[In the following essay, Senelick examines the influence of Chekhov's own experiences and relationships on The Seagull.]

Of all Chekhov's plays, The Seagull is perhaps the most personal, for it treats the question of the artist's métier. Most modern critics agree that this is a play about art and not, as Stanislavsky thought, a romantic dramatization of Trigorin's “subject for a short story.” The theme of splendors and miseries of artists is plainly struck by Nina Zarechnaya in Act I, when she explains why her parents won't let her come to Sorin's estate: “They say this place is Bohemia.”¹ And the Bohemia of journalists, writers, and actors was familiar turf to Chekhov. Literary biographers have spent much time debating whether it was Potapenko or Avilova or Levitan who suggested one or another lover's knot or anecdotal incident. What has been overlooked is the backstage element which saturates the play. Years of theatre-going, reviewing, dealings with performers and managers are distilled by Chekhov in The Seagull to create a density of metaphor for the artistic experience, for the contrasts between commercialism and idealism, facility and creative striving, purposeless talent and diligent mediocrity. Of the main characters, one is an aspiring playwright, another a successful and performed writer, one is an acclaimed star of the footlights, another a novice actress. Chekhov's contemporaries would be alert to the references made throughout The Seagull to the relationship between these characters and artistic life in the capitals. Treplev's demand for “new forms” to replace the stale and trite reflects many of the changes the Russian theatre itself had undergone in the first thirty-five years of Chekhov's existence, and the isolated ambiance of Sorin's estate should not distract us from the reality that lies outside it. It is worth examining the actual theatrical context from which Chekhov drew his material to comprehend the richness of topical allusion and specific reference out of which The Seagull is made.

As a boy in Taganrog, Chekhov not only participated in amateur theatricals, but, when his family moved to Moscow, leaving him alone to finish school, he became an inveterate spectator at the Taganrog Civic Theatre, in company with his enthusiastic uncle Mitrofan Egorovich.² It is noteworthy that, at this very time, the Taganrog management had completely refurbished the repertory to suit the new building constructed in 1865. Formerly, the local company had played an outworn stock of Kotzebue, Lensky's vaudevilles, and the grandiloquent dramas of Polevoy. But the new management endeavored to introduce to the Taganrog public the latest in dramatic novelty. By examining the repertory lists of the theatre from 1868 to 1879, when Chekhov was still a resident, we see that he may have viewed major operas by Rossini, Verdi and Donizetti, as well as an ever-increasing number of good Russian plays and foreign imports. Gogol appeared with some frequency, and gradually the staples of the repertory came to consist of the “new drama” of Potekhin, Ostrovsky, and Dyachenko, in addition to the well-made plays of Sardou and Dennery.³ The newness is tenuous sometimes—Dyachenko's society dramas are one step away from Lady Audley's Secret—but, as an impressionable adolescent, Chekhov observed what were taken to be the latest thing—problem plays, dramas of peasant life, and comedies of byt or everyday activity. Along with them, he cherished a fondness for the older varieties of Romantic melodrama: Kean, The Murder of Coverly, and Burdin's The Mail Robbery (the Russian Lyons Mail), which turns up in The Seagull as a memory of Shamraev the stage-struck overseer.

The heroes of Shamraev's anecdotes are, in Arkadina's phrase, “antediluvians.” The actors to whom he refers are members of a generation of flamboyant personalities who held an audience rapt by the virtuosity of their playing, little subordinated to the script. Shamraev recollects striking single moments, but there is something askew with his judgment in vaunting performances at county fairs and provincial capitals over disciplined and realistic actors like Sadovsky, who helped to popularize Ostrovsky's drama. Shamraev's praise is meant to label him as hopelessly old-fashioned, a Philistine with a taste for bombast.

The transition from quasi-operatic vehicles for actors to the problem drama had already taken place when Chekhov moved to Moscow, and his years as a medical student coincided with a similar transformation in theatre-going. Increasing pressure from amateur groups, “people's” theatres, and influential playwrights had led to the cancellation in 1882 of the monopoly held by the Imperial theatres. Many private theatricals immediately went professional, appealing to new audiences and creating showcases for new playwrights, both homegrown and imported. For all its deficiencies, Chekhov could comprehend the appeal of the “new drama,” though he never put much stock in its claims of social relevance and truth to life. At the same time, he mocked the conservatives who decried stage realism and, like Shamraev, hearkened back to the romantic past. In his “scenelet,” On Drama (1884), he shows us a provincial justice of the peace pontificating on art:

I've read Taine, Lessing. … I'm not an artist or an actor, but I've got the flair for it, the nose for it! I've got heart! Brother, I can tell at once if something's phoney or unnatural. You can't hoodwink me, even if you're Sarah Bernhardt or Salvini!⁴

Lamenting the decline of the drama, his Honor cries down the “new forms” that were usurping the limelight:

Present-day dramatists and actors strive, uh, how can I put this more clearly … they strive to be life-like, realistic … On stage you see what you see in life … But is that what we need? We need expression, impact! You're bored with life, you're fed up with it, used to it, so you need a sort of … something on the order of … something to jangle your nerves and turn your guts inside out! An actor used to talk with an unnatural gruff voice, beat his breast with his fists, howl, drop to the ground, and yet how expressive he was! And he was expressive in his speeches too! He would talk about duty, humanity, freedom … In each of his movements you saw self-sacrifice, deeds of love on behalf of his fellowmen, suffering, and passion! And now? Now, you see, you have to be life-like … You look at the stage and see … pff! … you see some sort of trash … a swindler, a worm in tattered trousers talking some tommyrot … Spazhinsky or some Nevezhin [prolific playwrights] consider this mangy cur a hero, but, honest to God, it's aggravating!—if he came before my court, I'd take him, the sonuvabitch, yes, you know, Article 19, decide his guilt on inner conviction, I'd slap him with three to four months!⁵

After beating his nephew mercilessly for getting a low grade in Greek, the judge returns to the emotional force of the theatre.

