SOURCE: Jackson, Robert Louis. “Chekhov's Seagull: The Empty Well, the Dry Lake, and the Cold Cave.” In Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jean-Pierre Barricelli, pp. 3-17. New York: New York University Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1967, Jackson elucidates the theme of art versus reality in The Seagull.]

Art is at the center of The Seagull. Four characters in the play are actresses or writers. Everybody talks about art. Everybody embodies or lives out a concept of art. The problem of talent—what it takes and means to become an artist—is a fundamental theme of the play.¹ Illusion and reality, dream and fulfillment in art and life constitute the innermost concern of the author. Finally, art in its most basic form as myth gives expression to the underlying dramatic conflicts and realities in the play: the myth of creation, the oedipal syndrome, and the metaphor of the journey.

In his myth play in Act I of Chekhov's The Seagull the young writer Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev pictures a bleak future for the world: thousands of centuries have passed and all life has vanished. The bodies of living beings have long ago crumbled into dust, and eternal matter has turned them into stone, water, and clouds; their souls have merged into one. A doleful moon vainly sheds light on this desolation. And desolation it is: “Cold, cold, cold. Empty, empty, empty. Terrible, terrible, terrible.”

Konstantin's play itself, as commentators on The Seagull have observed, is also terrible. It is a concoction of melodramatic posturing and mannered symbolism. Yet—though bad art—it is, paradoxically, full of Chekhov's art. The action, the character-symbols and portents—all the devices that fail so miserably in Konstantin's play taken by itself and that seem merely a Chekhovian parody of a “decadent” theatrical style—have a distinctly allegorical character in the context of the larger play, The Seagull. Just as in Shakespeare's Hamlet, so in The Seagull, the play within the play reaches out into the psychological drama.² But whereas the import of Hamlet's theatrical is immediately evident, both before and after the performance, the significance of Konstantin's play is fully apparent only by the end of The Seagull. Chekhov's use of Konstantin's play is crucial to his whole development of the character of Konstantin and to the expression of some of the central ideas of The Seagull. A discussion of Chekhov's play, then, may properly begin with an analysis of the play within the play.

“Cold, cold, cold. Empty, empty, empty. Terrible, terrible, terrible.”

The state of Konstantin's world of tomorrow, unpromising as it appears at first glance, is not entirely without hope. On closer investigation, it becomes apparent that Konstantin is dramatizing in mythopoetic language a physical world that is delicately poised between death and life, between sterility and creation, between the negative force of the “father of eternal matter, the devil,” and the beneficent, life-stimulating power of “spirit.” We have here, essentially, a dramatization of unliberated life and creation; and, it is further apparent, this is also a crucial self-dramatization. The author Konstantin not only projects a vision of a universe in biological limbo; he, or his alter ego, also inhabits it. But what is not quite clear or established is the poet-narrator's exact status in this created legend.

At the end of the first half of his soliloquy—after referring to the merging of the souls into one—the poet identifies himself directly with the force of spirit and creation that continues to inhabit the universe.

The universal world soul—that's me, me. In me there is the soul of Alexander the Great, and of Caesar, and of Shakespeare, and of Napoleon, and of the last worm. In me the consciousness of people is united with the instincts of animals, and I remember everything, everything, everything, and I experience anew every life in myself.

This is the high point of the soliloquy. His self-centered exaltation is not without a sort of naïve charm. The poet completely identifies himself with his muse. And this muse is ascendant.

