SOURCE: Reid, John. “Matter and Spirit in The Seagull.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 607-22.

[In the following essay, Reid discusses the nature of the symbolism Chekhov used in The Seagull and the influence of the mystic Vladimir Solovyov on the author.]

Our time must be defined by two opposing features—it is a time of extreme materialism and, at the same time, of the most passionate idealistic outbursts of spirit. We are present at a great, significant struggle of two views of life, two diametrically opposed world views.

—Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1892)¹

[T]he materialistic movement is not a school or tendency in the narrow journalistic sense; it is not something passing or accidental; it is necessary, inevitable and beyond the power of man. … Outside matter there is neither knowledge nor experience, and consequently there is no truth.

—Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889.²

It's difficult to act in your play. There are no real living characters.³

At the end of the most recent National Theatre production of The Seagull (1994) in London, the lights faded to leave a single spot tightly focussed on the outspread wings of a disconcertingly large, yet elegant, stuffed seagull.⁴ It was clear that, for the sake of theatrical closure, a symbol had landed. But the audience seemed distinctly unclear about how to react. It was embarrassed by the director's assumption that it could do something with this object, make it mean more, rescue it from a state of semiotic aporia. It was a fine specimen of something from within the bird family, but it might as well have been an albatross. It was a theatrical false note of deafening corniness, and yet it epitomized a much deeper, common failure in recent professional productions of the play.

Too many directors seem to be unwilling to recognize the strength of Chekhov's rejection of the ideological baggage of symbolism and the equally uncompromising nature of his materialism. It seems to be a timely moment to challenge the facile assumption that invariably links Chekhov with symbolist methods. Even in the refreshingly astringent 1990 RSC production, Terry Hands clearly assumed that directing The Seagull involved him in the process of realizing symbolic statements.⁵ When directors get bored with traditional symbolic interpretations, they often feel obliged to exercise their directorial privilege and choose their own symbol. Hands decided that Trepliov's little makeshift theatre, not the seagull, is the main symbol in the play. Cynics may have felt that the apron staging at the Swan in Stratford, hosting a sizeable clump of backstage birch trees, meant that the “symbol” itself had weighed heavily in this artistic decision. Trepliov's rustic theatre remained visible among the birches throughout the production. (This was a symbol on a minimal theatrical contract—just be there.) When interviewed about the production, Hands offered a thematic justification for his choice of symbol by claiming that The Seagull is a play about play-making. No embarrassing questions were put to him about how theme and symbol might ever surface, or interconnect, in the theatregoer's mind. Like most directors of Chekhov, Hands seemed to assume that if there was a symbol around, the whole thing would hang together.⁶

With respect to the “seagull” as a symbol, there is nothing new about an interpretation that draws attention to Chekhov's ironic treatment. But there is a case to be made about the play as a whole and the extent to which its ironic structure draws its strength from the depth and subtlety of Chekhov's materialist vision. In the reading of the play that follows, I have deliberately set out to underline the degree to which the force of the play resides in its sceptical dismantling of symbolist rhetoric and idealist preoccupations—replacing bloodless abstractions with “living characters.”

The most obvious clue to Chekhov's ironic design makes itself felt through the reversals and inversions associated with Trepliov's aborted playlet. When, in Act Four, Nina repeats the opening lines of Konstantin's youthful symbolist drama, the audience should experience these lines in an entirely different manner than in Act One. Most modern actresses follow the lead of Komissarzhevskaya in showing Nina as someone who has won through, who has faith in her work, and who aspires to be a great actress. Trepliov's comments warn us of her limitations—she was good at stage-deaths and isolated cries (171) hardly the stuff of greatness. But she is an actress. For a moment, we should glimpse that “real actress” (181): it should be a compelling performance. For behind the performance is a “living character” and the pain of her personal experience. Suddenly, the self-pitying, plaintive monotony of Trepliov's threnody takes on new life, new force, new dignity. Instead of the symbolist abstractions of “life […] as we see it in our dreams” (126), the stilted repetitions and simplistic imagery are charged with the complex particularities of one woman's experience.⁷ Some critics suggest that Nina becomes the “world-soul” of Trepliov's play (129, 170), but this would seem to undo the subtle reversal that Chekhov has “materialized.” She is not a symbol.

If The Seagull had an entirely conventional structure, Nina's speech would be the climax of the play. This would allow directors to take a Stanislavskian approach to the play where their “superobjective” would be “to transform Trepliov's symbolist drama into a naturalist drama.” But even then, the beauty of the play is that it is the cumulative weight of the whole action (not just Nina's individual experience) that informs this complex process of theatrical metamorphosis. At the end of Act Four, Trepliov's own words spookily echo the lovelessness and lifelessness that shaped his symbolist beginnings:

I am lonely. I've no one's love to warm me, I feel as cold as if I were in a cellar and everything I write turns out lifeless and bitter and gloomy.

