SOURCE: Scott, Virginia. “Life in Art: A Reading of The Seagull.” Educational Theatre Journal 30 (October 1978): 357-67.

[In the following essay, Scott highlights Chekhov's theme of the artist's life as expounded in The Seagull.]

In 1898 the Moscow Art Theatre, led by Constantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, opened its triumphal production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, a production which Chekhov himself disliked intensely. During his stay in Moscow in 1899, the MAT arranged a special performance for him of which he wrote: “I cannot judge the play dispassionately, because the Seagull [Roxanova] gave an abominable performance, kept sobbing violently; and the actor playing the part of the writer Trigorin [Stanislavsky] walked and talked like a paralytic. He interpreted his part to be that of a man without a ‘will of his own’ and in a way that absolutely nauseated me.”¹

I infer that the acting choices which nauseated Chekhov arose from an overall failure in interpretation, a clue to which may be found in Stanislavsky's reading of the characters of Trigorin and Treplev. Stanislavsky clearly found the attitude toward art exemplified by Treplev to be admirable and worthy of support and the attitude exemplified by Trigorin to be despicable and worthy of condemnation. In My Life in Art he praised the “talented Treplev with the soul of Chekhov and a true comprehension of art,” while evaluating Trigorin as “a simple mediocrity,” and “the literary antipode of the talented Treplev.”²

These statements tell us more about Stanislavsky than about The Seagull. Stanislavsky was committed to a neo-romantic view of art; his analytical system is expressed in such terms as “artist of genius,” “soul of the play,” “inner essence,” and “spiritual core of the actor.”³ Treplev speaks Stanislavsky's language. The problem is that he does not necessarily speak Chekhov's.

After all, it was Chekhov who wrote: “a play ought to be written in which the people should come and go, dine, talk of the weather, or play cards, not because the author wants it but because that is what happens in real life.”⁴ When Treplev objects to the theatre on the grounds that it depicts “the way people eat, drink, make love, walk about and wear their clothes,”⁵ he is condemning not only the sort of play Chekhov called for, but the very play in which he is a character.

In asserting that Treplev does not speak for Chekhov, I do not mean also to assert that Trigorin does. To do so would be to support another foolishly reductive interpretation. The play is not disguised debate, and didactic analysis will fail the modern critic just as it failed Stanislavsky. We are not being asked to choose sides; rather we are being asked to make complex responses to various and conflicting propositions about the nature of artistic experience. I propose to examine the play in order to identify the propositions and describe the strategies by means of which Chekhov shapes our responses.

Close observation of the text reveals several structural patterns. The characters exist along a continuum from nonentity to identity to nonentity. Identity is a product of role or profession. At the one end are the three “children,” Treplev, Nina, and Masha, who lack identity because they do not participate in the business of adult life; in the center are Trigorin, the writer, Arkadina, the actress, Medvedenko, the teacher, Shamrayev, the steward, Polina, the wife, and Dorn, the doctor (more or less in the order in which their professional roles absorb them); at the other end is Sorin, retired from his profession and also lacking identity. The continuum thus moves—in the terms established by the play—from Treplev, l'homme qui veut, to Sorin, l'homme qui a voulu. Only two options appear to be open to the “children”: they must successfully adopt some adult profession or role, or they must accept their perpetual nonentity.

This structure is developed by a strategy based on time. Like Chekhov's other plays, The Seagull concerns itself with past, present, and future. In The Seagull, however, contrasts in time are not dependent on narratives of the past or verbal predictions of the future. Rather, past, present, and future exist together in the play in the metaphorical relationships of the characters. Each “child” is like or potentially like one or more of the adults. Thus, the “children” represent the probable pasts of the adults and the adults represent the probable futures of the “children.” This complex, I suggest, is the dominant structural pattern in the play. Each “child” makes—or refuses to make—a choice and we are able to predict the results of that action by referring to his or her analogue. Furthermore, the structure of time within the play, with its gap of two years between Acts III and IV, sets up a rhetorical relationship between play and audience. The audience predicts the future from information gathered in the first three acts and verifies its predictions in the final act.