But at this point—and we are now halfway through Konstantin's play—the “marsh fires” (will-o'-the-wisp) appear. (The reader will recall that Konstantin's mother, the actress Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina, exclaims at this juncture: “This is something decadent”—to which Konstantin replies with a pleading “Mama!”) The marsh fires, it is evident, take on the character of some kind of robot creature—symbols that have depressing import to the poet. Indeed, their appearance signals the collapse of his poetic ego: the “universal soul” metamorphoses into a petty anthropomorphic soul. “I am alone. Once in a hundred years I open my lips to speak and my voice echoes gloomily in this emptiness, and nobody hears me.” The pale fires, born from the rotten bog, wander mindlessly and without will or beat of life toward the dawn. Fearing that life will awaken in them, the poet tells us, the “father of eternal matter, the devil” keeps the atoms in these fires in constant flux. “Only spirit remains constant and unchangeable in the universe.” But now spirit seems to be keeping very much to itself. The poet, plainly, is abandoned by his muse.

Like a prisoner thrown into an empty, deep well, I do not know where I am or what awaits me. One thing, however, is not concealed from me: in stubborn, savage struggle with the devil, with the element of material forces, I am destined to conquer, and then matter and spirit will unite in a beautiful harmony and the kingdom of the world will is to arrive.

Konstantin's play gives expression to the pro and contra in his nature. It dramatizes his creative yearnings, the flight of his poetic muse, but in the final analysis it is paradigmatic of the downward spiral of a hopelessly crippled creative spirit. “There's something in it,” Doctor Dorn observes after seeing Konstantin's play, something “fresh, naïve.” The play, indeed, partakes of poetry, as the audience realizes in Act IV when the young actress Nina Mikhaylovna Zarechnaya recites again the opening lines from Konstantin's youthful work. But apart from revealing a propensity for abstractions and symbols (“not a single character that's alive,” Trigorin later observes of Konstantin's writings in general), the play discloses Konstantin's tendency toward grandiose dreams and impetuous challenges, on the one hand, and passive retreats and sterile reconciliations on the other. The movement of the play—all appearances to the contrary—is precipitous from self-exaltation to a depressed posture of defeat. Here in his well the poet prophesies “stubborn, savage struggle with the devil” and eventual victory. But this is empty prophecy: the well is dry. The poet himself is inwardly aware of the emptiness of his prophecy, of the utopian character of his mythic dream of “beautiful harmony” and of a “kingdom of world will.” He resolves the contradiction between the reality of his nature (his weakness of will, his impotence) and his fantastic dream in the manner of a familiar Chekhovian type.

But all this will only take place when, little by little, through long, long series of millennia, both the moon, and the bright Sirius, and the earth will turn into dust. And until then, horror, horror.

The horror here is, in a sense, an intuition: the self's forereading of its own tragic emptiness.

It may be argued that our analysis of the inner direction of Konstantin's play—the view that it moves toward compromise and defeat—must be permanently flawed by the fact that we are analyzing an incomplete drama: the play within the play, as we know, is cut short by a flurry of argument between mother and son. There is no question that the outcome of the poet-narrator's struggle with the devil cannot be deduced with complete certainty from Konstantin's text alone, just as it is impossible at the outset of The Seagull clearly to anticipate the denouement of Konstantin's struggle to become a mature artist. Both destinies are to a large extent “open.” But in the action that brings Konstantin's play to an end Chekhov subtly prefigures the sad fate of Konstantin and, at the same time, indicates the inner direction of Konstantin's play, that is, discloses that conclusion which is embryonic in the play's development. This action is so ordinary and so distracting as to conceal its profound meaning. We have in mind Konstantin's altercation with his mother.

This altercation is the momentary point of intersection of two lines: the line of the poet-narrator's struggle with the devil in the play within the play, and the line of Konstantin's permanent psychological duel with his mother. The duel—one marked throughout The Seagull by alternating acts of hostility, magnanimity, and submission—forms a real-life prologue to Konstantin's play; it bisects the play at its halfway point (the appearance of the marsh fires and the deflation of poetic ego—the painful exchange between mother and son); finally, it is the immediate cause of the play's ending. “My mighty opponent, the devil, is now approaching,” the poet declares. “I see his fearful, crimson eyes. …” At this point, Konstantin's own mighty antagonist, his mother, once and for all shatters his magic lantern with some disruptive, sarcastic comments on the play. Put out by this cruel teasing, Konstantin declares: “The play is finished! Enough! Curtain!” And in a childish fit he retires from the scene. His retreat, of course, constitutes an ironic commentary upon the bold resolve of his fictional alter ego. In the context of Chekhov's subtle juxtaposition and interplay of real and fictional lines in the episode of the play within the play, we recognize that Konstantin's announcement, “the play is finished,” anticipates the abortive ending of his life drama; it constitutes a dramatic rehearsal for the ending of The Seagull.