It used to be you'd sit in your seat, look at the stage and feel something! Your heart was going, boiling over! You heard humane words, beautiful ones, and … would you believe it? … I would weep! I used to sit and weep like an idiot. “What are you crying about, Petya?” my wife used to ask. And I didn't even know why I was weeping … On the whole, the stage has a civilizing effect on me … Yes, to tell the truth, who isn't moved by art? Who isn't ennobled by it? If not for art, where would we get our lofty feelings, unknown to savages, unknown to our ancestors? Look, I've got tears in my eyes.⁶

The justice's practice of sentimentality in the theatre and callousness at home reflects Arkadina's theory, “Nature is far more moving and elegant in poetic images than as is” (a line Chekhov later cut). What's more, it reminds us that Arkadina, as well as Trigorin and Treplev, often behave as if play-acting in old style, mouthing speeches about self-sacrifice and passion. Contrary to the judge's complaints, the new problem dramas, in which actresses like Arkadina appeared, did in fact retain enough of melodrama's emotionalism and rant to satisfy ordinary audiences. The theatres in which Chekhov saw such plays most regularly were those of the “Muscovite wizards and warlocks,” Lentovsky and Korsh, who, in their separate ways, promulgated their own interpretations of “new forms.”

Mikhail Valentinovich Lentovsky had been the last pupil of the great actor Shchepkin, but, an indifferent player himself, had turned to the administration of the Hermitage pleasure garden. This and his operetta theatre, the Bouffe, were enormously successful, although his New Theatre, dedicated to legitimate drama, foundered. Chekhov's brother Nikolay worked for Lentovsky as a scene-painter and the two brothers had regular entry to the Hermitage, one of whose features was the so-called “Fantasy Theatre,” a derelict mansion overgrown with weeds, but rendered romantic by moonbeams and electric fairy lights, chimes, a hidden orchestra, tables beneath Chinese parasols and a small stage,⁷ where Lentovsky could present the latest music-hall attractions from Paris and Vienna. The merchant class, to whose taste he catered, enabled Lentovsky to make a fresh start after a bankruptcy, and in 1886 he founded the Skomorokh or Mountebank Theatre. He began with the highest hopes of a reputable repertory of “Drama,” and even wrote to Tolstoy, offering to mount The Power of Darkness, which was, unfortunately, forbidden by the censorship. The varied penchants of his heterogeneous audience were reflected in the bill. Plays of Gogol and Ostrovsky, and even Hamlet, could be found there, but more and more the bulk of the repertory was translated farces, melodramas and particularly feeries, Lentovsky's speciality. Long before Méliès, Lentovsky put together an extravagant version of the Offenbach and Verne Trip to the Moon with illuminated panoramas. His productions abounded in pyrotechnical display: explosions, fires, collapsing bridges, and all the impedimenta of sensationalism. Chekhov had already remarked on this fondness for the spectacular in 1883, when Lentovsky was running the New Theatre.

Our Lentovsky, in creating a dramatic theatre, banged his fists on the table and said:

“Only I … I … can give Russia a really Russian, national, cultivated theatre! I! And you'll see how I carry out my great task!”

And we saw. In September and October, Lentovsky presented nothing but drama and comedy. And what do you suppose? People began spreading nasty rumors about the collapse of the new theatre, that it was going down the drain.

Nobody went to see the drama, except the reviewers. In November Lentovsky desperately banged his fist on the table, cancelled his “great task” and put on his good old “Cloches de Corneville.” “Look here, look there” gave the nicest results. A full house and a pleased public. Having rung the bells of Corneville, Lentovsky blessed Muscovite taste even further: he gave a hundred-gun salute. “The Forest Tramp” which he staged and now presents three times a day consists entirely of shooting, desperate villains, good geniuses, rattlesnakes, grand inquisitors and mad dogs. Mr. Lentovsky had no pity on the backs and midriffs of our merchants, for he gave free play to pismires and tiny shivers to run up and down their spines. Thanks to this new, bitter-sweet, German Liebergottic rubbish all Moscow smells of gunpowder. The merchants' womenfolk like this gunpowdery balderdash and it impresses a thinking man as a practical joke.⁸

Although he kept up good relations with the man himself, whom he credited with sense and ingenuity, Chekhov's newspaper columns continued to fire hilarious sallies at the mixtures of fustian and lycopodium served up at Lentovsky's theatre. He composed two absurd skits, “The Impure Tragedians and the Leprous Playwrights”⁹ and “A Hell of a Mess in Rome” (both 1884) in which the entrepreneur's choice of material, stagecraft, and acting company were riotously flayed. Ultimately, Chekhov's chief complaint about Lentovsky's extravaganzas and the “Fantasy Theatre” in particular was that they were not genuinely fanciful, too often a compromise of heightened realism with cheap trickery rather than a true stimulus to the imagination.

If Lentovsky pandered to the craving for spectacle and excitement without pretense, Fyodor Abramovich Korsh put a veneer of culture on his commercialism. When Korsh, a former lawyer and ticket broker, took over Madam Brenko's Pushkin Theatre in 1882, actors and public alike assumed that he would continue its policy of serious literary drama by the best Russian authors. Instead, he maintained a stable of hacks to produce translations of European bedroom farce and well-carpentered dramas of adultery; by doing so, he greatly increased his audience and reached ranks of society new to the theatre. However, and to his credit, he instituted a policy of matinees at reduced prices with a new production every Friday when he would present classics and controversial new plays. These matinees were great favorites with the youth, who would respond by foot-stamping and cries of “Bis! bis!” A Korsh première normally drew the entire literary and artistic world of Moscow and Stanislavsky later attributed to him the creation, over a decade, of a theatrically-educated public that was ready to accept the reforms of the Moscow Art Theatre.