The strategy of this structure is easiest to perceive if we attend first to Masha whose progress through the play is contained in, and very nearly confined to, the beginnings of each act. This strategy on Chekhov's part suggests that Masha is designed as a key to our perception of the more complex patterns and analogies of the other two children.

We accumulate information about Masha as follows. In Act I we discover that she always wears black, despises her father, takes snuff to épater les vieux, holds sentimental views about happiness, and enjoys a hopeless passion for Treplev. The character at this point appears to be generalized, an adolescent who dresses and behaves so as to be noticed by Treplev who, in Act I, seems to see himself as a combination of Hamlet and Young Werther.

Our initial assessment of Masha is called into question in Act II. In the hot light of midday her romantic black is slatternly and she looks even older than her age which we discover, with some astonishment, is twenty-two. Arkadina happily compares herself, brisk as a bird and ready to play ingenues, to the lumpish Masha, who is then faced with Nina “looking very pretty today” (p. 129). Masha retreats to have a drink or two before lunch, and we recognize that our typical teen-ager is beginning to look like an unhappy, self-destructive woman.

Yet, within the play's frame of reference, she cannot be a woman—that is, an adult—until she adopts some role. In Act III, now drinking openly, Masha announces her intention of marrying the schoolmaster, Medvedenko. By this point we have enough information to predict her future if she carries out her decision. Our prediction is based not only on what we know of Masha, but also on the systematic definition of her probable future by means of the enacted present of her mother, Polina.

Polina is married to Shamrayev and in love with Dorn, a situation of long standing at the opening of the play. In Act I she fusses over Dorn like a mother hen and ignores Shamrayev to the extent that we would have no way of knowing they were married unless we had read the dramatis personnae. In Act II Polina begs Dorn to let her come, finally, and live with him; he ignores the suggestion and, from that point on, her.

Thus, when Masha decides in Act III to marry Medvedenko, we predict that she, like her mother, will end contemptuous of the man she marries and ignored by the man she loves. And, indeed, this prediction is verified in Act IV when Masha continues to pursue the disinterested Treplev while sneering at her husband and neglecting her child. What is more, we are encouraged to continue to predict Masha's future by the total lack of any interaction between Polina and Dorn who are on stage together for half of Act IV without exchanging a word or a glance—and all this set against Polina's speech before Dorn's entrance: “Give a woman a kind glance sometimes, Kostia, and she won't ask for more. I know that” (p. 167).

Once we perceive the structure of Masha's progress through the play, we can recognize the similar patterns operating in the progress of the other two “children.” Just as Masha and Polina, the two women who choose marriage as their adult role, “stand for” each other, so do Nina and Arkadina, the two who choose to be actresses. Their lives are remarkably similar. Arkadina is from a good family; her brother is, after all, a former upper-level bureaucrat. She may well have grown up on the same lake; although the text is not clear on that point, we do notice that the lotto game she played with as a child is in the drawing room. We may infer that she ran away to go on the stage and there became involved with Treplev's father, an actor and member of the lower middle class from Kiev. Significantly, the text never tells us that Arkadina married him, but only that she had a child by him. She has endured poverty, played the minor provincial circuits, in other words, gone through the same sort of apprenticeship Nina reports in Act IV. Thus, when Nina announces at the end of Act III that she has decided to run away and go on the stage, we know something about the kind of life she will find herself following.

By that point we have also perceived a number of personal similarities between Nina and Arkadina. The first references in the play to Nina are to “Zaryechnaya,” an appellation which is appropriate to Bernhardt or Duse, or even Arkadina, but not to a seventeen-year-old provincial girl who has never been on the stage. Nina, like Arkadina, is attracted to the trappings of theatrical life. On her first entrance we suspect that she has escaped from home to come to Sorin's estate, not because she is in love with Treplev—she breaks off a kiss to ask “What sort of tree is this” (p. 125)—but because she wants to be noticed by the famous and raffish Arkadina and Trigorin, especially the latter. Further, Nina's response to Treplev's play is not unlike Arkadina's: she describes it as “so uninteresting” (p. 140) and without action or living characters (p. 126). “I do think,” says Nina, “there ought to be love in a play” (p. 126).

