what he is reading, to jeer at Trigorin, is significant precisely because the quotation does not apply. Here, as elsewhere, the art theme merges with the love theme, because Treplev makes the comment for Nina's benefit. He realizes that he must destroy Trigorin's prestige in Nina's eyes if he is to keep her affection; but he fails to do so, since his work, not Trigorin's, consists only of “words, words, words.” To understand the extent to which the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia is reversed in that of Treplev and Nina, it will be helpful to cite Winner's comments on the specific factual similarities between Nina and Ophelia:

When Nina enters …, we are confronted with the first, yet weak, shadow of the Ophelia motif which also grows in intensity as the play progresses. We learn from her that her father strongly objects to her association with the Arkadina-Treplev-Sorin household, as Polonius objects to Ophelia's association with Hamlet. We learn that Nina's mother, just like Ophelia's is dead.¹⁹

We are … led to associate Nina not only with the image of the closeness to water, an image with which the seagull, as a water bird, is of course closely connected. Are we not again dealing here with a gentle echo from Hamlet? For water, so frequently representing the death image in Shakespeare, is closely tied to Ophelia's end.²⁰

But Treplev does not drive Nina mad; in The Seagull, it is the man who commits suicide, while the girl loses her illusions and delusions about herself and about art. Schiller anticipated the contrast between Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri, the relationship which forms the basis for the art theme in The Seagull, when he wrote, in Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, “The writer either is nature, or he will seek it.” Salieri seeks nature, while Mozart clearly is nature. Salieri seeks nature, that is to say, the ability to create, through the mastery of technique alone:

                                        Having slain the sounds,
I dissected the music like a corpse. I
Checked the harmony by algebra. Then,
Experienced in science, I dared to give myself
Over to the bliss of the creative dream.(21)

The destructive aspects—destructive with regard both to the emotions and to art itself—of such an emphasis appear here, but come to the fore in the following passage, the source of the important motif of the destruction of the manuscript in The Seagull:

Not infrequently, after sitting in my silent cell
Two or three days, and forgetting sleep and food,
After tasting the ecstasy and tears of inspiration,
I burned my work and coldly watched
As my thought, and the sounds to which I gave birth,
Disappeared, flaming, in a light smoke.

Creation does not arise from the depths of the soul for Salieri, and does not involve his entire being; thus, when Salieri hears Gluck's innovations—presumably his departures from the Italian operatic tradition—he completely changes his style:

                                        … When the great Gluck
Appeared and revealed to us new secrets
(Deep, captivating secrets),
Did I not abandon all that I formerly knew,
All that I had so loved and believed so warmly,
And did I not go firmly after him
Uncomplainingly, like one who has lost his way,
And is sent in a different direction by a passerby?

Salieri's reference to his “[monastic] cell,” hints at his asceticism, his isolation from the world, and his view of art as something set apart from it; he speaks of himself, for example, as one of the “priests, servants of music.” He tells Mozart, “Mozart, you are a god, and you don't know it yourself.” Mozart, who does not use the abstract vocabulary typical of Salieri's speech, replies in a manner characteristic of his pervasive, light-hearted ingenuousness: “Bah. Really! Perhaps … / But my godhood has gotten hungry.” Composing comes naturally to Mozart; he brings Salieri a piano piece written during a bout of insomnia, and is genuinely surprised when Salieri considers it beautiful. Mozart can therefore be sufficiently sure of himself to laugh at a poor performance of an aria from Don Juan; he brings in a blind violinist whose ineptness amuses him. But the dour Salieri finds the wretched performance deeply offensive, since his rigidity prevents him from seeing the humor in the situation.

Mozart's supreme genius enables him to attain easily the eminence which Salieri's hard work and self-denial will never bring him. Such blatant injustice destroys for Salieri the possibility of any ultimate or metaphysical truth; he cries out in anguish:

                                                  … I envy him; I deeply,
Agonizingly envy him. Oh heaven!
Where is the justice, when the holy gift,
When immortal genius is sent not as a reward
For ardent love, self-sacrifice,
Work, diligence, or prayer—
But illumines the head of a madman,
An idle reveller? … Oh Mozart, Mozart!

To relieve the unbearable tension which this envy creates Salieri convinces himself that he is chosen to kill Mozart, and poisons him. To understand the full irony of the act, we must remember that Mozart likes Salieri; in his ingenuousness, Mozart has not the slightest idea of the agony which he causes Salieri. Although Chekhov developed and deepened the confrontation, as we would expect in a four-act psychological drama, he has retained its essential components in the art theme in The Seagull.

