SOURCE: Katsell, Jerome H. “Chekhov's The Seagull and Maupassant's Sur l'eau.” In Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jean-Pierre Barricelli, pp. 18-33. New York: New York University Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, Katsell identifies the influence Guy de Maupassant had on Chekhov and draws parallels between The Seagull and Maupassant's travel sketch Sur l'eau.]

I

Chacun de nous, sentant le vide autour de lui, le vide insondable où s'agite son coeur, où se débat sa pensée, va comme un fou, les bras ouverts, les lèvres tendues, cherchant un être à étreindre. Et il étreint à droite, à gauche, au hasard, sans savoir, sand regarder, sans comprendre, pour n'être plus seul.¹

—Sur l'eau

From the viewpoint of genre and the reputations of the respective authors, one would not expect a Maupassant travel sketch and a major Chekhov play, the first of the great quartet of plays which brought him world recognition, to have much in common. True, the French author is mentioned in the first act of The Seagull when Konstantin invokes Maupassant's flight of disgust before the vulgarity of Eiffel's famous tower, this as part of his assertion of the necessity to turn away from dead artistic routine and to search for new aesthetic forms. True, the travel sketch Sur l'eau (1888), is named and quoted from in the opening scenes of the second act of Chekhov's play. At first glance, however, the connection between the two works might appear slight indeed. But it should be remembered that like his use of telling detail in his stories Chekhov's employment of literary allusions in his plays is integral to an overall appreciation of central thematic concerns. Thus, an understanding of Sur l'eau, its themes, and its philosophical ruminations may well be useful in further illuminating The Seagull.

Maupassant's series of travel sketches has, for the most part, been overlooked in the criticism of The Seagull. It is clear, of course, that the passage read by Arkadina in Act II from Sur l'eau comments ironically on the relationship between Trigorin and herself. It has been asserted, however, that there are many elements in the second, Cannes chapter of Sur l'eau “crucial to an understanding of The Seagull.”² The worship of rank, the superficial life of the idle rich in hotels, pessimism about human beings to the point of misanthropy—these are some of the elements in the second chapter of Sur l'eau. Many other features, some of them common to both works—the mysterious power of the moon is an example—function to the same purpose to “constantly puncture illusions, constantly remove the veneered cover of falsity to expose the deflated reality.”³

There is much, to be sure, in Chekhov and Maupassant that is predicated on the ironic gap between illusions and reality. But it is more important, I believe, to go to the texture, the ever repeated motifs and structures within Sur l'eau to capture the deeper levels shared by the two texts. Here we find a central concern in both works of the nature of art, the essence of the artistic personality, and beyond that a groping toward an understanding of the nature of freedom. Sur l'eau and especially The Seagull are not works of profound pessimism, although the former bristles with facile despair; they are, rather, works that center on oppositions such as pessimism-optimism, youth-age, capture-freedom, restriction-boundless space that have in common a concern for human potentialities. Many of the cadences and arguments throughout Sur l'eau may be seen to find echoes, perhaps reincarnations in the very texture of The Seagull. There are, without doubt, significant differences among the two works, and these will be pointed out.

Arkadina refuses to read further in Sur l'eau because the Maupassant text describes the actions of society women intent upon capturing and dominating a writer; “the rest is both uninteresting and false,” she asserts.⁴ The travel sketch then continues to render an account of how such a woman turns a writer into a mere social fixture of her drawing room.⁵ It would be well to remember that Dorn, in the presence of Arkadina and Masha, has been reading Maupassant's work before the beginning of the second act and that the content of Sur l'eau might in fact explain Arkadina's need to demand acknowledgment of her youthfulness, expressed through a display of insecure behavior. She asserts that she never thinks of death, does not look to the future, that she is stylish and careful, and always dressed and groomed, as she puts it, comme il faut.