Nina's idea of love—again like Arkadina's—is based upon theatricalizations of love in melodrama and drame. Laurence Senelick, in an illuminating study of Chekhov's use of the nineteenth-century Russian theatre in the play, demonstrates how Arkadina and Trigorin confront each other in Act III in the language and rhythms of the provincial repertory.⁶ Nina shows the same tendency when she gives Trigorin the medallion with its romantic clue to “If you ever need my life, come and take it” (p. 160). Nina and Arkadina are thus so alike, not only in background but in attitude, that we predict at the end of Act III that Nina's experiences will parallel those of her counterpart.

In Act IV we discover that they have, although we note one change in the pattern. Nina has had an affair with Trigorin resulting in a child, now dead. Deserted by him, she has made her own way, beginning by acting leading roles in small provincial companies. When we see her she is distressed, melodramatically so, but insists she is now a “real” actress. The scene is redolent, as was the earlier Ardkadina-Trigorin scene, of the nineteenth-century stage. What is different, however, is Nina's attitude toward her art.

Arkadina is an artist of surfaces; when she talks about acting, she connects it with appearance and dress. In Act III, when Sorin suggests that she buy Treplev a new suit, she answers: “I'm an actress; my dress-bill alone is enough to ruin me” (p. 156). In Act IV, and significantly just before Nina's entrance, Arkadina describes her reception in Kharkov: “Three baskets of flowers, two garlands, and this [a brooch] as well. … I had a wonderful dress on. … I know how to dress, if I know anything at all” (p. 175). Nina, on the other hand, is concerned with how acting makes her feel. “Now I am a real actress, I act with intense enjoyment, with enthusiasm; on the stage I am intoxicated and I feel that I am beautiful” (p. 181).

This theme of the ecstasy of creative experience has been struck earlier in the play, first by Dorn at the end of Act I and then by Nina in Act II. Dorn, who is not an artist, tries to comfort Treplev with a definition of the creative experience which is perhaps best explicated as that of a man who has been reading the romantic poets. “But if it had ever been my lot to experience the exaltation an artist feels at the moment of creative achievement, I believe I should have come to despise this material body of mine and all that goes with it, and my soul would have taken wings and soared into the heights” (p. 136). Nina later asks Trigorin, “don't you have moments of happiness and exaltation—moments when you feel inspired?” (p. 149). Her language is less flowery than Dorn's, but her idea is the same. Trigorin, who unlike Dorn, or Nina at that point, is deeply involved in artistic activity, will have none of this theory of inspiration. He answers: “Yes, while I'm writing I enjoy it. I enjoy reading proofs, too” (p. 149).

The aesthetic conflict, between Nina's “intoxication” and Trigorin's compulsive grind, is thus introduced. It is not, however, resolved. Nowhere does the play lead us to conclude that the nature of the artist's private experience has any necessary correlation with the quality of art achieved. We are, for instance, given no real information about either Arkadina's or Nina's skill as an actress. We know only that Treplev, hardly an unbiased observer, can say of Nina that “there were moments when she showed talent” (p. 171).

If we are to produce The Seagull we must make a judgment about Nina's skill since Nina “acts” for us just as Treplev earlier “writes” for us. Nina's performance of Treplev's play in Act I and her reprise of it in Act IV bracket the action of The Seagull and we must conclude, from their prominence in the structure, that these two moments are central to the strategy and effect of the play.

I would argue that we must take our clue to the Act I performance from the responses of Dorn and Trigorin. Dorn, who is speaking in soliloquy and whose responses we have no reason to distrust, says: “I did like that play. There is something about it. When that child was holding forth about loneliness, and later when the devil's eyes appeared, I was so moved my hands were shaking” (p. 135). Trigorin, who—because he is speaking to Nina—is somewhat less trustworthy, says: “I didn't understand it at all. But I watched it with pleasure, all the same. You acted with such sincerity. And the scenery was beautiful” (p. 133). The effect which moves both Dorn and Trigorin, and which should move the audience as well, thus derives from a combination of the setting—the empty platform at the edge of the lake with the moon rising—and the simplicity and sincerity of Nina's reading, from nature and not from art.

