[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1982, Paperny studies the lesser themes of The Seagull, which contribute to the play's complexity.]

The study of Chekhov's text can be compared to the history of the investigation of matter, where researchers have come to employ smaller and smaller units of magnitude. What formerly seemed indivisible has proved a complicated structure consisting of interconnected microparticles.

Something similar is taking place in Chekhov studies. From general formulations investigators delving more deeply into the text have become increasingly convinced that the tissue of poetic narration displays a structure. Along with the main actors, there are also “microparticles” of a sort, and all these “macros” and “micros” are interconnected and subordinated one to the other.

In The Seagull the movement of the main subject—the history of the characters' development and their mutual relations—is complicated by microsubjects. The characters not only advance opinions, make confessions, argue, and act, they also offer each other various subjects for literary works, which express their understanding of life, their point of view, their basic “idea.”

This is an important feature of the play. Almost every character has not only his own personal drama or tragedy, but also a literary subject, a project that he intends to carry out himself or offers to someone else.

Let us recall the schoolteacher Medvedenko. He says to Trigorin, “Or how about writing and then staging a play that describes the life of teachers like me? Our life is hard, very hard!”

Fictive invention is totally foreign to this subject. Medvedenko proposes to “describe,” that is, to tell everything as it really is, to reveal life in its reality. His subject betrays the single idea that runs through his every speech: material need, his difficulty in making ends meet.

Trigorin, the practiced literary master, has his subject:

NINA:
What's that you're writing?
TRIGORIN:
Just making a note. I had the glimmer of a subject. (Putting away his notebook) A subject for a little story: a young girl has lived on the shore of a lake since childhood, someone like you. She loves the lake the way gulls do, and she's happy and free like them. But a man happens by, sees her, and for lack of anything better to do, destroys her life—like this gull here.

This subject does not go to waste in Trigorin's literary economy. In the fourth act he will say to Treplev: “Tomorrow morning, if it's calm, I'm going fishing at the lake. By the way, I want to look over the garden and the place where your play was staged—remember? A motif has taken shape in my mind, and all I need now is to refresh my memory of the scene.”

Everything that Trigorin sees and feels is skillfully and efficiently fashioned into subjects for novels, stories, and plays. His interest in life is above all professional. Even Nina interests him not only in herself but also as a kind of literary “raw material.” “I don't often meet young girls—young and attractive,” he tells her. “I've forgotten how it feels to be eighteen or nineteen and can't imagine it clearly, so young girls in my novels and stories generally don't ring true. I'd like to change places with you, even for an hour, to find out how your mind works and just what you're like.”

There is a certain cruelty in Trigorin's “subject-creation,” his tireless reworking of life into literature. He leaves Nina calmly and easily; nothing is left of his affair with the beginning actress but a literary project that, we may be quite certain, he will successfully carry out.

At the end of the play, Nina confesses to Treplev that she still loves Trigorin. But she does not want to be merely the occasion for one of Trigorin's subjects and argues with him, as if trying to free herself from painful chains: “I'm a seagull. No, that's not it. … You once shot a gull, remember? A man happened by, saw it, and for lack of anything better to do, killed it. A subject for a little story. … That's not it. …”

Here it is particularly clear how active the microsubjects are in The Seagull and how tellingly they touch, move, and disturb the characters. What for Trigorin is merely a theme that has taken shape, a subject for a little story, is for Nina her fate, her vocation.

The microsubjects in The Seagull are like little periscopes that connect what is happening on the surface with the very depths. Only here the direction is reversed, running not from the surface to the depths, but the other way around.

Treplev has his subject, and not just one, but two. The first is the one that formed the basis of his unfortunate play, whose performance was such a disaster. The second is the subject, vaguely and incompletely sketched, of the story he is working on in the fourth act, before Nina's arrival.

At the end of the play Nina takes issue with Trigorin's “subject for a little story,” which assigns her the role of a defenseless victim and, as it were, returns to Treplev's play.

We see that Trigorin's and Treplev's subjects are profoundly connected to the general development of the action and the fortunes of the characters. They appear and reappear like leitmotivs throughout the entire narration, and this intermittent but insistent repetition of motifs and details is one of the most characteristic features of the play.