It is, of course, Trigorin, the gifted artist, whose character derives from that of Pushkin's Mozart; Trigorin unwittingly exerts great pressure on Nina and Treplev, both of whom embody Salieri's characteristic traits. To a considerable extent, an understanding of The Seagull depends on our ability to remember that, despite Trigorin's accomplishments, he, like Mozart, remains a basically unself-conscious, ingenuous man. Mozart shrugs off Salieri's statement that he is a god; likewise, when Nina tells Trigorin how fortunate he is, Trigorin says, “Hm … Here you are talking about fame, about happiness, about some bright, interesting life, but for me, forgive me, all those fine words are the same as marmalade, which I never eat.” Asked by Nina how it feels to be famous, he replies, “How? Not at all, I guess. I've never thought about it. (After thinking a bit.) One of two things: Either you exaggerate my fame, or it is not felt at all.” Like Mozart's piano piece which came to him in the night, Trigorin's stories come unbidden; he serves largely as the instrument through which they are recorded: “When I finish a work, I rush to the theater or to go fishing; I would like to rest and forget myself, but—no, a heavy castiron shell—a new subject—is already revolving in my head …”. Trigorin, like Mozart, cannot evaluate his own work; he tells Nina in Act Two, “And the public reads (my work and says), ‘Yes, it's charming and talented … charming, but far from Tolstoi.’” This admission is all the more convincing since it echoes Treplev's biased statement to Sorin in Act One, “As far as his writings are concerned, how can I tell you? It's charming and talented … but … after Tolstoi or Zola, you don't feel like reading Trigorin.”

Because of the manner in which Trigorin's stories take him by force, as it were, they absorb him so completely that he never has any awareness of his impact on Treplev and Nina. (Trigorin is embarrassed when Irina introduces him to Nina, and Irina is right when she says, “He's a celebrity, but he's a simple soul.”) Just as Mozart never suspects Salieri's envy, so Trigorin is puzzled by Treplev's first attempt at suicide: “He gets, upset, snorts, preaches new forms … But after all, there is room for all forms, both the old and the new—why should we clash?” Unlike Irina, Trigorin refuses to criticize Treplev's play: “Each man writes as he wishes and is able,” he says. Likewise, we must believe Trigorin when he relates his interest in Nina to the “subject for a small short story,” an interest which links Nina and the gull, for throughout the play he regards his encounters with others as possible material for future stories, and he speaks of her only with regard to his work. Trigorin's first statement to Nina in their long scene together in Act Two sets the tone for their relationship:

Hello. Circumstances have unexpectedly worked out so that we're leaving tomorrow. You and I probably won't see each other any more. And it's too bad. I don't often have a chance to meet young girls, young interesting ones; I've already forgotten, and can't clearly imagine how they feel at eighteen and nineteen, and that's why the young girls in my stories and tales are usually false. I would like to be in your position for just an hour, to find out how you think, and in general what you're like.

Just before Trigorin kisses Nina at the end of Act Three, having learned that she will meet him in Moscow, he says, “I will see these marvellous eyes, the inexpressibly lovely, tender smile again … These gentle features, the expression of angelic purity … My dear …” We have no justification for taking his speech as that of the practiced flatterer of a callous seducer, for Trigorin uses the same tone in the tense preceding scene with Irina: “A young magnificent, poetic love, taking one away into a world of dreams—that alone can give happiness on earth! I haven't experienced such love yet …”. But having experienced this love, he abandons her and his child in all innocence, because his relationship to her always has the impersonal quality of art.

Nina and Treplev, in their reactions to Trigorin, represent the creative and destructive dimensions, respectively, of the art theme. At the beginning of the play, both embody Salieri's attitude; gradually, however, Nina begins to change, but Treplev does not and cannot. Although Nina expresses her attitudes considerably more completely than Treplev, she has no opportunity to do so until Act Two. Nina is shocked when Shamraev, Sorin's bailiff, refuses to give Irina Nikolaevna the horses she wants: “To refuse Irina Nikolaevna, a famous artist! Is not any wish of hers, even a caprice, more important than your farm?” After her surprise wears off, she begins to break down the sharp distinction between art and life, between the artist and the ordinary person:

I thought that famous people were proud, inaccessible, that they despised the masses [that] by their fame and glamor they took revenge on the masses because the masses place wealth and being well-born above all. But they cry, go fishing, play cards, laugh, and get angry like everybody else. …

This realization represents the first aspect of her development; the second begins during her conversation with Trigorin, and culminates only after Trigorin abandons her. Even if she has begun to believe that artists are not inherently different from other people, she considers them more fortunate. Her feelings toward Trigorin correspond precisely to Salieri's toward Mozart:

A marvellous world! If you knew how I envy you! People's lots in life are different. Some barely drag out a boring, imperceptible existence, they are all alike, and they are all unhappy; an interesting, bright, life, full of meaning, has fallen the lot of others; it is your lot, for example—you are one in a million.

