SOURCE: Gilman, Richard. “The Seagull: Art and Love, Love and Art.” South Atlantic Quarterly 91, no. 2 (spring 1992): 257-87.

[In the following essay, Gilman explores the twin themes of love and art in The Seagull.]

Some preliminary notes, ideas, observations, questions, and reminders for an essay on the play.

Its title is the most nearly symbolic of those for any Chekhov play, but like its closest rival, The Cherry Orchard's trees, the bird isn't symbolic in any pseudo-poetic or anxious way.

The chief “subjects” are art and love, never far from each other thematically. Or perhaps a better way of putting this is in the form of questions: What does it mean to be in love? What does it mean to be an artist? And to be both in love and an artist?

This is Chekhov's first play that doesn't have a dominant figure, a protagonist whose fate, and our interest in it, dwarfs all others, and so it is the first thoroughly to disperse action and sentience among a considerable number of people of whom, in this instance, four can be thought of as major characters, dramatically equal—four protagonists, then.

Though it ends with the suicide of one of the main characters, Chekhov made a point of calling it a “comedy.”

Its architectonics or musical structure is easily discernible, more sure-handedly laid out than in Ivanov, yet not so finely balanced as this mode of composition will become in the three plays that will follow. Another artistic advance over Ivanov is that the earlier play's melodramatic disfigurations are mostly gone.

Some commentators on the play, including Vladimir Nabokov, have chosen to dwell on the things they think faulty. Ronald Hingley, Chekhov's biographer and translator, perversely considers it inferior to Ivanov.

In his pioneering but now rather out-of-date study, David Magarshack accounted for Chekhov's arrival at artistic maturity in The Seagull by drawing a distinction between his earlier “scientific” approach to writing and a new spirit of human concern, and an even more important distinction between his old method of “direct” action and a new “indirect” composition. How useful are these distinctions now? Do they go far enough, or too far?

I think the reigning spirit of The Seagull is anti-romanticism.

To write about any Chekhov play is to risk going off on digressions, the homeopathic reason for this, or the imitative fallacy involved, being his own digressive procedures, his continual deviations from an expected narrative line. Is the temptation to wander off on side trips especially strong when writing about The Seagull? One reason it may be is just its relationship to the previous and ensuing plays: this one is so full of ripening method, archetypal situation, that you want to use those things to illuminate the whole of Chekhov's theater. Not that The Seagull doesn't have its own substantiality, independence, and artistic specificity; but as a storehouse of things to come it continually presses you to think ahead.

Another reason for the mind's being led afield by Chekhov is the way his writing so often suggests so much more than it directly says. All good writing does this, of course, but in his case the unstated is especially rich. You want to hunt his implications down, his very reticence setting in motion the loosening of your own tongue.

I'll save the question of the title until near the end of this essay, since by then the text, after being explored and meditated upon, should have something to say about its name. I'll look now at the words Chekhov used to describe the play, “A Comedy in Four Acts.” We can be sure that he knew exactly what he was doing, for he chose the subtitle with the same care he exercised on all the others. Ivanov is a “Play,” Uncle Vanya is “Scenes from Country Life,” Three Sisters is a “Drama,” and The Cherry Orchard is another “Comedy.”

All these terms or, in the case of Vanya, descriptive phrases, are to one degree or another tactical alerts. In effect, they tell us not to bring preconceptions about types of drama to these works; they ask us to be supple in the way we wield artistic categories and to be open in our anticipations. The extreme flatness and neutrality of “Scenes from Country Life,” for example, have an ironical quality in light of the text, which is scarcely a pastoral idyll, but they also warn us not to expect or look for a “high” theatrical experience, one that will induce in us what we think of as classical pity and terror. On another level, the subtitles indicate the relationship of the plays to one another in Chekhov's mind: lighter, graver, more subject to misreading, less so, and so on.

The most notorious instance of his gentle advice being ignored was Stanislavski's staging of the 1904 premiere of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theater. I'll take this up again, but for now it should be noted that Stanislavski was a most serious man; his own writings and the accounts of others tell us that wit and humor weren't his strong points. And so he directed Chekhov's last play as something of a tragedy, the Russian term for which translates as “heavy drama.” Like a number of directors after him, and performers and critics for that matter, Stanislavski wasn't able to see that for all the losses some of its characters sustain, The Cherry Orchard isn't heavy at all but powerfully light, a heartening gesture of freedom. It isn't too much to think of it as rather like Chekhov's Tempest.

In much the same way, The Seagull is also a comedy, not in spite of the suicide and other painful events but, in a quietly original way that at the same time has classical precedents, in part because of them. To discuss that now would be to run far ahead of myself but to talk more generally about “comedy” as a designation for a work it might not seem to fit wouldn't be inappropriate. And so a digression.

The two towering examples that come immediately to mind are La divina commedia and Le comedie humaine. In both cases, the word “comedy” clearly isn't being used to denote a conventional genre or to describe the main substance of the works; both, after all, enclose more than enough suffering, death, evil, and other decidedly unfunny goings-on. Instead, it points to or controls a final, governing response. The word “comedy” suggests the answer to these questions: What is our state of mind or spirit after we finish these works? How are we to understand them, to “take” them, as we like to say?

With Dante the matter is comparatively clear. Because the movement of the great poem is from despair to rejoicing, hell to heaven, it ends happily, that much is obvious. Not so obvious, we might think, is why this outcome should earn for the whole work the term “comedy.” It does because such is the morale, the lasting attitude, wrung from the entire arduous yet successful journey “upward,” that Dante has toward his creation and we are meant to share.

For beyond its ordinary function of making us laugh or smile, comedy has a wider, deeper action, as Shakespeare's comedies make evident: to restore, to heal, to embolden. Just as there are “thoughts that lie too deep for tears,” so there are those that lie beyond the relative simplicity of laughter. Comedy in Dante's universe is a lightness retroactively at work for those who qualify, the potentially saved (and, by analogy, for nonbelievers of good will, as Eliot pointed out); it's a relief from spiritual anxiety, a reminder of redemption, a restoration and a new existence of hope; it's God's difficult yet loving “joke.”

Balzac uses the word in a different, much more problematic sense, deliberately and more than half-mockingly adapting his title from Dante yet in the end retaining something of the poet's meaning. The new title suggests a God-like perspective, with the novelist's eye replacing the divinity's omniscience. In this secular world, life is “comic” in a negative sense because it lacks the dignity of tragedy as well as the metaphysics to sustain a tragic view, and in a positive sense, which is to say one it does deserve, because it contains its own principle of redemption.

Forever defeating itself, like a haplessly suffering circus clown, Balzac's “comedy” roughly resembles what we call a “comedy of errors,” rather more grave and consequential than is customary in such a genre, no doubt, but still full of endless deviations from or betrayals of the ideal, perpetual failures of understanding, slipups, cross-purposes, and gaffes—some of them, to be sure, fatal ones. But though it may be a comedy we sigh over, a “black” farce at times, and though some of its humor may be of the gallows variety, it isn't in the end conducive to despair.