Both these subjects are present in the ending. But while Nina rejects Trigorin's, Treplev's subject becomes accessible to her once more. And when she runs off at the end, it is as if she takes it with her.

Old Sorin has a literary idea to propose: “I want to give Kostya Treplev a subject for a story,” he says. “It is to be called ‘The Man Who Wished,’ ‘L'Homme qui a voulu.’ When I was young at one point I wanted to become a writer, but never did; I wanted to be a good speaker, but I spoke terribly … I wanted to marry, but I didn't; I always wanted to live in the city, but here I am ending my days in a village, and everything.”

His life is drawing to a close, and he still has not started to live. Fortune has passed him by; it has not provided him what he sought or what he hoped to achieve.

The subject that he offers Treplev is not merely autobiographical. Do we not sense Masha's fate in it as well? Or that of her mother, the manager Shamraev's wife? It can be said that Sorin's microsubject helps a great deal in understanding Chekhov's larger subject.

At the beginning of the third act Masha says to Trigorin: “I'm telling you all this so that you can use it in your writing.” And then: “In all honesty, if he had wounded himself seriously, I wouldn't have lived another minute.”

What Masha tells Trigorin he can use is the story of her love for Treplev, the love she tries so assiduously and so vainly to tear out of her heart during the course of the whole play, the hopeless and ineradicable love that swallows up all her feelings and desires.

Thus in The Seagull the main subject unfolds before our eyes, performed by Chekhov's characters; and simultaneously this represented reality appears twisted, foreshortened, and brokenly reflected, as it is seen by different characters. The microsubjects of Medvedenko, Trigorin, Treplev, Sorin, and Masha are, as it were, micromodels of life that contend among themselves and contradict each other. In this peculiarity of the play's construction is crystallized an important aspect of its content: that attention to secondary characters that so struck sensitive early readers.

At the same time the microsubjects of the five characters reflect various relationships between art and life, from Medvedenko's despondency in the face of prosaic everyday demands, to Treplev's aspirations beyond the bounds of reality.

It is most significant that not only the writers propose subjects, but also the schoolteacher Medvedenko, Masha, and Sorin. Chekhov seems to imply that the boundary between art and life is elusive. Not everyone in The Seagull writes, but they are all as it were surrounded by waves of art, and nearly every character tries to make sense of life in his own way. Even if a character does not write himself, he takes his literary “commission” to a professional.

One can speak of a large and a small subject in Chekhov. This aspect of his plays, which has escaped scholarly attention, appears not only in the form of literary subjects proposed by the characters.

The principle of large and small subjects makes itself felt in the overall construction of The Seagull as well. We have a rather rare example of theater within theater, a play within a play, and even (if we recall the fate of the original Aleksandrinski Theater production) a failure within a failure: Treplev's play is ridiculed as was Chekhov's own.

The reader is confronted with two theaters. One is firmly established, the one that the actress Arkadina and the playwright Trigorin serve, and in which Treplev feels stifled (“… the contemporary theater is convention, prejudice”). The second is Treplev's own, set up at the beginning of the first act. It does not look like a stone box, and nature itself and the real moon form the scenery. This theater will be misunderstood. At the conclusion it “stands naked, ugly as a skeleton, the curtain flapping in the wind.” But after many wanderings, afflictions, and quests Nina will return here and weep as she remembers everything youthful, innocent, and pure connected with this stage.

In The Seagull the very word “theater” seems to split up. The play's microsubjects create a distinctive system of poetic mirrors that register various clashing “reflections.”

Thus the constant, unitary symbolic image of the seagull seems to shatter and take the form of various “fragments,” one of which reflects Treplev's fate, another Trigorin's, and a third Nina's.

During Chekhov's lifetime critics more than once resorted to such a simile: his works reflect reality not like a large, intact poetic mirror but rather like the broken pieces of a mirror that was once intact. Only taken as a whole do Chekhov's stories create a total impression. In reading The Seagull we see that the principle of “multimirrored” construction makes itself felt in the structure of the play as well, where microsubjects enter into complicated and tension-filled relations with each other.

A special type of microsubject consists of references to the classics, quotations that far from seeing mere anthological snippets, start to take on new life in their new context.

Three writers are mentioned in The Seagull—Shakespeare, Maupassant, and Turgenev—each of them not once but two or three times.