The Act IV reprise, however, follows a scene played in “the manner of the theatre,” with Nina converting her experiences into the conventional images of the stage: “‘And Heaven help the homeless wayfarers’”; “We've been drawn into the whirlpool” (p. 179). Thus suggests that Nina should now speak Treplev's play in the style of a provincial leading lady of the 1890s, the style, in fact, of Treplev's mother. This semi-polished rant will collide in our memory and in Treplev's with the image of the earlier performance, and will conclude the Nina-Arkadina analogy with a confirmation of our prediction.

Treplev is the most complex of the three “children,” the one with the most fully realized history and psychology, and the most puzzling. While the two women seek identity, Treplev is perilously close to having achieved nonentity, the culminating insult in the barrage which his mother fires at him in Act III. His pattern in the play is similar but not identical to Nina's and Masha's. He makes no overt choice before the end of Act III; we, therefore, make no specific prediction of his future. Further, he is given not one but two analogues: Sorin and Trigorin.

Sorin is established in Act I as a man who wanted “passionately” to get married and to be a novelist. The shadow of Sorin's disappointment hangs over Treplev from the beginning. In Act IV Sorin describes himself as l'homme qui a voulu, the man who wanted. Treplev, throughout, is the man who wants. He wants to be a great and innovative artist, he wants Nina to love him, he wants his mother to attend to him. His means for achieving these ends are small: some talent and a badly damaged spirit.

Treplev's talent is, like Nina's, moot. Chekhov wrote in his notebook: “Treplev has no fixed goals and that's what destroyed him. Talent destroyed him.”⁷ Treplev's lack of fixed goals is easily supported by the text, but his talent is less easy to perceive. We see his play, which reads like a parody of symbolism, but in which Dorn finds the evidence to say, “You've got talent and you must carry on” (p. 136). I suggest once again that anyone producing the play must find a way to elicit from the audience some agreement with Dorn's assertion that Treplev is talented.

What Treplev lacks is the power to focus what talent he has on a specific goal. Dorn identifies this problem when he follows his praise of Treplev's play with “A work of art must express a clear, definite idea. You must know what you are aiming at when you write, for if you follow the enchanted path of literature without a definite goal in mind, you'll lose your way and your talent will ruin you” (p. 136). Treplev's stated goal is to create “new forms,” but he has no idea of what such new forms might be. He seems primarily motivated to create a theatre in which his mother cannot function. His discussion of new and old forms is jumbled together with attacks on his mother's repertory, way of life, and attitudes. His “new” theatre will not include people eating, drinking, and making love, nor will it teach “some petty moral … suitable for use in the home” (p. 123). What it will do, Treplev cannot say.

The sample we see is a muddle of pseudo-Maeterlinck and crude approximations of traditional nineteenth-century stage effects, grand abstractions mingled with the sulphur pots.⁸ This muddle reflects the ambiguity of Treplev's feelings about his mother: on the one hand a theatre which excludes her, for he is, after all, desperately jealous of her career; on the other, a theatre which uses the traditional elements of her theatre, for he is also desperately eager for her approval. None of this bears any resemblance to a fixed artistic goal.

As in art, so in life. Treplev loves Nina and assumes that Nina loves him. When he discovers that she does not, he flings a dead seagull at her feet and, in a moment of “mad despair,” carefully gives himself a flesh wound in the head. He is capable of gesture but not of action, and all his gestures seem to say: “Attend to me.”

Psychologically this is justified by Arkadina's neglect of him, a neglect which we attribute to her self-absorption, but which Treplev regards as evidence of his own unworthiness. Faced with this unwanted self-perception, Treplev theatricalizes it, much as his mother and Nina do the unpleasant experiences of their lives, although his taste is better. While Arkadina rages in the cadences of Fumes of Life, her son acts out Hamlet. Arkadina recognizes, is perhaps amused by, her casting as Gertrude; her first speech to Treplev is “Oh, Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turns't mine eyes into my very soul; / And there I see such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct” (p. 128). She is less amused by Treplev's casting of Trigorin as Claudius, important as this may be to Treplev's self-esteem. Perhaps her teasing complicity in Act I is what encourages Treplev to stage his own closet scene in Act III. He first establishes contact with his mother on the only basis she permits, by summoning up memories of the past when he was a very small child. But, as soon as he turns the conversation to Claudius-Trigorin, his scheme begins to fail. Instead of a broken and weeping Gertrude, her eyes turned on the “black and grained spots” of her soul, Treplev confronts a furious Arkadina with all her defenses aroused, and the one who ends in tears is Treplev.