The imaginative act has intervened. Simply to see this roiling series of mistakes, miscalculations, and failings, this burlesque of the ideal, to observe its inexhaustible variety—comedy is always much more multifarious than tragedy—and organize all that in the creating mind as a sort of failed Divine Comedy, is to bring, paradoxically enough, some of the relief Dante gives us. It's to offer hope through perception, a “cure” through the description of the disease. Even the darkest moments in Balzac, the particular novels or events that recoil most strongly from being called comic, take their places in the general easing of anxiety which occurs whenever experience is recovered from shapelessness and made less inexplicable.

Chekhov, it goes without saying, is much closer to Balzac than to Dante. Like the French writer, he hasn't any religious convictions that can make for comedy in a sublime sense, he isn't dealing in salvation. Like Balzac, he gives us nothing that resembles a conventionally “happy ending” either. But Chekhov has an even more wry and rueful appreciation of human frailty and folly, and he is far less disposed to draw moral conclusions—he isn't disposed that way at all—or to impose his own views. He doesn't try to substitute for God, as Balzac often seems to be doing, nor does he wish to extend his artistic dominion over everything. His comedies aren't part of any broad “canvas,” but are instead the products of alternations in his moods or particular visions.

When Chekhov is engaged in writing a comedy, the situations he invents receive their identifying energy and shape from his sense that something can be done about them; they remain open, not yet determined. The comedic aspect of The Seagull, as of The Cherry Orchard, lies, then, in Chekhov's attitude toward the situations he describes, not in the literal series of events or despite any of them. This is so obviously true that I hesitate to make anything of it. Yet misunderstandings of such matters abound, especially in regard to Chekhov, whose “subject matter” is so often seen to dictate his manner, instead of the other way round.

Attitude shows itself, of course, not declaratively but in structure, design, and tone. One thing we see in The Seagull is that Chekhov constantly deflects matters away from being taken too seriously, which in this context means either tragically or in too absolute a way. This is so even in the plays he didn't call comedies, such as Ivanov. In the more “serious” works the openness remains, if not the physical way out.

The resulting “lightness” in the noncomedies is nothing like a diminution of seriousness, and in the comedies nothing like frivolity. In their different ways both kinds of drama offer us something like breathing room, space in which we can maneuver, take emotional or intellectual steps of our own, set matters in order, compare, recognize. All this is an act of freedom from what deconstructionists would call a programmed response. As a corollary of this, or its executive means, Chekhov's tone in The Seagull is either bantering or matter-of-fact, never somber. He'd enjoyed writing the play, he said, something rather rare for him, and the pleasure permeates the text.

In a much-quoted letter of 21 October 1895, Chekhov wrote to Alexie Suvorin that he was at work on a new long play, his first since The Wood-Demon of six years earlier. In the interim he had several times expressed his disgust with the condition of the theater in Russia—“We must strive with all our power to see to it that the stage passes out of the hands of the grocers and into literary hands, otherwise the theater is doomed”—yet he had also given voice to those by now familiar doubts as to his own talent for writing plays. But he told his friend and publisher: “I can't say I'm not enjoying writing it, though [because would have been more nearly true] I'm flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage. The comedy has three female roles, six male roles, four acts, a landscape (a view of a lake), much conversation about literature, little action and five tons of love.”

He had some way to go before he finished, but The Seagull would turn out to be almost exactly as he had described it, with the addition of a fourth, minor female character and rather more action than he had suggested.

Chekhov wasn't exaggerating the weight of love in The Seagull. It announces itself almost immediately and by the end of the first act a character will remark, “What a state they're in and what a lot of loving.” Indeed, what a cross-hatching of amorous relationships and would-be ones, too! He wasn't overstating, either, the prominence of what he had called “conversation about literature.” Actually, the conversation—and not just that but also monologues, interjections, spoken thoughts, and private murmurings—is about fiction and writing it, plays and writing them, the state of the theater, the nature and profession of acting and, most widely, the life of both art and the artist.

The Seagull, then, is a play, a comedy, largely “about” art and love, creation and the erotic. I put “about” in quotation marks to make what I think is an important point, the one Beckett was making when he said of Joyce that “he is not writing about something, he is writing something.” This is to say, the subjects of imaginative literature, in which I include plays as texts (and also in performance, though that's another question) don't exist independently of the writing itself. They're not like prey waiting to be pounced upon by a verbally gifted hunter, or seedy rooms needing to be refurbished by a painter in words. In turn, writing isn't the expression or treatment of a preexisting reality but an act that discovers and gives life to a “subject” within itself.

Ibsen once said that “I have never written because I had, as they say, a ‘good subject’” but out of “lived-through” experience. And Picasso, to turn to another art to which Beckett's observation is every bit as pertinent, said once, “Je ne cherche pas, je trouve.” By which he certainly didn't mean that he found things to paint—just imagine him coming upon a woman with three noses or legs like giant sausages and crying “Aha!”—but aesthetic reality of a visual order in the making of the painting.

Following on this, The Seagull is about art and love not in the sense that they are its topics so much as that the entire play quite literally surrounds them, providing those abstractions with the dramatic context or field in which they can come to life, working themselves out as motifs, or maybe it would be more useful to think of them as something like “notional presences,” ideas attached to bodies. Chekhov takes art and love into his writing, turning them from their disembodied state into dramatic energies. These are then deployed throughout the play, and in the process art and love necessarily assume new identities, since they are not being written about but written. This is what happens whenever we encounter something in an imaginative work and say, I never saw it that way before; you couldn't have because it wasn't that way before.

But this isn't all of it. What his characters say or think about love or art has to be revelatory of what they are, of their natures, not discrete attitudes or a series of opinions (though having more opinions than passion is itself a revelation of character)—which is to say that themes have to be active, incarnate, endowed with physiognomies, or else they plague us as inert thought.

Who are these characters in so many of whom love or art has lodged or taken over like an infection? An anatomy of the dramatis personae might be in order here.

Irina Arkadina is a famous or at least well-known actress, vain, voluble, a “foolish, mendacious, self-admiring egoist,” Chekhov said about her, which might be just a little strong; she's concerned about her son, Constantin Treplev, yet constantly forgetful of him or actively hostile, and she's in love with her companion, Boris Trigorin. Constantin is in his early twenties, starting out as a playwright and writer of fiction; he's self-absorbed and self-pitying, with, one suspects, something of an Oedipal fixation on his mother, and he's romantically in love with Nina Zarechny.

Trigorin is a very famous writer, possibly modeled on someone Chekhov knew, absorbed in his craft but indifferent to his celebrity; an essentially selfish man, he'll leave Arkadina for a while when he falls in love with Nina. She's an aspiring actress, sensitive, warm, impulsive, someone we might in today's debased vocabulary call “vulnerable”; she's in love with Constantin at first, then succumbs temporarily to Trigorin.

These are the four principals. It's interesting to note that all are actively in love and all are practicing artists in one way or another.

A few degrees below them in significant presence are Peter Sorin and Eugene Dorn. Sorin is Arkadina's brother, a retired civil servant, self-deprecating, genial yet fussily melancholy over the onset of old age; he's somewhat reminiscent of Shabelsky in Ivanov and a characterological ancestor of Gayev in The Cherry Orchard. Dorn is one of the four doctors in Chekhov's major plays (only The Cherry Orchard lacks one); an intelligent, wryly skeptical man with a lyrical streak tempered by a mild philosophical bent, he might be considered the only “balanced” person in the play.