When we turn to the passages Dorn, Masha, and Arkadina have in fact been reading in turn—they must have been at it for some time—we see that the Maupassant text concerns the dangers for a woman of society to become involved with a novelist. There is much about the novelist as described by Maupassant that reminds us of Trigorin, much that might put Arkadina on the defensive about the vulnerability of her position. Here is what Maupassant writes:

The poet has more delicate charm, the novelist often possesses more wit. But the novelist presents dangers not encountered in the poet—he preys upon, ruins and exploits everything that enters his field of vision. With him there is no tranquility, no assurance that he won't, one day, expose you quite nude [toute nue] in the pages of his book. His eye is like a pump that sucks in everything, like the hand of a thief always working away. Nothing escapes him; he ceaselessly amasses and gathers things; he remarks the movements, the gestures, the intentions, everything that occurs about him; he notices the least words, the smallest actions, the least little thing. From morning till night he stores these varied observations of which he creates salable stories, stories that make their way around the world, which will be read, discussed, and commented on by countless thousands of people. And the most terrible thing of all is that the wretch can't help executing striking portraits, unconsciously, in spite of himself, because he sees things clearly, and he must tell of what he sees.

(30-31)

The passage that Arkadina has been reading and listening to, in contrast to the main thrust of the passage read aloud onstage, concerns the power of the writer, his ability to destroy through the use of words, the sense of dominance over others that the novelist's sensitivity and perspicacity give him. She has noticed how Nina reacted to Trigorin—it is probably not the first time the female admiration Trigorin provokes has come to her attention—and now, perhaps, she gets her own back through Masha. The truth of her relationship with Trigorin contained in the passages subsequent to the one read onstage, the ones Arkadina wants to avoid, concerns the woman who, in Maupassant's opinion, neutralizes the writer by her wiles and social position. She draws him into her circle to be admired and shown off, but always under close scrutiny and guard; he becomes the caged literary lion.

If Arkadina does in fact see her portrait in the description of the society woman who must emasculate the novelist in order to control and dominate, it might well help us understand her relationship to Trigorin, and beyond that give us an insight into her relationship to art. Both relationships are intertwined with, and based on, fear. Trigorin must be kept docile, his art not allowed to go beyond his own characterization of it as “charming, talented,” but far below the level of a Tolstoy or a Zola. It might be noted parenthetically that Maupassant would neatly fit the description Trigorin applies to himself. This attitude on the part of Arkadina perhaps explains her indulgence of Trigorin's fishing as well as her casual attitude toward his books. She unwittingly allies herself with the middle if not the lowbrow in art, and by the end of the play we see her offering gossipy arty talk to Shamrayev.⁶

More important, Arkadina's fear of real art and forms she cannot understand plays into her relationship with Konstantin. There is more than an oedipal relationship here. In view of Arkadina's reaction to the Maupassant passage in the second act, we might reconsider her reaction to Konstantin's play in Act I. His claims to new artistic form in a play that deals with essences and ultimate states of being/nonbeing threaten Arkadina in the potential for power-as-artist that it might portend for Konstantin. She fears the power of potentially genuine art she does not understand in Konstantin. Thus, she rejects the description of the writer's lady who, Maupassant insists, is in danger of finding herself “toute nue” between the pages of a story. There is no indication within The Seagull, in fact, that Arkadina reads Trigorin. We know that she never reads a word of Konstantin's work after he begins to publish. Could it be that she fears an unflattering portrait of herself in Trigorin's fiction? All the while that she is not supportive of, or interested in, Trigorin's work, she is forcing her own bad art upon him. Not only does he have to put up with her flamboyant acting in some good but mostly second-rate plays—we do have the feeling that Konstantin is right about her level of acting—but he must also accept her bad melodramatic acting as real feeling in their personal relationship.⁷ Of course Trigorin has exchanged his loftier ambitions, those of which he speaks to Nina in the second act, for the comforts and social position his liaison with Arkadina afford. The adoption by Arkadina of a melodramatic role in her life is underscored by her hysterical wooing back of Trigorin in Act III, even to the point of her saying to herself, “Now he's mine!”