Our last sight of Treplev in Act III is as he leaves the stage, still weeping, to avoid a meeting with Trigorin. He has made no choice up to that point, nor are we entirely sure that a choice is available to him. We suspect that he may slip into Sorin's state of near oblivion, but without Sorin's memories of past identity.

In Act IV we are first surprised and pleased to discover that Treplev has become a published writer and then astonished to find that he is attempting to write in the manner of Trigorin. We have noticed, earlier in the play, some similarities between the two characters, especially in their responses to being “outsiders,” but we have been given no overt indication that Treplev might choose to follow Trigorin's path. That he should do so makes sound psychological sense, of course, since Treplev perceives Trigorin as the one who has stolen both his mother and Nina from him. Further, Treplev's imitation of Trigorin indicates that the former still has no fixed artistic goals.

Our perception that Trigorin is a viable analogue for Treplev forces us back into the play to assess the implications. We have been given three assessments of Trigorin as a writer. Treplev's first, which takes place early in the play before Nina has set her sights on Trigorin, is: “It's all very clever and charming, but … if you've been reading Tolstoy, or Zola, you don't feel like reading Trigorin afterwards” (p. 124). Trigorin's self-assessment is very similar: “And so it will go to my dying day—everything will be charming and clever—and nothing more” (p. 149). Arkadina's assessment, although part of an effusion of flattery and thus unreliable, is interesting because she knows precisely upon what point Trigorin needs reassurance: “With a stroke of your pen you can convey the whole essence of a character or a landscape; people in your books are so alive” (p. 161). Treplev, and Trigorin himself, would agree that Trigorin is a master of descriptive detail, but not that his characters are alive. Trigorin is well aware of his central problem as a writer:

I have a feeling for nature, and it arouses a sort of passion in me, an irresistible desire to write. But, you see, I'm not a mere landscape painter, I'm also a citizen of my country; I love it, I love its people. As an author, I feel I'm in duty bound to write about the people, their sufferings, their future … And I write about everything in a great hurry while I'm being prodded and urged on from all sides … and in the end I feel that all I can do is paint landscapes, and that everything else I write is a sham—false to the very core.

[p. 150]

This weakness in Trigorin's writing is hardly surprising; he has so walled himself off that he has no emotional life. Little can be learned about human experience from gudgeons or, for that matter, from Arkadina. Throughout the play we watch Trigorin take notes and they are all of landscape details: “a cloud shaped like a grand piano”; “The Maiden's Forest”; “Takes snuff and drinks vodka. Always dresses in black.”

For a moment Trigorin thinks he has found a way out. Nina attracts him, in part because she is so obviously attracted by him, in part because he sees the possibility of opening his life to an emotional involvement. “I've forgotten,” he says, “what it feels like to be eighteen or nineteen, indeed I can't imagine it at all clearly. That's why the girls in my novels and stories are usually so artificial” (p. 146). Later he tells Arkadina, “Young love … the only thing that can bring happiness on earth! I've never known a love like that. … In my youth I never had time” (p. 161). Unfortunately, Trigorin finds that he has no time for Nina either, or perhaps he discovers that Nina, the actress, is as much an artifice as one of his own characters. In any case, he returns to Arkadina who demands nothing of him but his presence in the neighborhood, leaving him free compulsively to create his landscapes lacking living characters.

Treplev is also unable to create living characters. Nina says it first: “It's difficult to act in your play. There are no real living characters in it” (p. 126). Trigorin repeats it in Act IV, this time speaking of Treplev's published stories: “And not a single living character.” Yet Treplev is not an emotional neuter like Trigorin. He has the matter to create life in art—perhaps Chekhov has given the character such a rich and detailed psychological life so that we will recognize that his problem is not lack of matter. Rather, he is unable to turn his life to the service of his art. He moves from the abstract—the Soul of the World—to the concrete—“the passage where the hero is woken by the noise of the rain” (p. 177)—but as he shares his efforts with us we realize that he, too, is largely concerned with landscape.