The four other characters occupy with varying bulk the remainder of the dramatic space. We can think of them as participants in subplots or lesser agencies for the working out of perception, but they're never simply functional, like the servants, guards, messengers, and the like, of classical drama. Ilya Shamrayev, Sorin's estate manager, is a brusque, officious, somewhat despotic man and the only character apart from Sorin who isn't either in love or the object of someone else's carnal, or at least amorous desire. His daughter Masha is an intelligent self-dramatizing young woman hopelessly in love with Constantin, and her mother, Polina, is an efficient, loyal family retainer lifted from a merely functional status by being unrequitedly in love with Dorn. And Simon Medvedenko, a schoolmaster both pedantic and long-suffering, pathetically desires Masha, who treats him contemptuously for his pains (though she'll later, with unchanged contempt, agree to marry him); he is a direct forerunner of Kulygin in Three Sisters.

The setting for the comedy they enact, Sorin's estate in the country, is similar to those for all of Chekhov's major plays with the apparent exception of Three Sisters, which has an urban milieu; still, it's linked to the other mise-en-scènes by the extreme provincial dullness of the town. These settings provide Chekhov with dramatic conditions, or conditions for a drama, that wholly suit his artistic intentions, and so irresistibly compel a digression at this point.

The places are isolated, at a distance from the hurly-burly and multiple distractions of big cities, from “culture,” careers, formal amusements, professional entanglements, politics, ideas, the sway and clutch of complicated, often abstract associations. In his long story “The Duel” Chekhov has a character “stuck” in the Caucasus and ardently, if a bit journalistically, longing for the pleasures of Moscow and St. Petersburg. People in those places, he thinks, “discuss trade, new singers, Franco-Prussian accord. Everywhere life is vigorous, cultured, intelligent, brimming with energy.” And then of course we will hear the Prozorov sisters' repeated “Moscow! To Moscow!”

In the deprived country settings the characters are pressed back on themselves and on each other, including those who—like Arkadina, Trigorin and, at the end, Nina of The Seagull, Ranevskaya and some of her extended family of The Cherry Orchard, and the Prozorovs and Vershinin of Sisters—have known or will come to know what the larger world, the “great” world is like. In his two comedies Chekhov offers relief from the narrowness of provincial or rural life—this is one reason they're comedies—but even so the alternative is given to us offstage, talked about, offered as a possibility but not lived visibly on the stage.

On these isolated estates people gaze, speak, gesture, kiss, think, and weep in a severely limited atmosphere. They're enclosed in an enclave, tiny, burdensomely self-sufficient, stifling at times yet also, for the purposes of Chekhov's art, in a very special way “pure,” reduced to essentials. They are far from the vast sprawling human country whose distant voices they hear, speaking of another, richer life. And they're where they are because Chekhov has put them there, by design, to exist in one kind of play rather than another, not, as those who see him fundamentally as a social observer think, because he looked around and found a fitting object in these “deprived” lives for his famous brooding, pitying, humane, and mournful glance.

In the way he chooses to circumscribe his characters' situations he is closer to Beckett than to any of his contemporaries, or to any other Russian writer for that matter; Gorky put many of his people in a romanticized poverty, Turgenev in an elegant rusticity. The restricted circumstances Beckett and Chekhov fashion for their plays resemble one another beneath their enormous physical differences, and the artistic purpose of this confinement is much the same for both.

In their plays—so much straitening, so much absence. In Endgame as in Uncle Vanya, in Waiting for Godot as in Three Sisters, the inescapable fact is that there's nothing much to do. Beckett's plays are of course far more radically denuded than Chekhov's, though certainly not on that account better, but the surprisingly dramatic result of the scarcity and want in both playwrights' invented lives, so unpropitious for drama, one would think, is nearly the same.

For what is done is closer to fundamental life than the seductions toward activity, toward choice and mobility as the very essence of meaningful existence, ever allow us to come in the conventional theater or to see in our own lives. Deprived of distractions, having to rely on their own primitive or sadly provincial ones—all that keeping “the ball rolling” or fussing with the bag in Beckett, all those card or lotto games or musical evenings in Chekhov—bereft of the consolations of staying busy, on the road neither to fulfillment, that fictive aim or shibboleth, nor to wisdom, nor even in most cases understanding: all of Beckett's characters and nearly all of Chekhov's are reduced to the essential tasks of getting through the days and nights, making their way, with what is left to them, through time. Once again, we remember that in the comedies more is left to them, but even so such a residue is on hold, so to speak, for the future, which in both dramatists, for highly significant reasons, has no status, is simply a fiction.

And then, or rather along with this they go off in that quintessential human way of holding back the darkness: they talk; they tell their lives; they ad lib their hopes, joys, and sorrows, creating their fates in language as they go, and our recognition of their fates. These outwardly minimal existences come to us with all the freshness, peculiar as the word may sound in this context, of the root, the way it is at bottom, Beckett's comme c'est ça.

And so the characters of The Seagull talk. Naturally, there are physical events too, but nearly all the decisive ones take place offstage. This is one of the things Chekhov meant when he spoke of consciously ignoring the fundamental tenets of the stage, and is at the center of David Magarshack's argument about Chekhov's emergent mastery. The subject is so dense and important that I'm tempted to go off on another digression to pursue it, but I'll content myself with simply saying here that among the theatrical principles (pieties, we might better call them) Chekhov was challenging was the notion that offstage is only for things that for reasons of propriety or mechanical difficulty can't be shown directly. In Greek and Roman drama, of course, important events took place offstage, as well as in Shakespeare and other classics, but for a long time offstage had been chiefly where the stagehands waited.

As he does in every one of his full-length plays after Ivanov, Chekhov quickly brings on all the persons of the drama. From The Seagull on, no play will fail to introduce everyone of any significance—which is to say nearly everyone, since almost no character, however “minor,” lacks dramatic weight—within the first few minutes. The strategic point of this is that it works against the linear or accumulating movement of the usual play. Nobody will come onstage later, bringing important news or actively furthering developments and so extending a line of more or less strictly unfolding narrative. The quietly revolutionary effect of this is that the characters take their places almost like players in a game such as soccer, occupying a field and ready for what will happen.

The very first stage direction informs us that art, in the form of theater itself in this opening scene, is going to figure in The Seagull. Setting the scene, Chekhov writes of “a rough stage put up for an amateur performance” and of “workmen … hammering and coughing … behind the drawn curtain.” Then in the first lines of dialogue “love” also makes its appearance, in intimate (if a little ludicrous) connection to art.

Medvedenko and Masha are onstage; he tells her that “Nina Zarechny will act in it [the play for which the crude stage has been set up] and Constantin Treplev wrote it. They're in love and this evening they'll be spiritually united in the effort to present a unified work of art.” After this banality, he goes on to complain that unlike Nina and Constantin he and Masha aren't “soul-mates at all.” Masha has a moment earlier indicated her own lovesickness in the play's wonderful second line, the dourly cryptic “I'm in mourning for my life,” after Medvedenko's opening, “Why do you always wear black?”