(180)

If Trepliov's account of his emotional state is given due weight, the verbal echoes of his symbolist drama now disclose the voice of a “real,” “living character.” The whole dramatic texture depends upon a range of closely knit echoes, motifs, and images whose potential for ironic disclosure gathers momentum as the play goes on. This process of disclosure is dynamic. In this instance, Trepliov's words do not simply detonate the proleptic ironies hidden in his playlet, but also lead the audience to make links with the present: this self-diagnosis has a bearing upon the aesthetic sterility of his stories, which are currently under attack by the critics. Trigorin's diagnosis echoes Nina's earlier judgement of the play: “There's something strange and vague about his writing, at times it even suggests the ravings of a sick man. And not a single living character!” (175). By the end of The Seagull, a whole series of echoes and impressions have subtly modulated into a different key. The argument of the play insists that where the ideal was, there the real shall be. From this “materialist” perspective, only a calculated irony could have guided Chekhov's choice of title.

At the risk of betraying the gentle subversiveness of Chekhov's art, I want to argue that directors would be best advised to view the whole play as working towards the rejection of the “seagull” as a symbol. Whether the “seagull” is associated with Trepliov's inarticulate, emotional blackmail, or the facile cynicism of Trigorin's “idea […] for a short story” (151), or Nina's fatalistic spectre of self-failure, or the stuffed specimen itself—the symbolic possibilities are invariably undercut or stillborn. Critics who should know better tend to see this as a mark of failure on the part of the playwrights and persist in treating the play as if it were The Wild Duck or a poor relation of The Cherry Orchard. But in this case, the “seagull” has no organic cohesiveness as a symbol; it cannot offer an all-inclusive symbolism that embraces the whole action. If it is a symbol of anything, then, paradoxically, it must be as a symbol of the failure of symbolism. Within the play, the process of symbol-making is exposed to varying degrees of irony, which ensures that it remains anchored within a comic perspective. It seems to me that directors would recover a more lively sense of the play's comic potential if they took full cognizance of the anti-idealist, anti-symbolist resonances that define that perspective.⁸

Allusions to an idealist plane of discourse about the “soul” prove to be an important clue for the latter comic perspective. Before mid-nineteenth century, various sections of the Russian intelligentsia had relied upon Schelling's Naturphilosophie to express their idealistic emphasis on the “soul.” In the final decades of the century, it was Vladimir Solovyov, poet, philosopher, and mystic, whose spiritualism found favour in intellectual circles nourished by such idealist traditions. Solovyov's mystical notions about art and love provide one of the most important contexts for such discourse in the play. The down-to-earth unhappiness and incompatibility of Masha and Medviedenko is quickly realized at the play's opening. But Medviedenko, with typical leaden earnestness, is keen to show his awareness of the high-flown, syzygetic possibilities available to modern lovers:

Yes. Zaryechnaia is going to act, and the play is by Konstantin Gavrilovich. They are in love with one another, and to-day their souls will be merged in an attempt to create a single work of art. But your soul and mine have no points of contact.

(119-20)

Chekhov's comedy has a bias, and the comic bathos suggests that it is a materialist one. Aesthetic consummations, and mergings of souls, are not possible in this comic world. Even the famous, theatrical self-posturing of Masha's opening line—“I am in mourning for my life. I'm unhappy” (119) gains in comic depth if its gloomy soulfulness is felt to betray its symbolist affinities. The first line can alert the audience to the possibility of the bad faith of self-consciously making symbols of this kind; the second reveals the Masha who struggles (fitfully) to be realistic about her situation. Taken together, Masha's two lines could readily pass as a laconic precis of Trepliov's symbolist monologue. If it were possible, in terms of speech act theory, to hazard a guess at the “force” of this play in its period, surely it is designed to subvert the life-denying idealism of the emerging symbolist movement. For critics who take Chekhov's materialism seriously, it seems likely that Trepliov's symbolist experiment should be read as an amusing parody of the mystical ideals of Solovyov's followers.⁹

Solovyov was the spiritual father of Russian Symbolism. Although Solovyov claimed that the life of the spirit was just as amenable to materialist explanation as matter itself, his claims were supported by little more than pseudo-science. Medviedenko is anxious to prove that he's just as au fait as his rival with these conflicting perspectives: “There's no ground for making a distinction between spirit and matter, because spirit might consist of a combination of material atoms” (132). Unlike Dr. Dorn, Solovyov was a visionary who claimed to have directly encountered the Father of Eternal Matter. His visionary rhetoric insisted that the souls of all living beings would merge in the World Soul, which is defined as “a living being, the first of all living beings, materia prima, and the true substratum of our created world.”¹⁰

Solovyov's mystical, lyric poetry was addressed to a lake—a lake that made incarnate the feminine spirit of the World Soul. (The lake at sunset is central to Trepliov's symbolist incantation.) In Solovyov's lake (Lake Saimo in Finland), the contending waves mirror the ceaseless, dualistic striving of the World Soul. This dualistic vision is perfectly captured in “On Saimo in Winter” (1894), where the World Soul becomes the “radiant daughter of sombre chaos.”¹¹ Solovyov had his first, visionary trysts with the Eternal Feminine in that half-world of neither here nor there, a misty night. Subsequent appearances established the period from sunset to sunrise as the period most conducive to ecstatic visions: for Solovyov, a day-time meeting with the Eternal Feminine was unthinkable. In later editions of his “lake” poetry (c. 1900), Solovyov was forced to take issue with critics who had crudely suggested that the “spirit” of these mystical visions could be interpreted as possessing wholly secular, erotic overtones.¹² It may not be without significance in Chekhov's ironic appropriation of Solovyov's mystical scheme that the World Soul is a feminine principle: “the potential and future Mother of the world, existing outside God, corresponding, as an ideal complement, to the eternally actual Father in the Godhead.”¹³ Certainly, the warring abstractions of Trepliov's idealist conflict make a rapid descent to an entirely “material” level of conflict in the form of his formidable mother.¹⁴