Here she echoes Salieri's view of the creative artist as someone set apart, and uses Salieri's rhetorical vocabulary when she asks Trigorin, “Do not inspiration and the very process of creation give you high, happy minutes?” She cannot understand Trigorin's denials and disclaimers, and finally states flatly that her love of art results from a desperate need for recognition (the recognition presumably denied her by her parents) in this remarkable speech, which corresponds to Salieri's account of his own deprivations endured in the services of art, and contains an accurate, detailed prophecy of her own future difficulties:

For the happiness of being a writer or an artist, I would endure the hostility of my relatives, need, and disenchantment; I would live in an attic and eat only rye bread; I would suffer from dissatisfaction with myself, with the awareness of my imperfections, but in return I would demand fame … real, resounding fame. (Covers her face with her hands.) My head is spinning. …

Salieri speaks in similar tones of fame:

By intense, concentrated persistence
I finally in boundless art
Achieved a high degree. Fame
Smiled at me; in the hearts of people
I found a response to my creations.
I was happy; I peacefully enjoyed
My work, success, and fame. …

In Act Four, Nina states her abandonment of such attitudes only indirectly, through the motif of the gull, which we shall examine presently.

Treplev's resemblances to Salieri remain more implicit than Nina's; he expresses his basic attitude when he tells Sorin in the opening scene of the play: “New forms are necessary; if we don't have them, nothing is necessary.” This statement seems to coincide with Salieri's concern for technique, and his semi-religious view of art. Treplev's view of the artist as someone set apart appears implicitly at the beginning of Act Two when Masha says of him, “When he reads something, his eyes flash and his face turns pale. He has a magnificent sad voice, and manners like a poet's.” (Winner interprets this as a reference to Hamlet, the “man of pale cast.”)²² He also makes a revealing comparison when describing his reaction to the plays in which his mother acts: “When in a thousand variations I'm constantly offered one and the same thing, one and the same thing, one and the same thing, I flee and flee, as Maupassant fled from the Eiffel Tower, which was crushing his brain with its banality.” Another reference to Maupassant occurs in the play when, at the beginning of Act Two, Irina reads a passage from Maupassant's Sur L'eau, a travel book which discusses, among other things, society ladies and their relationships with writers.

In a work which employs spatial form, such references never appear gratuitously; Maupassant's life and attitudes show a number of similarities to those of Treplev and Salieri. Maupassant was Flaubert's protégé, and few writers have concerned themselves more with technique as such than did Flaubert; for no one did creativity flower less freely. Flaubert firmly believed in the exalted nature of the artistic enterprise, and Maupassant indicated his own sympathy with this belief by writing that when Flaubert was expecting his literary friends for lunch, “As soon as a peal of the bell announced the first visitors, he covered the papers on his work table with a piece of red silk, thus concealing his tools, sacred to him as objects of worship for a priest.”²³ Maupassant's denunciation of the Eiffel Tower—but not the statement that it was “crushing his brain,” which is Treplev's—occurs in the first chapter of his La Vie errante, one of the strongest expressions of his anti-egalitarianism. Like Treplev, Maupassant had an intense relationship with his mother which left him an emotional cripple incapable of sustaining reciprocal relationships with others; he needed to thrust people away, much as Treplev does. Trigorin comments that there are no vivid characters in Treplev's work; although one can hardly say this about Maupassant's stories, his hatred of the world at large and his morbidity often come through in his writing, to the detriment of his art. To complete the list of similarities, Maupassant made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide in 1892, a year and a half before his death. Thus, Maupassant embodies a particular configuration of negative attitudes about art and society which culminate in Treplev's suicide.