Korsh's great coup was the first production of Madame Sans-Gêne outside of France, with a script made from stenographic notes taken at one of Réjane's performances; but he also encouraged Russian writers to turn their talents to the stage, soliciting Chekhov, for example, to write a comedy in the spirit of his humorous tales. Important works like Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness, Chekhov's Ivanov, Ibsen's A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People, along with plays by Becque, Rostand, and Sudermann had their first Moscow productions at Korsh matinees.¹⁰ He also excelled at elaborate stage settings; his designer A. S. Yanov embellished Turgenev's Evening in Sorrento with a vista of Naples, complete with twinkling harbor-lights, boats in their moorings, wisps of smoke ascending from Vesuvius, moonlight reflected in the bay, and a backstage tenor warbling “Si tu m'aimais.” According to one observer, “the audience went out of its mind.”¹¹

Korsh's theatre then, with its dedicated acting company, verisimilitudinous sets, and lip-service to the higher ideals of drama probably is the target for Treplev's disgust at the “cliché-ridden, pedestrian” contemporary theatre.

When the curtain goes up and in an artificially lit room with three walls, these great talents, devotees of sacred art, display how people eat, drink, love, walk, wear their jackets; when out of cheap, vulgar tableaux and cheap, vulgar speeches they try to extract a moral—a tiny little moral, easy to understand, useful around the house; when in a thousand different ways they serve up the same old thing over and over and over again—then I run and keep on running. …

To which his uncle replies with the tired businessman's bromide, “Can't do without the theatre.”

During this period, when Korsh and Lentovsky dominated the Moscow scene, Chekhov's sporadic journalism entailed much theatre attendance, for in the early eighties he wrote what amounted to a behind-the-scenes gossip column with occasional reviews. This activity led in turn to an acquaintance with actors and managers, and his correspondence began to be laced with tidbits of greenroom scandal and pithy aperçus about the latest productions. Growing familiarity bred contempt in him but could not uproot his perennial fascination with the stage. Significantly, his first collection of stories is entitled Fairy Tales of Melpomene, and his early works teem with vignettes of backstage life, usually presented as caricature or sardonic social commentary. There is nothing idealized about Chekhov's gallery of thespians, who are depicted as vain, ignorant, petty, and yet more sympathetic than the solid citizenry. In the late eighties, when Chekhov's friendship with professional performers like Shcheglov-Leontiev and Yuzhin-Sumbatov deepened, and when he himself became active as a playwright, his commentary grows more embittered, more caustic, and more exasperated. His oft-quoted remarks about actresses being cows who fancy themselves goddesses, about actors being steeped in conceit and unaware of life outside the poolroom date from this period. His close acquaintance with particular actors and particular plays is manifest throughout The Seagull.

Chekhov followed avidly the intrigues at Korsh's, for example, and once, when the actress Glama-Meshcherskaya walked out after a quarrel with the manager, he wondered, “Who now will play the sick pussy-cat in psychopathic plays?” (Letter to I. L. Shcheglov, 7 November 1888). Such an emploi would naturally fall to Arkadina. Ivan Bunin complained that Chekhov always gave the women in his plays names befitting provincial actresses, but in The Seagull two of the women are provincial actresses. Zarechnaya means “across the river,” and suggests Nina's dwelling on the opposite shore of the lake as well as her alien spirit in Sorin's estate. Arkadina, however, is a comic nomenclature: clearly a stage-name based on Arcadia, with its promise of pastoral bliss (the sort of boring country life Arkadina hates). Arcadia was also the name of a popular amusement park in St. Petersburg, managed by Lentovsky and famous for its zoo, magicians, and quick-change artists. So Arkadina's nom-de-théâtre emblazons the flashiness of her style.

Although Chekhov eventually omitted her artistic credo, quoted above, an informed spectator could easily pick up hints about Arkadina's range from her son's remarks. Her acting, Treplev tells us, is remarkable in La Dame aux Camélias and Fumes of Life, and for Chekhov's circle of intimates, this was an in-joke. These two plays were favorites of the actress Lydiya Yavorskaya, a popular star whose name has often erroneously been linked romantically with Chekhov's. The writer's brother Mikhail relates, “I was never a fan of her talent and especially disliked her voice, screechy and cracked as if she had a chronic sore throat. But she was an intelligent woman, progressive, and for her benefits would stage plays that seemed at the time ‘racy.’ In any case, she enjoyed a great deal of success at Korsh's in Moscow and Suvorin's in Petersburg, where the audience literally bore her in its arms.”¹² Chekhov had seen her as Madame Sans-Gêne and, though he took note of her affectations and shrillness, recommended her to his friend Suvorin, the powerful editor of New Times, who was managing a theatre in Petersburg along the lines of Korsh's. Oddly enough, Yavorskaya's father was the Kiev police-chief, a “Kievan townsman” like Arkadina's husband and son, and her name crops up in the very letter in which Chekhov first mentions the play that would become The Seagull. (To A. S. Suvorin, 18 April 1895).

Flirting appears to have been Yavorskaya's standard tactic with men. When she was appearing in the Hindu drama Vasantasena, in which she had to kneel before her loved one and say, “My one and only, inscrutable, divine …”, Chekhov happened to visit her friend, the actress Shchepkina-Kupernik. Yavorskaya threw herself on her knees on the carpet, stretched out her arms to him and exclaimed, “My one and only, great, divine.”¹³ Similar histrionics occur in Arkadina's appeal to Trigorin in Act III. Both Yavorskaya and Korsh were present in Shchepkina-Kupernik's drawing-room when Chekhov first read The Seagull aloud and they reacted in much the same way as Arkadina does to Nina's acting and Treplev's play; the actress went into “insincere ecstasies” and Korsh wondered, “My dear boy, this isn't theatrical: you make the man shoot himself offstage and don't even let him talk before his death!”¹⁴ Clearly, Arkadina's social traits, her need to take stage even in private life, derive from Yavorskaya. Particularly interesting is the pose of progressivism, fashionable in the heavily-censored eighties. Treplev says of his mother, she will “rattle off all of Nekrasov's poetry by heart,” and the journalist Gilyarovsky pointed out that at the time “reading verse in society was considered high art … and subject matter was selected for profundity, but chiefly for the possibility of airing civic grievances and always for meaning. Nekrasov was especially popular.”¹⁵ Arkadina's recitations, like Yavorskaya's benefits, are an easy means of acquiring a reputation for social consciousness.