After a few more exchanges they're soon joined by all the other characters, who lay out for us, offhandedly and in some respects unconsciously, most of their ruling qualities and idiosyncrasies, as well as what binds them factually and emotionally to one another. Little signatures show themselves—Sorin's self-deprecating laugh and his finishing his remarks with “and so on” or “stands to reason,” Dorn's bemused singing of snatches of songs—the kinds of things that so unaccountably irritated Nabokov. And we hear the first mention of the bird in the title when Nina says that she feels drawn to the lake as though she were a seagull.

They've gathered for the performance of Constantin's play. They're mostly in an amiable mood, except for Masha, who's almost never amiable, Constantin, who's nervous, and Arkadina, who's clearly disgruntled by her son's having dared to step onto her territory. “When does the thing [italics mine] start?” she asks, and then breaks out in a pointed declamation from Shakespeare—“O Hamlet, speak no more …”—to which Constantin replies with another speech from Hamlet that in the most literary way reveals his Oedipal rivalry with Trigorin (he's already revealed his envy of him as a writer): “Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed.”

The inner play begins with a prologue by Constantin, who “loudly” orates: “O ye ancient, hallowed shades that float above this lake at night.” The curtain parts to reveal Nina, in white, sitting on a rock. “Men, lions, eagles and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders and silent fishes,” she begins, launching into a long futuristic monologue that speaks of a time when everything in the world is dead except for some vague spirit that will do battle with the Devil and, victorious, will establish the “reign of cosmic will” and harmony.

The “experimental rubbish,” as Arkadina so cruelly yet not without reason will call it, suggests the worst of German expressionist drama of a generation later, in its whole tone and in lines like “That World Spirit am I. I.” Still, it does give some evidence of anarchic talent and urgent ambition, and this, rather than any reasoned scornfulness, lies behind Arkadina's gibes, so jealous is she of what she considers her own fiefdom. After she's interrupted Nina several times, Constantin abruptly stops the performance, saying bitterly, “I'm extremely sorry, I forgot that writing plays and acting are only for the chosen few.”

In a generally most perceptive essay on The Seagull, Robert Louis Jackson makes an ingenious case for Constantin's play as highly significant in its own right. He offers a detailed reading of it in terms of a creation myth, a metaphor for the artist's journey and a disguised Oedipal confession, and then extends his findings beyond their source and into the main text. I owe a great deal to Jackson's other ideas and will have occasion to draw on them in this essay, but I think he makes too much of this one.

Whatever the literary motifs of Constantin's play, they seem to me less important in themselves than what, among other things, they tell us about Constantin, which, to be sure, Jackson partly acknowledges. Yet in his eagerness to use the little play to shed light on the larger one, he pushes his interpretation too far, overloading a relatively uncomplicated if subtle comedy with abstract ideas and in the process losing sight of a concrete function of the inner play, which, as I see it, is to set going talk about art and the artist. We can be sure that Chekhov didn't provide Constantin with any old overblown piece of writing because he wanted to discredit him, but he didn't give him such an arcane and ponderously philosophic one as Jackson thinks either.

The talk set in motion by the inner play, Chekhov's “conversation about literature,” which as I said earlier is about other things too, begins even before the aborted performance. “Your play's hard to act,” Nina tells Constantin as they wait for the others to take their places. “There are no living people in it.” “Living people!” Constantin explodes. “We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be but as we see it in our dreams.” Nina calmly ignores this, going on to say, “There's not much action, it's just a lot of speeches. I think a play really needs a love interest.”

The exchange tells us a good deal about where they are in relation to their art at this point and obliquely suggests their eventual destinies in the comedy. Constantin's ideas are vague, soft, inexperienced, a young man's aesthetic, and they're peculiarly belligerent. He'll drop the “program” later on, but he'll do so for tactical reasons, not out of conviction, when he turns into a technician in the fiction he comes to write. Still, he won't overcome the absence of life from his work, and by continually trying to justify his writing on one basis or another, usually by attacking other people's, he reveals something dangerously defensive, polemical, and theoretical in his approach to art.

As for Nina, she's basically right in her criticism but she too betrays a weakness, provisional in her case; her remark about a play needing “love interest” indicates that she's not yet a serious artist but is in the preliminary phase of being stagestruck. We should notice that in a delicious piece of irony Chekhov has written her into a play with an abundance of love interest, only of a kind and with dramatic implications as far as they can be from what she means here.

Constantin's play provokes other responses besides Nina's and Arkadina's, and each provides a little revelation of character. Trigorin is neutral, evasive in his “everyone writes what he likes as best he can,” and Medvedenko adds to his reputation for boring pedantry with “No one has the right to separate Spirit from Matter, since Spirit itself may well be. …” Dorn's surprising approval—“I liked the play. It has something”—can be ascribed to his usual kindness but is better explained by his confession to Constantin after praising him that if “I'd ever experienced the uplift that an artist feels when he's creating I think I'd have taken wing and soared into the sky.” And the play also inspires Sorin to admit to having in his youth dreamed of being a writer.

Understandably, the talk about art and the artist has as its chief participants Constantin, Arkadina, Trigorin, and, with especially great consequence at the end, Nina. They are the artists and each has something to elucidate, press for, or defend. In everything they say we can feel Chekhov's presence, beyond the obvious sense of his having written the dialogue; the points of view and attitudes he presents touch, often intimately, on his own concerns as a writer. He doesn't necessarily endorse any of them, he clearly disapproves of some, but he anchors the “debate” in animate personalities who have a stake in its outcome, and so keeps it from becoming abstract.

As we would expect, Constantin is most vociferous. Besides the conversation with Nina before his play begins, he also talks to Sorin about his mother and the theater, the two “topics” merging into one argument. “She adores the stage,” he says, “serving humanity in the sacred cause of art, that's how she thinks of it. But the theater's in a rut nowadays. … [T]hese geniuses, these high priests of art … out of mediocre scenes and lines they try to drag a moral, some commonplace that doesn't tax the brain … a thousand variations on the same old theme.”

To this point his views would certainly have been echoed by Chekhov (except for the note of envy they contain), as would his remark that “What we need's a new kind of theater.” But when he adds, “New forms are what we need, and if we haven't got them we'd be … better off with nothing,” an alarm goes off.

As we know, Chekhov never spoke of “new forms.” He wanted changed morale, a theater of truthfulness and resiliency instead of dead mechanics, but he never consciously or avowedly aspired to technical change or pursued it as an end in itself, as Constantin seems to do. When Trigorin says of him that “he frets, fusses and crusades for new artistic forms,” the verbs suggest that Constantin's quest for originality has something inorganic and inauthentic about it, simply because it's a mission too conscious by far.

At the end of the play, after he's achieved an empty success as a writer of fiction, Constantin will partly recognize his own condition. “I've talked so much about new techniques,” he tells himself, “but now I feel I'm … getting in the old rut.” He unhappily ponders Trigorin's “easy” methods for a while, quoting some images from one of Trigorin's stories that are actually from a Chekhov story, “Wolf,” comparing them to his own stressful, slick, and brittle style (qualities we identify from his own and others' comments), then says: “This agony. (Pause.) Yes, I'm more and more convinced that old or new techniques are neither here nor there. The thing is to write without thinking about technique—write from the heart, because then it all comes pouring out.”