Salieri's burning his work upon hearing Gluck's music for the first time is an action typical of one whose self-respect depends on the approval of others and on the mastery of technique alone; but an artist's style usually evolves in a more organic, self-contained manner, and destruction of one's creative work is clearly a form of self-destruction. In the development of the art theme, Treplev is continually associated with destruction, not creativity; after he rings down the curtain on his play, he brings Nina the dead gull and says, “Women cannot forgive failure. I have burned everything, to the last scrap.” When he adds, “I will soon kill myself in the same fashion,” he brings together everything upon which he visits destruction—the effect of his play, his work, the gull, and finally himself. Treplev clearly has a touch of paranoia in this scene; before Nina has a chance to express her feelings toward him, he blurts out: “The play didn't go over; you despise my inspiration, and consider me ordinary and insignificant, the kind of person of whom there are many.” Treplev deeply needs to consider himself unappreciated and unloved, for unless he views himself as a martyr in a hostile, philistine world, he has no proof of the sublimity which he wishes to attribute to himself.

Yet characters in a work which employs spatial form are never one-dimensional; like Hamlet, Treplev possesses a dangerous combination of weaknesses and strengths. After Treplev has some work published, he is too perceptive not to see the difference between his work and Trigorin's, too honest not to admit Trigorin's superiority. In Schiller's terms, he realizes that he is not nature:

I've talked so much about new forms, but now I feel that I'm slipping into a routine myself … Trigorin has worked out his devices, it's easy for him. … This is agonizing. (Pause) Yes, I'm coming more and more to the realization that the main thing is not new or old forms, but that a man writes without thinking about forms at all, that he writes because it flows freely from his soul.

After this realization, Nina comes to tell him that she still loves Trigorin; thus, Treplev has failed in his search for fulfillment through art, and in his search for fulfillment through love. Truly, all occasions do inform against him, and suicide or murder are the only two possibilities for a person in the grip of such acute anxiety; Salieri commits murder, and Treplev commits suicide.

Both Nina and Trigorin, the characters who achieve fulfillment in art, perceive Treplev's inability to create, and express this perception with a negative phrase in which the key word zhivoi, formed on the same root as zhizn', “life,” appears with both its related, but different, meanings: “living,” “alive” and “vivid.” In Act One, Nina tells Treplev; “It is difficult to act in your play. There are no living (zhivykh) characters in it.” Here zhivoi must mean “living,” for it can have only this meaning in the line from Treplev's play, “It has been thousands of centuries since the earth carried a single living (zhivogo) creature on it.” Apparently Treplev abandons such mannerism, since the extracts from his work in progress which he reads in Act Four seem conventional enough; thus, when Trigorin uses the word zhivoi to characterize Treplev's published work, it must mean “vivid”:

Things are not going well for him. He can't ever hit the tone appropriate for him. It's something strange and undefined, at times resembling raving. There's not a single vivid (zhivogo) character.

And to make the contrast clear, Irina Nikolayevna tells Trigorin, when she feels threatened by his interest in Nina, “People are as though alive (zhivye) in your work.”

In one of the obvious character relationships in The Seagull, Sorin, Treplev's uncle, provides a re-statement of Treplev's own problems in his apparently random complaints. Sorin has failed, as Treplev will, in art and love, and Chekov thrusts his failure at us as emphatically as the symbol of the gull. Early in the play Sorin says, “Brother, things are not right for me in the country,” and he wants to go to the city as much as Treplev does. “Women have never loved me,” he grumbles, and toward the end of the play, he says that he was in love with Nina “for a certain time.” In Act One, Sorin gives a precise description of Treplev's state of mind just before his suicide: “I passionately wished for two things; I wanted to get married and I wanted to become a man of letters, but I didn't succeed either in one or the other.” In Act Four, Sorin says, “Here's something—I'm dangerously ill, but meanwhile I'm not given any medicines.” Treplev is dangerously ill, too, in an emotional sense; when he opens the window, he is pleading for the air that will prevent him form suffocating, but neither he nor Sorin ever gets what he wants. A bit later, Sorin suggests that Trigorin write a story called “The Man Who Wanted To,” and by giving the title in French, “L'homme qui a voulu,” he forms a linkage with Treplev's comparison of himself to Maupassant. Finally, Sorin re-states the image which Treplev uses to express the emotional effect of his continuing failure in art and love. After Treplev tells Nina he has burned the manuscript of his play, he says, “It is as though there were a nail in my head,” an image linked to his reference to Maupassant's fleeing the Eiffel Tower, “which was crushing his brain with its banality.” (The Tower resembles a huge nail standing on its head.) Sorin also uses a metaphor of violence to the brain; after he tells Treplev, “Somehow, things are not right for me in the country, brother,” he goes on to say, “I went to bed yesterday at ten and woke up this morning at ten with the feeling that because I had slept so much my brain had stuck to my skull.”