Solovyov's mystical cult of Sophia underpins his idealist conceptions of love and art, which influenced so many Russian artists and poets at the end of the century. Throughout his mystical poems, Solovyov conjures up an intriguingly iconic vision of the Eternal Wisdom: the poet is drawn to the hypnotic, attractive eyes of Sophia's ever-radiant visage that gleam through the mist over the lake or through the gloom at sunset. These magnetic eyes can be skyblue or emerald, and they dominate the lake-scape with visionary intensity.¹⁵ In Trepliov's lurid, symbolist melodrama, he seems to have taken the synecdochical propensities of the visionary artist to new limits: only the red eyes of Eternal Matter appear, as red spots across the lake. But, like Soloyvov, Trepliov looks forward to a distant future when matter and spirit will merge in a kingdom of universal harmony.

In his essay The Meaning of Love (1892-94), Solovyov claimed that it is only on rare occasions when human love attains the heights of spiritual and physical merging that we are allowed a glimpse of that ultimate syzygy whose consummation will bring about complete oneness with God. At the present moment, while all existence is striving towards the realization of this oneness, only a few superior persons can expect to experience such intimations of complete, mystical union. From the sublimated heights of this otherworldly eroticism, the course of human love throughout the centuries is a glum epic of drudgery and transitory joys: “For the majority of humanity life is only a succession of wearisome mechanical labours and coarse sensuous satisfactions which numb consciousness” (66). Since the processes of spiritual regeneration are dependent upon those mystical moments of fully achieved love, the spiritual elite could hardly expect to make much impact upon their realization. But Solovyov is undaunted by “the nonrealisation of love, in the course of the comparatively few thousands of years experienced by historical humanity” (54) because his vision of its realization belongs within a vast evolutionary time-scale.¹⁶

The Seagull can be seen as Chekhov's wry comment on this kind of popular love mysticism, drawing attention to the pathological effects of this idealist cult. So many characters behave as if love were, in Trigorin's words, “the only thing that can bring happiness on this earth” (161). At the structural level, the human carousel of unrequited lover pursuing unrequited lover is designed to point up the wastage and futility of such idealism. Trepliov idealizes Nina; she is a vision that he worships. From the moment that he greets her as his “enchanting being,” his “dream,” the audience begins to link his aesthetic idealism and his emotional immaturity (124). The comic incongruity between Medviedenko's idealist gloss and the awkward realities of the young people's actual relationship forms part of a broader critique of idealist notions of love.

In the first exchange between Polena and Dorn, in Act One, the doctor makes light of his flirtatious enthusiasm for Arkadina's company, dismissing it as a harmless “sort of idealism.” In his efforts to offer Polena an objective account of the “idealis[tic]” feelings of women patients who have fallen for him in the past, Dorn points to the real facts that shaped such feelings: his medical and obstetric skills, and his honesty as a professional man (127). Dorn's perspective is as partial as any other, but it is part of the comedy's unsentimental view of love. Whether “love” is refracted through Masha's masochism, Trigorin's compensatory yearning for a “pure soul” (160), or Trepliov's motherlessness—the motives for “love” are not spiritual, or mystical, but human. With almost Feuerbachian irony of understanding, and tenderness, Chekhov persuades us to see that every form of idealism has its roots in human need.¹⁷

Solovyov had an unshakable faith in the reality of the spiritual order, and, within that order, art is man's highest metaphysical activity: it is a theurgy that ensures the transformation of psychical life into its spiritual counterpart. Marc Slonim, quoting Solovyov, points out his tendency to treat symbols as if they were literally real: “Symbols are not an illusion but reality itself.”¹⁸ Trepliov's dead seagull seems to belong within the same (dubious) idealist mode of thinking about art and symbolism. Solovyov assumed that art was a ladder stretching from earth to heaven and the only means of becoming one with ultimate reality—the world soul. This spiritualist exaltation of the creative act was probably the most influential aspect of Solovyov's thought for the Russian symbolists.

When Medviedenko talks of Nina's and Konstantin's “souls […] be[ing] merged in an attempt to create a single work of art” (119), such idealist conceptions belong within that mystical universe of discourse associated with Solovyov's religion of art.¹⁹ Dorn's efforts to encourage Trepliov, at the end of Act One, lead him to claim, “if it had ever been my lot to experience the exaltation [of artistic creation], I should have come to despise this material body of mine and all that goes with it, and my soul would have taken wings and soared into the heights” (136). At the end of Act Two, Nina expresses an equally exalted image of the artist soaring, goddess-like, above ordinary people and ordinary life: “I should give my whole life to the ordinary people, realizing at the same time that their happiness lay in striving to rise to my level and then they'd have harnessed themselves to my chariot” (150).