Treplev is finally faced with his choice in Act IV. He can give up all striving, for art and love, and become another man who wanted. Or, he can wall himself up as his mother, Trigorin, and Nina have and commit himself to the techniques of surfaces and landscapes. He sees Nina turn into the image of Arkadina before his eyes, he looks down at his own work and sees the image of Trigorin staring at him from the page, he lifts his eyes to the death bed of Sorin. His choice is a refusal to choose on the terms offered and a decision to confirm his nonentity.

Does the play offer no other options? Are artists condemned to landscapes? I suggest that the alternative is defined by the play, itself, and by the extent to which it escapes from surfaces and creates living characters.

I am interested by the fact that Stanislavsky and others following him have attended only to Trigorin's “subject for a story” and have ignored Masha's and Sorin's. None of these is, of course, analogous to The Seagull itself, but all three are part of the play's structure, and in all three instances we are given the chance to contrast the subject as offered and the treatment Chekhov gives it. Once again, it may be useful to begin with Masha, although actually Trigorin's seagull story precedes hers.

Masha, we discover, has been telling Trigorin her story at the beginning of Act III in the hope that he will make use of it and—we infer—give her hopeless love for Treplev the status in being of romantic fiction. Trigorin does not take notes of Masha's revelations; he has already written down her landscape which is all he wants. Chekhov is the one who writes Masha's story, though not as Masha would have wanted it written. Neither Masha's romance nor Trigorin's method of allusive detail could have resulted in a character with the depth and complexity of Chekhov's Masha, whom we pity for her misery, laugh at for her posturing, and dislike for her contemptuous treatment of the dull but dedicated Medvedenko.

Sorin, near death, wants to give Treplev “a subject for a novel.” Treplev has no opportunity to write it, even if he could. We recognize that the story of Sorin's life is only too probably the story of Treplev's, and we further recognize that Treplev, like the other artists in the play, shies away from his own life and experience or transmutes it into the conventions of art available to him. Chekhov, however, has taken Sorin's subject for a novel and used it as a subject for a play, though again not the play Sorin would have wanted. Instead of a symbolization of dissatisfied self-pity, Chekhov gives us an analysis of how lack of goals and lack of energy create “men who wanted.”

Finally, we have Trigorin's “subject for a story,” worth repeating here in full because of its importance: “An idea suddenly came into my head. A subject for a short story: a young girl, like you, has lived beside a lake from childhood. She loves the lake as a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. But a man chances to come along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her, just like this seagull here” (p. 151).

As far as we know Trigorin never writes this story. Nina adopts it as a fictionalization of her life and uses it to identify herself with the seagull in Act IV. We, however, must compare it with the version Chekhov writes.

In the first place Nina is not like the girl in the story. She may “love the lake,” but she is hardly happy and free. Her first speech in Act I demonstrates her motives in escaping from home to act in Treplev's play: “My father and stepmother won't let me come here. They say this place is Bohemian … they're afraid of my going on the stage. And I am drawn to this place, to this lake, as if I were a seagull” (p. 125). A page later—after we have seen her gently evade Treplev—we begin to perceive what has drawn her. When Treplev asks her if she is nervous, she answers: “Yes, very. Your mother—she's all right, I'm not afraid of her. But there's Trigorin … I'm so afraid and ashamed of acting in front of him … a famous writer … is he young?” (p. 126).

Given the opportunity, briefly in Act I and extensively in Act II, Nina takes dead aim at Trigorin. Her flattery of him is as fulsome as Arkadina's; her gift of the medallion a thoroughly theatrical gesture. We can hardly blame Trigorin for taking full advantage of the situation, which is not the same thing as gratuitously destroying an innocent young girl. Nor is Nina destroyed. Wounded, yes, but by her own bullet.