III

The verbal (and non-verbal) motifs in a work which employs spatial form serve to link characters with other, similar characters, or characters with things. Through the systems of “references and cross-references,” the linkages form clusters, rather than symbols in the usual sense of the word; since such clusters are images, in Pound's sense, a reference to any part of such an image actually becomes a reference to the other parts of the image as well. It is the fact that the image may contain numerous planes of meaning, or even—as in the case of The Seagull—directly contradictory meanings that distinguishes spatial form from allegory and parable. Thus, the flowers and the gull are linked to both the creative and destructive aspects of art and love; however, the lake has only a negative connotation.

There is a certain fairy-tale quality about Nina, the innocent, idealistic girl who lives by the side of a lake, guarded by her suspicious father and evil step-mother, who will inherit the fortune that actually belongs to her. (In fact the basic circumstances resemble those of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Undine, a romantic novella about a water sprite who lives by the side of a lake, and who falls in love with a knight.) Perhaps because of these fairy-tale qualities, Nina can remain in character, yet openly establish a basic motif in the play in one of her first speeches: “I am drawn to the lake, like a gull.” Such an utterance allows us to associate references to the lake and the gull with Nina; in Act Three Nina specifically links herself with the lake when talking to Trigorin: “I was born there [on the other side of the lake], I have spent my whole life near this lake and know every little island on it.” Once we understand this linkage, a number of seemingly capricious references to the lake take on precise meanings.

In his first conversation with Nina, Trigorin casually remarks, “There must be a lot of fish in this lake,” and when Nina replies, “Yes,” he adds, “I like to catch fish.” In light of the association between Nina and the lake, Trigorin's remark becomes a statement of sexual desire, and Nina's “yes” a foreshadowing of her future consent. However, this relationship does not bring fulfillment for either party involved, for the lake is not linked to creation or fulfillment. Act Four begins after Trigorin has broken off his affair with Nina, and thus we may take Masha's comment, “There are waves on the lake. Enormous ones.” as an indication of Nina's presence, and the emotions that Nina is experiencing as a result of her proximity to Trigorin. The lake also appears when Trigorin confesses his inability to find complete satisfaction in love: “If I lived in an estate like that by a lake, would I write? I would overcome this passion and do nothing but fish.”

Other characters refer to the lake in a manner consistent with these linkages, of course. Irina expresses the jealousy caused by her awareness of Trigorin's interest in Nina when she says, “He spends whole days at the lake, and I hardly see him.” She also refers to the sense of loss associated with the lake when she says: “About ten or fifteen years ago here on the lake, music and singing were heard continuously every night.” Ten or fifteen years ago, her dominance of her son had not, presumably, become so complete, but now Treplev cannot create or respond to others. Therefore, he gives the most direct expression of the sterility of the lake after he gives Nina the gull: “Your coolness, is frightful, improbable, as though I woke up and saw that this lake had suddenly dried up, or flowed into the earth.” To complete these negative linkages, which correspond to the use of water in Hamlet, we note that Treplev's still-born play is performed beside the lake (on a stage which Medvedenko, at the beginning of Act Four, describes as a “skeleton”), and that Treplev goes outside, near the lake, to shoot himself.

No one could miss the fact that the gull has particular significance in the play; aside from its appearance in the title, Nina says, when Treplev places the gull at her feet, “And this gull, too, is apparently a symbol, but forgive me, I don't understand.” Trigorin picks up the motif when he tells Nina:

Subject for a small short story: A young girl, one like you, has lived on the bank of a lake since childhood; she loves the lake like a gull, and is happy and free, like a gull. But by chance a man came, and from having nothing to do, destroyed her, like this gull here.

When Nina gives Trigorin a medallion with an inscription referring to the sentence from one of his works, “If you ever need my life, come and take it,” the reference seems complete and consistent: The gull implies destruction. However, the gull motif has another meaning as well.