These speeches capture the way in which the symbolist aesthetic exalted the artist as spiritual guide and vanguard of the people. One of the paradoxes of the whole movement was that as it developed, its claims about the spiritual renewal of national culture could not be reconciled with its individualism, its subjectivism, its cult of the solitary visionary. As James West points out, “All the symbolists were acutely aware of the barriers separating ‘the poet’ from ‘the crowd.’”²⁰ Nina is not a symbolist, but her idealist conception of art partakes of that vulgarity of exclusiveness that denies the humanity of art. She never loses her snobbish view of the public, and Chekhov does not let us lose sight of this damaging limitation in her as an artist. In Trepliov's play, the poet claims to be the “common soul of the world” (129), but what the play actually expresses is chronic loneliness, an inferiority complex, and fear of life.²¹

Trepliov seems to have used Maeterlinck's ludicrous, symbolist stagecraft as a way of giving dramatic form to Solovyov's cosmic dualism. The crudity of his attempt unwittingly exposes the banality of this high-minded metaphysical melodrama as much as it reveals the inadequacies of the playwright. The grandiose claims of the solitary voice that dominates Trepliov's playlet are undercut by language that points up the naivety and infantilism of the speaker. But these claims are identical with Solovyov's claims. There are further allusions that make it clear, I think, that Solovyov was the target of Chekhov's parody.

One of the ways in which a parodic effect is achieved is through the reemergence of symbolist motifs in contexts that point to human meanings and possibilities rather than to ponderous symbolist resonances. Sometimes Chekhov does this by using a character to make a direct link for the audience as in Dorn's allusion to the “world-soul” in Act Four, and his experience in Genoa of “becom[ing]” part of the crowd spiritually” (170). Laurence Senelick believes that this is a “triviali[zation]” of Trepliov's play, merely “equat[ing] the world-soul with the experience of “losing oneself in a crowd.”²² It's difficult to see what the playwright might gain from such a trivializing effect, but if this humanizing of the world soul is interpreted as part of a broader questioning of “spiritual” perspectives, then it does make dramatic sense. It is important that Dorn makes the link with Genoan street-life in a gently sceptical manner—“you end by almost believing that a world-soul can really exist” (170, emphasis added). Trepliov does not dispute the philosophical issue. For one thing, he is now a short-story writer, struggling (it seems) to find his way within a more realistic genre. For another thing, he has now lost the young symbolist's messianic zeal about the artist as spiritual luminary: “How easy it is to be philosophical on paper, Doctor, and how difficult when it comes to real life” (172). Within that frame, Dorn's allusion is sufficient, I think, to contribute to the shift from a symbolist to a humanist perspective that is occurring elsewhere in the play.

Trepliov and Nina are the most important agents in this process of metamorphosis, particularly in the final act. Prior to Nina's brief reprise of Trepliov's play, the words in which he confides his obsessive love and inner emptiness contain ghostly echoes of his own playlet. He is still imprisoned, still “bound to [her] heart and soul” (179) for all eternity. Trepliov's World Soul, like so many symbolist “characters,” had also been imprisoned for a long time—thousands of years—and, it only “open[ed its] lips to speak” every hundred years (129). Trepliov's life-denying fixation makes him feel that he has “been inhabiting this world for ninety years” (180), which introduces an equally unreal, yet human, sense of anomie.²³ He is still lost in a dream-world that is as lifeless as the “deep and empty well” invoked by his World Soul (130): “I am lonely. I've no-one's love to warm me, I feel as cold as if I were in a cellar …”

The musical logic of the whole ironic structure demands delicate control of timing and variation. I assume, for example, that Masha's lines at the beginning of Act Two function both as an echo of Trepliov's world-weariness in his play and as a distinctive variation on them: “I feel as though I'd been born long, long ago, and I'm trailing my life behind me like a dress with an endless train. … And often I don't feel like going on with life at all” (138). But these lines also prepare us for Trepliov's undoing of his play's symbolist rhetoric in the final act. Nina is not a symbolist, but she is an idealist who has become the victim of her own ideals. The demythologizing of Nina's idealist fixations works as a fugal counterpoint to Trepliov's descent to earthly terrors.²⁴ Directors find it difficult to avoid treating Nina's final scene “as a version of the traditional mad scene,”²⁵ but what is at stake need not be construed in such narrow, psychological terms.

The difficulty arises from the fact that Chekhov orchestrates the scene so that, once again, the haunting symbolist music is heard: “The horses are waiting for me at the gate. […] Give me some water” (180). The actress playing Nina has to evoke that symbolist dimension and yet struggle to reject it. Chekhov presents, again, a choice between matter and spirit, but that choice is now a question of acting styles: “But you can't imagine what it feels like—when you know that you are acting abominably. I'm a seagull” (181). Nina has to enact the significance of her rejection of the abstractions of her symbolist melodrama. Her distrust of the symbolic mode becomes a struggle for authenticity. Her symbolist refrain, “I'm a seagull … No, that's not it,” has to be performed in a way that forces upon the audience the equation between bad acting and bad faith. The actress must persuade the audience that it is an existential choice. When she confides that she is “not afraid of life” (181), the symbolic mode has almost been laid to rest. When she performs the opening lines of Trepliov's play, the lines resonate with new-found authority—the authority of her experience. The shift in acting mode suggests that she should speak calmly, without any trace of evasion, affectation, or pseudo-tragic posing.