The negative attitude of Madame Arkadina toward her son—unfavorable circumstances, indeed, for the artistic as well as psychological development of Konstantin's personality—cannot be underestimated in any evaluation of his personal tragedy. But in the final analysis it is Konstantin himself who chooses to ring down the curtain on his own life, as he does on his own play. We may note in passing, here, that Konstantin's impulsive retreat before his mother's jibes contrast pointedly with Nina's efforts, in the midst of the quarrel, to continue the play. His behavior in this episode, then, reveals fundamental character weaknesses that will manifest themselves in his life at large. Konstantin's confrontation with his mother is of a very petty nature. Yet as Chekhov once observed: “Let everything on the stage be just as complex and at the same time just as simple as in life. People dine, merely dine, but at that moment their happiness is being made or their life is being smashed.” So, also, here—in an ordinary quarrel, in a single moment, Chekhov discloses the compound character and fate of his hero.

Konstantin created for himself in his play a legend not too different in character from the typical fairy tale with its demons, its embattled and enchanted knights, and its golden kingdoms at the end of the trail. As in a fairy tale, so in Konstantin's legend we are in a world of magic, of the supernatural. The hero in this legend, plainly, finds himself imprisoned by some evil force (the devil). But how will he get out? In stubborn, savage struggle, he declares, “I am destined to conquer” (mne suzhdeno pobedit'). The passive structuring of this thought is revealing. Who has destined this victory? What fairy of fate, what magic is going to liberate the hero from his dry prison well? The appeal here on the part of the poet to a force, fate (sud'ba), outside self points to the tragic flaw in Konstantin, this modern pseudotragic hero of The Seagull: his refusal to recognize his essential freedom and to accept the responsibility that it implies.

Chekhov alludes to this refusal at the very outset of the play when Konstantin casually tries his fortune by an age-old means: “Picking petals from a flower. She loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not. Laughs. You see, my mother doesn't love me. You can say that again!” A search for authority, for a decision maker outside oneself, of course, is characteristic of all immaturity. The young actress Nina also reveals a penchant for fortune-telling: “Even or odd,” she asks Trigorin at the beginning of Act III. “No,” Nina sighs, “I have only one pea in my hand. I was trying my fortune: Should I become an actress or not? I wish somebody would advise me.” Trigorin's reply—and we have no difficulty recognizing Chekhov in these words—is that “in this sort of thing nobody can give advice.” We are free. Nina must accept her freedom: the choice must be one's own. “No general ethics can show you what is to be done,” Sartre wrote in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme in connection with another case of decision making. “There are no omens in the world.” This is a painful lesson that many of Chekhov's heroes experience. It is of the essence of Chekhov's conception of Nina that she ultimately accepts a world without omens, that, in a very real sense, she takes her fate into her own hands. “Boris Alekseyevich,” she exclaims to Trigorin at the end of Act III, “I have made an irrevocable decision; the die is cast; I am going on the stage. Tomorrow I will not be here any longer; I am leaving my father, abandoning everything; I am beginning a new life.” Nothing is fated, nothing postponed here; a choice is arrived at lucidly. If anything, Nina's decision constitutes a challenge to fate, to the force of circumstances (her family life) that is so hostile to her choice of an artistic career.