Arthur Ganz's article, “Arrivals and Departures: The Meaning of the Journey in the Major Plays of Chekhov,” demonstrates that only one aspect of the gull's significance appears in the verbal references. Nina and the gull are linked, and both change in significant ways between the beginning and the end of the play. Ganz observes that “The charming but nonetheless stagestruck girl whom we meet in Act I is at the end of the play an actress of talent and a woman of character. Though scarred by what she has endured, she is ready to cope with life.”²⁴ Trigorin's treatment of her destroyed only the chaff, the silly, immature qualities. Since Nina has changed at the end of the play, the gull, when we see it a second time, has changed, too. With regard to the stuffed gull in Act Four—stuffed on Trigorin's orders—Ganz remarks:

And like Nina the gull has undergone a change. The life has been drained out of it, but in its new form it survives and even keeps a kind of permanence. Nina, too, though injured, has evaded destruction, and in her art, even as an actress, we may believe that she achieves something of the timelessness that pertains to all beauty.²⁵

Since Nina has changed, she now repudiates her linkage with the gull of Acts One and Two, for in doing so, she repudiates the immature Nina:

I am a gull. No, that's not right [Net, ne to] … Remember, you shot a gull? A man came by chance and from having nothing to do destroyed. … Material for a small short story. … No, that's not right.

Just as her relationship with the gull has changed, so has her relationship with the lake. None of the life-giving properties of water are mentioned, or used, until this scene, Nina's last, when she says to Treplev, “Give me some water.” She receives the water, and thus the life, she needs, but Treplev's mother forbids him to let air into his life.

Treplev is associated throughout the play with destruction and sterility; thus, it is appropriate that he begins the flower motif, which usually suggests these qualities. As he talked to Sorin, before his play begins, Treplev plucks the petal from a flower, and says, “She loves me-she loves me not, she loves me—she loves me not, she loves me—she loves me not. (Laughs) You see, my mother doesn't love me. And how.” As in his other comments about his mother, Treplev is right; the motif of tearing flowers usually alludes to the destructive qualities of the yearnings seething beneath the placid surface of the play. In Act Two, a non-verbal linkage involving the destruction of flowers appears when Nina picks a bouquet, and gives it to Dorn, an act which immediately arouses Polina Andreevna's jealousy. “Give me those flowers,” she says, and tears them to pieces, and throws them to the side. The Russian stage directions make the linkage even clearer; the same verb, rvat', (“to tear”) is used for the action of both Nina and Polina Andreyevna. (The verb used for Treplev's tearing off flower petals is obryvat', a verb formed from rvat'.)

The fact that Polina Andreevna and Masha, a mother and daughter, love a man who does not return their affections (Dorn and Treplev respectively) forms a linkage, of course, and since Polina Andreevna tears up the flowers that Nina gives to Dorn, we expect that Masha will in some way use the same cluster to express the destructive qualities of her own frustration. Although Masha does not use an explicit flower image, she implies an image of her hopeless love for Treplev as a flower. While telling Trigorin that she drinks at the beginning of Act Three, she says, “But nevertheless I am brave. I've up and decided: I'll tear this love out of my heart, I'll tear it out by the root.” She repeats the image in the last act: “Once love has established itself in your heart, you have to get it out [nado eë von]. They've promised to transfer my husband to another district. As soon as we move there—I'll forget everything … I'll tear it out by the root.” Just as Treplev proposes to create by an act of will, so Masha proposes to terminate her love for him by an act of will.²⁶ The final usage of the image as a reference to emotional destruction appears in Nina's nostalgic remark in Act Four, “Things used to be good, Kostia! Remember? What a clear, warm, joyous, pure life; what feelings—feelings, resembling tender, exquisite flowers.” But, of course, these feelings have been destroyed, by Nina's maturation and Treplev's imminent suicide, as the bouquet which Nina picked for Dorn was destroyed.

We have seen that Trigorin uses the motif of the gull only in its destructive dimension; but he makes the flower motif more complex by using the destructive aspect of creativity in a dialectical manner. In Act Two, he tells Nina, with regard to his compulsive need to write:

And I have to rush to write and write again. And so it always, always is. I have no peace from myself, and I feel that I am eating up my own life, that for the honey that I pass to someone in space, I strip the pollen from my best flowers. I pluck [rvu] the flowers themselves, and trample their roots.

This speech interlocks with the other uses of the cluster—flowers, destruction, and the verb rvat'. The mention of the destruction of roots forms a linkage to Masha's plan to tear the love out of her heart by the roots, but a positive, not a negative, one this time. Both Trigorin and Nina, who do find fulfillment in art, pick flowers—Nina actually, Trigorin metaphorically. And just as the gull suggests both creation and destruction, so does the picking of flowers, which Trigorin uses as an image of his creation of permanent beauty.