An important aspect of Maupassant's Sur l'eau concerns social conventions. The focus on travel and contact with the pure elemental forces of the ocean is part of an obsession with attempted escape from the charade of society, highlighted each time the narrator comes to port by devastating criticisms of social customs. Within these sketches, one of the most important oppositions is that between the naturalness of the ocean and the unnaturalness, the role playing, the acting at the heart of society. It is this moving backward and forward from the world of natural perfection to the world of human limitations and corruptions that represents a structural and thematic commonality between Sur l'eau and The Seagull. Nina embodies such naturalness, especially in contrast to Arkadina. Although she is naïve and impressionable, she is not afraid to seek after real people and real art. It might thus be deemed significant that she does find herself, to an extent, in Trigorin's books. That Trigorin's art, in spite of what Konstantin tells Sorin in the first act about its being “charming, talented, but …,” may be more than either the self-depreciating Trigorin or Konstantin claim is highlighted by the latter's admission of its superiority to his own efforts in Act IV. Trigorin initially responds to Nina, as to his own lost potential and to that part of him that is the genuine artist, which Nina unconsciously recognizes despite her lack of worldliness.

Sur l'eau begins with Maupassant's escape on the Bel Ami for a sailing trip along the Mediterranean coast. “What joy not to speak for fifteen whole days!” (15). It ends with the author's plunging back into society to meet a friend at Monte Carlo's gambling tables. In Sur l'eau land consistently represents imprisonment and the sea potential freedom. Thus, in the story of Paganini's death told by Maupassant, the great musical personality is scorned by the very society that had adored him above all mortals. He can find a resting place for a time only on a tiny island out to sea, Saint-Ferreol.

For Maupassant, it appears, society cannot be avoided, but ideally it should be.

Sur l'eau is saturated with images and accounts of imprisonment. There is reference, for example, to the Man in the Iron Mask, (also mentioned in The Seagull in Act IV when Trigorin pointedly notes that Petersburg and Moscow literary people consider Konstantin “mysterious, like the Iron Mask”), an account of a condemned man, a story about a couple secluded from society for decades in self-imposed exile because they are in love, locked into a dependence on each other that severely limits their possibilities. There are other images of imprisonment as well.

Maupassant concentrates on imprisonment that is socially engendered and his own general disgust with humanity. Chekhov, on the other hand, concentrates on the emotional imprisonment involved in relationships between people who have not developed independence. The tons of love in The Seagull do in fact exist. All the triangles in the play rest upon dependence, with the dependent person in an emotional prison, condemned to a life sentence: Konstantin, Masha, Polina, Trigorin, and even Arkadina fit into this category. There is partial escape into indifference, as displayed, for example, in Dorn's attitude to Polina or Konstantin's toward Masha. Nina, of all the characters in The Seagull, although she does not escape emotional dependence and involvement, goes beyond it.

Maupassant escapes from the claims of society to the open sea, to a primeval world that for him is both chaos and simultaneously an emblem of health. The essential element of this chaotic benevolence is the sea, itself at the mercy of the omnipotent wind. “What a personage the wind is for sailors! They speak of it as if of a man, of an all-powerful sovereign who is at times terrible and at times kindly” (16). The wind is both the energy that carries the ship and also the emblem of nature's potentially destructive forces. Like life itself, and like death, the wind represents a reality that must be faced and accepted as man comes to know his existence and function. “No enemy, no woman gives us so intense a sensation of combat, nor forces us to so much foresight, for it is the sea's master; we may avoid it, use it, or flee from it, but we can never subdue it” (17). In the last act of The Seagull it is just this master element with which Nina seems to have merged. The storm raging outside is the element from which she comes and to which she returns. Nina's lack of fear of the wind and rain outside is but one of the ways by which Chekhov indicates her independence and facing of life in all its manifestations. Other examples of this include her rejection of Konstantin's offer of dependent love and her declaration of her feelings for Trigorin, despite his total neglect of her.