Chekhov thus takes a conventional sentimental story, a mainstay of matinee and magazine fiction, and reverses it. In doing so, he makes a comment on Trigorin's art of surfaces which is also an art of conventional techniques and strategies. This comment is summarized in the image of the seagull to which so many ironic perceptions adhere by the end of the play.

The image can be explicated as a symbol of soaring creative experience, tied to Nina from her first line of dialogue, representative of her triumph as an artist. Such an explication pays little attention to the facts of the play; nonetheless, we cannot dismiss the ideal bird in ecstatic flight, for we need it as an ironic contrast to the real bird which we see twice in the course of the action, once dead, once stuffed.

The gull, which Treplev shot to symbolize his desire to murder the faithless Nina, and which he flings at her feet to gain her attention, makes little impression on her. It lies next to her on the garden seat during her long encounter with Trigorin and serves him as the detail which prompts his subject for a story. It also apparently prompts him to ask that Shamrayev have it stuffed and mounted, although Trigorin cannot remember the request when Shamrayev reminds him of it in Act IV. Shamrayev produces the preserved gull just after Nina's final exit; the audience's eyes are on it when the sound of the shot is heard.

The moment is extraordinarily rich. We are thinking of Trigorin's subject for a story, of Nina's identification of herself as a seagull in the preceding scene, of Treplev's murder of the bird—all in the instant before his murder of himself. Yet informing all of these perceptions should be one derived from that very early moment in the play when Nina says: “I am drawn to this lake as if I were a seagull.”

Gulls, for all their beauty, are scavengers, and what attracts them is rubbish and leavings. Nina is attracted by Trigorin and Arkadina, artists controlled by the leaving of tradition. Arkadina plays La Dame aux camelias and Fumes of Life, staples of the conventional repertory of twenty years earlier. Trigorin compares himself with his models, especially Turgenev, while constructing sentimental plots dressed up with “telling” visual images. Both are trapped by outworn traditions and incapable of creating life with their art. Their analogues fare no better. Nina soars on the stage nourished by Arkadina's leavings, not a resurrected gull but only its embalmed image. Treplev, with no goals of his own, following Trigorin's well-worn path could achieve no more.

The Seagull, finally, is a play concerned with the central question of realistic art: how does an artist create the illusion of life? The answer to that question is the play itself, where Chekhov shows himself to be, like Trigorin, a master of details, but details of inner life as well as surfaces. Unlike his characters, who transmute life into the comfortable and familiar patterns of conventional fiction Chekhov makes art from life and finds his own fixed artistic goal in the revelation of inner experience through observed details of human behavior.

His technique is not entirely mature; no scene in The Seagull shows the incredible subtlety and complexity of, for instance, the final scene between Varya and Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard. Yet, just as the characters stand as mirrors for each other reflecting past, present, and future, so the play stands as a mirror for the theater which Chekhov knew and was leaving behind and the theatre which he was in the process of learning to create.

Notes

1. Letter to M. Gorky, 9 May 1899. In The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, ed. Lillian Hellman, trans. Sidonie Lederer (New York, 1955), p. 242.

2. My Life in Art, trans. J. J. Robbins (Boston, 1924), pp. 355, 352, 359.

3. Creating a Role, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York, 1961), p. 78.

4. Quoted by Robert Corrigan, “The Plays of Chekhov,” The Context and Craft of Drama, ed. Robert Corrigan and James Rosenberg (San Francisco, 1964), p. 146.

5. Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, trans. Elisaveta Fen (London, 1954), p. 123. All quotations are from this edition and are hereafter cited in the text. I have compared six translations and I am reasonably satisfied that my interpretations do not rest upon eccentricities of translation. I have not used Fen's somewhat unconventional transliterations of character names, but have adopted those more frequently used and thus more familiar.

6. Laurence Senelick, “The Lake-Shore of Bohemia: The Seagull's Theatrical Context,” ETJ 29 (May, 1977), 206. I am most indebted to Mr. Senelick, not only for his article, but also for answering my questions about the Russian text, and for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this paper.

7. Ibid., p. 213. Quoted from Chekhov i teatr, ed. E. D. Surkov (Moscow, 1961), p. 365.

8. Senelick, p. 213.