Chekhov sees in the individual's attitude toward “fate”—whether expressed in discussion or in casual or unconscious acts—a measure of the individual's capacity to respond to the sum total of forces acting upon him, to necessity, to the given in life. Chekhov's focus in his brilliant story, “A Woman's Kingdom” (1894), is upon the interrelation of this factor of the given (background and environment) and individual will, character, and fate, in the life of the heroine. She was not to blame for the fact that she never married, the young factory owner Anna Akimovna muses one Christmas morning. Chekhov takes us into her inner consciousness. “Fate itself had flung her from a simple worker's setting where, if one can believe memories, she had felt so comfortable and at home, into these huge rooms where she was completely unable to imagine what to do with herself, and could not understand why so many people were darting in front of her.” But it is her passive character, her lack of courage that seals Anna's destiny. Her daydream that, if her father had lived longer, he would “surely have married her to a simple man, for example, to Pimenov”—would have “ordered her to marry him—and that would be that”; her general belief that “love will define my obligations, my work, illuminate my world view”; her conviction that “nobody will take me”; the symbolic scene at the card table when she asks to be “matched” with Pimenov, and then jumbles the cards—all this is symptomatic of Anna Akimovna's deep malaise, her inner impotence. “A man's character is his fate.” “A Woman's Kingdom” embodies the insight of this maxim of the ancient Heraclitus.³

Those characters in Chekhov who accept the notion of fate, of a force acting independently and capriciously outside human will, seem to bear within themselves the element of defeat. The fatalistic philosophy of Tuzenbach, so poignantly expressed in Act II of The Three Sisters, is an ingredient of his tragic fate. “The die is cast,” he exclaims in connection with his decision to retire from the army. But his decision to take charge of his life comes too late. This amiable but weak man is the victim, quite ironically, of the meaningless universe that he posits as a philosopher. His would-be partner in life, Irina, also relates passively to life; like Konstantin Treplev in The Seagull, she reveals the character of her world view in her casual play with cards: “It's coming out right, the patience, I see. We shall be in Moscow.” Fate, chance, luck, of course, is not going to bring the sisters to Moscow, any more than Sharlotta Ivanovna's tricks (in The Cherry Orchard) will save the orchard. Chance is never productive, creative in the world of Chekhov. On the contrary. When the owners of the cherry orchard renounce their option to decide upon the fate of the estate, when they renounce their freedom actively to participate in their own fate, the estate and their lives are ceded both literally and symbolically to the caprice of chance—the auction block. We discern in the magician Sharlotta Ivanovna a symbol of that haphazard universe for which Lyubov' Andreyevna Ranevskaya and her brother opt (the scattering of money, the game of billiards are symbolic). It is the merchant Lopakhin—no relier on chance or the help of others, but a man who lifts himself by his own bootstraps—who takes fate into his own hands and who triumphs. It is perfectly true, of course, that the freedom of the estate owners is, historically, severely limited. Chekhov plainly depicts the estate owners—in the context of their suffering humanity, to be sure—as representatives of a moribund class that is impotently being overcome by the movement of time and history; on the other hand, the ability to “decide” and to act is given to a representative of a historically new class—Lopakhin. But Anya and Trofimov also take advantage of the option to shape their own lives. Are we pawns of history and circumstance? Orlov, in Chekhov's “An Anonymous Story,” suggests that “in nature, in man's environment nothing happens indifferently. Everything has reason and is necessary.” But we are not thereby relieved of responsibility for, or participation in, our fate. For all Chekhov's undoubted pessimism over the human condition, he is not an adherent of a theory of implacable determinism. Lopakhin's constant reiterations to “decide,” “think seriously about it,” “definitely decide,” “decide once and for all,” “think about it” point to the constant potential for freedom in man's life. The sense of doom and of guilt that weighs upon Lyubov' Ranevskaya and Gayev is not alone in the force of circumstances, in ineluctable “history”; it is in them, in their passive nature, in their philosophy. They have become their own history and, no less than Oedipus, are the source of their own undoing. “I am continually waiting for something, as though our own house must collapse over us.” Chekhov significantly juxtaposes this observation of Ranevskaya with her brother's random (in form and content) billiard talk. “Today my fate is being decided,” she remarks in Act III. Her fate is indeed out of her hands at this moment, but it is she who has cast it to the winds, as surely as she has scattered her wealth.