Chekhov isn't advocating, through Constantin, any naive or primitive aesthetic; he's not saying, “The hell with how you write, it's what you write that counts.” But for him technique was always in the service of vision and experience, not the other way round, just as originality was a possible outcome, never a goal. Constantin's “agony” is spiritual, not the result of wrong methods. Dorn, who admires him, says near the end, “I'm only sorry he has no definite aims [the exact words Chekhov had earlier used about Constantin in his notes; for “aims” we can read “intentions beyond the ego”]. He produces an effect, that's all, and mere effects don't get you … far.” Trigorin sums it up: “None of his characters is ever really alive.” A most subtle point Chekhov is making about Constantin is that ideas don't guarantee anything.

Trigorin talks even more about writing than does Constantin but never aggressively and never as a matter of theory. Quite the contrary: in the play's longest speeches he tells Nina about the writer's, or artist's, life, countering her breathlessly romantic notions of what it must be like with prosaic, deflating comments. When she speaks of “fascinating, brilliant lives full of meaning” he replies, “Sorry, but this nice talk only reminds me of boiled sweets—something I never eat.” When she insists that his life must be “marvelous” he says, “What's so nice about it?” and goes on to tell her that writing for him is compulsive, not inspired. “I'm always writing, never stop, can't help it. What's wonderful and brilliant about that?”

In her infatuation with him or at least as much with the life he seems to inhabit, Nina continues to press him. When he keeps denying that his vocation is glamorous she tells him, “You're simply spoiled by success.” Trigorin's reply is crucial to an understanding of Chekhov's idea of the artist in The Seagull, as Nina's thoughts on the subject will also be at the end. “What success?” he asks. “I'm never satisfied myself. I dislike my own work. I drift around in a trance and often can't make sense of what I write.”

The words may not represent Chekhov's feeling in every respect, but the self-critical position does, as we know from his repeated expressions of it. He once wrote in his notebook that “Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the foundation stones of every true talent” and this, among other things, is what distinguishes Trigorin from Constantin, whose later self-depreciation is a matter of injured ego, not creative modesty. Moreover, Trigorin's scoffing at Nina's idea of success—acclaim by the world—echoes Chekhov's often-expressed and passionately held opinion that, defined this way, success is more than contemptible. Though he wasn't without a reasonable interest in his own reputation, he hated the sort of celebrity that produced followers, a cult. In 1898, at a low point in his morale, he wrote to Lydia Avilova, an erstwhile fiction writer who was in love with him, that “what disgusts me so much is not the writing itself as the literary entourage from which it is impossible to escape.”

There are other connections between Trigorin and Chekhov. Trigorin tells Nina, for example, that early in his career as a playwright he was afraid of the public: “When I put on a new play, I always felt the dark-haired people in the audience were against me, while the fair-haired ones didn't care either way.” We are immediately reminded of Chekhov's letter to Suvorin in which he says that before performances of Ivanov he was sure that “the dark-haired men” among the onlookers would be “hostile.” None of this is to say that Trigorin is Chekhov's alter ego; there are important differences, but the connections are clear.

If Trigorin isn't an egotist about his art, he's not free from one occupational disease of the writer, which is to exploit others for one's art. “I try to catch … every word you and I say,” he tells Nina, “and quickly lock [them] in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.” And indeed we see him at this work of plucking what he calls the living “flowers” for imaginative use. Into his ever-present notebook go jottings about Masha—“Takes snuff. Drinks vodka. Always wears black. Loved by schoolmaster”—and Nina too: “A plot for a short story,” about her and a seagull, he says of one note she sees him making.

Dangerous as it is to interpolate from a writer's life to the work, it seems justified in this case. On several occasions, most notably concerning a short story of 1891, “The Butterfly,” Chekhov was accused of having exploited for literary purposes some embarrassing facts about friends of his. He denied any conscious intention and there is no reason not to believe him, but the matter must have remained vaguely oppressive. We're put in mind of how Ibsen tried to expiate in his last plays his guilt for having “sacrificed” to his art the people closest to him. While Chekhov is nowhere near such moral anguish, he does, I think, render Trigorin in part as a cautionary figure and a delegate from his own conscience.

Arkadina doesn't talk so much about art as about the artist—herself. Chekhov called her an “egoist,” and many touches contribute to a portrait of the actress as Narcissus. We've seen her attack her son for his own artistic ambitions; later she'll announce that she's never read his published stories, “never have time.” In their famous quarrel, as she bandages his self-inflicted head wound, she calls him a “pretentious nobody” and he in turn calls her a “hack.” Constantin's epithet is rather more accurate. Fame, éclat, position are what his mother wants. When she does speak about acting it's to call attention to her successes: “I had such a reception in Kharkov. … I'm still dizzy. … I was superbly turned out.”

There's fine irony and splendidly deft characterization in her reaction to a Maupassant story they've been reading aloud at the beginning of act 2. Arkadina reads from On the Water: “Writers are very popular. So when a woman's marked one down for capture, she keeps on at him, flattering him, being nice to him and spoiling him.” She breaks off reading to say, “Well, the French may be like that, but we're different”; then she reads some more lines to herself and tells Nina, “Oh well, the rest's dull and unconvincing.”

She speaks highly of Trigorin's stories but we suspect she hasn't read them, having instead “captured” him and his name. She's a miser who gives three servants a ruble to split among themselves; she's a prima donna in almost every respect. But though she clearly incarnates Chekhov's deep dislike for the artist or practitioner consumed by self, something a little more positive about her escapes his authorial vigilance. She does love her brother and, in a besieged way, her son, and she encourages Nina to go on the stage. The point about these things is that she should never be played on a single strident note. She isn't a villain but the occupant of one end of a spectrum covering the variations of selves as they engage with art and love, the way Nina stands at the other end.

Nina. I wrote earlier of how she begins as stagestruck and of her infatuation with some presumedly thrilling artistic life. As an aspect of that, we see her also as “star-struck.” When Shamrayev rudely tells Arkadina that no horses are available to take her to the station, Nina says to Polina: “Imagine saying no to a famous actress. … Her slightest wish, her merest whim … surely they're more important than your entire farm.” The evolution, or education, that carries her far past these immature conditions of mind and spirit lies behind Chekhov's having written, “To me, Nina's part is everything in the play.” I have to defer my consideration of how this “everything” accumulates and decisively asserts itself, until we have the rest of The Seagull's substance in our grasp.

If we were to imagine a piece of music inspired by some aspect of The Seagull a likely one might be called “The Love Variations” or maybe, borrowing from Bach, “Chaconne for Violin Solo on an Amorous Theme.” “Five tons of love,” Chekhov jestingly said the play contained, but of course the real point isn't such undifferentiated heft but the diversity and intermeshings. In that last regard there are moments when we're reminded of Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen or, as it's better known to us, La ronde, written five years later out of a very different, far narrower sensibility and idea but somewhat resembling Chekhov's play in the way its characters link up in a chain of carnality or carnal aspiration, as well as romantic longing.