The whole of the final act is designed to be “one great, thought-inducing anticlimax,”²⁶ but, in theatrical terms, it can fail if it is felt to be merely anticlimactic. The audience must be persuaded that the direction and focus of the dramatic thought retains a critical edge which has to do with resolving the tensions between materialist and spiritualist-cum-idealist perspectives—in a materialist direction.

By the final act the conflicts between matter and spirit have been conflated into the tensions between separateness and yearning for union. The latter could be said to function as a reductio ad hominem of Solovyov's religious idealism, which was inspired by a vision of a world soul that would unify the created world and a future, heavenly kingdom that promised absolute, divine union. In his widely influential Lectures on Godmanhood (1878), Solovyov treated the Christian story of the fall of man as a fall from a state of all-unity into separateness:

But, rebelling against the divine beginning of all-unity, excluding it from his consciousness, man thereby falls under the power of the material beginning … he becomes himself but a fact [losing his former position] of the commanding centre of the natural world, becomes one of the multitude of natural beings: no longer the focus of “all,” he becomes a mere “this.” If before, as the spiritual centre of the universal creation, he embraced in his soul all nature and lived one life with it, loved and understood and therefore governed it; so now, having asserted himself in his separateness, having shut his soul off from everything, he finds himself in an alien and hostile world, which no longer speaks with him in any intelligible language, and which does not understand or obey his word. If previously man had in his consciousness a direct expression of the universal organic connection of [all] that exists, and that connection (the idea of the all-unity) determined the whole content of his consciousness; then now, no longer having this connection in himself, man loses with it the organizing beginning of his inner world—the world of [his] consciousness is transformed into chaos.²⁷

Trepliov's symbolist fragment invokes the chaos and separateness of such a fallen world and the distant ideal of paradise regained. But Chekhov's treatment prompts the audience to intuit the wholly ordinary feelings of loneliness that feed upon such ideals. We are prompted to notice, for example, how Dorn is strongly moved by the playlet—his ear for loneliness is one that we come to trust and understand. In an era when symbolist despair became fashionable among poets, Chekhov offers as unglamorous an image of suicidal loneliness as Emile Durkheim in his sociological treatise.²⁸ Human loneliness, not metaphysical homelessness, is the keynote of the final act of the play.

The ironic gap between Act Three and Act Four sharply defines the shift in perspective. Act Three ends with a comic climax: Trigorin's sentimental effusions over Nina, capped with a lingering kiss. Instead of romantic visions, Act Four unfolds a vision of the fragility of human relationships. Characters huddle together in a world where loneliness appears to be the common lot of human beings. The sombre music of transience and failed ideals is richly orchestrated at the beginning of the act: the loneliness of Masha and Medviedenko remains unchanged by marriage; the image of the derelict, “skelet[al]” stage (and “someone inside—crying”) (165) establishes the mood of ideals withering into compromise; but most interesting, I think, is the hint about Sorin's loneliness in the face of death.

In symbolist drama, characters are passive victims overwhelmed by the menace of Death. Maeterlinck's religious fatalism crushed the life out of his characters, and their passivity made the transcendent realm a welcome escape from life. In Chekhov, death is not a metaphysical bogeyman. Sorin's fears are understandable; his dependence on Trepliov is equally unsurprising. But what strikes the audience, when Sorin appears, is not fears and intimations of mortality but his irrepressible appetite for life—even if that appetite retains all the quixotic futility of unexercised desire. His habitual contretemps with Dorn becomes a droll occasion for enjoying his own self-deprecatory routines, his self-pity and sense of failure. The notion that art might give full expression to his unfulfilled wants (in “The Man Who Wished” [169]) is so unashamedly self-centred that Sorin, the chronic idealist, often wins an audience's sympathetic laughter before Dorn, the chronic rationalist. But the latter way of putting it fails to do justice to Chekhov's comic objectivity. The tussle thrives on serious differences in attitude beneath the surface, but it is not an ethical confrontation demanding that we take sides. Death does not intrude as an archetypal presence overshadowing the action. This particular duet is only one of many comic accents in the final act that sustain a comic balance and a focus on “living characters.”

At the opening of Act Four, symbolist devices are used to evoke both the passage of time and the time-serving inertia and claustrophobia of the play's social world. But these devices have only limited functions. The human focus of the action ensures that tragic, melodramatic, and symbolic accents are not allowed to dominate. Alongside the ironic humour and objectivity of the dialogue, it is the play's ironic structure which insists that the ending is divested of all symbolic trappings. Instead of the melodrama of symbolic theatrical statement, we are given the understatement of an offstage suicide that barely interrupts a social evening of gossip, drinking, and bingo-playing. Even Nina's performance, which could tip the scale towards heroic closure, is promptly undercut by Trepliov's pathetic infantilism. Life does not stop in order to blossom into the radiant significance of a symbol. The symbol is dead, stuffed, and forgotten. Life is more important than art and richer than any symbol.