La Dame aux Camélias recalls Bernhardt, who had toured to Russia in 1881 and to whom Chekhov, as a young reviewer, had devoted two critiques. He found her distasteful, too much the sacred monster, and believed the only thing Russian actors could glean from her example was a pattern of hard work. Like Shaw, Chekhov preferred the simplicity and sincerity of Duse, whom he had seen as Cleopatra. He was not alone in this, and it was a sport with critics and connoisseurs to contrast visiting stars in the same roles. Duse's originality and emotional strength as Marguerite Gauthier were praised above Bernhardt's and Tina di Lorenzo's efforts in the part;¹⁶ Arkadina would be similarly contrasted in the Russian public's mind. But Arkadina shares Yavorskaya's penchant for the gamy, and Marguerite is only one of the many fallen women she impersonates (and to some degree imitates in life). Fumes of Life, a dramatization by the fashionable Boleslav Markevich of his novel The Abyss, was a play Chekhov abhorred. He always disliked Markevich's practice of putting his closest friends recognizably into his fiction, and in 1883 Splinters of Moscow Life had carried an unflattering summary of the novel from Chekhov's hand. His reactions to the dramatization and its production extend over a long period. That same year, his column in Splinters announced “News as pleasant as yesterday's kasha with vinegar or a chronic head-cold. Boleslav Markevich is dramatizing his long, fat, boring ink-blot …”¹⁷ and he called upon the novelist to desist. The next year, Chekhov proposed to his editor Leykin that he would see the play at the earliest opportunity and compose a parody of it; in this resolve he faltered, fearful of Markevich's hyperemotional reaction and quarrels with his fans. Instead, Chekhov wrote a review noteworthy for its uncharacteristic tone of personal animosity:

We have seen and smelled the Fumes of Life—a drama by the famous Moscow fop and man-about-the-salons B. Markevich, the very drama that sank with such a crash through the floor of the Theatrical-Literary Committee. It sank without the slightest crash at Lentovsky's theatre, although it treats of persons and places dear to the heart of Moscow. In his works Markevich depicts only his close friends—the token of a writer who can't see beyond his nose—“Bah! we know all these people!” exclaimed the Moscow scandalmongers, savouring his drama. We saw on stage not only his friend Ashanin, in his salad days a faded Moscow Don Juan and gentleman of the bedchamber, but even the “Rocher-de-Cancale,” a place not open to ladies. A pleasant, verdant spot, but it is indecent for a writer of the beau monde to churn out publicity for it. On the whole, the play is written with a lavatory brush and smells foul.

However, they say the manager of the “Rocher-de-Cancale” applauded it furiously.¹⁸

The play that provoked such abuse is a drama after the fashion of Dumas fils. Its leading lady is Olga Elpidiforovna Rantseva, an adventuress, who, over the course of five acts, betrays her adoring husband with the aforementioned Ashanin, is protected and then repudiated by a noble old Count, becomes a pariah in Petersburg society, weds a scoundrel who robs and abandons her, and at last dies in an odor of sanctity, repentant and contrite, declaring that her life has been nothing but delusive “fumes.” A role that involves five costume changes, the opportunity to run the gamut from passion to piety, and an almost constant presence on stage would have immediate appeal to the Yavorskayas of the day; when Chekhov has Arkadina continue to play in into the mid-nineties, he is making a most sarcastic reflection on her taste and vanity.

Arkadina has even picked up the speech patterns of her lurid heroines in her overwrought moments, a particularly subtle means for Chekhov to undercut her protestations of sincerity. The scene in which she pleads with Trigorin not to desert her not only rehearses Yavorskaya's genuflection to Chekhov, but also, to choose from many similar examples, echoes Olga Elpidiforovna's climactic pleas to the Count who is casting her off:

Yes, I am an adventuress, I have been since my earliest days, it's true … You could have saved me, I hoped for it, I asked for it with all my soul: from your hands I might have begun a new, pure, honorable life … He, whom I could never love—it's not my fault!—he told you the truth: I would have been to you ‘a real, true wife’ … But you, whom I loved as a divinity, you could never make up your mind, you didn't dare.¹⁹

Purple passages like this color Arkadina's effusions, the hectic rhythm in marked contrast to the staccato colloquialism of her normal speech, revealing how inextricable her stage life has become from her true emotions. Under stress, she must recur to the ready-made formulas of the problem play.

If Arkadina occasionally reeks of the Fumes of Life, Trigorin and Nina may possibly be stamped by another play, one which Chekhov admired, his friend Suvorin's “comedy” Tatyana Repina. The play was based on an actual occurrence, the suicide in 1881 of the twenty-eight-year-old actress E. P. Kadmina; jilted by her lover, she poisoned herself and came on in the last act of Ostrovsky's Vasilisa Melentieva, in which the heroine also dies of poison. Kadmina perished in gruesome torments before the eyes of a Kharkov audience, which event turned her into a posthumous celebrity. Chekhov took an interest in her as an “extraordinary celebrity,” even collecting her photograph. Suvorin's play follows the facts reasonably closely. Tatyana Repina, a high-spirited and talented provincial actress, is thrown over by her lover who hopes to repair his ruined fortune by marrying an heiress. Deeply offended, publicly insulted by a gross Jewish banker, seeing nothing to live for, she takes poison before going on stage and dies during the last act of Ostrovsky's play as her acquaintances look on, aghast. Except for the essential theatricality of the situations, the play is without great merit, and Chekhov's enthusiasm for it is difficult to comprehend. Yet he was lavish with his praise, criticizing it at length in his letters, suggesting changes and even writing small snatches of dialogue. He predicted a success which came to pass both in Petersburg and Moscow; Chekhov became embroiled in the Moscow rehearsals and, while Suvorin was staging Ivanov in Petersburg, he became an intercessor between the actors and the author of Tatyana Repina. Later he wrote a sequel to Suvorin's play, satirizing the suicide epidemic supposed to follow Repina's example.