Konstantin's play deals with the end of time, the end of change, the approach of absolute stasis. If Nina appears to represent the real possibility of change as she battles through chaos, disruption, time's passage, and personal loss, the other characters in The Seagull embody only lack of change. Act IV of Chekhov's play is designed to show that in fact nothing changes. We are teased with Konstantin's putative success as a new writer, but soon it is obvious that all the relationships of the central characters are a spinning of wheels into the same, deeper ruts. Even Konstantin's suicide is a repeat performance; we assume a “success.” Although Maupassant does not portray any of the inner struggle to overcome routine, but rather the disgust of his narrator at the lack of creativity and expansiveness in man, in Sur l'eau he is strikingly in accord with the underlying currents of Chekhov's drama. “Happy are those who do not perceive with immense disgust that nothing changes, nothing passes and that all remains the same” (41).

Although the fin de siècle elements of Weltschmertz, sentimental pessimism, misogyny, and misanthropy found in Sur l'eau are foreign to Chekhov, The Seagull shares with it the presentation of attempted escape from mature and responsible life through vanity, superficiality, loneliness, emotional dependence, and the dead routine of bureaucratic work. For Chekhov, harmony and reconciliation can come, if ever, through hard work and the transcendence of art. For Maupassant, the question of art does indeed surface many times in Sur l'eau, in the important second chapter and elsewhere. It is connected for Maupassant, like Chekhov, with man's loneliness and isolation and his inability to overcome. “Console yourself, they say, in the love of science and the arts” (42). Reconciliation for Maupassant is never possible, because man cannot be released from the self within which he is enchained. It is, therefore, possible to read The Seagull as Chekhov's answer to the world weariness of Sur l'eau, where the artist flees from the ordinary world to get close to the basic elements of sea and wind in order to create the journal we have in front of us. “But isn't it perfectly clear that we are always locked up within ourselves, without being able to come out, condemned to drag along the chains of our hopeless dream” (42).

We have now come to a basic difference of approach between Chekhov and Maupassant. In The Seagull we are presented with a series of life failures, failure in the deepest needs for love and recognition in virtually all of the characters; the striving to change this situation, especially through art, must be seen as the central problematic about which the play revolves. In Sur l'eau, conversely, the possibility of a breakthrough, either from science or art, is seen as the grossest of illusions. Maupassant's travel sketch consists in fact of a series of sorties back and forth from the sea to the shore, from the empty posturing and ineffectual contortions of society to the silence, peace, beauty, and truth of the ever changing and ever unchanged sea. Man can escape neither himself nor the incredible emptiness within Maupassant's world view. After a short rumination on the failure of science to solve fundamental questions there follows perhaps the most devastating sentence in Sur l'eau: “We know nothing, we see nothing, we can do nothing, we divine nothing, we imagine nothing, we are shut up in ourselves, imprisoned in ourselves” (43).

This imprisonment of the individual within the self of which Maupassant writes so passionately prevents communication with the other. In Sur l'eau the narrative stance is that of the individual who may be excellent at passing pleasantries with his fellows—Maupassant has a longish encomium to the genius of the French nation in making the ordinary in life into something stylish and pleasant, of turning history itself, through the use of well-placed words and phrases, into an elegant diversion—but who is essentially cut off and alone.⁸ Chekhov's characters are known to be caught within themselves, too, and are typically subject to the pains of mutual incomprehension. The fundamental difference between Chekhov and Maupassant in this regard is that Chekhov will not give up the idea that man is capable of change, despite his nature.

II

Personne, jamais, n'appartient à personne. On se prête, malgré soi, à ce jeu coquet ou passionné de la possession, mais on ne se donne jamais. L'homme, exaspéré par ce besoin d'être le maître de quelqu'un, a institué la tyrannie, l'esclavage et le mariage. Il peut tuer, torturer, emprisonner, mais la volonté humaine lui échappe toujours, même quand elle a consenti quelques instants à se soumettre.

—Sur l'eau

Maupassant does indeed show the other side of the coin as well. The individual's isolation, his inescapable destiny, can be a source of strength if not salvation. The human will is capable of getting around institutions and superstitions based on fear. Built into the individual, along with all that is negative and self-destructive, is the will to fulfill a brighter and more harmonious existence. There is a touching story in the seventh, penultimate chapter of Sur l'eau about a young woman who runs away with a young officer below her social rank from a regiment commanded by her father. For thirty years the couple live in isolation far from the mainstreams of society. The man, it eventually turns out, has been keeping a mistress from a nearby village the whole time. His bride, by now an old lady, throws herself from a bedroom window in despair. The human will can cut many ways. It can lead to great happiness, to despair, and even to death. Its function here appears to be the maintaining of the individual's integrity, whatever the cost. One might even see in Maupassant's depiction of a woman's suicide from lost love a parallel with the fate of Konstantin in The Seagull.