The objective passiveness of the three sisters in fact leaves everything open to counterproductive chance: their weak brother gambles away their money; his wife, Natasha, and her lover, Protopopov, untroubled by any fate or a sense of the meaninglessness of life, reap the benefits of this play with the wheel of fortune. “It's all the same,” mutters the defunct doctor Chebutykin throughout the tragic Act IV of The Three Sisters. But whatever meaninglessness, chaos, or nonsense exists in the world outside Chebutykin's will, he generously contributes to it through his own action or inaction. He himself, in his renunciation of knowledge, his philosophy of nonexistence, his bankruptcy as a doctor, and his indifference to the fate of Tuzenbach (and therefore, for all practical purposes, to the fate of Irina) is the agent of blind, accidental fate. The life of Tuzenbach and the half happiness of Irina are sacrificed to Solenyy's bullet of chance. “He was sentimental,” Dostoyevskiy observed of Fedor Karamazov, “he was evil and sentimental.” These words might have been applied by a sterner Chekhov to Chebutykin.

Chebutykin's refrain, “it's all the same,” is juxtaposed at the end of the play with the theme of knowledge, of knowing. “If we only knew, if we only knew!” Ol'ga exclaims. “A man must be a believer or must seek some belief,” Masha says in the same play, “otherwise life is empty, empty. … Either he knows what he's living for, or it's all nonsense.” Whether or not Chekhov believed that absolute insight into the meaning and purpose of life was attainable, he did believe that a creative life had to be based upon a striving for that knowledge. Happiness or despair, truth or void lie not outside man, not in Moscow or in the falling snow, but in man, in his choices, and in his attitude toward the world about him. “I am destined to conquer,” Konstantin's protagonist declares. We are not a priori destined for anything—is Chekhov's reply in The Seagull. Nor is the universe a priori a meaningful one. Man creates meaning; he gives embodiment to his “history,” his destiny. His first step, everywhere, must be to recognize his fate in himself, his past in his present, and so come to grips with the only real given in history: man. This step Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev is incapable of making.

“I love you just as tenderly and devotedly as in childhood,” Konstantin tells his mother. “Except for you there's nobody left me now.” The neurotic deadlock that constitutes his relation with his mother remains unbroken from the beginning to the end of The Seagull. “Can you imagine anything more hopeless than my position in her house?” he asks his uncle Sorin, in Act I. But, unlike Nina, who wrenches herself free from the stifling confines of her family, Konstantin chooses to remain with his dilemma. His last words, in Act IV, after Nina runs out of the house and out of his world once and for all, point to his peculiar oedipal paralysis. “It would be too bad if anybody met her in the garden and then told Mama. That might upset Mama.”

Konstantin cannot leave the illusory “magic lake”; he cannot step out of the magic circle of his love-hate relationship with his mother; he cannot cease being a child. He finds himself surrounded by successful people whom he despises and who, so he believes, despise him as the son of a “burgher of Kiev.” Certainly imagination, as much as reality, feeds his hypersensitivity. “It seemed to me that with their glances they measured my insignificance, I guessed their thoughts and suffered from humiliation” (italics mine). He has contempt for the stale, though glamorous theatrical world of his mother. He is convinced that “new forms are necessary”; yet it is characteristic of his frayed and offended ego that he is equally convinced that “if we don't get them then nothing is necessary.” Maupassant, he observes, “ran away from the Eiffel Tower which oppressed him with its vulgarity.” But Konstantin himself does not run away from the vulgarity of his world: he stays with it, sinks ever more deeply into it, with his rankling ambition and sniveling self-depreciation, his wounded pride and peevish vanity.