Chekhov's intimacy with Tatyana Repina peers out in The Seagull, especially in the first long scene between Trigorin and Nina. To some extent, the admission of Trigorin as a central figure is a radical volte-face for Chekhov; in 1885, in an article called “Fashionable Effects,” he had carped that dramatists were introducing a man of letters in every current play as “the most effective effect.”

Men of letters, who are put on stage in the capacity of most effective effect, have one and the same physiognomy in all plays. They are usually persons of beastly guise [an old Russian locution for “drunk”], with dishevelled, unkempt hair, full of straw and fluff, unacquainted with ashtrays and spitoons, who borrow money and don't pay it back, lying, drinking, blackmailing. These parties always speak of themselves as “we” and “modern literature.” The dramatist wants you to see in these dishwater cocktails not Pyotr Petrovich or Ivar Ivanovich, but a “man of letters,” “a representative of the press,” a collective human being.²⁰

Chekhov went on to surmise that the playwright had apparently no first-hand experience of men of letters and that it was immoral to describe without having observed. Certainly these complaints cannot be made of Trigorin, who is not only well-observed but partakes of many of his creator's traits—the love of fishing, the note-taking, the impressionistic literary style (as in the Act IV description of a mill-dam taken from a Chekhov story), the terror of audiences, and above all the compulsion to write with its consequent guilt, insecurity, and dissatisfaction. Trigorin's monologue to Nina about his “beautiful life,” for all its intentional appeal to an untried girl, is probably the most deeply felt speech in The Seagull (Tolstoy thought it the only good thing in the play); Trigorin is integral to the play's concern with art and the artist's career. But, oddly enough, the structure of his scene with Nina is based very closely on a similar episode in Tatyana Repina.

The central and longest scene in the first act of Suvorin's play takes place in Tatyana's hotel room where she is being courted in a desultory way by the play's male lead, Mikhail Adashev, a journalist. He waxes eloquent and bitter about his profession, and Tatyana's interjections, like Nina's, spur him to denials and explanations, although here the woman's comments are teasing and not naive.

ADASHEV:
A journalist's specialty is journalism. I have to know everything or pretend to, understand everything, everything has to be at my fingertips, starting with the Egyptian pyramids and international politics and ending with the cop on the beat. Don't shrink from anything, throw yourself into everything, make decisions about it all—that's our motto … May I have another lump?
REPINA:
(putting in sugar) Oh, a sweet-tooth!
ADASHEV:
Call that sweetness? Things are sweet when we can poohpooh some governmental nabob or give advice to ministers and like Alexander the Great cut through the Gordian knot, arouse passions, denounce war, bless peace, weep over the needs of the people …
REPINA:
Crocodile tears?
ADASHEV:
No, real ones sometimes … Passionate tears of love! Yes, ma'am. We love and hate at the same time, as nervous and impetuous natures tend to do. Passions begin to blaze, we loose the reins on national pride—we blare war, propound hate, glorify martial valor … The war breaks out, mothers and wives weep … But we don't lose heart, we are bound to comfort and say: this is War for an Idea, a great Idea! A battle's lost—we show how it should have been won, and suddenly, without taking a breath, we go into raptures over an actress's dressing-room, a ballerina's feet, we discover new talent, we are wafted to the highest spheres and straight from there to the sewer-pipes which have been invaded by some stinking fish from the Neva … That's what we're like … How can you ask, what do I write? (With cheerful irony) We follow our noses everywhere, fray our own nerves and other people's, notice everything, pump a fly up into an elephant, sometimes let an elephant slip by us, we get excited, dissatisfied, insulting, and along with it we pay our compliments to principles of civilization, art, science; compliments to liberty, equality, fraternity, compliments to the people, patriotism and humanity! … With such defenses, who dares to stand against us?
REPINA:
(laughs) What a way to talk about your profession! Let me give you a piece of advice: never run yourself down! There are always plenty of people willing to do it for you …
ADASHEV:
All right! It's not all that difficult! We're our readers' humblest servants, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh; for them we're ready to extract our souls and tear off the choicest hunks of our hearts. Go ahead, we say, eat them and good health to you … And without a care for ourselves, we spill our blood, our guts. How many others would do that? 360 days of the year we listen to everyone, trust everyone, weigh and study things … Would many act that way?(21)

This is meant to be light badinage, despite Suvorin's awkward dialogue and his own obvious empathy with a journalist's profession. The structure appears virtually unchanged in The Seagull, even to Trigorin's phrases, “I give myself no peace and I feel I'm gobbling up my own life. … I feel that if I'm a writer, I have an obligation to speak of the people, their suffering, their future, speak about science, human rights, etcetera, etcetera, and I do speak about everything, trip over myself, I'm spurred on from every side, I provoke their anger.” Trigorin's feelings may mirror Chekhov's own harassment, but their expression and the realization that a writer on stage need not be “the man of letters” hauled in for effect is inspired by the example of Tatyana Repina. Chekhov felt strongly about the character Adashev, did not want Suvorin to break up his long speeches with remarks from Repina, and was anxious that the actors in their chopping and changing keep his lines intact. In the event, he was greatly pleased by Lensky's portrayal and wrote, “I'm sure that all the Moscow gents once they see Adashev-Lensky will start posing as lover-journalists. Lensky is passionate, ardent, effective and usually sympathetic. That's good. The audience ought to see journalists not as tiresomely clever Davydov-like husks, but in a rosy light, easy on the eyes.”²² Similar, more serious concerns over an audience's reception of a creative writer inform the part of Trigorin, and led to Chekhov's annoyance at Stanislavsky's misinterpretation of the role.