The impossibility of submitting to something less than the destiny conceived for the individual by the will is central to virtually all the characters in The Seagull. Sorin, for example, despite his age, his dozing, and his infirmity, despite his nearly thirty years in a job to which he was indifferent, despite the dosing of valerian drops given him by Dorn, is still searching for the free life of the artist and lover in the exciting city. He identifies with Konstantin's youthful romantic struggle to become the great artist; he has an eye for feminine beauty and even has self-insight. So, in spite of physical decrepitude and the pincers of senility, Sorin's very human will to harmony, independence, and creativity still struggles on. There is even a rearguard action, hopeless as it is, against the outrages of Shamrayev, that embodiment of blunt voracious vulgarity.

This ineluctable thrust of the will is evident in other characters in The Seagull. Masha's identification with the creative triumph so poorly actualized by Konstantin stays with her despite all her efforts to “tear it out by the roots.” Arkadina, too, wills herself to be a great actress. She has no clear idea of what a great actress should be, but she knows what the popular conception of a great actress is and goes after that. Trigorin is the kind of man that a great actress should have for a lover and so she has him. Her will is directed to fulfilling a highly visible role. Shamrayev is her true audience. We come to know this during the course of the play and the fourth act confirms what we are deeply aware of by the end of Act III. Will is also involved in the actions of Polina and Medvedenko; and even Dorn, satisfied as he is, throws away his last savings on a trip abroad.

Maupassant's statement beginning the epigraph at the start of this section that “no one, ever, belongs to another,” is certainly borne out in The Seagull. The will of one individual can involve the suppression of others, and it is true that all love is spurned in The Seagull because the object of love has a will demanding something else. Masha rejects Medvedenko; Konstantin, Masha; Nina, Konstantin; Trigorin, Nina; and so on. Maupassant has hit upon something in his statement that was not news to Chekhov but that, given the striking thematic parallels in The Seagull and Sur l'eau, may have reinforced an important element in the play.

Will exercised presumes subordination of others and the relationship of belonging. Here power and money play an important role. In this sense Nina belongs to her father, who, ironically, has set her on to the road to freedom by disinheriting her. Konstantin is given the same treatment by Arkadina but reacts in an entirely different way. In fact, this role of money and other social conventions that fix individuals in relationships of superiority and inferiority is prominently displayed in Sur l'eau and The Seagull. Even though no one may own the other, Chekhov knows that the will, even though it struggles on to express its higher needs of love and integration, can be buried by the nets of social necessity.

Independence is an attribute that is a given to nature. Society corrupts or blocks off man from his elemental merging with nature. For Maupassant in Sur l'eau there is only temporary respite from the relentless destruction to man caused by human society, and it is to be found in the virtual isolation—Maupassant is of course well tended by a pair of capable sailors who see to his needs—of the sea. For Chekhov the picture is somewhat different. The isolation of the individual is there, the will to independence as well, but not the misanthropy, the revulsion, and the turning away from the frivolous and inane in society. The paradox in The Seagull is that true humanity and independence can be found by the individual only through and for the human community with all its grotesque perversions and gaucheries. This is perhaps illustrated by Dorn, who cherishes the tumult and dense humanity of the Italian crowd above all his memories of a recent trip to Western Europe. It is also Dorn, the best obstetrician for miles around, who has worked hard all his adult life for the general good of the community. It is a saving grace in the instance of Trigorin that he realizes as a writer, “I'm also a citizen. I love my country, my people. And I feel that if I am a writer, I must speak of the people, of their sufferings, of their future” (30).

