Life in Art: A Reading of "The Seagull"

Author(s): Virginia Scott

Source: Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Oct., 1978), pp. 357-367
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3206540
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 VIRGINIA SCOTT

Life in Art: A Reading of The Seagull

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

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 Stanislavksy than about The Seagull. Stanis-
lavsky 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

Virginia Scott, an associate editor of ETJ, is a member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst where she heads a program in dramaturgy.

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.

357

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358 / ETJ, October 1978

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,
I'homme qui veut, to Sorin, I'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 con-

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.

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359 / THE SEAGULL

fined to, the beginnings of each act. This strategy on Chekhov's part suggests t
Masha is designed as a key to our perception of the more complex patterns a
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 dpater 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 cann

an adult-until she adopts some role. In Act III, now d
announces her intention of marrying the schoolmaster, M
we have enough information to predict her future if she
Our prediction is based not only on what we know of
systematic definition of her probable future by means of th
mother, Polina.

Polina is married to Shamrayev and in love with Do

standing at the opening of the play. In Act I she fusses over
and ignores Shamrayev to the extent that we would h
they were married unless we had read the dramatis perso
Dorn to let her come, finally, and live with him; he ign
from that point on, her.

Thus, when Masha decides in Act III to marry Medvede

she, like her mother, will end contemptuous of the man
by the man she loves. And, indeed, this prediction is ve
Masha continues to pursue the disinterested Treplev while
and neglecting her child. What is more, we are encourage
Masha's future by the total lack of any interaction b
who are on stage together for half of Act IV without ex
glance-and all this set against Polina's speech before D
woman a kind glance sometimes, Kostia, and she won
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

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360 / ETIJ, October 1978

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 apprentice-
ship 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 appelation 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, how-
ever, is Nina's attitude toward her art.

6 Laurence Senelick, "The Lake-Shore of Bohemia: The Seagull's Theatrical Context," ETI 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.

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361 / THE SEAGULL

Arkadina is an artist of surfaces; when she talks about acting, she conn
it with appearance and dress. In Act III, when Sorin suggests that s
Treplev a new suit, she answers: "I'm an actress; my dress-bill alone is en
to ruin me" (p. 156). In Act IV, and significantly just before Nina's en
Arkadina describes her reception in Kharkov: "Three baskets of flowe
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

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362 / ETI, October 1978

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.

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

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363 / THE SEAGULL

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 approximation

of traditional nineteenth-century stage effects, grand abstractions mingled with the
sulphur pots.8 This muddle reflects the ambiguity of Treplev's feelings about h
mother: on the one hand a theatre which excludes her, for he is, after all, desperatel
jealous of her career; on the other, a theatre which uses the traditional element
of her theatre, for he is also desperately eager for her approval. None of this be
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
moment of "mad despair," carefully gives himself a flesh wound in the head. He
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

attribute to her self-absorption, but which Treplev regards as evidence of his ow
unworthiness. Faced with this unwanted self-perception, Treplev theatricalizes
much as his mother and Nina do the unpleasant experiences of their lives, althou
his taste is better. While Arkadina rages in the cadences of Fumes of Life, her s
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 w
not leave their tinct" (p. 128). She is less amused by Treplev's casting of Trigori
as Claudius, important as this may be to Treplev's self-esteem. Perhaps her teasi
complicity in Act I is what encourages Treplev to stage his own closet sce
in Act III. He first establishes contact with his mother on the only basis s
permits, by summoning up memories of the past when he was a very sm
child. But, as soon as he turns the conversation to Claudius-Trigorin, his sche
begins to fail. Instead of a broken and weeping Gertrude, her eyes turned on th
"black and grained spots" of her soul, Treplev confronts a furious Arkadina wit
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
entirely sure that a choice is available to him. We suspect that he may slip in
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 becom
a published writer and then astonished to find that he is attempting to write i
the manner of Trigorin. We have noticed, earlier in the play, some similaritie
between the two characters, especially in their responses to being "outsiders,"
but we have been given no overt indication that Treplev might choose to follo
Trigorin's path. That he should do so makes sound psychological sense, of cours

8 Senelick, p. 213.

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364 / ETJ, October 1978

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 reassur-
ance: "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 irresistable 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. 1501

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

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365 / THE SEAGULL

single living character." Yet Treplev is not an emotional neuter like Trigorin.
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
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 passa
where the hero is woken by the noise of the rain" (p. 177)-but as he shares hi
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, f
art and love, and become another man who wanted. Or, he can wall himself u
as his mother, Trigorin, and Nina have and commit himself to the techniques o
surfaces and landscapes. He sees Nina turn into the image of Arkadina befo
his eyes, he looks down at his own work and sees the image of Trigorin starin
at him from the page, he lifts his eyes to the death bed of Sorin. His choice i
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?
suggest that the alternative is defined by the play, itself, and by the extent to whic
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
None of these is, of course, analogous to The Seagull itself, but all three are part
the play's structure, and in all three instances we are given the chance to contra
the subject as offered and the treatment Chekhov gives it. Once again, it may b
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 Ac
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
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 wo
have wanted it written. Neither Masha's romance nor Trigorin's method of allus
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 f
her contemptuous treatment of the dull but dedicated Medvedenko.

Sorin, near death, wants to give Treplev "a subject for a novel." Treplev has n
opportunity to write it, even if he could. We recognize that the story of Sorin
life is only too probably the story of Treplev's, and we further recognize that Treple
like the other artists in the play, shies away from his own life and experienc
or transmutes it into the conventions of art available to him. Chekhov, howeve
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
dissatisfied self-pity, Chekhov gives us an analysis of how lack of goals and la
of energy create "men who wanted."

Finally, we have Trigorin's "subject for a story," worth repeating here in fu

because of its importance: "An idea suddenly came into my head. A subject fo

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366 / ETJ, October 1978

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 percep-
tions 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

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367 / THE SEAGULL

story, of Nina's identification of herself as a seagull in the preceding scene,

Treplev's murder of the bird-all in the instant before his murder of himself.
informing all of these perceptions should be one derived from that very ear
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 scavangers, and what attracts them is rubbish
leavings. Nina is attracted by Trigorin and Arkadina, artists controlled by the leavin
of tradition. Arkadina plays La Dame aux camelias and Fumes of Life, staples of
conventional repertory of twenty years earlier. Trigorin compares himself with
models, especially Turgenev, while constructing sentimental plots dressed up w
"telling" visual images. Both are trapped by outworn traditions and incapable
creating life with their art. Their analogues fare no better. Nina soars on the st
nourished by Arkadina's leavings, not a resurrected gull but only its embalm
image. Treplev, with no goals of his own, following Trigorin's well-worn pat
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 theatre
which Chekhov knew and was leaving behind and the theatre which he was in the
process of learning to create.

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