Tatyana Repina may leave other traces on The Seagull. In Act IV, in Repina's dressing-room, after she has taken the poison, without revealing this fact to Adashev, she asks his opinion of suicide. Playing raisonneur, he launches into a severe condemnation of its cowardice and dishonesty, and proclaims,

Among us suicide has really become something epidemic. There's no shortage of gunpowder for good people. Children rush for the revolver when they get low grades, grown-ups over trifles … They fall out of love—a bullet through the brain. Their vanity's been bruised, they aren't appreciated—they shoot themselves. What's happened to strength of character?²³

Adashev is a spokesman for Suvorin, and his opinion is one Chekhov may endorse; at any rate, it may help explain why Treplev's suicide, twice-attempted, has nothing tragic about it; it is a typical act of weakness, a refusal to cope with life's demands.²⁴

When Nina overhears the laughter of Arkadina and Trigorin in Act IV, her running to the door and her response, “He's here too … Why, yes … Never mind … Yes …” has a precedent in Act III of Suvorin's play. There the young actress, forlorn in a suburban pleasure garden, hears her ex-lover singing at his bachelor supper.

He? Wait … Yes, yes, that's his voice … l'amour qui nous … It's he, he … (Listens intently)²⁵

For Tatyana, this is the deciding factor in her self-destruction; for Nina, it is the lowest ebb in her confrontation with her past.

Of all the characters in The Seagull, Nina is perhaps the most rooted in literary and stage tradition, even though Chekhov wreaks some important variations on her. From Karamzin's Poor Liza (1792) on, the type of the victimized young girl, abandoned by her lover and coming to a bad end, makes frequent appearances in Russian literature. Often she is depicted as the ward or dependent of an older woman, who, in her cruelty or wilful egoism, promotes the girl's downfall: Ostrovsky's plays frequently feature such a duo, as does Potekhin's A Sheepskin Coat but a Human Heart, and the Natalya-Verochka relationship in Turgenev's A Month in the Country (1850) is one of the subtlest, most sophisticated treatments of the theme. Chekhov cleverly stands this relationship on its head; it is Arkadina's example rather than her deeds that sends Nina to Moscow, maternity, and mumming. Her insincere flattery of the girl barely constitutes encouragement with malice aforethought. And Nina's fate may be hard but it is not dire: her salvation from a tragic ending comes with discovery of her vocation and an acceptance of her lot.

The pure-souled, lone, provincial actress, prey to the jealousy of colleagues, the importunities of admirers, the blandishments of the wealthy, the exploitation of managers, and the scorn of society, had early become another avatar of the Poor Liza type. Aleksandr Herzen's story “The Thieving Magpie” (1846), in which a serf actress is viciously and systematically destroyed for repelling her master's advances, was taken as a paradigm for oppression before the Emancipation; the anecdote had come from Shchepkin, whose own memoirs include the Dostoevskyan tale of a promising young actress who is first humiliated, then married by a young nobleman; when he dies, she runs mad. A major character in Pisemsky's One Thousand Souls (1858) is Nastenka, a local girl betrayed, who goes off to become a famous tragedienne, returns to her home town to shine in an aptly chosen revival of Misanthropy and Repentance, and enjoys a bittersweet reunion with her former lover. This interview parallels the similar scene between Treplev and Nina; Nastenka relates at length her squalid past, her sufferings, and when she berates her lover for not continuing with his writing, he flies into a rage:

What the deuce—literature! That was less suited to me than anything else. And after all, say I had become a kind of Russian Byron or Shakespeare—what then? We have seen the fate that overtakes all the most progressive people in that arena. This one is shot, that one dies in abject poverty, a third drinks himself to death or goes out of his mind. No, thank you! There's no life for poets and artists in our country so far. They've come to the wrong place.²⁶

He looks to Nastenka to save him from himself and “Nastenka, who seems to have loved him more because of her fond memories than in reality, gave up acting and became the wife of a Councilor of State chiefly from a sense of duty.”²⁷ Chekhov greatly admired Pisemsky (“Pisemsky's characters are alive, powerful temperaments,” letter to Suvorin, 26 April 1893), and had been reading his works in extenso two years before writing The Seagull. But, significantly, Nina does not marry her former suitor out of a sense of duty and fond memories of the past; her duty as she sees it is to her career, and her memories of “a bright, warm, joyous, pure life, … feelings like tender, fragile flowers” are both inaccurate and irrelevant in the light of present necessity. At Nina's most intense moment of recollection, she runs away, leaving the failed writer to save himself.

Later literary prototypes for Nina include Anninka and Lubinka in Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyov Family (1876) and, most appositely, Negina, the heroine of Ostrovsky's comedy Talents and Admirers (1881). Saltykov's two sisters run away from the stifling atmosphere of the family estate, and after a brief stint on the Moscow stage descend to a seedy round of provincial houses playing louche roles in musical comedies, and protecting their virginal “treasures” from not very gallant besiegers. Humiliation, seduction, arrest, alcoholism, and attempted suicide follow in rapid succession; Anninka, the survivor, returns home and introduces a desperately bawdy note into her sanctimonious uncle's life. Negina, on the other hand, is a gifted leading lady, born into a theatrical family, who turns down the love of the idealistic student Melusov to go to Moscow with the wealthy landowner Velikatov in order to further her career. She is clear-eyed about her goals and cannot reconcile them with the quixotic aspirations of her young suitor. Again, a final encounter of the provincial actress and her abandoned admirer strikes a familiar chord:

MELUSOV:
Oh, Sasha, how can you! Are talent and depravity inseparable?
NEGINA:
No, no! Not depravity! Ah, what a man you are … understand … I'm an actress! But according to you I ought to be some sort of heroine. Yet how can every woman be a heroine? I'm an actress … And if I were to marry you I'd soon throw you over and go back to the stage. Even for the smallest salary. Just to be there—on the stage. I can't live without the theatre.(28)

Nina's beginnings, her debut outside Moscow at a summer theatre, her subsequent touring, her dead baby, and hollow affair, recall the swift decline of Anninka and Lubinka, as do her third class journeys to boom towns like Elets where “educated businessmen will pester me with their attentions. A sordid life!” But, like Negina, though without Negina's brilliant prospects, her faith in her vocation keeps her from succumbing to despair. We even hear Negina's assertion in Nina's “I'm a gull … Not that. I'm an actress. Why, yes!”