The community is at the center in The Seagull. The problem of self-actualization is shared by all, and the triangular nets of love that bind virtually all the characters underscore this fact. The central problematic, finally, in all of Chekhov's work regardless of genre, is to find a way of merging the individually attained victories of wholeness and independence into a stronger and more cohesive community. Without the support of the community the individual withers. And here we may have come upon a key to the overexaggerated devastation experienced by Konstantin when his play proves a failure in the first act. He has been slighted by his mother, whom he had wanted to impress not only with the fact that he has talent but by the fact that he is grown up, but he has also been a failure in front of the entire community surrounding the country estate of his uncle Sorin—Dorn, the doctor and friend of many years; Nina, the girl he loves, a famous writer, Trigorin; and even the servants and estate stewards, the Shamrayevs.

The content of Konstantin's play is also a measure of his alienation from the community and its central striving. His play within the play in The Seagull is set at the very end of time when the possibility of community no longer exists, when the human spirit is subjected to the most absolute of all possible isolations. The setting of Konstantin's play could be rivaled in its depiction of the deadened waste of the world's end only by Chekhov's contemporary, H. G. Wells, in his description of time's last phase in The Time Machine. Wells's novel was published in 1895, the year in which Chekhov wrote The Seagull. Of course, Konstantin's play expresses not only his despair and underlying alienation from those around him but also his need for love. The human spirit still somehow does live in the fruitless dead world he presents, and it takes on the devil himself.

Such a primitive cry of despair and the need for love comes close to escaping the lips of Maupassant. On one of his forays back onshore from the Bel Ami, he notices a pair of lovers in a pine forest. He feels sad and happy at once. Later he sees them again at an inn, from the distance and in profile. “Then I was overcome with my loneliness, and in the mildness of that spring night, at the soft sound of the waves on the sand, under the slender crescent moon tumbling its light into the sea, I experienced in my heart such an intense desire to love, that I nearly cried out in my distress of longing” (69). In many ways Maupassant's Sur l'eau presents an artist unhappy with himself and disgusted with society, wandering around without fixed destination for himself or for his art. Could Chekhov, to some extent, have found here a portrait of one of the possible variants of the artistic personality, a Trigorin, or even a Konstantin? One may only speculate, but the possibility is intriguing.

The difference between Konstantin and Trigorin, however, goes beyond the question of forms. Trigorin might in fact depend on well-established techniques, and Konstantin might on the surface be fiddling with new devices. But the important difference is that Trigorin, no matter how unsuccessfully, directs his work toward an attempt to understand the community and the group personality of which it is ultimately made. His failure to achieve greatness as a writer lies in the fact that he does not possess the energy and drive, the will, to dig for the complexity of human relationships and processes that he knows are at the heart of the matter of art. In this sense he could be very much like the writer Chekhov understood Maupassant to be. If so, this would add yet another layer of interest to the fact of Arkadina's reading Maupassant and her rejection of his importance. One has a feeling that Arkadina does not respect Trigorin as a writer, and therefore as a person, either.

Arkadina's lack of respect for Trigorin on several levels is a reflection of the basic instability of their relationship. One of the outward manifestations of this instability is the fact that they have no permanent place of residence. They live in hotels. They are perpetual tourists. The possibility of getting involved in the local community does not exist for them. Their lives are based on their selfish and individual needs. This lack of permanence goes some way to explain and illustrate the kinds of relationships they do have. Arkadina, distanced from her brother and son, and Trigorin, lover for nothing better to do and professional colleague because he knows of nothing else to do. Well, going fishing perhaps.

In Sur l'eau hotels and the life of the tourist is most strongly associated with the sense of death and dying, with the idea of life wasted. Maupassant speaks of the tubercular patients who come to the south of France for treatment and describes the region as “this charming and fearful country, this antechamber of Death” (34). The thrust of his remarks about the frivolous life of tourists in hotels is that it represents a mere sprinkling of perfume over the stench of death, the ultimate reality of human life. In this attitude he is astonishingly close to the subject matter and tone of Ivan Bunin's story, “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” “A coffin is never seen in the streets, never the funeral draperies, never are heard the funereal tollings. Yesterday's thin sunken walker no longer passes below your window, and voilà, that's all. If you are surprised to no longer see him and make inquiries, the headwaiter and all the servants will tell you with a smile that he is much better and on his doctor's advise has set out for Italy. In effect, in every hotel Death has its secret stairwell, its confidants, and its accomplices” (36).