He clearly seeks a kind of surrogate mother in Nina. Yet the tragedy of his emotional quest is not that he seeks warmth and affection, love, but that this love becomes a kind of sine qua non for any sustained interest and progress in art. As he broods over the “failure” of his play (significantly this is his own judgment), he complains to Nina about her coldness. “Your coldness is terrible, unbelievable, it's as though I woke up and looked out and saw this lake suddenly dried up or sunk into the earth.” And later, embracing his mother after his quarrel with her, he exclaims: “If you only knew! I have lost everything. She does not love me, I can no longer write, all my hopes have been smashed.”

“Love,” Chekhov jotted down in his notebook, “is either the remnant of something long past which is dying out but was once tremendous, or it is a part of something which in the future will develop into something tremendous; at the present time, however, it doesn't satisfy, offers far less than one expects.” “If you fear loneliness, then don't marry,” reads another note. In his well-known letter to his brother Nikolay in March 1886, in which he defines a cultured person, Chekhov remarks that if the cultured person possesses talent he respects it, he sacrifices “peace, women, wine, vanity to it.” The creative personality does not passively subject itself to the love relationship. Love alone, Chekhov suggests in The Seagull, does not provide a firm foundation for a creative life. The tragedy of Masha in The Seagull is that, unlike Nina, she desires nothing but love.

Chekhov, however, does not adopt a monastic attitude toward the love relationship. Nina, in her final talk with Konstantin (Act IV), indicates her readiness to plunge back again into the maelstrom of life. She says of Trigorin at this point: “I love him. I love him even more than before. ‘An idea for a short story.’ I love, I love passionately, I love to desperation.” This is active love: love that is combined with a readiness to face life; it may not carry Nina to Arcadia, but it is love without illusions, love that seeks to envelop and not to be enveloped in warm self-oblivion.

Konstantin, on the other hand, seeks to be enveloped in love. He is “cold” and desires warmth; he yearns for the waters of the womb. Psychologically, he finds himself trapped in the “oedipal situation.” But if he is trapped, he has nonetheless, like Oedipus or Hamlet, the option of self-discovery in art or action. This option he rejects, for he lacks the courage to face himself, his talent. The self-knowledge that he attains in the end is too incomplete and too incidental to his real condition to grant him any tragic stature. Like so many Chekhovian heroes, his tragedy consists in his inability to rise to the level of tragedy. He is far from being a Hamlet. And for all the noise of his departure from this world, the real truth is that he leaves this life—to borrow the words from T. S. Eliot—“not with a bang but a whimper.”

The real knowledge of self, the blinding vision, the tragic perception, on the other hand, is granted to Nina. Her drama in its painful dialectic is symbolized in the complex image of the seagull; in its living and dead incarnations this image enters her being as a pro and contra. “I'm a seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress.” In her anguished outpouring to Konstantin in Act IV she speaks of her growing spiritual strength. “Now I know, I understand, Kostya, that in our work—it makes no difference whether we are on the stage or writing—the main thing is not fame, not glory, not what I dreamed of, but the ability to endure. Be able to bear your cross and have faith. I have faith and it doesn't hurt me so much, and when I think about my calling, I do not fear life.”

Just before the performance of Konstantin's play, Medvedenko matter of factly observes that Nina “will do the acting, while the play is written by Konstantin Gavrilovich.” It is, indeed, Nina who acts in Konstantin's play and in the broader drama of life, who summons the will to confront the devil in “stubborn, savage struggle,” who emerges in The Seagull as the embodiment of Konstantin's “world soul.”