The final use of the verb rvat' occurs in the stage directions which describe Treplev's destruction of the manuscript, an action which refers not only to Salieri's destruction of his manuscripts, but also the predominantly destructive quality of the flower motif, and Treplev's own self-destructive tension. Once we become aware of the references to destruction which involve Treplev, the actual act of his suicide comes almost as an anti-climax.

IV

By definition, the references and cross-references in The Seagull interlock in a manner so complex as to defy discursive summary; and it seems dubious that a similar statement can be made about any previous Russian play of the 1880's and 1890's. But to say that Chekhov wrote a play in spatial form is merely to give a more rigorous, more formal description of what we already know; no one doubts Chekhov's significance as an innovator in drama. In fact, discussions of Chekhov's work, especially with reference to Russian literary history, exemplify what Eliot characterized in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as:

Our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects or parts we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated to be enjoyed.²⁷

As a conclusion to this essay, I should like to present a few remarks which may indicate the fruitfulness for an historical understanding of Chekhov's work of Eliot's objection to this individualizing tendency: “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual, parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”²⁸

One rarely thinks of Chekhov as continuing the work of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, for his calm, resolute atheism and distaste for rhetoric—his “absence of style”—distinguish him from Dostoevskii, and class considerations and socio-ethical convictions distinguish him from Tolstoi. Yet if we consider the three writers' use of form and imagery, we find some striking similarities. To begin with the matter of form, I have suggested in earlier articles that both Tolstoi²⁹ and Dostoevskii³⁰ used spatial form, not the temporal form characteristic of their contemporaries in France in England. From this fact comes the uniqueness of modernism in Russia; the movement's use of form did not represent a reaction against its nineteenth-century heritage. Tolstoi and Dostoevskii gave inspiration to a generation of modernists as Flaubert and Thackeray could never have done.

In terms of situation, and the imagery that grows out of that situation, The Seagull resembles Crime and Punishment, a work with which it might seem to have very little in common. In both Crime and Punishment and The Seagull, a penniless student who has recently left the university has an emotionally charged relationship with his mother; each student takes one of the choices of murder and suicide. Both Crime and Punishment and The Seagull employ the juxtaposition of life in death, and death in life, that pervades Russian Orthodox thought.

Chekhov and Dostoevskii use the images of suffocation and thirst for the young man's emotional isolation. While Treplev never gets air and water, and therefore dies, various people offer them to Raskolnikov, who lives. Porfiry Petrovich, with his intuitive knowledge of Raskolnikov's feelings, asks during a visit to the police station: “Aren't you suffocating, shouldn't I open a window?” and offers him a drink of water. Sonia Marmeladov's irregularly shaped room, in which Raskolnikov confesses his crime, faces a canal and has several windows; the room has access to air and water (as Raskolnikov's does not; his mother calls it a “coffin)” and thus suggests Sonia's life-giving qualities. Dostoevskii also uses for Raskolnikov's tension the image of the nail in the head, which Chekhov uses for Treplev. During Raskolnikov's first visit to the police station “He put both elbows on the table and pressed his head into his hands. It was as though a nail were being driven into the crown of his head.”³¹

The Seagull and Crime and Punishment also share the motif of horses, which the authors use in a manner consistent with Jung's explication of the symbolic function of horses in dreams; I refer here to a chapter from Symbols of Transformation whose very title indicates its significance for Treplev and Raskolnikov: “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother.”³² In keeping with Jung's interpretation, horses in the two works take on the significance of life-giving energy, which the young man lacks because he cannot free himself from his mother. In The Seagull, Treplev has no horse—no emotional power to break out; in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov dreams of an overburdened mare, a projection of himself, which is beaten to death. Horses also serve to create the contrast between Treplev and Raskolnikov, on one hand, and Nina and Razumikhin on the other. As we know, Nina has her own horses, both at the beginning of the play and at the end; she does have the strength to break out. In Raskolnikov's dream, a reference to “enormous, long-maned dray horses” which Raskolnikov “liked to look at” suggests the strength to deal with his difficulties which Razumikhin displays throughout Crime and Punishment.³³

These few remarks can of course only begin to demonstrate the possibilities of using the results of close textual analysis to structure literary history in terms of situations and images. Because I believe that virtually all of the masterpieces of Russian literature created in the last century or so have used spatial form, and have as a recurring concern the dialectical relationship between life and death, I believe that combining close analysis with historical interpretation, as I have done for The Seagull in this brief essay, can prove very fruitful for other works as well.