We know about Arkadina's and Trigorin's unstable life and their poor relationships between themselves and with others. We know that Konstantin, in effect, accuses them both of being dead, of their art being dead. Arkadina and Trigorin poison the devotion and enthusiasm of youth. Their unstable life is in fact exactly that which Nina must adopt. It is a measure of her strength and courage just how independent and clear thinking she has become by the fourth act. She is living in hotels, leading the life of the single actress, uncared for, pawed by the local intelligentsia—surrounded, in Maupassant's terms, by empty, dead people and by death itself. And yet she survives and goes on, it appears from her last meeting with Konstantin, to triumph and achievement.

We must ask the question why Nina, seemingly so naïve and vulnerable, is the one person from all the principals in The Seagull who makes an inner success of her life. Chekhov gives us, at least in outline, the reasons why Nina can succeed, to the extent that people in his world view can ever succeed, in overcoming the impediments to fulfillment. In her early life her mother died. This is her first confrontation with death and sets her on an elemental and childish search for a world of harmony. Her search involves the lake to which she ascribes miraculous powers. She is rejected by her father and stepmother both materially and spiritually. Nina has learned at an early age to overcome that which is negative within herself and to cherish the harmonious and the possibilities for human transcendence. She recognizes that some if not most people lead, as she tells Trigorin in the second act, “dreary, miserable, inconspicuous lives, everyone just like everyone else, and all terribly unhappy” (28). She recognizes in Trigorin's work, however—and this is just what both Konstantin and Arkadina miss because they are mediocre artists—those elements portending artistic excellence that go beyond his own depression and acceptance of himself as less than he could or would have liked to become.

It is Nina's confrontation with death and rejection of it that has formed her character. She wants to seize life in all its aspects, including the negative, and triumph over it. Thus she leaves behind all the material support she has ever had, her father's estate and its beautiful natural surroundings, especially the lake. She goes beyond the deadness in those she knows, recognizing it and overcoming. It is remarkable in Act I when Konstantin asks her if she is nervous about her debut in acting, and in front of a famous actress, too, that Nina replies she is not afraid of Arkadina. She is close to and cheers Sorin, recognizing his humanity and search for harmony in art, no matter how weak and hopeless. She is able to stand up to all that is dead in her environment, a struggling actress without recognition. For Nina even Yelets with its vulgarity and provincial dullness possesses that spark of artistic harmony that she recognizes to be central to all human personality.

Nina's surname is no coincidence either. Beyond the river, Zarechnaya, refers to water, the traditional symbol for life at its essence, and beyond the river the sea to which it flows. Perhaps it is after all the tidal ebb and flow of the primeval sea in all its vastness which connects at the deepest level Sur l'eau and The Seagull. Chekhov believed in the power of redemption it symbolizes; he believed in man. Maupassant is another story. “Oh, how I would sometimes like not to think, not to feel, how I would like to live like a brute in a warm and bright-clear country, in a golden-yellow country, without our crude and brutal tones of verdure, in a country of the Orient where I could sleep without sadness, where I could awaken without care or regret, where restlessness is without anxiety, where there is no anguish in love, and where existence is not a burden” (92).

We have seen that a wealth of thematic strains is held in common by The Seagull and Sur l'eau. The universal symbol of water as a life giver and sustainer is deeply present in both works. For Maupassant, there existed a much greater pessimism about the possibilities for human action in the face of the implacable fact of death and decay. When a storm occurs on the ocean all the possibilities the sea holds out to man for peace and serenity are dashed in an instant. In this he is as much a follower of Schopenhauer as of his older Russian contemporary, Turgenev. The will of nature as a unified and total force is uncalculably beyond the power and ken of man, and—here is the point shared by Maupassant with the German philosopher—totally indifferent to human existence and fate. In The Seagull, Konstantin, in his play, comes closest to this world view of Schopenhauer in which human will is a microcosm of nature that is seen as a series of arbitrary processes not subject to rational apprehension.