Notes

1. “Reasons for the Decline of, and New Trends in, Contemporary Russian Literature,” in Russian Symbolists: An Anthology of Theoretical and Critical Writings, ed. and trans. R. E. Petersen (Ann Arbor, 1986), 18. When these lectures were published in January 1893, as Reasons for the Decline of, and New Trends in, Contemporary Russian Literature, Merezhkovsky presented Chekhov with an inscribed copy. Chekhov had taken a keen interest in his younger contemporary's work, but his idealist rhetoric and visionary pretensions clearly amused him. Later in his career, as a leading member of the mystical wing of Russian symbolism, Merezhkovsky came to hate Chekhov's work and its (to him) depressingly earthbound materialism.

2. Anton Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889, Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics, ed. Louis S. Friedland (New York, 1964), 259. John Tulloch's account of Chekhov's stance “[i]n the paradigm debate between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists’” has been a timely reminder of the tough-minded, intellectual commitments of Chekhov the doctor. See Chekhov: A Structuralist Study (New York, 1980), 80. It is a vital antidote to the sentimentalist's Chekhov. See especially Tulloch, chap. 3, “Chekhov the Doctor,” 47-97.

3. Nina, in Anton Chekhov, The Seagull: A Comedy in Four Acts, in Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen (Harmondsworth, 1959), 126. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

4. John Caird, dir., The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov, trans. Pam Gens, The National Theatre Company, Olivier Theatre, London, from 7 July 1994.

5. Terry Hands, dir., The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov, trans. Michael Frayn, The Royal Shakespeare Company, the Swan Theatre, Stratford, from 6 November 1990.

6. “Terry Hands Talks to Benedict Nightingale,” Times [London] (6 November 1990), n. pag. Hands's choice of the theatre as symbol may owe something to the 1980) Moscow Art Theatre production, in which the director, Oleg Yefremov, went for a set design that would realize his sense of symbolic theatres: “I found the image forming of a theatre situated in a gazebo, which would serve as Trepliov's theatre, Arkadina's theatre, Trigorin's theatre.” Oleg Yefremov, “A Path to Chekhov,” in Chekhov on the British Stage, ed. Patrick Miles (Cambridge, 1993), 132. I am more interested in Hands's implicit sense of obligation about the symbolic plane than in his perfunctory rationale. In his recent production of Three Sisters, Max Stafford-Clark succumbed to similar yearnings for symbolic closure: a fine production was seriously undermined by the crass decision to add on a final tableau in which all the characters reassembled to witness a freshly spun, spinning top. Max Stafford-Clark, dir., Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov, trans. Stephen Mulrine, Theatre Royal, Bristol, in association with Out of Joint and The Royal Court Theatre, from 14 September 1995.

7. In Hands's production, Amanda Root moved to the apron forestage to deliver her speech, which was used to reveal more (as if more were necessary) about Nina's neurotic state. As she spoke, Nina became more and more overwrought and momentarily broke down on “all life, all life.” See Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, in Plays, trans. Michael Frayn (London, 1988), 12 1. Given that she had survived the invitation to melodramatic excess in “I'm a seagull,” it seemed a pity to pile on the pathos at the moment when she wanted most control.

8. For Raymond Williams, the “seagull” symbolism is a glaring instance of the failure of Chekhov's naturalism. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London, 1968), 103-4. J. L. Styan asserts that “[t]he seagull property strikes us today as too overt and defined a symbol for a naturalistic play, one which in any case would work quite well without it. … it cannot stand for the general condition of the lives of all these unhappy people.” See Chekhov in Performance: A Commentary on the Major Plays (Cambridge, 1971), 18. In Leigh Woods's account, The Cherry Orchard is an example of an all-embracing symbolism but the “seagull” is made to stand for too many different possibilities, which undermines its effectiveness. “Chekhov and the Evolving Symbol: Cues and Cautions for the Plays in Performance,” in Drama and Symbolism, ed. James Redmond, Themes in Drama 4 (Cambridge, 1982), 254-55.

9. David Magarshack championed the notion that Trepliov's play gave dramatic form to the mystical dualism of Solovyov, a leading light of the Russian Symbolist movement. Magarshack's critical dismissal of two ill-informed BBC productions (New Statesman 13 January 1969], 24) was followed up in his The Real Chekhov: An Introduction to Chekhov's Last Plays (New York, 1972), where the symbolist context was shown to be crucial to an understanding of the comedy.

10. Vladimir Solovyov, La Russie et l'Eglise universelle (Paris, 1889), 235, translation mine.

11. Vladimir Solovyov, “On Saimo in Winter,” cited in Samuel David Cioran, Vladimir Solov'ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (Waterloo, ON, 1977), 60. I am deeply indebted to Cioran's discussion of Solovyov's Sophiology, and I have made free use of his translations of the poems that dwell upon Sophia's radiant, azure eyes.