The myth of Plato's “cave” and its inhabitants may or may not have been a conscious allegorical point of reference for Chekhov when he wrote The Seagull, especially its last act. But the fundamental elements of this myth nonetheless inform Chekhov's play (as they do Gor'kiy's later play, The Lower Depths) on its deepest level of meaning—that level in art where character and idea merge with archetypal pattern and source. The central problem here is unquestionably that of illusion and reality and man's necessary movement from the former to the latter; the relevant metaphor, appearing in art and epic, is the journey. It is Nina, like Plato's wanderer, who leaves the magic world of illusions to make the difficult journey—the Platonic “steep and rugged ascent”⁴ to reality, to knowledge, to quintessential meaning; it is Konstantin who chooses to remain forever secure in his world of shadows, illusions, and disembodied forms. “You have found your road,” he declares to Nina in Act IV, “you know where you are going, but I am still moving in a chaos of dreams and images, not knowing for what or for whom this is necessary. I do not have faith and do not know where my calling lies.”

Two worlds are juxtaposed in the last act of The Seagull (as they are in the first scenes of Hamlet): the inner, comfortable world of warmth and the outer world of dark, threatening reality. “Evening. A single lamp with a shade is lighted. Semidarkness. The sound from the outside of trees and rustling and the wind howling in the chimney. The night watchman is knocking.” Outside, behind the glass door to the terrace which faces the audience, the garden is dark. Nina, like the wanderer in Plato's myth who revisits his den of old, returns to her native nest. She observes: “It's warm, nice here,” and again: “It's nice here, warm, comfortable. Do you hear—the wind outside? Turgenev says somewhere: ‘Happy is he who in such a night sits under the roof of a house, who has a warm spot.’ I'm a seagull. No, that's not it. Where was I? Yes, Turgenev. ‘And God help all homeless wanderers.’” And Nina, in her tears of pain and anguish, tears evoked by the contrast of past and present, recalls her “clear, warm, joyful, pure life,” her naïve dreams of fame, and her dreamlike love. But Konstantin misunderstands Nina's feelings. He begins to speak—trying to pick up the threads of the past, to reweave the old pattern; he reaffirms his love for her. Nina is brought up with a start. “Why does he talk that way, why does he talk that way?” The question is a pertinent one. Konstantin answers the question. “I am alone, not warmed by anybody's affection, I am cold, as in a cave, and no matter what I write it's dry, harsh, and gloomy. Stay here, Nina, I beg you, or let me go away with you. Nina quickly puts on her hat and cape.”

Why is Nina in such haste to leave? Socrates, discussing the return of the wanderer to the cave, observes that the wanderer would find it easier “to endure anything, rather than think as they do [in the cave] and live after their manner.” Men in the cave would say of the wanderer, according to Socrates, that “up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending.” But for the wanderer—“he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.” It is in these terms that we can understand Konstantin's view of Nina as a failure (his story of Nina's two years away from home) and Nina's attitude toward his appeal to remain with him. There can be no return to the innocence and illusions of the past. Nina's reply to Konstantin's plea is replete with real and symbolic meaning. “My horses are standing at the gate. Don't see me off. I'll make it by myself. Through her tears. Give me some water.” Nina dashes into the play on a horse—“A red sky, the moon is already rising, and I raced the horse, I raced it.” Nina's horse—Pegasus, winged horse of inspiration—stands ready to carry her away. Brutal reality (“we have both been drawn into the maelstrom”) is preferable to Konstantin's sterile cave. “Give me some water.” Nina's request for water—over and above its perfectly ordinary meaning—takes on special poetic significance in the context of the rich water imagery in The Seagull (Nina's name, Zarechnaya—“beyond or across the river,” the “magic lake”). Water is creation, life. Konstantin offers Nina some water to drink. Yet in the arid world that he still inhabits there is none of the water for which Nina craves and upon which art and life flourish. The “magic lake” toward which Nina once had been drawn “like a seagull” has vanished. All that is left is a cold cave, a dry lake, an empty well.

