A new era in Russian theater had begun. Its emblem was the stylized image of a seagull that was sewn onto the Art Theatre’s curtain. It is there to this day.
. . .
In a letter to his friend and publisher Alexei Suvorin, on October 21, 1895, Chekhov announced: “. . . I’m writing a play . . . not without pleasure, though I’m violating the conventions of the stage quite terribly. A comedy, three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, landscapes (view of a lake); much talk about literature, little action, five tons of love.”
Chekhov’s practice of “violating the conventions of the stage” puzzled Tolstoy, who once asked him about Uncle Vanya: “What’s it all about? Where’s the drama?” In fact, the subtitle of The Seagull, “A Comedy in Four Acts,” already begs the question. It is certainly not a comedy in any conventional sense. Calling it a comedy may have been something of a provocation on Chekhov’s part, aimed at directors and actors. He wanted a different manner of playing than in the melodramas of the day; he wanted it to be light and quick; he wanted an internal shifting of tones rather than a single overarching effect. Comedy flashes repeatedly in the exchanges between his characters, and disappears again. The aim is not laughter per se. It is also not satire, though there are sharply satirical moments in the play. It is a serious comedy of human contradictions.
There is no central idea in The Seagull, nor in any of Chekhov’s last plays; there is no social message, no final revelation, apparently no unifying vision. Separate people go their separate ways. They seem to walk past each other and talk past each other; they keep repeating the same words, harping on the same obsessions. “One of Chekhov’s most important innovations,” Harvey Pitcher wrote in The Chekhov Play, “was to decentralize his cast. The traditional idea of hero and heroine has been discarded. No single character is allowed to stand out as more central than any other . . .”¶ This quality of Chekhov’s dramaturgy happened to suit the notions of the new Moscow Art Theatre, with its stress on the ensemble over individual stars (in Stanislavsky’s famous phrase, “There are no small parts, only small actors”). But for Chekhov it was not simply a technical innovation. Here is Sorin’s country estate with its view of the lake; and here is this odd conglomeration of people, with their disagreements about literature and theater, with their “five tons of love”—a love that separates them more than it unites them. Their active lives are over (Sorin, Dorn), or not yet begun (Treplyov, Nina), or go on elsewhere (Arkadina, Trigorin). There is indeed “little action” in the play itself. The few dramatic events happen offstage. What unites the characters is not their involvement in a well-constructed plot; it is their happening to be together in a place suspended in time. There is no hierarchy among them; they are one in their exposed humanity. Chekhov’s portrayal of them is both humorous and pitiless.
In 1892 Chekhov bought the small country estate of Melikhovo, some fifty miles south of Moscow. He settled in with his parents, his sister, and his younger brother in March and lived there more or less permanently until 1899, when he moved to Yalta. It was a one-story house, with a garden and a view not of a lake but of a very small pond. Chekhov wrote The Seagull and Uncle Vanya there, along with some of his finest stories. He also cultivated the garden, planted trees, served as a doctor in free clinics for the local peasants (there were cholera epidemics in 1892 and 1893), and built three schools in Melikhovo and neighboring villages, which he also supplied with furniture and textbooks. His life there bore little resemblance to the suspended life on Sorin’s estate.
Yet Melikhovo plays an important role in The Seagull. Chekhov invited friends, writers, artists, actors to visit him, among them the novelist and playwright Ignaty Potapenko, the painter Isaac Levitan, and several women, writers or performers, who were more or less in love with him. Details of their collective life on the estate turned up in the play. In 1895, Levitan, who was a very close friend, tried to shoot himself over an affair with a woman. He ended up with a slight wound and a white bandage on his head. Potapenko, who was married, seduced the young opera singer Lydia Mizinova, whom he met at Melikhovo and who had been hopelessly in love with Chekhov. Potapenko took her away to Paris, and, when she became pregnant, abandoned her and went back to his wife. On reading the manuscript of The Seagull, which Chekhov, perhaps maliciously, entrusted to him for copying and passing on to the censors, he could hardly help recognizing himself in the character of Trigorin. Another guest at Melikhovo, the writer Lydia Avilova, once gave Chekhov a medallion inscribed with a reference to a line from one of his own stories: “If you ever need my life, come and take it.” The same line, now attributed to one of Trigorin’s stories, is referred to on the medallion that Nina gives to the writer toward the end of Act Three. What’s more, Chekhov actually gave Avilova’s medallion to the actress who played Nina. Even the complaining, underpaid schoolteacher Medvedenko had his prototype in a teacher from one of the local schools near Melikhovo. And Chekhov’s guests, like Arkadina’s, used to gather and play lotto in the evenings.
How does Chekhov bring the realia, or banalia, of life at Melikhovo onstage in The Seagull? How does the stage transform them, when they are held up as an image? The play opens with a play within the play, Treplyov’s symbolist (“decadent,” as his mother says) experiment with “new forms.” It immediately invites comparison with what we are actually watching, that is, with Chekhov’s supposed naturalism. Treplyov’s play is abstract, peopleless: “A curtain, then the wings, then empty space. No scenery.” So Treplyov describes it. It is the opposite of Stanislavsky’s staging, which is filled with details of everyday life, trees, bushes, lawns, benches, chairs, tables, draperies, lamps, the sounds of wind and rain, the barking of a dog, the croaking of frogs. There are still some traces of older theater—Trigorin’s long monologue in Act Two, a few brief soliloquies. But his characters never play to the audience or acknowledge its existence. On the contrary, they keep to their separate world. In Act One they even turn their backs to the audience as they watch Treplyov’s play. And at the end of Act Three the stage is left empty; we hear the noises of departure from outside, people saying good-bye; a maid rushes in, picks up a forgotten basket of plums, and rushes out again, as if nobody was looking.
It is all very real, ordinary, nothing like the parodied symbolism of Treplyov’s play, and yet it has its own symbolic resonance. The most obvious symbol in the play is the seagull of the title. Early in Act One, Nina tells Treplyov: “It’s the lake that draws me here, like a seagull . . .” In Act Two, Treplyov enters and presents Nina with a seagull that he has shot. “Soon I’ll kill myself the same way,” he tells her rather melodramatically, to which she replies: “. . . you express yourself incomprehensibly, in symbols of some kind. And this seagull is also apparently a symbol, but, forgive me, I don’t understand . . . I’m too simple to understand you.” Later in the same act, Trigorin enters, sees the dead seagull, and immediately jots down an idea for a story, which he tells to Nina, and which nearly becomes the story of their relationship. In Act Four, two years later, Treplyov tells Dorn he has been receiving letters from Nina, which she signs “Seagull.” In her last scene with him, she keeps saying “I’m the seagull,” meaning, as she alone knows, the seagull of Trigorin’s story. But she finally rejects the identification and goes off to live her own unsymbolic life. And when Trigorin is presented with the same seagull, now stuffed, in the last moments of the play, he cannot remember anything about it.
There is a more subtle symbolism in the changing sets of the four acts. The space gradually shrinks: in Act One there is the open space of the park and the wide alley; in Act Two the house appears far upstage right; in Act Three they move inside to the dining room, and in Act Four to the cluttered drawing room, which Treplyov has turned into a study, and which is being made up as we watch into a bedroom for the ailing Sorin—meaning that it is virtually the only inhabited room in the house. There are doors to other rooms on either side and a glass door straight ahead leading to the terrace. Toward the end of the act, Treplyov locks one of the side doors and barricades the other. He is alone there with Nina for their last scene together. She comes in through the glass door,