Konstantin's foil is, of course, Nina. She accepts the raging storm and goes beyond it. She accepts the chaotic form of nature and yet believes in something within man that can go beyond the given, something that speaks of the possibility and the potential for human integration, harmony, and inner achievement. It is no accident that she quotes these lines from Turgenev: “Happy is he who on a night like this has a roof over his head, a warm corner” (57). She feels her loneliness deeply; she feels the destructive power of deceit and treachery in personal relationships. But yet she proceeds steadily to develop inner confidence. Her weapons are an honest facing of her feelings, her hurts and her desires, and a memory that goes beyond the negative to the potential in herself and others. Thus she is able to quote from memory from Konstantin's play. Trigorin, a failed artist, within several lines of Nina's quotation from Konstantin's play, states his “I can't remember” (55). Memory is used as one of the main tools by Nina to build a structure of dedication and inner resistance to breakdown in the present; it is the essential tool of the real artist and goes beyond, for example, Konstantin's merely formal innovations. The central role of memory, positive memory, from which the artistic personality builds itself from within is a very strong element in The Seagull. Its importance here and elsewhere in Chekhov may explain why Nabokov was such a great admirer of Chekhov. Memory plays a similar role for him.

I believe the foregoing speculations have shown that Sur l'eau was a reference point for Chekhov in The Seagull that goes far beyond the ironic light shed on the Trigorin-Arkadina relationship in the one quote taken from it in the second act of the play. Maupassant's travel sketch represents a rumination on the role of nature in human life. It ultimately rejects society and the possibility of human harmony with nature. It is a guide to Maupassant's extreme, and often facile, pessimism and misanthropic despair. Maupassant knows what it takes to make a great artist. His real lack of inner confidence and belief in man was his downfall. Chekhov had that confidence and belief in spite of all Russia's primitive woes and injustices. To quote Maupassant: “He has seen all, noticed all, retained all, in spite of himself, because he is above all a man of letters” (81).

Notes

1. Guy de Maupassant, Oeuvres complètes de Guy de Maupassant, (Paris: Louis Conrad, 1908), XXII, 128. This edition of Maupassant's works is used throughout, and all page references herein apply to it. The Russian original of The Seagull (Chayka) consulted for this essay appears in A. P. Chekhov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, [N. F. Bel'chikov, chief editor], (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), XIII, 3-60. Translations from Russian and French are my own.

2. Ellen Chances, “Chekhov's Seagull: Ethereal Creature or Stuffed Bird?” in Paul Debreczeny and Thomas Eekman, eds., Chekhov's Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays, (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1977), esp., p. 32.

3. Ibid., p. 33.

4. Simon Karlinsky believes that this statement by Arkadina expresses Chekhov's opinion of Maupassant's artistic merit. This is an interesting speculation, although Chekhov may here just as well have been masking the many points of connection between the two works. See Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected letters and Commentary (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 282.

5. Sur l'eau, p. 31. It should be noted that Maupassant uses l'homme de lettres as a generic term for the “writer,” and distinguishes between le poète and le romancier. The Russian translation used by Chekhov, the work of M. N. Timofeyeva, has romanist, which signals specifically a novelist as does the second French term.

6. Chekhov underlines the superficiality and lack of true artistic stature characteristic of Arkadina throughout The Seagull. One of her last statements in the play is typical of her self-centered personality. “We shall play [cards] and drink,” p. 60.

7. An important irony that gives the lie to Arkadina's pretensions to artistic superiority and her disdainful attitude toward Konstantin's passion for new forms lies in the fact that Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux camélias in which she apparently acted frequently was a play that broke extremely important ground in terms of form and content, away from the well-made play of Scribe and his imitators. In its subordination of plot to the psychological investigation of a young woman struggling to find herself in difficult social circumstances, La Dame aux camélias intriguingly suggests a basic situation in The Seagull. Nina's profession of actress carried in Russia some of the connotations that Marguerite's role of prostitute did in France.

8. Sur l'eau, pp. 138-46.