Chekhov's own early stories abound with actresses who lead erratic lives and endure slurs and contempt for it; few of them are imbued with Nina's extra-professional belief in the value of art. Even Katya in “A Dreary Story,” who loses both her baby and her illusions about the glamour of the theatre, eventually retires to quiet seclusion. But at this point in her life, Nina still ignores the shoddiness of the work she is given, content to develop an inner strength, regardless of forms old or new. It is this which removes Nina and her life from the realm of the anecdotal and invests them with their symbolic quality. Most artists in the theatre, Chekhov seems to be suggesting, are wrong to abandon entirely traditional modes; one's skills are learned within them. All the advice he offers to aspiring playwrights in his letters keeps in view a necessary pragmatism, the compromises that must be made with production, censorship, actors' whims, the public taste, while maintaining one's integrity as best one can.

The working artists in The Seagull bear out this modus operandi. They truckle to popular demand, avoiding or stifling any inner stimulus to challenge the received conventions. Arkadina, barnstorming the countryside in the Russian equivalent of East Lynne, is convinced that she is performing great drama, and keeps herself “in tune … ready to play a girl of fifteen.” The old forms suit her public, the public of Korsh and Lentovsky. Trigorin, well aware that he is falling short of his potential, discontented with his achievements, still plugs away, willing to work within the traditional forms set by his masters Tolstoy and Turgenev. Nina, from the first modelling herself on Arkadina, by the play's end has accommodated herself to the fulfillment of routine, equating it with self-fulfillment. There is irony in this: Chekhov has taken the prototype of the novice actress, and indicated that her destruction need not come from outside forces. Nina's own willingness to settle for what is going, her rejection of human contact, is not self-mastery but solipsism. Her cloistration in the railway hotel, her solitary rambles through the park, her romanticization of the past all point to her gradual transformation into Arkadina, whose devotion to her work is an escape from her emotional responsibilities.

This seems implied by the fact that Treplev, the only artist-character anxious to break away from convention, is most harshly condemned by his mother and Nina. The non-action of Treplev's play, located in a void where all things are extinct and the only conflicts are between symbols like the Universal Will and the Principle of Eternal Matter, is ripe for parody. But Chekhov is careful to place the criticism on the lips of Arkadina (“This is something decadent”) whose tastes in drama are suspect, and of Nina. Nina's complaint that Treplev's play is nothing but chitka (literally, “a reading,” but theatrical slang for “lines and speeches”) uses a technical term that must echo Arkadina. It also echoes Chekhov, who, in a letter to Suvorin (20 June 1896) remarked of Bjørnsen's metaphysical drama Over Evne, which he found moving and intelligent, “It won't do for the stage, because there's no way to play it, no action, no living characters, no dramatic interest.”²⁹ Treplev's immature playlet is often taken to be Chekhov's spoof of the Decadents, whose cosmic dramas dealt with such monumental themes as Human Life and Fate. But in fact no plays by Russian symbolists had been written by 1895; the first such drama, Strindbergian in tone and tediously prolix, is Nikolay Minsky's Alma (1900); Leonid Andreev, the foremost exponent of this school, did not initiate his theatrical activity until 1905. (It is unlikely that Chekhov knew much French symbolist poetry, for, although he was reasonably abreast of literary trends in prose and commercial drama, he evinced throughout his life a lack of interest in modern poetry.) Chekhov's model for Treplev's play might have been the works of Maeterlinck, whom he admired. A week before he completed The Seagull, he had written to Suvorin to stage Maeterlinck at his Petersburg theatre. “If I were your producer, in two years I would turn it into a decadent playhouse or try my hand at doing so. The theatre might perhaps look strange, but still it would have a personality.”³⁰ Suvorin took his advice and his production of Intérieur was the first professional staging of the Belgian playwright in Russia.

The point is that Chekhov is not ridiculing Treplev for his espousal of bizarre “new forms.” After all, the writer Kuprin recollected that Chekhov himself called for new unimaginable forms in the theatre, predicting that they would not come about for a hundred years. Treplev's shortcoming is his inability to preserve the purity of his ideal; his symbolist venture is actually a garble of popular stage techniques ill-connected to his poetic divagations. Arkadina, who is up on theatrical practice, knows this. Treplev's theatre, “Curtain, then first wing, then second wing, and beyond that, empty space” is an amateur mock-up of Lentovsky's “Fantasy Theatre”; Treplev too relies on the moon and the damp for atmosphere. It is Lentovsky's pyrotechnics which Treplev feebly tries to imitate with his red flares and smoking sulphur, and which Arkadina accurately qualifies as “special effects.” Throughout Act I, he refers to Nina as “Zarechnaya,” equating her in his mind with divas like Duse, Bernhardt or Arkadina. In short, Treplev is incapable of finding an unhackneyed form to express his nebulous ideas; his play, like Bjørnsen's, “has no significance because the idea isn't clear. It's impossible to make one's characters perform miracles, when you yourself have no sharply defined conviction as to miracles.”³¹ Chekhov has Doctor Dorn, his raisonneur, repeat this and give warning of the pitfalls ahead. In his notebooks, Chekhov stressed “Treplev has no fixed goals and that's what destroyed him. Talent destroyed him.”³² By Act IV, Treplev's quest for “new forms” has dwindled into a studied avoidance of journalese and an effort to find a formula, to write like Trigorin, whom earlier he had scorned for his facility.³³