“The main thing is to turn life upside down; all the rest is not important [glavnoe-perevernut' zhizn', a vse ostal'noe ne vazhno],” the young Sasha tells the heroine Nadya in Chekhov's last brilliant story, “The Betrothed.” Like Nina after her meeting with Trigorin, Nadya turns her life upside down: “gay and full of spirits” she leaves her provincial town, unaware, however, that “all the rest”—the endless struggle with the conservatism of life—is really very important, indeed, the “main thing”; she leaves—Chekhov writes in the concluding line of the story—“as she supposed, forever.” But there is no “forever” or finality in Chekhov's conception of life (though there is much of it in the lives of his heroes and heroines). Life is not a lineal movement toward a finite goal, but a process of endless striving, suffering, fall, and recovery. The mature idea of the “return” (vernut'sya) in “The Betrothed”—the idea of the periodicity of lunar character of all experience and striving—is buried in Sasha's youthful hopes of giving a new turn to life (perevernut') and in the heroine's belief in an “unfolding” (razvernut'sya) “spring life” “not here, but somewhere.” The new, pure life, as Chekhov views it, is a permanent dream to which one returns again and again, but it is also one that makes one “want to cry” because of its inaccessibility. The idea of the “return” that informs “The Betrothed” on its deepest level (the theme of the prodigal son) is dramatized in Nina's return to the estate of her first dreams and strivings. Nina had turned her life upside down, but unlike the blithe Nadya she had already come to discover “all the rest.” She returns poignantly to relive the tender dreams and hopes of her past. But return here does not involve a blind elevation of self (as in the case of Nadya) above those whom she had left behind and now once again leaves behind; nor does it signal retreat or defeat. Return here involves the humble and passionate inclusion of her past in her life and, therefore, its inclusion in her future; it involves above all recognition of suffering (“bear your cross”) and knowledge (“now I know, I understand”) that the meaning of life lies in the journey itself—one that is a series of endless returns and restartings.

The personal tragedy of Konstantin is that he chose not to make the journey of his life; overwhelmed by his character, he remains forever in the shadow of his fear of life. The triumph of Nina is her free choice of the journey, her willingness, finally, to endure. One may say, of course, that this is a very narrow, precarious triumph. But Chekhov, like Dostoyevskiy, was a realist where man is concerned. He knew that the only triumph that counts is the precarious one, the one, in short, that organically is fused with tragic knowledge and experience.

The painful relinquishment of golden childhood and the dream of innocence before the bitter necessity of knowing reality—this is the poignant and tragic side of Nina's journey into life. Art or, at least, “pure art” with its efflorescence of beauty, is somehow permanently linked with that dream of innocence. In this sense Nina's awakening in real life reenacts the tragedy of the fall. Yet it is clear that Chekhov does not envisage the renunciation of art or illusion (in the deepest creative sense) in the journey to reality. In the lucid confrontation with reality—the “paradox of the fortunate fall”—lies all realistic hope, the hope once again of reappropriating the dream.

Notes

1. For a wide-ranging analysis of The Seagull—one that posits the central importance of the problems of art and talent in the play—see V. Yermilov's discussion in his Dramaturgiya Chekhova (Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel', 1948), pp. 3-54.

2. For an interesting discussion of allusions to Hamlet in The Seagull, see Thomas G. Winner's “Chekhov's Seagull and Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Study of a Dramatic Device,” in American Slavic and East European Review, 15 (February 1956), pp. 103-11.

3. The theme of chance or accident—with its correlative idea of a meaningless or perverse universe—saturates the content of “A Woman's Kingdom.” It is only when this theme is perceived that the real inner structure and meaning of this story—philosophical, social, and psychological—emerges. Strictly speaking, nothing “happens” in this story; yet in the course of twenty-four hours, held as within the classical unities, the fate of the heroine is determined; put in other words, she (and the reader) discover that fate that is already embodied in her character but that has not yet crystallized in consciousness. The story—and it is largely a psychological one—is the account of the feeble inner struggle (turning centrally on a chance encounter but involving the heroine's Christmas charity activities) that results in the defeat for self-determination.

4. Citations from The Republic are from The Portable Plato, ed. Scott Buchanan, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1948).