Notes

1. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (New York, 1968), p. 332.

2. Ibid., p. 334.

3. Ibid., p. 345.

4. Ibid., p. 334.

5. Ibid., pp. 337-338. One might organize a useful history of the modern theater in terms of works that juxtapose heterogeneous elements and those that juxtapose homogeneous elements. Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi and Chekhov's The Seagull seem to begin these two tendencies almost simultaneously. The Seagull had its premiere, a critical and popular failure, in the fall of 1894, after Ubu Roi had come out in book form the previous spring; Ubu Roi, which provoked fist fights and a near riot because of its obscenity and its bizarre cast, had its premiere in Paris on December 11, 1896; on December 17, 1896, the Moscow Art Theatre scored its first stunning success with The Seagull. At each play, the audience correctly sensed that a new kind of theatre was beginning. While the Expressionists and Brecht developed Jarry's drama of heterogeneous juxtaposition, the drama of homogeneous juxtaposition culminates in Beckett. Thus, when George Steiner proposes “a topic for future dissertations: uses of silence in Webern and Beckett,” he seems to forget Chekhov's analogous use of silence long before Beckett was born. (George Steiner, “Of Nuances and Scruple,” Extraterritorial [New York], p. 15).

6. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” The Sewanee Review, LIII, 2 (Spring 1945), 229. Frank included “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” in his book, The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick, N. J., 1953).

7. Ibid., p. 232.

8. Ibid., p. 229.

9. Shattuck, p. 326.

10. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (London, 1932), p. 14.

11. Thomas G. Winner, “Chekhov's The Seagull and Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Study of a Dramatic Device,” The American Slavic and East European Review, XV, 1 (February 1956), 103-111.

12. Cf. Winner's comment that “Treplev has learned to hate and fear him [Trigorin] as a rival in love as well as art (and the two concepts are here symbolically one).” Ibid., p. 106.

13. I have used the Cambridge Edition Text of Hamlet, as it appears in The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Garden City, N. Y., n. d.).

14. Winner, p. 106, fn. 6.

15. Ibid., p. 105.

16. I find no evidence for Winner's contention that Treplev's play is intended as a parody of early symbolist drama, and Winner adduces none; see ibid., p. 107.

17. Robert Louis Jackson, “The Seagull: The Empty Well, the Dry Lake, and the Cold Cave,” Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1967), p. 102.

18. All translations from The Seagull are my own; I have used the edition in A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 20 vols. (Moscow, 1944-1951), XI.

19. Winner, p. 103.

20. Ibid., p. 106.

21. All translations from Mozart and Salieri are my own; I have used the edition in A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Leningrad, 1937-1959), III.

22. Winner, p. 108.

23. Quoted in Francis Steegmuller, Maupassant: A Lion in the Path (New York, 1949), p. 63.

24. Arthur Ganz, “Arrivals and Departures: The Meaning of the Journey in the Major Plays of Chekhov,” Drama Survey, V, 1 (Spring 1966), 10.

25. Ibid., p. 11.

26. In response to the question, “Why do you always wear black?” (the first line in the play), Masha says, “Because I am in mourning for my life.” Chekhov thus establishes Masha's life-destroying tension in the opening seconds. In a play as tightly integrated as The Seagull, we should take the fact that Masha loves Treplev as an indication that she shares this tension.

27. Eliot, p. 14.

28. Ibid.

29. On Tolstoi, see “Notes on Spatial Form in Tolstoy,” The Sewanee Review, LXXVIII, 3 (July-September 1970), 513-530; and “The Function of Imagery in War and Peace,” Slavic Review, 29, 3 (September 1970), 460-480.

30. On Dostoevskii, see “Spatial Form as the Intrinsic Genre of Dostoyevsky's Novels,” forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies.

31. The first use of the nail image seems to occur in Turgenev's A Month in the Country. When Islaev, with whose wife Rakitin has a platonic love affair, begins to worry about the strange behavior of the two, he declares, “It is as though a nail were sunk in my head.”

32. See C. G. Jung, “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother,” in his Symbols of Transformation, trans. by R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1956), ch. vi, pp. 274-305.

33. In these remarks on Crime and Punishment, I am drawing on W. D. Snodgrass's brilliant article, “Crime for Punishment: The Tenor of Part One,” The Hudson Review, XIII, 2 (Summer 1960), 202-253. All translations from Crime and Punishment are my own; I have used the edition in F. M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1956-1958), V.