12. In the preface to the third edition of his poems (Moscow, i goo), Solovyov made a principled defence of his worship of the Eternal Feminine, which, as a poet, he had found incarnate in a lake. He insisted that such prefiguring of the divine Sophia should not be misconstrued as the idolatrous worship of any earthly Aphrodite. See Cioran, 6 1-62 (see note i i).

13. Solovyov, La Russie, 235, translation mine. See note to.

14. Robert Louis Jackson's essay remains a classic account of the way in which Konstantin's play turns upon “the self's forereading of its own tragic emptiness.” “Chekhov's Seagull: The Empty Well, the Dry Lake, and the Cold Cave,” in Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976), 102. Where my reading differs from Jackson's is in following the way in which the central motifs of the symbolist fragment recur later in the play but in a new, anti-symbolist key.

15. Samuel Cioran discusses a wide range of Solovyov's poems that invoke Sophia's radiant eyes. See especially chapter two of his study.

16. Paul Debreczeny has drawn attention to Solovyov's tendency to couch his vision of the future in vast, millennial periods: he quotes Solovyov to the effect that “it may take thousands of years before love attains its full expression.” “‘The Black Monk’: Chekhov's Version of Symbolism,” in Reading Chekhov's Text, ed. R. L. Jackson (Evanston, IL, 1993), 180-82. Debreczeny suggests that Solovyov is a likely prototype for Kovrin in Chekhov's “The Black Monk” (1894). Considering the importance of visionary eyes in Solovyov's Sophiology, it may be worth noting that moments before his death, Lovrin has a vision of Yalta Bay as if it were alive and it “looked at him with its many sky-blue, dark-blue, turquoise and flame-coloured eyes, and beckoned him” (The Fiancee and Other Stories, trans. Ronald Wilks [Harmondsworth, 1986], 22).

17. “The Student” (1894) is one of Chekhov's most powerful evocations of youthful, religious idealism. When the hero, who is a theology student, recounts the story of Christ's betrayal by Peter, he assumes that Widow Vasilisa's tears are prompted by devout, Christian feeling. Her weeping inspires him with a sense of the power of the ancient Christian story and a vision of human life as charged with sublime meaning: “That old woman had wept, but not at his moving narrative: it was because Peter was close to her and because she was concerned, from the bottom of her heart, with his most intimate feelings.” Wilks, The Fiancee, 232 (see note 16). Conventional readings of this story tend to disregard the gossamer thread of irony dully glinting in that subtly uninsistent negative—“but not at his moving narrative”—just as they tend to disregard that unobtrusive, throwaway conditional of the penultimate sentence—“he was only twenty-two.” There is no overt challenge to Ivan's idealistic perspective. His magnanimous disregard of all possible counterfactuals, his willingness to assume the best of all possible motives, brings alive the potential pain of denying his heart-felt vision of the power of the Christian story. We must weep with the Widow Vasilisa (“a woman of experience”), blush with her brutalized daughter, who is clearly a stranger to this world of intensely pure feeling, and stifle any sceptical reservations about Ivan's reading of his listeners. How can young Ivan know anything of the bottom of Vasilisa's heart? His youthful passionate faith may make him discount himself in favour of Peter in reckoning the motives for Vasilisa's tears, but Chekhov makes sure that we, as readers, are as moved by Ivan's embodiment of caritas as she, clearly, is. The far from sublime details of the peasant women's lives assume the power of muted, choric statement, and their restraint is as moving as the student's narrative. Like the widow's, the restraint of the narrator, refusing to undercut the childlike innocence of Ivan's thoughts and feelings, is designed to awaken an equally generous restraint on the part of the reader. There is no need to make Chekhov an honorary member of the Choir Invisible on the basis of this story; its imaginative reach into the holy foolishness of the inexperienced speaks for itself. Any analysis of “matter” and “spirit” in Chekhov would need to examine the delicate balance achieved in this story.

18. Marc Slonim, Modern Russian Literature (New York, 1953), 107.

19. For Solovyov's aesthetic views, see Natalie Duddington's translations of two key articles of the 1890s “Beauty in Nature” and “The General Meaning of Art,” in S. L. Frank, A Solov'ev Anthology (New York, 1950), 127-49. Solovyov claimed that the task of art is to mediate between the material and the spiritual realms: “In their highest achievements the arts that exist at present catch glimpses of perfect beauty in our transitory existence and, extending them further, anticipate and give us a foretaste of the reality beyond, which is to come” (146-47). When he formulates a “general definition of real art,” there is an unmistakable emphasis upon the revelatory and prophetic: “every sensuous expression of any object or event from the point of view of its final state or in the light of the world to come is a work of art” (147). The “final task of perfect art” is “to spiritualise and transfigure our actual life” (149).

    For interesting discussions of Solovyov's influence on Russian symbolism, see Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge, 1994); Samuel D. Cioran, Vladimir Solov'ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (Waterloo, ON, 1977); Jean Delaney Grossman, Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence (Berkeley, 1985); B. G. Rosenthal, D. S. Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age (The Hague, 1975); James West, Russian Symbolism: A Study of Vyacheslav Ivanov and the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic (London, 1970).