Just before the performance of Treplev's play begins, Arkadina suddenly and apparently without the slightest motivation, recites from Hamlet:

                                                                      O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.

Treplev answers with a quotation from the same source:

                                                                                Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty,—

Then a horn sounds and Treplev's play begins. The quotation from Shakespeare is like an overture.

From the very beginning of the first act one senses the tension in the relationship between Arkadina and her son, his dissatisfaction with her, his sense of injury, his jealous, unfriendly feelings toward her lover, Trigorin. The exchanges of speeches from Hamlet, in itself half-joking and playful, at the same time lends an unexpectedly tragic coloration to all that follows. Associations develop between Treplev and Hamlet, Arkadina and the Queen, and Trigorin and the King who has no right to his throne.

Of course in so putting it we coarsen Chekhov's meaning to some extent; in the play everything is put less definitely and is less “spelled out.”

Shakespeare is mentioned next in Nina's monologue from Treplev's play (“I am the universal world soul, I! The soul of Alexander the Great is in me, and of Caesar, and of Shakespeare …”). And finally Shakespeare is mentioned for the third time (again it is Hamlet) in Treplev's conversation with Nina after the collapse of his play. Catching sight of Trigorin who is approaching, he says sarcastically, “Here comes real talent; he strides along like Hamlet and is even reading, too. (Mockingly) ‘Words, words, words. …’”

It is not simply a matter of references and quotations, but of deeper correspondences between The Seagull and Hamlet.

A. I. Roskin accurately observed that “the lines from Hamlet in The Seagull sound not like quotation but like a leitmotiv, one of the play's leitmotivs.”¹

Much in Chekhov's plays goes back to Shakespeare's Hamlet, in subject and in the development of the action where the main event is postponed.

The source of tension in Shakespeare's subject is not that the Prince of Denmark kills the false King, but rather the opposite, that for so long he does not.

The “Shakespearean” enters into the very nature and most essential character of Chekhov's subject.

Another link between The Seagull and Hamlet is the theater within a theater. The Prince arranges a performance that ends in an uproar and is broken off. The fate of Treplev's production seems in a way similar. Particularly interesting are the parallels between the conversations of the Prince with the Queen and Treplev with Arkadina in the third acts of both plays. It is lines from precisely this act that are quoted in The Seagull.

In Hamlet while the Prince is castigating his mother who has fallen into vice, the Ghost appears; and Hamlet's tone of voice alters and he begins to sound more sympathetic toward his mother, whom the Ghost of his father the King seems to defend.

A similarly abrupt transition takes place in The Seagull when after mutual insults mother and son cry, are reconciled, and embrace.²

Chekhov studies Shakespeare's art of abrupt reversals, discontinuities in the characters' states of mind, and sharp transitions from anger to remorse or from apparently irreconcilable quarreling to unexpected tranquillity.

In The Seagull Shakespeare is not merely a quoted classic. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father he appears in the play and exercises an unseen influence on the course of the action and on its character. Associations with Hamlet enrich our perception of The Seagull and enter into the very structure of Chekhov's play.

Guy de Maupassant is mentioned twice. Treplev speaks of him at the beginning of the play (“… when I am served up the same stuff again and again and again, I run and run, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower which was crushing his brain with its vulgarity”). At the beginning of the second act Arkadina, Dorn, and Masha are reading aloud from Maupassant's Sur l'eau. Arkadina opens the book at a passage about a society woman who is trying to attract a writer: “She lays siege to him by means of every variety of compliments, attractions, and indulgence.”³ Arguing against Maupassant, Arkadina points to the example of herself and Trigorin.

Maupassant's Sur l'eau appeared in 1888. It consists of the description of a week's cruise on the yacht “Bel-Ami.” It is a bitter book, full of skepticism and mockery of deceitful human society, particularly fashionable society.

Treplev in The Seagull attacks convention, banality, and vulgarity. For Maupassant, however, vulgarity is a synonym for life: “Happy are those whom life satisfies, who are amused and content.”⁴

Upset by his mother's ironic remarks, Treplev, at the performance of his play, cries “Enough! Curtain!”