I'll begin with the lesser characters' longings, all of them, as it happens, unconsummated. I say “as it happens,” but Chekhov never lets things simply happen; he is always and wholly the deliberate artist. Not to have your desires fulfilled is as instructive and dramatic as to attain satisfaction, especially in light of the fact that for the major characters satisfaction is always partial, temporary, or fugitive. What love doesn't bring or do is a central “action” of The Seagull, and how it affects other aspects of life, most pointedly the morale of artistic practice, is another and even more important one.

Medvedenko loves Masha, Masha loves Constantin, Polina loves Dorn. None, in the old-fashioned sense, is requited and much of the play's lower level or integumentary buzz and hum of conversations and musings is made up of their sense of injury or deprivation. Medvedenko is the first to declare his emotion, to which Masha's response is, “Your loving me is all very touching but I can't love you back and that's that.” Then, in a fine example of how Chekhov, beginning with The Seagull, will often have his characters change the subject whenever it threatens to become too ponderous—or, at times, too disturbing—she adds, “Have some snuff.” Later, in despair over Constantin's indifference to her, she consents to marry Medvedenko, rationalizing her decision to Trigorin: “To be helplessly in love, just waiting, waiting for years. … [B]ut when I'm married I shan't bother about love.”

She's lying or deceiving herself. When she does marry Medvedenko she continues to treat him with brutal scorn and keeps the torch burning for Constantin, to the point where Polina embarrassingly pleads with him to give her daughter “just a few kind looks.” For her part Polina “imploringly” says to Dorn, “Eugene, dear, let me come and live with you, darling.” Dorn, who earlier had made the remark about the “lot of loving” going on, tells her, “I'm fifty-five, it's too late … to change my life.” The most skeptical of all the characters, as well as the least “involved,” Dorn moves to deflect and disarm the passions swirling around him with bits of balladry, half-mocking commentary on the love-charged atmosphere: “Oh tell me not your young life's ruined” and “Oh, speak to her, you flowers.”

These three minor characters in love aspire to an “other” as an agency of deliverance: Medvedenko from his material and emotional impoverishment and the lack of self-esteem his sententiousness masks; Polina from her unhappy marriage to the cold-spirited Shamrayev; Masha from the emptiness of life without a man she thinks equal to the high estimate she's made of her own worth—Medvedenko clearly doesn't fill the bill. And motivations or dispositions like these are present in the major characters, too, only with greater complication and weightier consequences.

Arkadina needs Trigorin for her own amour propre and as a shield against the loneliness or, more deeply, solipsism her selfish, brittle way of life creates. In turn, Trigorin stays placidly with her, out of what he calls his “spineless” nature (one way he doesn't resemble Chekhov) until his writer's quest for new “material” and his need for emotional replenishment encounter Nina. She begins by being in love with Constantin, mildly, as a kind of early habit, we suspect, then falls for Trigorin, who promises a glamorous new life. And Constantin needs Nina for reasons of ego as well as for a muse, a source of inspiration.

For all the characters-in-love the common condition is need. This sometimes displays itself directly but more often through speech whose excessiveness and rhetorical zeal betray a disjunction between feeling and fact, emotion and its object. I said at the beginning that the prevailing spirit of The Seagull is one of “anti-romanticism.” This negative quality is grounded precisely on repeated expressions of romantic desire itself, flowery outbursts of oratory about the wonders of the other and dirges on love's absence. The characters lay bare their hearts and in so doing reveal their dreamy or febrile overvaluation of love.

Listen to the twittering eloquence of the love birds, along with some harsher notes:

Constantin on Nina: “I can't live without her. The very sound of her footsteps is so beautiful … entrancing creature, my vision of delight.”

Masha on Constantin, talking to Dorn: “I'm so unhappy. No one, no one knows how I suffer [lays her head on his breast, softly]. I love Constantin.”

Trigorin on Nina: “Young love, enchanting and magical love that sweeps you off your feet into a make-believe world.” And to her: “You're so lovely … your wonderful eyes, your tender smile … your look of angelic purity.”

Nina to Trigorin: “If you should ever need my life, then come and take it,” a line from a short story, ostensibly his but actually from Chekhov's “The Neighbors,” which Nina has had engraved on a medallion. And to herself: “It's all a dream.”

Arkadina to Trigorin: “My marvelous, splendid man … my delight, my pride, my joy. … If you leave me for one hour I shan't survive, I shall go mad.”

A few notes on these urgencies and avowals. One of Chekhov's purposes throughout his writing is to expose or, if that's too harsh, to bring out the ways we fashion our feelings out of culture, articulating them along literary—that is to say, borrowed—lines. Constantin's “I can't live without her” is just such an appropriation; the point is we do or ought to be able to live without her or him if necessary, and in the way The Seagull unfolds this will become part of a cautionary tale.

The line on the medallion Nina gives Trigorin, from Chekhov's story “The Neighbors,” was actually engraved on a medallion by Lydia Avlova; on the back were the words “Short Stories by A. Chekhov.” Avlova evidently hoped to stir his passion but Chekhov wasn't to be moved by literary solicitations, not even of his own authorship.

Those two themes or motifs or subjects—better to go back to a term I coined earlier, “notional presences”—begin to converge as the play moves toward its close. In a brilliant stroke of dramatic imagination, Chekhov prepares the way for the final fusion of these presences—the confrontation at the end between Nina and Constantin—by having some central elements of the narrative occur offstage.

At the end of act 3, which closes on a “lengthy kiss” between Nina and Trigorin, a stage direction reads: “There is an interval of two years between Act Three and Act Four.” The events of this period include Masha's marriage to Medvedenko, Constantin's unexpected literary success and, most important, Nina's affair with Trigorin and subsequent start of a career on the stage. All this news reaches us almost entirely through apparently casual conversations, especially, as it concerns Nina, one between Dorn and Constantin, who has kept up with her life, even “follow[ing] her about for a while.”

The facts, as he knows them, are these: Nina had a baby, which died, Trigorin “tired of her” and went back to Arkadina, and the “disaster” of Nina's life, as Constantin sees it, extended to her acting in provincial theaters. He secretly saw some of her performances and tells Dorn that her acting was basically “crude and inept, with lots of ranting and hamming,” though with a few high histrionic notes too—“she screamed superbly.” Later he'd had some letters from her, “bright, affectionate” ones, but he had “sensed that she was deeply unhappy.” She'd seemed to him “slightly unhinged” and had strangely signed her letters “Seagull.”

Chekhov drew most of his material for Nina's life away from our gaze from a longish piece of fiction of his own called “A Boring Story,” written in 1889. In the story, a stagestruck young woman runs away with an actor, has a child who dies, is jilted by her lover, and then goes on the stage, though she has severe doubts about her talent. To this point her story is almost exactly Nina's, but the moral and intellectual consequences of these material details are wholly different for Katya of the fiction and Nina of the play.

The Seagull's climactic actions, some of the most passionately unfolding and swiftly revelatory in all of Chekhov, begin with Constantin in his room, meditating on writing, technique, his own feeling of sterility. The others are playing lotto in an adjoining room. Nina knocks on the French window and when Constantin brings her in she “lays her head on his breast and sobs quietly,” reminding us of Masha's having done this earlier with Dorn.