Clearly, in presenting these diverse approaches to work in the theatre, Chekhov refrains from taking sides, but preserves what might be called negative objectivity. For him there is little validity in any of the characters' means of fulfillment. The bygone virtuosity recollected by Shamraev no longer has substance; Arkadina's transference of problem play emoting into real life upstages the emotional needs of any one else; Trigorin dramatizes himself in order to “sell” the image of writer. In the younger generation, Treplev's experiments lead up blind alleys and Nina's eventual dedication to routine acts as a numbing drug. If, as Chekhov claimed, a writer's task is to state questions, not to provide answers, The Seagull leaves the problem of artistic fulfillment much where he found it. But in the process of asking, Chekhov managed to transmute the passing show of the theatre he knew into emblems of the artist's quest.

Notes

1. The Seagull, Act I. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. This translation of The Seagull has been published by Crofts Classics/AHM Press.

2. This phase of Chekhov's life is given good coverage in three works by his brother Mikhail: Anton Chekhov i ego syuzhety (Moscow, 1923); Anton Chekhov, teatr, aktery i “Tat'yana Repina” (Petrograd 1924); and Vokrug Chekhova: vstrechi i vpechatlenniya (Moscow, 1964).

3. V. S. Tret'yakov, Ocherki istorii Tanganrogskogo teatra s 1827 do 1927 god. (Taganrog, 1928), pp. 36-8, 59-61.

4. A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsate tomakh (Moscow, 1974-in progress) III, 95. Hereinafter referred to as PSS.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 97.

7. Vl. A. Gil'yarovskiy, Lyudi teatra: povest' akterskoy zhizni (Moscow-Leningrad, 1941) p. 130.

8. Chekhov i teatr: pis'ma, fel'etony, sovremenniki o Chekhove dramaturge, ed. E. D. Surkov (Moscow, 1961), p. 187. The Forest Tramp is a Russian adaptation of Aniecet-Bourgeois' Les Pirates de la Savane. For a good sketch of Lentovsky's career, see Ya. Grinval'd, Tri veka Moskovskoy stseny (Moscow, 1949) pp. 159-163.

9. A translation can be found in F. D. Reeve's Twentieth Century Russian Drama.

10. On Korsh, see Grinval'd, pp. 150-159, and T. Pavlova, “Teatr F. A. Korsha i zritel',” in Problemy sotsiologii teatra: sbornik statey, ed. N. Khrenov (Moscow, 1974), pp. 283-302.

11. M. P. Chekhov, Anton Chekhov i ego syuzhety, p. 192.

12. M. P. Chekhov, Vokrug Chekhova, p. 212.

13. T. A. Shchepkina-Kupernik, Dni moey zhizni (Moscow, 1928), pp. 325-6, and Chekhov i teatr, pp. 243-4.

14. Ibid.

15. Gil'yarovskiy, p. 176.

16. Baron N. V. Drizen, Sorok let teatra: vospominaniya 1875-1915 ([Petrograd], 1915) p. 81.

17. Chekhov i teatr, p. 186.

18. Ibid., p. 188. Chekhov's animosity derived more from his dislike of Markevich than of the genre Prince Sumbatov-Yuzhin, a friend of Chekhov's, wrote a similar play, Ties That Bind (Tsepi) about an erring wife who connives to steal her daughter away from her sacrificing husband. Chekhov not only thought it good (letter to A. N. Pleshcheev, 9 October 1888), but appears to have copied one of its scenes for the last act of Uncle Vanya.

19. B. M. Markevich, Chad zhizni, drama v pyati deystveyakh (St. Petersburg, 1884) Act III, scene 9.

20. Chekhov i teatr, p. 192-3.

21. A. S. Suvorin, Tat'yana Repina, komediya v chetyrakh deystveyakh (St. Petersburg, 1889) Act I scene 8.

22. Letter to A. N. Pleshcheev, 15 January 1889. PSS, Pisma III, 139.

23. Suvorin, Act IV, scene 3.

24. The point is better made in Russian. In Act III of The Seagull the characters say that Treplev strelilsya, has shot himself. But the curtain line delivered by Dr. Dorn goes: ‘The fact is, Konstantin zastrelilsya, has shot himself for good.” In context the prefix has an ironic tinge.

25. Suvorin, Act III, scene 6.

26. A. F. Pisemsky, One Thousand Souls, tr. Ivy Litvinov (New York, 1959) p. 415.

27. Ibid., p. 472.

28. A. N. Ostrovsky, Artistes and Admirers, tr. Elisabeth Hanson (New York, 1970) p. 64.

29. Letter to A. S. Suvorin, 20 June 1896. A. P. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1964) XII, 97. Hereinafter referred to as SS. Over Evne is known in English as Beyond Human Might: Chekhov read it as Pastor Sang.

30. But he was not doctrinaire. In the same letter, he recommends Thérèse Raquin (2 November 1895). Chekhov i teatr, p. 82. Of Les Aveugles, L'Intruse, and Aglavaine et Sélysette, he later wrote, “These are all strange, wonderful plays, and make an enormous impression, and if I had a theatre, I would definitely put on ‘Les Aveugles.’ Incidentally, there is a splendid set with the sea and a lighthouse in the distance.” (12 July 1897) SS, XII, 162-3.

31. SS, XII, 98.

32. Chekhov i teatr, p. 365.

33. Again the Russian conveys innuendo that translators seldom bother to bring across. Trigorin refers to himself as pisatel', a writer, a neutral but honorable term. Treplev always scornfully calls him a belletrist, to quote the pre-Revolutionary dictionaries, “one versed in polite literature.” “A fiction writer” or “a literary man” might be a close equivalent.