In Sur l'eau Maupassant directs this cry against life as a whole, for him a cheap and deceitful spectacle. “How is it that the worldly audience has not yet called out, ‘Curtain,’ has not yet demanded the next act, with other beings than mankind.”⁵

A comparison of Sur l'eau with The Seagull helps us to feel more sharply the differences in world outlook of the two writers and lets us grasp the distinction between the total pessimism of the one and, as it were, the imperfect skepticism of the other.

Echoes of Maupassant's novel are to be heard in other parts of Chekhov's play as well. In one of the chapters of Sur l'eau Maupassant expresses disagreement with those who envy writers and says that writers are to be pitied, not envied. Reading these lines, it is hard not to be reminded of Trigorin's monologue:

For (the writer) no simple feeling any longer exists. All he sees, his joys, his pleasures, his suffering, his despair, all instantaneously become subjects of observation. … If he suffers, he notes down his suffering, and classes it in his memory. … He has seen all, noticed all, remembered all, in spite of himself, because he is above all a literary man, and his intellect is constructed in such a manner that the reverberation in him is much more vivid, more natural, so to speak, than the first shock—the echo more sonorous than the original sound.⁶

And a little further on he compares the writer to “a terribly vibrating and complicated piece of machinery, fatiguing even to himself.”⁷

Thus Treplev, Arkadina, and Trigorin unexpectedly intersect with Maupassant. And each of them approaches him from his own angle. It is true that in Trigorin's monologue there is no mention of Maupassant, but traces of Sur l'eau are none the less discernible.

Turgenev's presence in the play is equally varied. Trigorin feels mocked by Turgenev's unattainable eminence as a writer, of which people constantly remind him: “‘A marvelous piece, but Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is better.’ … and when I die my friends will say as they go past my grave, ‘Here lies Trigorin. He was a good writer, but not as good as Turgenev.’”

And at the end of the play it is as if Turgenev extends a hand to Nina: “Listen—do you hear the wind? Turgenev says somewhere, ‘A man's all right if he has a roof over his head on nights like these, some place where it's warm.’ I'm a seagull. No, that's not it. (She rubs her forehead) What was I saying? Yes, Turgenev. ‘And God help all homeless wanderers.’ It's nothing. (She sobs)”

Turgenev's words in the context of Nina's monologue lose their “quotedness” and become Chekhov's. The actor V. A. Podgorny, who performed with Kommissarzhevskaya and knew her well, tells this story about her last days, when she was rehearsing The Seagull with her company in Tashkent: “‘And God help all homeless wanderers,’ said Kommissarzhevskaya in the sad words of Nina Zarechnaya, and looked at the actors with a smile. “We really are those homeless wanderers! Here in the middle of nowhere we are rehearsing and acting and living, and in a few days it will be time to go on and rehearse and act and live some more. …”⁸

Whom is she quoting? Formally, Turgenev; but actually it is Chekhov.

This example makes it particularly clear how a literary source changes on entering into Chekhov's text, and becomes no longer someone else's, but Chekhov's own.

Microsubjects in The Seagull are of various sorts. There are the literary subjects of the characters, both professional writers and people who have nothing to do with literature, and there are associations with classical works such as the quotations from Shakespeare, Maupassant, and Turgenev. There is still another variety: the anecdotes and funny stories that Shamraev and Sorin tell.

A few minutes after the end of Treplev's play, Nina steps down from the stage, Arkadina praises her and introduces her to Trigorin. They begin their first conversation.

On making the acquaintance of her idol Trigorin, Nina immediately starts talking about what pains her most: those who live for art, the chosen ones of fame who taste the higher pleasures. Arkadina, laughing, intervenes (she does not leave Trigorin alone for a minute). And at this dramatic moment, when conversation is starting up among the three characters who are to cause each other so much suffering—becoming close, separating, coming back together—at this point Shamraev begins telling his old story about a synodal cantor:

SHAMRAEV:
I remember one time at the Opera House in Moscow, the famous Silva hit a low C. As luck would have it one of our synodal cantors happened to be in the gallery and—you can imagine our astonishment—we heard booming out of the gallery, “Bravo, Silva!,” a whole octave lower. Like this: (in a low approximation of a bass voice) Bravo, Silva! The whole theater just died. (pause)
DORN:
A quiet angel flew by—we are sitting here in silence.
NINA:
It's time for me to go. Good-by.