But once again material actions resembling each other have entirely different aftermaths. From then on, in Nina's and Constantin's agitated, discordant, and ultimately “failed” conversation, everything having to do with art and love, talent and the ego, is brought together and we witness what is best described as the exposure and testing of the two characters' deepest—or rather, since Chekhov isn't interested in depth psychology—their most dramatically representative selves.

For Constantin, Nina's reappearance seems to be a miracle; she's come back to save him, he thinks. Earlier he had told his mother, “She doesn't love me and I can't write any more,” but now his hope springs up. Nina is at first bewildered, almost incoherent at times, struggling to express the hard wisdom her recent life has taught her and about which he knows nothing, despite his possession of the “facts.”

“I'm a seagull. No, that's wrong,” she says several times, identifying herself with the bird as victim and with her youth at the lake, then quickly taking on a real description not a fictive one—“I'm an actress.” And she says to him, still partly under the sway of their easy youthful romance and shared ambitions, “You're a writer now … and I'm an actress.” Then, in a prologue to the rapid, violent change in attitude she will soon have to him, a movement away from the waywardness of memory and the pull of early desire, she tells him, “I loved you and dreamed of being famous. But now—.” The “now” indicates that neither of these things is any longer true and the break launches her into a recital of some details of her physical life as an actress. She thus unwittingly baits a trap into which Constantin will immediately fall.

Ignoring her words and so revealing that his interest in her is only instrumental, a function of his need, Constantin pours out his misery and persisting desire, telling her that since she left him “life's been unbearable, sheer agony.” Then, in the most fateful line of the play, he adds, “I call upon you, kiss the ground you have trodden on.” To which Nina, “taken aback,” replies, “Why does he say this—why, why?”

Nina's use of the impersonal “he” instead of “you” indicates her sudden understanding of Constantin's character, so that her “why's” aren't really questions but a recognition and an expression of regret. He has in effect hanged himself by the romanticism that coats her in such sentimental language and by his having pinned his sense of himself as a writer, his ego, to her former and potential love for him. Early in the play he had engaged in the “She loves me, she loves me not” game with the petals of a flower, and this seemingly innocuous action can be seen in retrospect as a foreshadowing of his fatal lack of emotional maturity.

What Nina regrets or fleetingly mourns is her loss of innocence in regard to Constantin, the death of her sense of their shared values and beliefs. She has already lost her larger innocence. In several long, beautifully modulated speeches she traces the course of her spiritual growth. Because of “the cares of love” and his “laugh[ing] at my dreams” in her life with Trigorin, she had become “petty and small-minded” and her acting had suffered. “But I'm different now.” Through a process of maturation Chekhov doesn't describe, and doesn't have to, she has learned to esteem herself and “adore” her work and, most significant for The Seagull's pervasive themes, has learned what it means to be an artist.

“I know now,” she tells Constantin, “that in our work—no matter whether we're actors or writers—the great thing isn't fame or glory … what I used to dream of, but simply stamina. You must know how to bear your cross and have faith … [W]hen I think of my vocation I'm not afraid of life.” In various ways Nina's idea of “stamina” will be active in every Chekhov play to come.

In profound contrast to Constantin's having allowed his romantic hunger for Nina to ruin his self-possession, she confesses to still loving Trigorin “passionately” yet without this weakening her resolve to forge her own life as an artist or in any way diminishing her determination to endure. When she leaves, she allows herself a moment of fond remembrance, quoting from Constantin's little play, something from their mutual past. Along the way she has exorcised the image of the seagull with which both Trigorin, for whom she and the bird are material for a story, and Constantin, stuck in barren literary imaginings, continue to identify her. Left to himself, Constantin offers one last revelation of his weakness and immaturity. If his mother were to learn of Nina's visit, he thinks, “[i]t might upset her.” A few minutes later, from behind his closed door, we hear the shot.

“I'm flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage.” In that famous high-spirited letter, Chekhov for one of the few times we know about spoke of, or at least alluded to, matters of technique in his work, the methods he was choosing to make his plays take their shape. Uncharacteristically, he had claimed originality for Ivanov, but that was in regard to its plot, which he had called “unprecedented” because it had broken with the long tradition of plays as moral struggles, pitched between heroes and villains. And though Ivanov exhibited a number of innovative dramaturgical steps, they were uncertain or incomplete and were surrounded by elements of a not-yet-fully superseded past; nor, in any case, did Chekhov make mention of them.

The most basic theatrical “tenet” he was ignoring in the composition of The Seagull was that of the nature of action, as this was conceived by the largely melodramatic or farcical imagination out of which proceeded nearly all the plays of the reigning French style and its Russian imitations. The principle he was spurning or sidling around had energized most classical drama, too, though much more subtly.

A play has to be materially active, it was thought, full of incidents or built around one or two really big ones, and what physically happens on the stage is of a different order from, and almost always more decisive than, what is said. Chekhov's implicit reply to this was that speech can make up a good part, perhaps even most, of what “happens” in a play, as much an action as any sword thrust or discovery of a lover in a closet or arrival of a letter with fateful news.

Eugene Scribe, the high priest of les drames des boulevards, those “well-made” plays of French popular theater, once wrote that “when my story is right, when I have the events of my play firmly in hand, I could have my janitor write it.” With what magnificent shamelessness does this stand as the polar opposite of Chekhov's method, indeed of his entire sense of drama as an art. For him, events don't dictate the writing but very nearly the other way round. Speech is action, something taking place. Dialogue can therefore be much more than comment on physical activity, or an environment for it, an instigation toward it or its verbal counterpart. Beginning with The Seagull things said in Chekhov's theater constitute most of the drama. Material occurrences have their own necessity and integrity, but in a shift with enormous consequences for the future of the stage they mainly serve to spring speech—the executive instrument of thought—into life, behaving as language's outcomes more than its causes. Or events accompany language as a sort of ballast, preventing words from flying off like balloons, the way they do in the sort of sterile dramas we disconsolately call “talky,” of which Constantin's little play in The Seagull is an example.

That the chief physical eventfulness of The Seagull—Nina's flight with Trigorin, her baby's death, and her early career as an actress; Masha's marriage to Medvedenko; the shooting of the bird and Constantin's suicide—that all this takes place offstage has several powerful effects. It deeply undercuts if it doesn't entirely eliminate the possibility of melodramatic excess; it “cools” the play down and so allows reflectiveness to control sensation; and it therefore enables us to experience the play more as a pattern of animate consciousness, a set of moral and psychic rhythms and discoveries, than as a narrow, emotionally overwrought tale.

This shift from the explicit to the implied or reported on, from activity before our eyes to that which reaches us through language, is the movement Magarshack so usefully if incompletely and programmatically described as being from “direct” action to “indirect.” For all its basic accuracy, the formulation is too neat; it tends to blur the relationship between physicality and speech and gives insufficient weight to language's own directness, its being action in its own right. To be able to account for the radical change in Chekhov's methods Magarshack saw the process in too formulaic a way, but his fundamental argument, that at some point Chekhov stopped building his plays around large physical scenes in favor of a dispersal of action and the replacement of statement by suggestion, was a greatly original perception and remains essentially sound.