20. West, Russian Symbolism, 126 (see note 19). Merezhkovsky and Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont are fascinating case studies of the increasing separation of artist and people.

21. There is a case for insisting that Trepliov is remarkably typical of the confused young artist of the period. Considered as a parody of symbolist fatalism and impotence, he contains multitudes, but there are some distinctive Trepliov traits that are strongly reminiscent of Merezhkovsky's peculiar case history. Merezhkovosky used his poetry to express his deepest inner conflicts. His chronic fear of life, his neurotic dependence upon his mother, and his unassuageable loneliness made him a natural champion of symbolism as a form of therapy. His collection Symbols (1892) was an epoch-making work for the history of Russian symbolism, but within a few years he had given up poetry in favour of other forms of writing—just as Trepliov gives up drama in favour of fiction. In her study of him, Bernice Rosenthal discusses many of the poems of the eighties and nineties that are darkened by a masochistic, suicidal despair. Like Trepliov, he seems to fashion a metaphysic out of profound self-pity, lamenting that his sad fate is

    Eternally to dream in silence,
    Far from all friends,
    There on the bottom. On the very bottom,
    with a sick soul.

    from “Loneliness” (1892), trans. B. Rosenthal (32)

    Initially, Chekhov responded positively to Merezhkovsky's wholehearted engagement with aesthetic matters, but later, as an agnostic, he found it difficult to work alongside a religious ideologue, and finally he came to disapprove of the “hyper-satisfied Merezhkovsky” (E. J. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography [London, 1963], 545) and his fellow ideologues. My account of Merezhkovsky is particularly indebted to Rosenthal, D. S. Merezhkovsky (see note 19).

22. Lawrence Senelick, “Chekhov's Drama, Maeterlinck, and the Russian Symbolists,” in Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli (New York, 1981), 164.

23. The impotent waiting that overshadows Maurice Maeterlinck's drama is normally measured out in hundreds and thousands of years. “It seems to me that I have been here for centuries,” moans the Oldest Blind Woman in Les Aveugles (1890, my translation).

24. Chekhov's story “Terror” (1892) thrives on an equally Feuerbachian reversal of perspective. The donne of the piece is that we have no need to invent otherworldly terrors; the spooky trappings of the story fade away to leave the painful, human realities of betrayal of friendship. This story is one of several intertextual challenges by Chekhov to Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. Against the moral absolutism of Tolstoy's treatment of adultery, Chekhov brings the pathos of indeterminacy: the inadequate husband's fear of family life is used to interrogate Tolstoy's cherished notion of “family happiness”; the (narrator) seducer is only half-hearted and fails to notice what the wife is playing on the piano; the wife is not a victim in the menage but actively seeking her adulterous relationship. The cuckolder's desultory tinkling (“I stood at the piano, struck a few chords …” [Wilks, 231) sums up the prosaic inconsequence of so much of the action. Chekhov deflates the “terrors” of sex, marriage, and adultery that are the source of Tolstoyan melodrama, but he does not deny the pain of failed relationships or failures to connect. Chekhov's subversion of ghost story and tale of terror conventions reinforces this humane, anti-absolutist stance. But what remains disturbing to the reader is the sense of complicity in these everyday “terrors”: the narrator is the friend who has betrayed the hero, Silin (whom we like), so the narrator is also the friend who will betray us—the (nineteenth-century) reader. In a misty churchyard, at sunset, Silin turns to the narrator (who is about to cuckold him) “with a sad smile and ask[s] … why it [is], that when we want to tell some frightening, mysterious, grotesque tale, we never cull our material from life, my dear chap, but always from the world of phantoms and shades of the hereafter?” Anton Chekhov, “Terror My Friend's Story,” in Stories, 1892-1893, vol. VI of The Oxford Chekhov, trans. Ronald Hingley (London, 1971), 173. Directors fail to recognize that there should be a similar (silent) question-mark after the title of Chekhov's play.

25. Michael Frayn, editor's introduction to Plays, by Anton Chekhov, xlv. With respect to the seagull, Frayn rightly insists upon “the deadness of the symbolic process” (xliv). This is also the force of Peter Holland's argument in “Chekhov and the Resistant Symbol,” in Redmond, Drama and Symbolism, 227-42 (see note 8). Holland concludes that “[t]he pragmatism that is at the heart of Chekhov's attitude sees the symbol-hunting as a manipulation and an escapism” (241).

26. Styan. 71. See note 8.

27. Solovyov, Lectures on Godmanhood, trans. Peter Zouboff (London, 1948), 182.

28. See Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide (Paris, 1897). In the 1870s and 1880s, alarming statistics had forced Russians to take the problem of adolescent suicide more seriously. Chekhov was closely concerned with the problem because the son of his publisher friend, A. S. Suvorin, had shot himself in 1887, and not long afterwards he learned that several boys from the local school in Taganrog had killed themselves. The precise psychological and sociological imagination that Chekhov brings to bear in his treatment both of “Volodya” (1887) and of Trepliov reflects his concern to understand not just the “problem” but the experience of these young people. “Volodya” is in The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 1922), 155-74.