This anecdote, perhaps amusing in itself, is totally out of place here, at this moment. No one is listening to Shamraev, and when he finishes, they do not know what to say.

Shamraev's anecdote is funny less because of its intrinsic humor than because it is totally unexpected and unmotivated.

Shamraev's second anecdote is even more at odds with its context (“We're twapped!” instead of “We're trapped!”). Shamraev enters as the scene between Trigorin and Arkadina has just concluded, where she tries to take him away from Nina. At this moment he enters and “with regret” announces that the horses are ready and tells his story about “twapped.”

At first glance all these little anecdotes are pointless and only interrupt the course of the narration. However the stories told by Shamraev and Sorin (“Your voice, your Excellency, is powerful … but unpleasant”), are at once inappropriate and essential. Their very lack of harmony with the context makes them deeply organic elements of a play where everything is built on conflicts, contrasts, and discontinuities. One may say that these half-humorous microsubjects let us perceive life's lack of harmony, refracted by the play as if by a magnifying glass, and not only in the twists and turns of the larger subject, but on a smaller scale as well.

Shamraev's and Sorin's anecdotes play an important role in intensifying the play's polyphonic sound quality, in which tragedy and comedy merge into one.

Some readers, viewers, and interpreters of The Seagull have unintentionally tried to reduce the amplitude of oscillation from large to small, from tragic to comic. A curious example is provided by N. M. Ezhov's letter to Chekhov of 29 January 1899: “… there are things in The Seagull which I find most unattractive. The first is Sorin's singing and what he says about some gentleman's witticism, that the general's voice is powerful but repulsive [for “unpleasant”]. This is so jarring to the viewer that it is a shame! The second thing is the manager's story about ‘trapped’ and ‘twapped.’ I can't explain exactly why, but these two passages seem to me for some reason impossible in The Seagull.”⁹

What seemed to Ezhov an unjustified and impermissible violation of the style and tonality of the play is actually the bold introduction of counterpoint, creating a sort of disharmonic structure with constant interruptions in the development of the subject, a lack of mutuality in the sympathies of the characters, and clashes between the tragic “Hamletic” impulse and the anecdotal.

As we have seen, Chekhov's microsubjects are least of all illustrations. They have various sources, ranging from the literary “claim checks” of the characters themselves, to quotations from the classics, to anecdotes. In their many-colored mosaic there is a whole range of transitional tints and shades.

“Thou turnst mine eyes into my very soul” and “We're twapped!” are equally microsubjects.

Chekhov did not immediately achieve so rich and complicated a palette of colors, of transitions from high to low, from tragic to laughable.

In his first play Platonov we do not find microsubjects at all.

In Ivanov the main character tells about the workman Semyon who heaved two sacks of rye up on his back and strained something: “I think I've strained something, too.” Here the microsubject simply illustrates what is going on with the main character. The unexpectedness that characterizes the microsubject in The Seagull is lacking and there is no contradiction between the large and small subjects.

In Chekhov's third play The Wood Demon the situation is just about the same as in Ivanov. With The Seagull he first attains multimirrored reflections of reality. They form a complicated system that at first glance seems a mosaic of disparate bits, but which in reality is profoundly consistent in affirming through images on various levels the disharmony of life, its conflicts and contradictions, and the agonizing discrepancy between dream and reality.

Notes

1. A. Roskin, A. P. Chekhov; stat'i i ocherki (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959), 131.

2. Chekhov was particularly fond of the scene between the Queen and her son in Hamlet. There is much evidence of this. One example is the review “Hamlet on the Stage of the Pushkin Theater,” where, in discussing the performance of M. Ivanov-Kozlovsky, the twenty-two-year-old Chekhov notes that “the scene with the mother was done beautifully” (A. P. Chekhov, PSSP, 16:21).

3. A Selection from the Writings of Guy de Maupassant, vol. 4: Sur l'eau and Other Tales (New York: Review of Reviews Co., 1903), 20.

4. Maupassant, Writings, 26.

5. Ibid., 28.

6. Ibid., 56.

7. Ibid., 58.

8. V. A. Podgorny, Pamiati [Memories], in Sbornik pamiati V. F. Komissarzhevskoi (Moscow: GIKhL, 1931), 99.

9. In the archive of the Lenin State Library, Moscow, 331.43.11.