Whatever its nature, the “indirect” has the great and mysterious virtue of freeing us from the tyranny of a priori assumptions, the ones on which sentimental drama, or any heavily plotted kind, is based. Melodrama, I once wrote, “may be defined as physical or emotional action for its own sake, action without moral or spiritual consequence or whose consequences of those kinds have atrophied and turned into cliché precisely by having been the staples of previous ‘high’ drama.” Theater—this is as good a time as any to say it—is the most cannibalistic of the arts, forever chewing on its own history.

The a priori assumptions—amorous passion can be fatal, murder is detestable, a cuckold is ridiculous, and the like—move us in the direction of the already known; they create a stasis of imagination, its defeat, really, by sensation, habit, cliché. On the most trivial level, physicality tends to carry its own fixed meanings; to scratch one's head is to indicate bewilderment, to shake one's fist is to show anger. In regard to the theater, where the connections between inner and outer reality are of course paramount, these correspondences have always been present and were more than once codified, perhaps most notably by Goethe, who composed a manual for actors in which a great range of emotions and states of being were given their “correct” physical equivalents or objective correlatives.

We may be more sophisticated than that, yet so strong is our compulsion to read things this way, so thorough has been our training for it, that one secret of good acting, pace Goethe, is to make gestures that are unexpected, unpredictable, but that feel exactly right in the aesthetic context—to scratch one's head in anger, it might be, for the purposes of this argument, or to shake one's fist in bewilderment.

The larger point about this in relation to The Seagull is that had we witnessed any crucial parts of Nina's life between the acts, had it been given to us unmediated, we would have been swayed toward emotions too inelastic and circumscribed for the play's amplitude, too small, paradoxical as that might sound, because fixed and conventional. Pity for the infant's death, sympathy for the abandoned lover, perhaps contempt for Trigorin: such “natural” feelings would have flattened out the subtleties of Chekhov's scheme, confined the truest action—Nina's movement into spiritual and psychological maturity against a frieze of other characters more or less arrested within their situations and personalities—to the story of an ill-treated, doggedly ambitious young woman who somehow manages to survive.

As the play is constructed, Nina's inner change takes place away from our awareness; what we do see are the crystallization and articulation of her new self. We get the “facts” about her interim life first from Constantin, who wholly misinterprets them because he sees them conventionally, and then the truth from her. The contrast, which is at the same time the difference in their natures, is superbly dramatic, unfolding as a coup de theatre in the realm of consciousness such as an ordinary drama of highlighted physical events could not have given us.

Except for Anna's death, Ivanov had offered its substance to our direct gaze. And surely the most instructive demonstration of Chekhov's growth from that play to The Seagull is the suicides with which both dramas end. Ivanov shoots himself before our eyes, Constantin away from them. The obvious difference is that the latter suicide is at a distance, reaching us obliquely—the sound of the shot, Dorn's whispered words to Sorin—and that this greatly diminishes the emotional impact of the event. But this is an accession to the imagination, not a loss, for the assault on the senses of the suicide onstage leaves no space for reflection, specifically about the significance of the act in itself and in relation to other things.

No space for reflection and not much material for it. Ivanov's shooting himself is essentially solipsistic, isolated from the rest of the drama or, more pertinently, from any large pattern of consciousness, as such melodramatic actions tend to be. We've interpreted the suicide, relying on the character's own words, as in part an attempt to recapture his “old self,” through a last catastrophic but at least decisive act. It's also simply a way out of his untenable situation and a device by which Chekhov can end the play. Missing from it is any significant connection to other lives.

Suicide is always carried out in the moral or psychic neighborhood of other people, directed toward them (“See what you've made me do!”) or implying something about them, so that taking one's own life invariably poses questions about those who don't take theirs, those who live. Camus called suicide “the only truly serious philosophical problem,” and this dimension of thoughtfulness, of ontological query, is just what's lacking in Ivanov's shooting himself. By contrast, it's abundantly present in the circumstances and aftermath of Constantin's self-destruction.

His suicide exists at the imaginative center of The Seagull's concerns, which are chiefly the different ways people confront themselves in situations of love and vocation, or if they lack a calling, like Sorin and Masha, whatever niche they do occupy. Especially being tested is the relationship between love and talent, with Nina and Constantin as the exemplary figures, while most of the other characters circle at various distances from this thematic center.

When Constantin kills himself, it's squarely in the light of Nina's stamina, her going on. Her strength has revealed to him his own weakness in two connected ways. She has taught him in an instant how pallidly romantic and compensatory is his desire for her and he has learned (we sense rather than are told this) that he lacks the courage—a clearheaded capacity to continue on through vicissitudes—that she incarnates. Her visit and its words hover in the air of the final scene, as the lotto game so casually goes on; behind the closed door Constantin, brooding about what she has shown him, “defeated” by her example, prepares his pathetic counterstatement.

This is why the play is a comedy, in one of the ways I defined the genre earlier, why the suicide is neither tragic nor bathetic. For Constantin's death is the result neither of some fatal crack in existence nor of an attempt to pass beyond limits; its “reality” is brilliantly seen against a contrasting one, a choice of life that will be lived bravely and with honor. Something essential has been saved out of the entire human substance of the play, the principle of relief from fatality that governs all comedy is now in place, so that the imaginative balance is toward what remains, not what has been lost. Constantin is the cautionary figure in this dramatic positioning of selves and self-questioning, as Nina is its force of redemptive acceptance.

The mainsprings of its plot having been moved offstage, The Seagull presents a surface without any visible peaks, the landscape of a remarkably flat terrain. But this flatness is of a physical order, not an aesthetic or intellectual one. On those levels there is ceaseless activity, usually small, often apparently casual, an intricate meshing of gesture, speech, and idea. And something else becomes apparent when we have adjusted our sights to the newness of the dramaturgy. For the first time in Chekhov we see the drama proceeding as though its language and actions are gradually filling in a field, not moving in any sort of conventional straight line, the usual unfolding of exposition, development, and denouement. The energy thus released, the force of locomotion turned into that of presence, is exactly the principle of “newness” in Chekhov's theater, Magarshack's idea of the “indirect” but more accurately formulated this way, I think.

Ivanov had begun this transformation but stumblingly and with an incompleteness that came from Chekhov's inability at that point fully to shake off the past, the seductions toward melodrama, the mechanical deference given to physical sensation. Resisting these, Chekhov could greatly extend, even free from their surrounding narrative pressures all those scenes without preamble or immediate aftermath, without plotted logic, that had constituted the rough technical originality of the earlier play.

In The Seagull characters move in and out of our sight and of each other's, in a constant traffic of direct encounters, glancing meetings, conferences, interruptions, breakings-up and reassemblings, all of it governed sometimes by mutual understanding and sometimes by its lack. A seemingly structureless drama, it's really all structure, if by that we mean, as we should, something inseparable from texture and pattern. The play isn't an edifice laid horizontally yet rearing its “meanings” skyward, but a meshing of revelations, withholdings, recognition, everything serving as clues to the whole.

The entire substance is somewhat thinner than it will become in Chekhov's next plays—its characters' destinies, Nina's most saliently, are a little too predicted beyond the play instead of being fates wholly within it—but the ground for the full flourishing of Chekhov's imagination is prepared. His vision will darken in Uncle Vanya and even more in Three Sisters, to lighten again in The Cherry Orchard, but here for the first time vision and method have largely fused.